The usefulness factor

Urban Planner Alice Pfeiffer’s Tale

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Do the things we learn have to be useful for us to learn them?

Every day I lace my shoes without looking at what I’m doing. This is something I learnt at school at the age of 5. Our teacher¹ decided our class were too slow at getting dressed again after our PE lesson and that shoelaces were the problem. First she timed us until we could do it quickly, then she had us do it eyes closed. Learning to do this has turned out to be useful ever since. I couldn’t have known back then that I would still be using that skill this long. I think I enjoyed the challenge she set us.

An example of something learnt more recently? I have had the same personal email address for over 20 years, and created it when I attended an IT skills worshop in 2001. I had just been given a professional email account which I was expected to learn to use, so having a personal email was a way of keeping things separate. On the same day I learnt how to insert a link into a text I wanted to share.² This struck me as a fun trick. It lay dormant for a long time, but it’s now something I use constantly to reference words and ideas in all the blog posts published here.

So do we need to know their purpose in order to learn things? And given the diversity of all the things we learn, does successful learning make us specialists or just all-rounders?

These questions are at the heart of the latest conversation in the Learner Tales series for which our guest is Alice Pfeiffer, who is an urban planner. She works in Rennes in Britanny where she lives with her partner and their 3 year-old son.

A life-long passion for learning

Alice Pfeiffer begins by confessing to a life-long passion for learning anything and everything which leads to a better understanding of the world around her.

AP – I love discovering new things. I find it a little sad to say to yourself that it’s all behind you, your student days are over, you’ve got your diploma. I think I could have stayed a student all my life.

In spite of her own impressive list of diplomas, Alice says she is capable of giving her all to any new subject or field of research as long as it interests her. She likes to push the envelope as far as possible – sometimes to the point of exhaustion, because she also finds it hard to dose her efforts.

On more than one occasion, her need to be interested in everything – something she prefers to call multi-skilling – has come in for criticism as an inability to specialise in one thing. Today, she is happy to have found her way into a multi-skilling profession, and tries to give her own definition of what an urban planner does.

AP – Honestly, to say you work in urban planning doesn’t really mean anything as such. It’s a bit like saying you work in computing, because the term covers so many different activities. In my company, Le Facteur Urbain (The Urban Factor), where I work with Maurane Hernandez, we talk about participatory urban planning or simply participatory planning. This is something which happens right at the start of a planning project when we start to look at the different possibilities we can imagine for the transformation of a given space. To do this, we always make sure we work closely with the people directly concerned : the people who live and work there.

Participatory planning means knowing how to listen. So Alice Pfeiffer is in a position of constant learning in a job which involves identifying solutions for putting existing places to new uses which are adapted to both the places and the people who use them. Take a moment to skim through the different photo albums of planning projects shared by Le Facteur Urbain on the company website. Some projects are in urban areas, others in peri-urban areas. These include conversions and reconversions of public places and green spaces, but also intriguing projects about such things as creating a map for a new neighbourhood, or helping residents define a new identity when administrative changes merge two communities into one.

A questioning and self-questioning pupil

When asked what sort of pupil she was, Alice begins by talking enthusiastically about school.

AP – I love learning, understanding, exploring, listening, reading. All those things. I think that, from a very young age, I was wired for success in the school system.

But then her tone changes. She admits that in middle school she had a tendancy to work in certain subject classes while making no effort in others – an attitude based on very personal criteria. She gives the example of the maths class.

AP – I never understood what maths was for. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. In middle school I had the same maths teacher 3 years running and, each time he presented a new topic, I would put up my hand. He would pause for a moment, then he’d say (she sighs) “Alice …?” Then he’d bow his head and wait for my question. Because it was the same one : “Sir … What exactly is this for?”

What is mathematics for? The staging of this question certainly triggered a little laughter in class, but Alice really did want to know.

AP – I was slightly frustrated by the feeling that until I understood its purpose I wouldn’t really ever have access to this subject. I understood the logic of what we were doing. And I knew that somewhere, miles away, learning mathematics was a way of seeing the world, because it had been a key to all sorts of inventions. I knew that there was this ultimate goal. But I said to myself that that wasn’t where I was heading.

At high school, when she was 16, an economics teacher substituted supply and demand for x and y. It was a revelation. She finally understood what mathematical functions were for!

