If we had a local version of Crosscut, a recent post by Rob Richards would deserve banner-headline prominence. In “The Process is the Thing,” he argues that creating “good” density requires good process. That effectively means curtailing the power of developers and planners.
This is a pretty subversive perspective. You’ve heard of the military-industrial complex dominating U.S. foreign policy? A similar dynamic plays out with local land-use planning. All too often a planner-developer complex primarily serves the narrow interests of the local growth machine rather than the larger — and long-term — common good. Richards’ focus on empowering the citizenry would effectively shift power away from the planner-developer complex.
Participatory planning isn’t a fringe idea
It would be easy to brush aside his perspective as that of an environmental extremist. But that wouldn’t be fair. Richards links his argument to that of Jane Jacobs, one of the planning field’s most influential voices in the last half century.
Jacobs’ participatory-oriented approach has been embraced by other prominent land-use experts such as John Forester of Cornell University. He has authored planning textbooks such as Planning in the Face of Power (1989), The Deliberative Practitioner (1999) and Dealing with Differences: Dramas of Mediating Public Disputes (2009).
Indeed, Jacobs and Forester are such big names in the planning field that I would be shocked if there were any planners within Thurston County who hadn’t read at least some of their books and been asked by their professors to engage the meta-question: How should power be distributed in the planning process?
Ideals are hard to live up to
I had a planning professor who once lamented that so many young people entered graduate school with high ideals — only to find them dashed against the rocks of business-as-usual once they got their first job.
That’s why it is important to avoid blaming individuals and instead explore the systemic reasons why a planning process has taken citizen-involvement short cuts. As a case in point, the political economy of development can make it very hard for a planner to do more than mitigate its most egregious impacts.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, sociologist Harvey Molotch has argued that local politics is dominated by a growth machine. The activist group Controlling Growth In Our Communities summarizes this phenomenon: “The Growth Machine wants land to be used in ways that maximize the economic returns to its members. The Growth Machine does not care that its plans will lower the quality-of-life for current citizens or make the community less sustainable.”
How to best respond to the growth machine?
Controlling Growth further argues that “citizens cannot depend on our government officials to control land use for our common benefit because these officials protect the rights of property owners (i.e., Growth Machine) over the rights of current residents.” So this citizen’s group places an emphasis on legal resistance, such as through the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.
I suspect that Rob Richards may have a less legalistic — and pessimistic — attitude. He concludes his essay by stating that, “We know what we want our neighborhoods to look like, and we know what it’ll take to get us there. We just have to step up and take our place.”
My experience has been that it is harder for a neighborhood to coalesce around a common vision than Richards suggests. But it is a worthy undertaking. And it is more likely to succeed if planners saw themselves as facilitators of good process rather than social engineers determined to enforce a top-down policy, such as Sustainable Thurston’s ham-handed emphasis on planning for 170,000 new residents regardless of the environmental, social and financial consequences.
If you think it’s hard to change things in Olympia . . .
Sustainable Thurston could have turned out very differently if the staff of the Thurston Regional Planning Council had taken to heart the participatory planning approaches of Jacobs and Forester. Indeed, I’ve heard second-hand reports that not everyone was happy with the direction of this initiative, e.g., one planner allegedly described it as “the orderly destruction of the environment” — all under the orwellian name of sustainability.
If you think that Olympia’s neighborhoods lack adequate land-use powers, they have greater standing than those in unincorporated portions of the county. A proposed home-rule charter in the late-1980s would have at least partially addressed that problem. But it got demolished at the polls in part because of a last-minute negative media blitz significantly funded by out-of-county developer PACs.
This brings me back to a central theme of my writing: Citizen power requires electoral muscle that is not dependent on any one candidate. That goes for the City of Olympia just as much as it does the county.
T. Caine
April 1, 2012
A great topic.
“My experience has been that it is harder for a neighborhood to coalesce around a common vision than Richards suggests.”
I agree. I think any version of utopian vision of any community is even harder to find now than it was 50 years ago. The individual realities of each household only continue to become more unique and we have entered a new era where the identity of both home and community are being challenged and re-evaluated on every level. The ease (and resulting low cost) operation at the status quo is butting heads with the ideas of appropriateness and evolution.
As a design professional (an architect by trade) I think there is another conundrum that is difficult for designers to work around. To use your reference of Rob Richard’s quote, “We know what we want our neighborhoods to look like, and we know what it’ll take to get us there. We just have to step up and take our place.”
Who knows, exactly? And based off of what? Design and planning professionals are faced with the task of trying to create new spaces and social relationships that are relevant to the present and future. Non-professionals have a tendency to base their opinions on buildings and space on what they have known or have seen, an image of the past. There’s no reason to blame anyone for that. It is just human nature, but it makes the process of avoiding a “top-down” process of crafting our communities and cityscapes somewhat difficult. If people knew how to design a community by themselves then we wouldn’t need designers. The Catch-22 is that when migrating from what we already know, the average resident will have an opinion on what he does or doesn’t like, but usually only after it’s built. Multiple that by 170,000 and it becomes difficult to poll a mass of people with no design experience on how to best solve issues and problems that they are untrained to tackle.
That being said, I am not advocating for the developer-driven model. Without a doubt, too much of our construction is based off of bottom-line mentalities that accomplish nothing for the successful coordination of space or people on the building or the community level. It’s a tough problem, and one that suburban America in particular is still trying to figure out. Is “citizen power” really about everyone trying to be a designer in order to coordinate a community on their own, or is it about trying to collectively allocate directors of the process that share the goals of the community for its realization?
Rob Richards
April 2, 2012
I’m definitely second guessing my wording based on the attention paid to that one quote. If I could clarify, and I can, because you have a comment forum, I would say that T. Caine is exactly correct when they say, “The Catch-22 is that when migrating from what we already know, the average resident will have an opinion on what he does or doesn’t like, but usually only after it’s built.”
I think it’s critical for neighbors to have input in the design process, AND input along the way based on the actual use of the space. For instance, Sylvestor Park is nice, it’s a beautiful and unique urban park – but is it the best use of space for that neighborhood? Couldn’t the neighbors of the park design a better public space out of it, based on years of use? I think so, and that’s another level of public process that I’d like to see gain traction – a Neighborhood Use of Space Review, if you will.
T. Caine
April 2, 2012
Definitely, Rob. I think that the community still has a valuable role to play. I might offer that the community’s strength and the their perspective is to keep the developer agendas honest rather than be designers.
I hail from New York City, where community boards have been given a great deal of review power. Once a project reaches a certain type and size, they require a community board review. It is not to say that a community board has indefinitely and absolute power to deny a project, but they have a voice and it is usually one that even big developers respond to. I think things like this are valuable to a balance evolution of the built environment.