From Planning Commissioners Journal Editor Wayne Senville:
Our Summer issue includes a short, but very interesting article by PCJ contributing writer Della Rucker on why some comprehensive plans seem to fall flat after they're adopted. As is our practice, we circulated Della's article to those who have signed up to review draft articles -- and also made it available via our Linkedin group page. We received quite a few comments, several of which raised good points that Della simply didn't have space to address in her published article.
I asked Della if she'd be willing to take the time to expand on what she wrote.
After you've read Della's remarks, continue the discussion on our Linkedin group page (scroll down under the Discussions tab till you see the title of this post).
note: if you're a Planning Commissioners Journal subscriber, feel free to also download a complimentary pdf of Della's article from our Summer issue right now. Not a subscriber, Della's article can be downloaded for a small fee.
Wayne Senville:
In your column in the Summer issue of the Planning Commissioners Journal you focus on a topic that I’d guess most planning commissioners have wrestled with -- how to make sure their city or town’s comprehensive plan actually gets used and is meaningful to the community.
You describe the kinds of plans that you say typically end up sitting on a shelf gathering dust -- ranging from “the Encyclopedia” plan, which you describe as “covering everything whether it matters or not,” to “the Laundry List” plan, which, as you put it, “presents such a disorganized stream of recommendations that no one knows where to start.”
You then outline some of the elements that you feel are vital if a plan is to be useful: using data to understand the most important issue the community will be facing; having meaningful public participation; setting priorities; and focusing on what’s necessary to get the plan implemented. It’s this part of your article that I’d like to explore further with you. I also want to get your reaction to some of the many comments we received on our Linkedin group page about the first draft of your column.
One of the points you make, as I noted, is the need to have “meaningful public participation.” In your column you say that we have “to do more than let the public spout” and that those participating in the planning process need to have “real-world challenges to grapple with, so that the feedback you get has meaning.” Can you flesh that out a bit?
Della Rucker:
One of the biggest sleeper challenges we are facing today is that our traditional public debate model of public involvement isn’t working well and has probably outlived its usefulness. I think there are at least three reasons for that.
First, today we have a lot more voices and a wider range of them. Moreover, not everyone can express themselves adequately with the traditional “stand-up-and-make a speech” approach (that is, go up to the podium, and make your comments in three minutes or less). So we get silence from a large part of the population, and often less than ennobling wisdom from the small number who do stand up to speak.
The second reason is that the issues we have to grapple with have become much more complicated because of the interdependencies and interrelationships that we live with in a modern community. You can’t deal with too much complexity, address too many nuances, and acknowledge that there may not be a perfect solution when you are at a podium for a couple of minutes and the situation has been cast as a for-or-against debate.
The third issue is that the ways in which we gain understanding and grapple with decisions are changing -- and, I would argue, need to change ASAP. K-12 educational methods (how teachers are being taught to teach) have largely discarded the lecture as a useful means of building knowledge. Instead, teachers are shifting to methods that engage the students directly in dealing with information and making sense out of it for themselves. This allows students to develop better and more meaningful solutions to the problems they are presented. The more we become used to living in a world rich with information of all types, the more we need to be able to do more than parrot back what we hear.
What does educational methodology have to do with public participation? I’d argue, everything. What we desperately need is for our citizens to do much more than spout ill-informed NIMBYisms or buy into knee-jerk, simplistic cause-and-effect assumptions. We need to get people reasonably up-to-speed on the issues, and engage them in the search for solutions -- solutions that are realistic and address the complexities and ambiguities of real community life.
The corporate world certainly recognizes this. Companies are putting massive amounts of effort into broadening their employee base to include the widest range of people possible and then creating team environments to work on solving complex challenges. If they’re finding it necessary to use diverse team problem-solving to deal with stuff like getting shampoo into a bottle, how much more do we desperately need real, deep involvement to deal with the massive complexities that make up a community?
One thing that I always feel like I have to say as a follow-up to that idea is that it’s not simply a matter of throwing a bunch of people in a room with a problem and hoping that they’ll figure something out. That’d be foolish. Instead, we who work with communities have to borrow a page from good teachers and good business team managers; we have to carefully create a structure that:
Continue reading "Della Rucker talks about her article: "Why Comprehensive Plans Gather Dust"" »