Alice was never a maths wizard, but if the goals were made clear, she was willing to learn. So she has fond memories of studying probability, which her classmates found complicated, because measuring probable outcomes seemed to be a concrete, useful operation in the world she saw around her. Not that everything needed to be concrete and useful to be worth learning, and as long as art could also be seen as having as much importance as maths. She began to realize that, every time she was required to learn something new, she had to find a way of making it her own.

Another questioning time for Alice in middle school was in foreign language lessons. And to think everything had got off to a flying start in Spanish.

AP – We were always engaging in oral expression using some kind of support document – a picture, a cartoon, an article, anything really. The teacher would give us 5 minutes thinking time. Then we’d begin talking and that lasted the whole lesson. At the same time, we incorporated specific verb forms or some other language point, but the basis of every class was a discussion activity.

At the age of 13, like all her peers in middle school, Alice was required to start a second foreign language and she chose English. It was like taking a cold shower.

AP – In English, I remember that the classes were ultra packed, so we did no oral work as such, very little dialogue.

Gone were the joys of a living, breathing foreign language used as a tool of communication. In the English classes Alice experienced, she found herself wondering, on more than one occasion, if the language could be actually used to do anything. A specific example?

AP – We had to learn the irregular verbs in English. But only so that we knew them, not so that we would be able to use them. We didn’t start from a discussion in order to use things we were required to learn; we started from things we were required to learn – and never came anywhere near a discussion!

This vision of English as a dead, useless language only changed 6 years later once she had graduated from high school and completed a year’s study to prepare the entrance exam to enter Sciences Po-Grenoble where she would spend the next 5 years. Here, the English class was based on interaction.

AP – For the first time, we actually talked. The chairs in the class were arranged in a semi-circle. Our teacher had us prepare debates in English over two-week periods. She began by distributing the roles we were to play during the debate – politicians, elected representatives and so on. Leading up to the big debate, we did research on the planned theme by doing lots of reading and watching videos.

Suddenly, Alice had to adapt. Fortunately, motivation won out over the suffering involved.

AP – I loved every minute, even if I had no tools I could use. It was so hard for me to understand the videos that I had to keep pressing the pause button, ask myself what had just been said and try to write it down. It was tough, but the format was motivating. I felt like I was been given access to something because the learning-model suited me. From the preparatory work we did, we were able to look at specific grammar points and specific vocabulary in connection to the theme. Gradually you build your tools, but that’s not the first item on the list. You don’t start with the tools.

As a committed, lively pupil, she threw herself into learning English because she understood the value of the work – which was by no means easy – that she was asked to do. ³ Alice had made her peace with English, but she would not go so far as to remove Spanish from its position as first foreign language. When she later required to study abroad as part of her higher education diplomas, she would opt for Spanish-speaking countries, spending long periods in Argentina and Chile as we’ll see shortly.

Wanting to be a journalist

How do you choose a profession? Many of us ask ourselves as children or teenagers which profession we’d like to enter later. Some people seem to know from a young age that they want to be, let’s say, a musician, a chef or a doctor. For some of them, this will mean putting in extra work in their free time outside school. For others, the way forward is vocational training followed by an early entry onto the job market to keep learning and developing. For others again, the years of study in perspective will be long and difficult before they get the diplomas they need. Lastly, there are young people lucky enough to be able to take time over study in further education before finally making a professional choice.

For a long time, Alice Pfeiffer wanted to become a journalist, and she could even see how to get there.

AP – I wanted to become a journalist. In France, at the time, people used to say that the best way to enter the profession is by first studying at Sciences-Po. I used to write news articles all the time when I was a child. My parents kept loads of things I wrote which I came across before moving house. Heaps of completely imaginary news articles. Anyway, I had always wanted to study at Sciences-Po, perhaps for childish reasons. A cousin of mine had studied there and it looked interesting. My Dad was totally in favour of the idea. I was pushed towards it, as if I knew that there was only one direction for me. I didn’t question this plan at all and I did the preparatory year for the entrance exam to make sure I was accepted.

As you already know, a long-held objective and a diploma from Sciences-Po did not make Alice Pfeiffer a journalist. What happened?

