Gritty urban crime TV drama The Wire has won millions of fans the world over for its intensely realistic portrayal of the problems and poverty in the US city of Baltimore, but the State of Maryland’s former Secretary of Planning, Richard Hall, isn’t one of them.

As the man who’s spent years implementing policies that revitalise and improve areas and neighbourhoods in a state that’s making a tough transition from an industrial and manufacturing economy to one more based on services, he’s more interested in talking about how earn the trust of communities and maintain a genuine conversation as they necessarily change.

“The Wire is just a TV show that showed the worst of Baltimore, exploited it in my opinion. It was well filmed and well-acted. I think that unfortunately a lot of people watched that show and think that’s what Baltimore is all about and they don’t know the other part,” Hall says frankly.

It’s a straight-up attitude that seems to underpin much of the work he’s doing in his new job as the Executive Director of the Maryland Citizens Planning and Housing Association, a citizen based advocacy group that pushes for transparency and integrity in planning decisions, not to mention economic development.

Hall is in Australia to deliver the keynote address to the Locate 16 conference, the nation’s largest gathering of professionals and stakeholders at the coalface of surveying, planning and community resilience.

[This article originally appeared on Government News. Click here to read the article in full.]

Locate16 is the national conference of the spatial and surveying industries of Australia and New Zealand. It is taking place all this week at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, from Tuesday through Thursday. Registration remain open, including for today’s Expo Open Day, which is free to all.

Click here for further details about Locate16.