>Where else it's been done, how, lessons learned,
>technical/organizational/political questions. All of it. I'm looking
>to do a radio series on the topic, and maybe write up some of it too.
>I'm pretty fired up about it, in fact.
The New Orleans situation is, of course, unprecedented The classic case given these days of participatory civic process is the Porto Alegre budget. Then there is the bus-riders union in Los Angeles. Neither of these even begin to address the scale and scope of the New Orleans situation. The factory occupations in Argentina are another related but not directly applicable situation. Venezuela has a community planning law but I don't know either how effective it is or how relevant. Other examples that may come to mind with a little jogging. Maybe you could ask Naomi Klein if she has any other models in mind.
Pierre Clavel at Cornell University wrote a book a long, long time ago about participatory planning in US cities in the 1970s: New Haven, Cleveland, Berkeley, Santa Monica, Ca., (one of Clinton's aides came out of the Santa Monica operation). I personally found it tired and quite dated already by the 1980s. I don't know if Pierre has kept up on examples of best practice or whatever but my sense is that the political and fiscal retrenchment of the 1980s and after sort of squelched the idea of participatory planning in other than a superficial or trivial sense. The other guy at Cornell who does participatory planning is John Forester. John and I were barely on speaking terms when I left the program.
Vancouver conducted a process called "City Plan" in the early 1990s (I edited most of the backgrounder information for it) but it was pretty much of a feel-good exercise.
I'll do a bit of online lit crawling and see if I can come up with any more leads.
The Sandwichman