AP – Once I entered higher education I saw the whole range of possibles outside journalism. In 2006, in my preparatory year for Sciences-Po after getting my Bac, I discovered a passion for history beyond the narrative we’re taught at school. Up to then, I had learnt that we simply opened our textbooks at page 42 (sic) and learnt of events that happened and how they happened. I understand this choice of narrative which remains unquestioned. But the day I found out that history is actually historiography, I was fascinated.

In 2007, as a new student at Sciences-Po in Grenoble, something a history lecturer said developed her appetite for the subject even further.

AP – He said to us : “If you want to tell me that Stalin was a democrat, go ahead. Prove it to me. You can do it, but I want to hear your arguments. Tell me about it. History is a narrative to be constructed. So start digging, find your arguments, make your critical remarks and do your research.” It was extraordinary! History is not a single narrative but several narratives. I forgot all about journalism without even realising it.

Doubling her workload

Good things come in pairs, and the encounter with history would not be the only learning path on Alice’s new map. Now she was the political science student she’d dreamed of becoming, she would also begin law. She would find it difficult to choose between them for a long time. To the extent that she found herself deciding to major in both, doubling her workload.

AP – When I arrived in Grenoble, during the first two years at Sciences-Po I was also enrolled at the Faculty of Law. I had special status as a law student because I couldn’t attend all the classes. And as a law student, if you don’t go to class, you can’t take the exams. Attendance is strictly monitored. So I had classes on line which I printed out and worked through at home alone. Then, every Saturday morning, I had to attend two seminars at the law faculty in person.

The workload was massive – Alice says she gave it every waking hour – and she kept up the pace for two years. When the universities reopened for the new academic year in 2009, she was already exhausted. She had already enrolled for the final year of her law degree, and was also facing a particularly challenging third year of Sciences-Po.

AP – I wasn’t feeling at all comfortable. My flatmate, who wasn’t part of the student community – she was a midwife – put a simple question to me : “Can’t you do law later at some point? Do you really have to do it now?” The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind! So I withdrew from law and stopped it altogether, telling myself that of course I could see later if I really wanted to pick it up again.

With a single workload, the year went more smoothly. Even if the dilemma of choosing between ultimately being a political scientist or becoming a lawyer was not quite resolved. But there was another decision waiting nearer on the horizon. She was lucky enough to be in an institute of higher education which required its students to spend a compulsory year abroad. She decided to look for something in a Spanish-speaking country.

A completely different approach to learning

Alice spent 2010-11 in Argentina where she came in contact with a completely different approach to studying and learning.

AP – In France, teachers in higher education give you a lot of guidance. I’m talking about my experience here. For example, when you need to study an author like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, you get a 10-page extract from The Social Contract to read beforehand. In class, the teacher writes up a series of headings on the board. The teacher talks, the students take notes. Occasionally, people ask questions and there are exchanges, but basically you go the way the teacher points. So finally you learn to talk about an author and a book that you haven’t read in full! You read stuff in preparation but, globally, in class it’s the teacher who does the work.

In Argentina, more precisely at la Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), things happened differently. For each class, the students were given a book a week in photocopy form to read. This reading then served as the basis for a collective discussion.

AP – We felt very exposed in class. If you hadn’t read the thing, there was no point in coming. I remember on one occasion – it only happened once, in fact – I went to class without doing the reading. It was about a highly specialized histographical approach to the so-called discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus. It was a critical perspective and the narrative proposed was completely different to the one I knew – so it was really exciting! As rule, I have no trouble in situations like that. But here I was completely out of my depth.

This regime imposed a close reading of three books a week – and they were all in Spanish – for the three classes which Alice had to attend as a foreign student. The approach gave the students more freedom, but also greater responsibility.

In fact, the model was one of collaborative learning : the class only worked if everyone participated and accepted to contribute things from their personal reading to the shared discussion. In the grand Argentinian tradition, a warm supply of maté to drink passed from person to person in the assembly, as the teacher subtly managed the exchanges.

AP – The teacher’s role was as a coordinator and a mediator. He questioned us, got us started and, depending on what we said and what we understood – we often didn’t understand what we had read – he would intervene and reformulate. He wasn’t at all passive, but he didn’t have that overbearing presence which meant that he would be the one giving the class. In fact, there weren’t even any tables in the room. There were only chairs, which were vaguely set out in a sort of circle so that we could all see each other. The teacher sat with us. Sometimes there were two or three teachers. Not sitting together, but in among the students. Everybody, teachers and students, made sure we – the foreign students – were part of the conversation. So, if you were in difficulty over putting something into words, it wasn’t a problem. It was all very supportive.

