by Peter Block
Every planning process claims to involve citizens and potential occupants, but in most cases it is lip service, holding to the belief that experts, usually from out of town, hold the real key to great design.
Ken and John treat citizens as producers of the design rather than as consumers who react and respond to the decisions of community leadership groups and planning experts.
The following are some elements of their thinking that fit well with the themes in this book:
• Ken and John work hard to get a cross section of people, especially those citizens who are typically disengaged. They actively recruit those on the margin and make sure they are welcome. They want two kinds of people in the room: those who have a direct stake in the design, whom they name the “internal community,” and some outsiders, whom they call the “external supportive community.” This recognizes that the wider community has a stake in the quality of design for each property or neighborhood. It takes a region to raise a property.
• Before citizens get involved in the design, Ken and John have them get to know each other. They have them meet in small groups and engage in many of the conversations for transforming community. In their groups, citizens talk about the crossroads facing this project, they discuss their doubts and reservations, and they hold the gifts conversation and name the promises they are willing to make to ensure that this project succeeds.
• Ken and John then identify several critical places in the property or neighborhood where the design will determine the essential experience of those who will eventually occupy the space. They have citizens physically walk these spots, and they have them ask themselves some interesting questions:
° When I look at this spot, what do I see?
° When I look, what do I know?
° When I look, what are my assumptions?
° When I look, what do I envision?
These questions, asked early, evoke the imagination of those who will live with the design. This is different from creating designs or plans that express the imagination of the architect and developer.
• After the citizens have walked the physical spaces, Ken and John bring them together to post their answers to the questions. They are careful to record each comment exactly as spoken so that all ideas are held and documented. A primary goal is for citizens to recognize their contribution in the final plan. At each stage, Ken and John can point to the language and words that came from citizens.
It is after the conversation with citizens that Ken and John do the traditional research and define the core elements and requirements facing the design.
Citizens are then brought together again and presented with an organized version of their comments and the results of the research. In this meeting, Ken and John use some creative ways to sustain ownership and commitment:
• In small groups they use a talking stick, which ensures that every person’s voice is heard and prevents the more verbal people from dominating the conversation.
• They have designed a physical game in which people can explore and discover their choices. People place objects, buildings, benches, parks, and all the other design specifics on the board and then talk through the trade-offs in the design process. Experts usually do this; here, citizens do it.
When strong differences become obvious, they also handle conflict in a special way. They avoid the arbitrator role and instead use a fishbowl structure to resolve conflicts. They put those who disagree in the center of a group and have chairs for others to occupy so that their voices can be heard. This means that other citizens participate in conflict resolution instead of the usual approach of handing the issue to a professional.
When people get stuck in their differences, Ken intervenes. He tells them, and other citizens who are interested, that they have twenty minutes to resolve the conflict. At the end of the time, Ken comes over with a pink pearl or a silver dagger. One of the two is placed on the design, depending on whether the citizens have been able to reach agreement. If they can agree, they get the pink pearl. If not, a silver dagger is placed on the design and the group moves on. He reports that this structure often achieves agreement, even when people have been at odds with each other for years.
The simple but elegant device of Ken and John’s game keeps citizens engaged and treats each design question as a challenge that the community has the capacity to resolve. It also moves differences from an abstract discussion of beliefs to concrete and certain terms on paper, which is cheap.
The final step is to document what has been developed in a draft design, which is presented back to the citizens. They gather to review the design and experience the product of their efforts.
This approach is such a radical and elegant expression of common sense. As you know, in the traditional planning process, experts do most of the work. Citizens are usually asked what they want in the design, and then the experts come up with a draft design that is presented to the citizens for feedback. The experts take the feedback back to their office and prepare a final design, which is then proposed to decision makers. There is little attention paid to creating more relatedness among stakeholders. There is no structure to have conflicts resolved by the advocates themselves. Making sure that citizens can identify where their own ideas show up in the design is left to chance.
The real difference between what Ken and John do and what is traditionally done is really a contrast between the contexts out of which designers operate. Ken and John bring a context of valuing the gifts of citizens, understanding the importance of engagement, and appreciating the hospitality of physical space, all elements of restorative places.
There Is More Than Enough Time and Just Enough Money
A final comment on space: Cost and speed are always cited in the argument against great design, but the discussion about cost and speed is not really about cost and speed. It is part of an agenda which declares that human experience is a low priority. The argument against the importance of the aesthetic is an argument against human freedom. Low-cost and quickly constructed buildings and spaces become warehouses designed to keep under one roof and under control those people whom we do not value. We measure their value in dollars and efficiency. We have too often seen the construction of ugly spaces and buildings in the name of cost reduction or of saving taxpayers’ dollars. It is not about the money. When a hallowed institution like a sports franchise or a large employer threatens to move out of town, we have all the money that is needed.
