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Feb. 6, 2004) PUBLIC PARTICIPATION -- Part 2
by Maria B. Pellerano*
Three recent reports suggest that communities will be safer, cleaner, stronger and happier as residents increase their participation in land use planning, zoning, and other environmental decisions. So what tools are out there to help us?
For the past two years, Environmental Research Foundation has been reviewing tools to help us participate in civic life. We post these tools on our web site in a section called "What's Working Now." (https://www.rachel.org .) Here we will review the best of them.
First, a word of caution. These are not silver bullets. As anyone who has tried it knows, community participation is hard work and, to be effective, must become a regular part of our civic lives. You shouldn't expect to create change by spending one evening at a meeting or writing one letter.
Furthermore, effective participation requires organization. Once in a while, a "lone ranger" makes a difference, but it is MUCH more likely that things will begin to happen if people get organized and work together. Community participation is a long-term process that is most likely to succeed if people create (or join) organizations whose agenda includes civic participation.
Understanding Your Community
To promote civic engagement, a community group can ask itself, Who needs to be at the table? And what does the community want?
Meaningful community input depends on having all stakeholders represented in discussions. Often we do not know who all the players are in our neighborhood or community. We can always round up the usual suspects, but we really need a full spectrum of viewpoints at the table, particularly viewpoints different from our own. Learning about your community will help your organization grow and develop better relationships with other groups, businesses, and agencies.
Community Asset Inventory
A good way to learn about your community is to conduct a community asset inventory.[4] It is best to undertake this on a neighborhood level with a neighborhood-based group doing the work. Cataloging a community's assets involves a door-to-door survey of one's neighbors, in three parts.
1. An inventory of the gifts, skills, and talents of neighborhood residents is compiled.
2. You locate and list all associations in your neighborhood, and you need to make this list as broad as possible. For example you would include social clubs, religious organizations, sports clubs and teams, PTAs, civic organizations, gardening clubs, etc.
3. Finally you develop a list of formal institutions; these might include private businesses, public institutions (libraries, schools, parks, etc.), and non-profit agencies (hospitals, community development agencies, etc.).
There are several reasons why community asset inventories are a valuable first step but the two most important are: 1) it helps community members identify their local assets and provides them with a list of all resources that might be pulled into a process of neighborhood visioning or regeneration; and 2) the very process of creating an asset inventory gets community members talking to each other about their shared hopes and concerns.
Participatory Mapping
After you have developed your community asset inventory, it is a good idea to understand what your community looks like now and how you want it to look in the future. Again you want to do this on a neighborhood level because it is much easier to handle a small area rather than an entire town or city. The best tool that I know of for doing this work is participatory mapping.
I am going to describe the low-tech version of participatory mapping not the one using computerized Geographic Information Systems (GIS) -- see https://www.rachel.org/bestPrac/detail.cfm?bestPrac_ID=68 for information on GIS mapping.
Community groups can use participatory mapping to involve a diverse group of residents in future land use planning for the community. These maps can serve many purposes such as siting a housing development, planning open space, or developing better pedestrian and bicycle paths.
I am going to discuss participatory mapping for developing an ideal overview of your community.
First you have a good local map printed on paper large enough for a small group of people to work on it around a table. You might make a number of copies of this map so that several small groups can work at the same time. Make sure that the map has all current land features (parks, streams, roads, etc.), buildings (houses, schools, hospitals, retail establishments, factories, etc.), and any known contaminated sites already noted on it. Make sure you use simple icons[6] to mark features such as existing libraries, schools, hospitals, etc. First, the participants examine the map and discuss the primary land uses in the neighborhood (housing, schools, empty lots, etc.), noting incompatible land uses such as a metal plating shop in the middle of a residential area.
People should then be given the opportunity to envision what they want their community to look like. For example, they might put all the industrial facilities in one area, have a concentrated shopping corridor, put schools within walking distance of people's homes, have open space and playgrounds walkable distances from each house, etc. If you have several groups working on the same area, each group can make a presentation and then everyone can decide which ideas are best and how to develop a single map. This final "consensus" map can then be used whenever the community is trying to show local officials how they want their community to develop. This can be done over a period of months so that you can get maximum input from your community.
Study Circles
Another great tool for discussing the vision of your community is "study circles" that are given the task of finding agreement on an issue[7]. A study circle is a facilitated group of 8 to 12 people with diverse backgrounds and differing viewpoints who agree to meet several times to discuss a specific issue. Each person has an equal voice and people try to understand one another's different views, share concerns, and look for ways to make things better.
Study circles can be used for most issues that communities face including race relations, how different generations can work together, how to plan for growth in a community, and how to provide better educational opportunities for our children.
With the help of the Study Circles Resource Center, communities develop a committee that creates the agenda for the study circle and helps find the participants. Like the study circles themselves, these committees need to represent different backgrounds and interests in the community. Multiple study circles are held in the community simultaneously over a period of time culminating in a community-wide meeting where the individual study circles report on the action ideas they agreed on. The whole group then agrees on the actions that the community can take together.
Local Governments Can Encourage Public Participation
Local governments can take the lead in helping citizens participate. Here are three ways that governments are currently aiding public participation: citizen advisory committees, community or neighborhood councils, and consensus conferences (sometimes called citizen panels).
Citizen Advisory Committees
Many government agencies use citizen advisory committees to help with decision-making on a variety of issues (transportation, environment, education, policing, housing, art, etc.). These committees are a good idea but historically in some communities they have been ineffective for various reasons (such as limits on the issues they can address; politically appointed membership not truly representative of a community; rubber stamping decisions already made; heavy influence from corporations; and limited input from citizens who are not members of the committee). Government agencies could work with communities to redesign advisory committees so that the community gets to appoint the members, the committee itself gets to decide which issues it will address, and the committee agrees to engage a wider public before making final decisions.