This resembles the participatory planning work which Alice now uses on a daily basis as an urban planner with Le Facteur Urbain. Just looking at the photos illustrating the projects section on the company website, you get a feel for the collaborative, sharing dimension given to each planning project with members of local communities considered as co decision-makers. This professional philosophy can now be seen as an extension of the work done in the collaborative learning community encountered in Buenos Aires.

Back to France and the learning jungle

On returning from Argentina, Alice completed her final year and obtained her Political Science diploma. At the end of an intense 5 years in Grenoble, with her parents’ support, she was able to look at continuing her studies and so decided to try and finish what she had started at the Faculty of Law. She thought it was just a question of completing the final year of her Bachelor’s degree in Grenoble but, as a qualified political scientist, she was eligible to enrol directly for the final year of a Master’s in International Law and Human Rights in Paris.

AP – I found myself suddenly in the jungle of a Master of Law course, surrounded by students who had all come through the orthodox study of law. There was no time to lose! I knew the basics of law but everything I knew was from 3 years earlier and I hadn’t updated my knowledge at all. There were also things I had simply never learnt because I’d skipped the final year of the Bachelor of Law and the first year of the Master’s.

She came face to face with the tough reality of legal studies, far from the perspective political science took on questions of law. She also had to take on board the idea that the second year of a Master’s course was a time when students were expected to be able to step back and look critically at what they had learnt the year before.

AP – You had to have solid foundations to survive. So I had to get up to speed on theory in double time, while also being able to pick holes in what I was in the process of learning. It was very intense, it was hard, but also exciting. I enjoyed every minute.

She came through her Master’s course successfully, but still has mixed feelings about having had to constantly shake off the image of being a political scientists lost among the lawyers. During her final oral exam the jury told her : “You’re not at Sciences Po here.” True to form, Alice couldn’t leave that remark unanswered. She did so with a question.

AP – I said : “You knew my background when I applied, so why did you accept me on the course?” I was told in no uncertain terms that I was a political scientist, certainly not a jurist, and I would never be one and that it was time to choose.

Has she managed to choose between the two?

AP – No, and I don’t want to. I remember when I was doing political science and law at the same time when I arrived in Grenoble. Especially in the first year, we sometimes worked on the same themes on both courses. In history class, for example, I would be studying the same periods at the same time, but I wasn’t hearing the same things at all. It was great. The dialogue between the two courses was brilliant.

That said, she tries to interpret the message about the need to choose from the jury in her law exam.

AP – Maybe they were trying to tell me that I would never be an expert on anything, that I’d always be an all-rounder, never a real jurist. Yes, they had a point. I’m not a political scientist or a jurist. I’m both, and I think that the result makes all the difference, it’s a different way of looking at things. I can see it today with urbanism, which is a multi disciplinary field. It’s enriching to have more than one string to your bow, to be multi-skilled and to be able to look at the same subject from different persepectives.

Human rights and urban planning revealed

Alice Pfeiffer first became aware of urban planning during two long stays in Santiago de Chile : the first was as part of her semester abroad on an internship with Amnesty International during her Master’s in International Law; the second was post-diploma, when she decided to move to Chile permanently.

AP – I was basically working on two subjects with Amnesty International and at the university ; migrant and refugee rights, and post-dictatorship jurisprudence in Chile today. On top of that, I ran workshops on access to rights and I also gave French lessons. So I went all over the city, navigating between extremely rich neighbourhoods and extremely poor ones.

These multiple jobs meant that she travelled a lot, because the acess to rights workshops and the French lessons were clearly not for the same people.

AP – The contrast was astonishing. Living on a daily basis in this socio-economic geography, I began to look at things in terms of space. Until then, I had always looked at the world in socio-political and socio-economic terms – inequalities, how society works and so on. But here, my job was to work on questions of migration, borders, and territorial access. There is the administrative border to cross but, once you’re through, where do you have the right to go and where don’t you have the right to go?

