[from `Move the goalposts, wingnuts thread]:
``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....'' Tom Walker
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I never read the book, but I lived in the middle of several years of developing `participatory planning' in Berkeley (in the 70s) at both ends of the process. My ex-wife was a city planner for the city, and many of my disabled political friends were part of the `community' doing the `participation'.
In this example, the key element for success was the depth of political sophistication of the community---which was very high. Several people moved from community organizing to the grad depts in City Planning/Architecture/Law at UCB, and then back to community organizations and later into state and federal government.
I am not sure the process can be well generalized because the real grit is in the details of the people involved, their own ability to figure out how to take an existing municipal system and modify it to meet the community needs---how to design the participation process, the funding mechanisms, how to link up contacts from the city, county, state and federal systems. How to form coalitions and how to police themselves and other competing groups. And most of all how to sustain the work over many years---building into government the kind of democratic and social processes they wanted to achieve.
Another key to success is to make sure that the community people hold the greatest measure of expertize on what is to be done. This amounts to a fundamental alteration of the balance of power between government agencies and their so-called target populations.
The usual problem is that a planning agency or a few people inside one decide they need to `revitalize' a neighborhood and link up with some local community organization and attempt to impliment what amounts to a top-down plan.
In Berkeley in the early-70s the process was reversed, so that a fairly sophisticated community organization (with some grad students in city planning, architecture, and law) essentially invaded the city agencies, bringing with them several academics from the university. They already had their own plans, proposals, and political agenda. In effect it was a bottom-up approach.
Another key element is how to frame the issues in terms of a class of people, so that a fundamental unity or center of solutions presents itself and acts to coordinate access to the political process and all public services in: education, housing, transportation, communication, law enforcement, health, etc. It isn't just an matter of reconstruction or `revitalization' of a neighborhood. It really amounts to overhauling government and city infrastructure at the same time...
The deepest problem with this last element is the evolution of `identity' politics so that essentially duplicate solutions are evolved for each identity named (which also provides an endless source of divide-and-conquer to advisaries). I don't have any idea how to get around this problem, primarily because the groups I worked with were disabled and the in-fighting was a major head ache. It was apparent to me that the most concrete base of unity was poverty and its inherent restrictions on access to public power---not just disability. On the other hand disability was the underlying organic unity that built the community base. The internal struggles between poverty, race, and disability were never worked out---so I can't describe how a higher level of class consciousness can be worked out in the concrete.
Now all of this may make dreadful reading material, but believe me, when I was living in the middle of it, it was waay cool. For example, my ex and a couple of disabled politicos laid out all the major intersections in Berkeley from the city plans and developed a list of priorities for ramping the city streets. Meanwhile I built a couple of models from the then current federal (proposed) specs for ramp designs and we decided they were wrong---by, duh, testing them. It was evident the experts had never actually tested their own specs in real life conditions.
So we developed our own design. It was incorporated into the main city plan (by others) and used as the first model---done in 1970-71 mostly around campus and downtown. Later improved fed specs and models were developed by others that were better than ours, but we had the first one.
Now, if the city had initiated the ramp project back then, they would have followed the fed spec, and it would have been wrong. The point here is that top-down very often doesn't work. Needless to say a whole committee of locals (Architectural Barriers Committee) had to ride herd on the responsible city and university (state) agencies to make sure all that happened...
There were similar community based groups working out simple and cheap modifications necessary for city housing projects, gaining access to the courts, public buildings---and finally the public transportation system seven or eight years later---all mixed successes and failures. But all of them were bottom-up projects.
Just read this [Naomi Klein, posted Tom Walker, Let the People Rebuild New Orleans]:
``We are calling for evacuees from our community to actively participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans...''
Just remember we are not talking about `participation', as in some bogus focus group of hand picked (top-down) selected neighborhood flunkies.
To make this work, you have to already be organized from the bottom, up to speed, and ready with your own damned reconstruction plans--in depth---with a long chain of trusted community connections back up the ladder of power---hopefully into the staff positions in Senate and House representatives who oversee the legislation, funding, appropriation, and final spending regs---along with some state officials in both the assembly and the governor's office---who will manage the federal money at the state level---and back down again to the region, county and city levels. (You'll also need a bank of rad lawyers, because you'll be proposing regs, laws, proceedures, codes, etc and going to court a lot...)
``...There are already signs that New Orleans evacuees could face a similarly brutal second storm. Jimmy Reiss, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, told /Newsweek/ that he has been brainstorming about how `to use this catastrophe as a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic'....''
You can bet Jimmy and the council have been working night and day to make those same connections outlined above. That's the bad news. The good news is Jimmy and the business council don't know shit about what to do---they will have to hire `experts' to tell them.
So people of New Orleans get it together now with your own expertize on the ground---and some technical specialists you trust (in city planning, architecture, social welfare, public health, and law). You will know what to do when you look at it from the perspective of how to do your town right...
CG