On City, Planning, & Community Engagement

To paraphrase Bob Dylan, here I am, “stuck inside Minneapolis, with the Milwaukee blues again”… Yes, here I am with 4,234 other planner-types at the American Planning Association Conference... In the company of such illustrious group, I can’t help but wonder:
- WHERE are the minority planners? (Sure, the tokens were there; but nada mas.)
- WHY are planners so boring? (The sessions - with few exceptions - felt like bad public hearings.)
- COULD IT BE time to bury PowerPoint Presentations? (Or at least, could presenters be required to go to PPP101?)

Oh how I yearn to be around regular folks! (Mind you, some of my best friends are planners. Heck, I am AICP myself – so I am one of them!)

Well, back to the topic at hand:

I wonder what it’d be like if planners took off their masks, became the residents they are, and approached this conference like a family bar-b-q, drinking beer, or enjoying a ballgame (which some of them did, watching the Twins beat the Rays 4 to 3 at the Metrodome.)

I wonder what it’d be like if:
- Instead of meetings we had gatherings;
- Instead of strategizing we had conversations;
- Instead of outcomes we told stories;
- Instead of visioning we dreamed.

Rather than meet to strategize about outcomes and vision, let’s gather to converse, tell stories, and dream… Gathering, conversing, telling stories, and dreaming are natural human acts. Meetings are not a natural human activity.

It is amazing that our puritan roots are our only roots that artificially separate life from art. In all our other cultural roots, art is life and vice versa. Oh, how we could learn from successful:
- HIV/AIDS education in Africa;
- Micro-lending peer-to-peer learning in India;
- Evangelization “comunidades de base” in Latin America;
- Shakespeare plays-in-the-square in the Anglo culture!

All these successful models of community engagement incorporate, weave, and blend the arts with learning and the learning with the arts - indeed, they are one and the same, inseparable. Separating artistic expression – music, dance, poetry, painting, performing – from public discourse is unnatural and illogical.

Therefore, when we seek public discourse and – artificially, I propose – try to control human behavior in staged settings we set ourselves up to fail. Thus, traditional public discourse in the planning discipline – public hearings and such – are boring, ineffective, and inefficient... They may meet the bureaucratic requirement; but they do not serve the intended purpose of authentic public participation.

Where oh where - you may ask - can I see successful engagement models?

Well, various communities throughout the USofA are doing what comes natural: Bringing people together in comfortable settings to talk about their communities and neighborhoods – and coming up with real solutions to make things better. Others are going ‘door to door’ seeing how neighbors are doing and making sure they have access to helpful services.

Want proof? Check out this YouTube video:
HERE
And, the blog from someone that is ‘walking the talk’:
THE VALUE OF PLACE

enJoy,

Reemberto