A good friend of hers, a sociologist turned urban planner, first showed her how to interpret the invisible borders in a city in this new way. She wanted to know more, but you have to train to become an urban planner. That meant Alice putting an end to plans of life in Chile and returning to France to find an appropriate course.

AP – My parents – I have to say that they trusted me! I told them I wanted to become an urban planner. “You work in international law and human rights, and now you you want to go into … urban planning?! What has happened to you?”

Le Facteur Urbain, birth and development

In 2015, when Alice entered l’École d’Urbanisme de Paris, she realised that she was neither a jurist nor a political scientist but an urban planner. She revelled in the multidisciplinary atmosphere of the course.

AP – For the first time, I was praised for not having chosen. Urban planning is a field where theory constantly meets practice. I loved the constant interaction between the two. And I continue to work that way every day in my job.

With her qualification, she was taken on by Rennes Métropole Service Habitat, the planning authority in a major town in Britanny. However, she found herself right at the bottom of a very hierarchical organization.

AP – I learnt a lot but didn’t feel I had any room for taking intiatives. I had so little to do that I completely lost confidence. I felt I had no purpose.

Alice, who had already asked herself what maths were for in middle school, and had come close to student burn-out at university, now found herself in major bore-out in a profession full of possibilities because she was stuck in a job where she was under-employed and under-valued. Early in 2017, she made a new start by creating the company which would become Le Facteur Urbain. This changed everything and she soon realized she had to think differently if she was to survive financially.

AP – I made the move and created my company because I wanted to do things my way both in terms of form and content. The risks weren’t enormous. I didn’t have a student loan⁴, or a child back then, but the situation was financially tricky. I used to stay with friends every weekend so that I could put my flat in Rennes on Airbnb, otherwise I couldn’t pay the rent. The government benefit I received every month was less than my rent. But once you pay the rent, you still have to eat. I used to to pick up stuff free or cheap at the end of street markets. I had my survival instinct turned on permanently just to get by.

She also got to learn about the world of small businesses and stumbled on a network of solidairity that she hadn’t been expecting.

AP – As head of my own company, I’d anticipated spending my days swimming with sharks. It wasn’t like that at all. At least, not where I was working. There was a lot of solidarity. Things started to pick up, and I began to earn a living. Now there are two us in the business and we’re thoroughly enjoying ourselves. Obviously, there are wake-up calls from reality. We have to think about contigency plans, turnover, cash-flow and so on. We also have to pay out our salaries every month and keep competing for public sector contracts. Of course, there are constraints, but there is also a great sense of freedom.

It was Alice’s business partner Maurane Hernandez who came up with the name Le Facteur Urbain for the company. It is rather a clever play on words.

AP – In French Le facteur is the postman, somebody who delivers messages and helps people keep in touch. Facteur also translates as the English word factor, a term which is used all the time when talking about an economic factor or a social factor, for example. So the facteur element is widely used and has multiple meanings. The other element, urbain, is a direct reference to urban planning, of course, but also to that urbane quality of courteous refinement which helps people to live together. One more thing about the name is that people often misremember or missay Le Facteur Urbain, and call us Le Facteur Humain, The Human Factor. I like that cheeky twist of meaning⁵.

Finally, let’s not forget that a factor is also a mathematical term which describes elements which, when multiplied together create a new element called a product. Without knowing it, Alice seems to have finally found a use for maths!

Still want more?

You can follow Le Facteur Urbain on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

Even if French is a foreign language for you, take a minute to visit lefacteururbain.fr, the company website. It’s creative and easy to use. You can even write directly to Alice Pfeiffer. I’m sure she’d love to hear from you. Say I sent you!

1. Thank you, Mrs Taylor. ↩︎
2. Thank you, Serge Vizzini, computer buff and colleague. ↩︎
3. Obviously, the remarks here about Spanish and English classes reflect Alice’s experiences, not how all teachers of these languages work. That said, since her years at school, language teaching in France has adopted an action-based or task-based approach which has now given oral work a more central role. Alice was born a little too soon to benefit from this change. ↩︎
4. The cost of tuition fees reduces the need for student loans in France compared with say the UK. However, the situation is slowly changing as this information page on student loans in France indicates. ↩︎
5. The Wikipedia page for The Human Factor also confirms a wide range of meanings in English. It’s nice when ambiguity works both ways. ↩︎