Don’t ever take at face value the argument about no funds and no time. Our stance about cost and speed is simply a measure of our commitment. In every case, low cost and fast action are really an argument against the dignity of citizens and against a more democratic and humanly inclusive process.
As a final thought, I want to acknowledge that the struggle to find or adapt space to support citizens facing each other with no barriers in between is an unending quest. The most sophisticated designs—whether for offices, museums, or public buildings—still want rooms with long rectangular tables, or seats and pews nailed to the floor facing forward, or cameras and microphone taking precedence over eye contact. This struggle is also an internal one, as I wonder whether getting people out of the pews, out of the bolted-down seats, or away from the comfortable conference setup is worth the disruption. The wish to be approved of or just to take the easier way is endlessly appealing. The temptation to just let the world sit where they want and stay disconnected always raises the question of my own intention, my own commitment, my own resignation. Each time I yield to that temptation, it is always a mistake. Sorry.
CHAPTER 15
The End of Unnecessary Suffering
There is a future that I know to be possible.
As is often said, you only teach what you need to learn, so it is my own desire for community, my own sense of isolation and unbelonging that have driven me into the work that has led to this book. Much of my life has been lived on the margin, outside of community, so I have firsthand familiari
ty with the toll it takes on a human being. This began so long ago that I have only a dim memory of its ever being any other way. Besides, any explanation I come up with would only be my story. Fiction it is. Over the last fifteen years, I have tiptoed cautiously, even reluctantly, toward fuller membership and belonging in the place where I reside, Cincinnati.
The possibility that is working on me is the reconciliation of community. Reconciliation is for me the possibility of the end of unnecessary suffering. This is the context within which I show up, even though, as with us all, I sometimes don’t know whether I am working for God or the devil.
As I work to create the reconciliation and end to suffering that I am committed to, the extent of the pain running through our communities keeps commanding my attention. I want to make a distinction about this pain: it is the difference between human and political suffering. Human suffering is the pain that is inherent in being alive: isolation, loneliness, illness, abandonment, loss of meaning, sadness, and finally (I think) death. These are unavoidable; they are going to happen to each of us, and try as we may, there is nothing we can do to prevent them. We have infinite choice in how to respond to this kind of human suffering, but it is part of the deal and is what gives vitality, meaning, and texture to a life.
The other kind of pain is political suffering. This is avoidable and unnecessary suffering. Some of the avoidable suffering is very visible: poverty, homelessness, hunger, violence, the diaspora of those unable to return to their homeland, a deteriorated housing project, or a neighborhood in distress. There is also political suffering that is more subtle: people’s learned dependency, internalized oppression, the absence of possibility, the powerlessness that breeds violence, imperialism, and a disregard for the worth of a human being. I am calling this political suffering because I believe it grows out of human choice: human choice to sustain a world of imbalance—surplus on one side and great scarcity on the other. This is a political choice, but not political in an electoral sense. It is not politics as in conservative or liberal, left or right. I am referring to politics as the choices we make about the distribution of power and control, and the mind-set that underlies those choices.
After all the social scientists, historians, economists, biologists, authors, and experts from all disciplines have finished with their explanations, it seems that what I am calling political, avoidable suffering occurs as a result of our disconnectedness and the imbalance of power and resources that is such a dominant feature of our culture. This in no way puts blame on anyone or any segment of society. I do not believe that “those people” exist anywhere in the world. I have simply come to believe that when we are unrelated to those whose lives are so different from ours, suffering increases.
When we see a growing distance between economic classes, an increase in protectionism and gatedness, and more resources coming into fewer hands, our capacity to value those exiled to the economic margin is reduced. This is not just about large societal movements; it is also about our growing dependence on experts, our attraction to celebrity and power, our increasing tendency to label and come up with new diagnostic categories in which to pour more services. All of this is rationalized in the name of cost control and greater expertise. These are what I consider the real politics of our lives. Where does choice reside, who decides, and at what moment is the interest of the larger whole given voice?
• • •
The political suffering will decrease as we collectively choose to be together in a way that creates a space for something new to occur. What is needed is for us to choose over and over to more widely distribute ownership and accountability. These choices will spring from the hands of citizens, rather than the hands of experts, leaders, and system executives. These choices will arise when we value, invest in, and recognize the gifts and capacities of citizens.
