designing public consensus

In her latest post on the Planetizen blog, Barbara compares two public process meetings, one in an EU country and one in the American South. She describes one meeting: 

Just as the lead developer was about to introduce the design team, we heard screaming people storming the entrance. There was visible concern among the attendees, and I believe the first thought of everyone in the room was “Are these people armed?”  

A few weeks later, another meeting on another continent:

The PR firms’ intent was to learn what people thought of possible development. Well, you can imagine what people thought—over a three-hour time span we learned that people are angry that they had moved from the city to the county only to find more development coming to the county than was expected in the surrounding cities for the next decade. 

How did these public meetings miss the mark? Why did they stoke rather than allay people’s anger? Read Barbara’s post. 

In a recent interview published on ArchNewsNow.com, Barbara talks about her original reason for writing about public process, and the lessons she learned while working on the book:

When I started the book, I was more interested in testing whether the public process actually homogenizes a design. Does it lower the quality of design? Many landscape designers and architects say yes. But in the end, after speaking with the design professionals in depth and looking at all these case studies, I came to the conclusion that the public process helps design. Perhaps in the old days it was sort of a panacea. You know, “We’ll put it up to the public, we’ll see what they say, and then we’ll do whatever we want.” That’s not true anymore. I think it’s important, especially for designers, to leave behind a project that people feel they have something invested in it. It makes the project more successful.

I’ve written long and hard on why it is the designer’s/planner’s role to make public process informative, factual, acceptable, and transparent to the public. But what is the responsibility of the public to get the facts? For a good example of how things should NOT work, here’s the story of what’s happened in my own neighborhood over the past few months.

The neighborhood association officials are not elected by the neighborhood. They appoint their own successors. You can see there is already a problem. Because we are in-town, there are many development pressures surrounding the neighborhood. A few years ago, the association went after a few of the developers, and with some matching grants has proceeded to devise a $4 million plan for “pedestrian and traffic calming.” 

I wrote about our ongoing neighborhood brawl in a recent post at Planetizen, but here’s a quick refresher: We’re talking about a lovely old area, adjacent to an Olmsted-designed park, with wide sweeping streets, scenic vistas, and plenty of topography. The “traffic calming” plan will tighten all the streets into one lane, limit parking, and install new speed bumps and larger traffic islands, which they affectionately call “amoebouts.” They did not hire a traffic engineer to design the new streets but relied instead on a variety of donated designs from neighbors.

Association officials had what they thought was a fine idea, found the money to pay for it—or at least a portion of it—-and have become fiercely determined to make it happen. Several neighbors, most of whom are involved in public infrastructure projects for a living (yes, I am one of them), think it’s an extraordinarily bad idea. It is simply too much for no good reason, an overzealous attempt to fix something that does not need fixing. No accidents, no issues, just money burning a hole in the neighborhood association’s pocket.

The association leadership decided that if 75% of property owners approved this plan, the city council would have to cave in and give approval to reconstruct the streets. So the association held public meetings, where the leadership presented only their rosy picture of the traffic plan. They did not disclose such information as how much infrastructure (water, sewer, etc.) will need to be replaced or how $4 million will ever be enough to rebuild streets and construct 15 traffic islands. The neighborhood web site tells only their side of the story. If you spoke against the plan, you were simply shouted down or booed off the floor. Read the rest of this entry »

ArchNewsNow.com features an interview with Barbara about the challenges of public process and her book, Designing Public Consensus.

The author of the article, Kenneth Caldwell, offers his assessment of Barbara’s book: 

Although it looks like a textbook, it doesn’t read like one. Each case study comes alive with her accessible and engaging narrative. Faga has accomplished something few else have tried: a readable guide through the city planning process. Although she is a principal in a large international planning firm, she has avoided writing a promotional tract; instead, she chose to reveal challenges, missteps, and even mistakes. This is not a coffee-table book. It’s a very human take on how cities get built.

 Read the whole article.