WORK
BY DEBORAH L. JOHNSON
WORK
BY DEBORAH L. JOHNSON
For too long we have left planning to the planners instead of asking them to listen to the community and help forge plans from consensus. Just as many of the state's leading businesses are reinventing themselves for the twenty-first century, our public management practices must also be reinvented to advance the unique potential of each community.
- FORMER WASHINGTON STATE REP. DALE FOREMAN (R, WENATCHEE)
The above quote from Dale Foreman, now head of the Washington State Republican Party, was his response to a questionnaire from the state American Planning Association chapter's legislative committee during his unsuccessful 1996 gubernatorial bid. He went on to conclude that Washington's existing growth management law encourages divisiveness rather than inviting a sense of community and does not "engage local citizens in real discussions about the future of their place," leading him to advocate its repeal or substantial reform (Washington Chapter of the American Planning Association 1996). Foreman speaks, in essence, of consensus democracy, which assumes that the same forces causing business to rethink the need for employee involvement push government to develop new processes for dialogue and decision making to ensure public ownership (Kentucky Leadership Institute/Center for Communities of the Future, n.d.).
While perhaps a little too eager to "throw out the baby with the bath water," Foreman's platform gets at a primary tension in carrying out effective long-range planning. Where do individual citizens fit into the process? "Participation, despite the rhetoric of 'planning with people,' remains a weak component of the planning process," wrote Bollens and Schmandt (1982) more than 15 years ago.1 By employing primarily technical or "scientific" approaches to planning dilemmas, is the planning profession alienating the very people for whom it is planning? On the other hand, does so-called advocacy planning driven by public sentiment adequately address each aspect of a community's long-range needs? This paper seeks to balance these approaches and suggests organizational strategies for public agencies to carry on meaningful public involvement, education, marketing, facilitation, and consensus building to create a people-friendly planning structure.
Outreach. Better communication. Creating a sense of interconnectedness. These are the sort of ideas that immediately arise in thinking about improving bureaucracy's relationships with its principal building blocks, neighborhoods. But slowly a missing ingredient becomes apparent; and, like a cake without leavening, all efforts without it to improve neighborhood planning and make it more responsive to neighborhood residents fall flat.
What is the missing ingredient? A sense of social responsibility. Widely varying interpretations exist as to what constitutes one's responsibility to society. But what about the individual's responsibility for participating? This brings us to the limits of this type of inquiry, and of this paper.
1. Bollens and Schmandt (1982) chronicle citizen participation in the planning process, citing that until the 1960's "it was the common practice of planning agencies to formulate plans and then present them at a public hearing for purposes of fulfilling legal requirements and providing information. This procedure affords opportunity to the public only to react, under very inappropriate circumstances, to proposals about which they have little knowledge and no input. This situation showed signs of changing . . . due mainly to the mobilization of the disadvantaged by community action programs, the rising objection of residents to expressway and urban renewal projects that threatened their neighborhoods, and fedral mandating of citizen involvement in aided programs."