Community Councils
Some U.S. cities have developed a system where neighborhood associations get support from city-funded agencies on a district level. Called different things in different communities (for example in Dayton, Ohio they are called Priority Boards and in Portland, Ore. they are called Neighborhood District Coalitions) they are designed to provide support and give a voice to neighborhood organizations. I call them all "community councils."
In general, community councils begin by having neighborhood organizations define their own boundaries. Then the city defines the boundaries of the community council, whose office and staff serve all the neighborhood organizations that lie within that council's boundaries. In general, representatives of the different neighborhood organizations make up the community council board. The staff is usually provided by the city and their job is to facilitate citizen participation by helping associations and training community members in leadership and civic involvement. Neighborhood organizations can use community council space for meetings, and can use office equipment such as photocopiers.
In general these community councils are hailed as a model of civic participation but in some cases the membership of the council may not reflect the general population of the area. For example, in St. Paul, Minn. some say that the Neighborhood Councils tend to represent white homeowners, even where most of the residents are people of color and renters.
Consensus Conferences
Consensus conferences are another way that governments can get community input on a complex issue[10]. The conferences were originally developed by the federal National Institutes of Health to produce consensus statements on controversial medical topics.
Today consensus conferences are used (chiefly by European governments) to reach consensus on controversial technologies (for example, genetically altering livestock, telecommunications policy, or the use of transplants in medicine). The conference is managed by a steering committee that chooses a lay panel of 15 volunteer participants who lack significant prior knowledge about the issue. [For details, see 10.] The steering committee also commissions the writing of a background paper that describes the pros and cons of the technology under discussion. Working with a skilled facilitator, the lay panel discusses this background paper and begins developing a set of questions that will eventually be answered by a group of experts.
The steering committee assembles an expert panel including scientific, technical, social, and ethics experts, plus stakeholders from unions, industry, and environmental organizations.
The lay panel reviews additional background papers provided by the steering committee, refines its questions, and suggests additions and deletions to the expert panel.
The process ends with a four-day public forum during which the experts make presentations and answer questions from the lay panel and sometimes from the audience. The lay panel deliberates and then cross-examines the expert panel to fill in information gaps and to clarify areas of disagreement. The lay panel then writes a report, summarizing the issues on which it has achieved consensus and identifying points of disagreement.
The panel's final conclusions are widely distributed to the media, and local hearings are held to stimulate informed public debate, help citizens understand the issues, and influence decision-makers. As with all these processes, serious effort is needed to insure a diverse lay panel.
The lay panel's recommendations are not binding on anyone, but they have proven to be very influential on public policy because of the deliberate and open nature of the process.
A Few Ways Communities Plan for Future Land Use
Austin, Texas has a long history of land use planning and zoning errors including zoning based on racial segregation. In 1998, Austin began a program to develop neighborhood plans -- a program designed to remedy existing zoning problems and improve community outreach and communications. Over the course of a year, Austin's Neighborhood Planning and Zoning Department works with neighborhood residents to address land use, transportation, services and infrastructure, and urban design issues. The goal is for diverse interests (renters, residents, property owners, business owners, community organizations and institutions) to get together and develop a shared vision for their community.
Each neighborhood plan has four goals: 1) identify neighborhood strengths and assets (for example, can a resident meet all his or her basic needs within walking distance?); 2) identify neighborhood needs and concerns (for example, the neighborhood might need more open space); 3) establish goals for improving the neighborhood (for example, exclude properties that do not reflect the scale of existing houses); and 4) recommend specific actions to reach those goals (for example, develop design criteria for all new buildings).
So far, 21 of the 54 plans have been completed and are available on Austin's Neighborhood Planning and Zoning Department's web site. The web site also includes an extensive library of materials that residents can review to prepare for their neighborhood planning sessions.
Eminent Domain
I have only heard of this tool used by a community group in one city, but there it has proven to be very powerful. In the 1980s, Dudley Street, a Boston community that straddles Dorchester and Roxbury, looked like other inner city neighborhoods -- one third of its land was vacant and it had become an illegal dumping ground. In 1984, residents took control, forming the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), organizing around immediate concerns AND starting to engage in long-term planning. DSNI's first campaign, "Don't Dump on Us," cleaned up vacant lots, shut down illegal trash transfer stations, and served as a community organizing tactic. DSNI decided Dudley Street needed to take control of the urban planning process, rather than allow its destiny to be decided by the City of Boston. Believing in "bottom-up" development rather than top down planning, DSNI and its hired planners created a comprehensive plan to "redevelop" Dudley Street into an urban village. The most pressing problem was to gain control of the vacant lots so that the community could guide future development. With free legal assistance, DSNI became the first neighborhood organization in the U.S. to win the right of eminent domain over its vacant lots. Eminent domain is the power of the sovereign to take property for public use, compensating the owner at market rates. The power of eminent domain allowed residents of Dudley Street to acquire valuable assets and gave them a strong bargaining chip for deciding the future of their community. To date, more than three hundred of the 1,300 abandoned parcels in the neighborhood have been transformed into high quality affordable housing, gardens and public spaces. Eminent domain is a powerful tool indeed.
To many people in the U.S., democracy means not much more than paying taxes and occasionally voting. However, as we have seen, it doesn't have to be that way. Using some of the new tools to enhance participation, citizens can directly influence many of the decisions that affect their lives.
* Maria B. Pellerano is associate director of Environmental Research Foundation.
Acknowledgement: Research and writing assistance for What's Working Now (https://www.rachel.org/bestPrac/index.cfm?St=1) has been provided by Allison Freeman, Ph.D. candidate, City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
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