We have evidence that this is possible and that it works. If you are doubtful, look at all the research on what constitutes a high-performing team; examine the employee involvement and customer service movement of the 1980s and early 1990s and how it helped bring US companies back from the edge of irrelevance. Look at the decentralized operation of the mega-churches of today and the way the armed services have long been interested in empowerment and point-of-contact decision making. In each of these efforts, existing leadership took the initiative, and citizens and employees and members accepted their role in producing an alternative future.
Therefore, consider how shifting our thinking and practice concerning the politics of experience could achieve reconciliation in several dimensions of community that are sources of so much grief.
Youth
Youth are a unifying force in community. Hard to argue against the next generation. An alternative future opens when we shift our view of youth (say, fourteen- to twenty-four-year-olds) from problem to possibility, from deficiency to gift. When you drive by a street corner and see young people hanging out at odd hours making a living in odd ways, you can view them as having gifts waiting to be given, rather than as being problems waiting to be solved.
If you notice that they are dealing drugs, you hold the thought that they have entrepreneurial skill; it is just aimed in the wrong direction. If you are concerned that they are not in school, well, they are learning something, just not what we had in mind.
Someone recently said that for youth who have dropped out of school and who have no support system around them, the street corner is the only classroom that welcomes them and is available to them. It has no entrance requirements and is open twenty-four hours a day. Is this way of thinking true? Not exactly, but it is useful because it puts us in a more forgiving stance.
If we care about youth instead of trying to control and inculcate them, then we have to deal with our adultism. This means we have to change the nature of our listening. Create places and people that welcome youth, where youth see themselves reflected in those who have chosen to work with them.
In a youth forum recently, ten young men in their late teens were asked if they knew a white person they could trust. One raised his hand. They were asked how many owned guns. You know the answer. How many had had a friend killed in the last two years? All raised their hands.
This reality most often leads to more conversations about programs on diversity, more action on weapons, or more vigilance. A new conversation would be to focus not on the suffering in their lives but on getting to know who these young men are, much as the Hoxseys and Sparoughs did in Findley House (described in chapter 8). To see them as gifts and capacities. These men (mostly) are entrepreneurial; they are leaders among their peers; they have a strong survival instinct; they are interesting and valuable human beings and have a hunger for this to be known about them. Let us just focus on that for a while and discover what emerges. Also, they are a reflection of the world we have helped create, so a conversation about our contribution to the plight of some of our youth would make a difference. This is not about guilt; it is about our accountability.
Public Safety
The shift is to believe that citizens have the capacity to create a safe neighborhood. It is street life and connected neighbors that make a neighborhood safe. We think the police can keep us safe. In our concern for safety, we too often defer to the professionals. Police are not the answer. They are needed for crime; they cannot produce safety.
There is in every neighborhood structures for citizens to volunteer: Citizens on Patrol, Neighborhood Watch, safety meetings, educational pamphlets hung on people’s front doors by the police. These go under the title of crime prevention. Not so. They are an organized assault on the outside. They are unkind to strangers hanging out in the neighborhood. Instead of making it possible for us to get to know who these human beings are, these structures embody the retributive mind-set.
The shift is to realize that safety occurs through neighborhood relatedness. The efforts that move in this direction focus on identifying neighborhood assets. On creating occasions for citizens to know each other through cl
eanup campaigns, block parties, and citizen activist movements to confront irresponsible landlords and abandoned houses and lots. Anything that helps neighbors know who lives on the street. Every neighborhood has certain connector people who know everyone else’s goings-on. My street has Laura. She knows everyone; she is on the street all the time walking dogs, caring for animals regardless of their owner, and generally providing the glue for all of us. She is the de facto mayor of Bishop Street. We need ways to recognize these people and others.
Sidewalk contacts are the small change from which the wealth of public life may grow.
Jane Jacobs
If we looked at the assets of the neighborhood, we would realize that youth are on the streets in the afternoon, and retired people and shut-ins have the time to watch what is going on. When we recognize the gifts of these people, safety will be produced.
Development and the Local Economy
One of the largest divides in our cities is between the developers and the social activists. The activists want to protect the residents from their invested neighborhoods. They want to make sure that lower-income residents are not pushed out of their homes or their way of life. The developer community wants more home ownership and a lively area to attract young professionals and cultural creatives, empty nesters, gays, and lifestyle enthusiasts. The future is named development by the media and gentrification by the activists. This puts the social activists and the developers at odds with each other. The argument needs reframing. In most places, either the situation remains at an impasse, or the developers, with the help of local government and tax benefits from the federal government, carry the day.
