Thanks very much for your thorough comment. Please take this comment as a commitment to undergo a thorough reading and to formulate a reply – just not right at the moment.

Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I’m glad you enjoyed it and even more glad that you are hearing things you’ve heard before.

I am really interested in this:

As to open plays – let’s not fool ourselves, nothing in the building world is “open standards” in reality – it is siloed, clumsy, expensive and oftentimes ineffective.

Your reading of this is really interesting to me, because you are referring explicitly to the building world — something that I’ve had little direct exposure to in my planning education thus far. But it’s also not the area in which I am seeing interest in openness, but more the movement towards civic hacking and city governments making data on city services available to citizens. The Province of British Columbia here in Canada recently did a Apps for Climate Action contest, gathering a data catalogue of climate change relevant data sets and awarding prizes for particularly interesting applications. It is the citizen engagement and participation side of events like this that get me really excited, but it’s also a lot further down the line in a building’s lifespan than I think you are focusing on.

In other words, there’s interest in the openness in what I believe is typically referred to as “post-occupancy”; and from the sounds of your statement, Living PlanIT is focused on ensuring the capability to have that data at all from the outset, by making sure buildings are designed to be data-collectors/reactors. Neat.

In any case, I bet that Portuguese Valley will be interesting to walk down in a few years.

Thanks again,

Karen

As you can imagine, Greg was working hard to net down a few hours of conversation into appropriate sound bites – didn’t do a bad job given the scale of the challenge.

However, I completely concur on a number of your items and rest assured, this is not a city designed by technologists, except where technology needs to support human interaction – and then, only in manner that is inclusive and does not require technology genius to operate it

We are working with renowned teams on the urban planning elements but also questioning convention that seems past its time.

The goal here is to deliver in PlanIT Valley a place that people will call home, improves their quality of life and in the process demonstrate what is possible if we collectively put our minds to it.

As to open plays – let’s not fool ourselves, nothing in the building world is “open standards” in reality – it is siloed, clumsy, expensive and oftentimes ineffective.

Time to whack it around the knees and shake some sense in to it – foster greater innovation, openness and start addressing critical issues we are all facing today.

Would love to chat some more with you – enjoyed your post – time to get you some more background and pick your brains on a few things.

Steve

There are so many problems with the field of public involvement, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start. Here are a few observations. These are not representative of mainstream thought. In some cases, we’ve discovered that they are considered almost revolutionary, although they’re supported by a large volume of hard data. Here’s one example.

What are we trying to achieve?

There’s no need for professionals to guess at this.

Our data, gathered from thousands of citizens during real projects, tells that citizens do not want “citizen control”, or Level 8, on the Arnstein Ladder. They want Level 6, or “partnership.” So do professionals such as engineers and planners.

The current gap between where citizens believe they are being treated now, and where they would like to be depends on their experiences and the agencies with whom they have dealt (we have data from projects as diverse as transit oriented development to nuclear plant remediation). But in all cases there’s a significant Gap.

So, this means:
1. Citizens don’t want “citizen control.” So why do some professionals claim that they do? If so, show us the data. Obtained from large numbers of real citizens. Otherwise, let’s base our conclusion on a real data set.
2. There’s a Gap of 2-4 points between what citizens believe they are now, and where they want to be in terms of quality of participation.
3. Professionals think they’re doing better than the public thinks they are.
4. This data also means the problem should be methodological. If the professionals and public want the same quality of participation, then we can work on methods to accomplish this. There’s no need to diminish people’s rights, or capacities, to participate.

Next, what are the public processes trying to accomplish? Why don’t we apply the same analytic treatment to large-scale processes that we do for smaller ones, and evaluate the process performance against these criteria?

So let’s set out a set of performance indicators for public processes, such as quality, inclusion, clarity of decision support and efficiency.

Many believe these indicators to be mutually exclusive, or tradeoffs (e.g. it is widely believed that quality is inversely related to inclusion, or scale, or even process efficiency)

This need not be so. The reason for this thinking is that current theoretical frameworks for public involvement are totally inadequate. The biggest issue is that the customary, normative and even implicit ideology of “consensus” is unworkable when dealing with large, diverse groups, with varying values, from whom valuations must be elicited in reasonably short timeframes and translated into effective, meaningful, and fair outcomes. Logically:

Consensus does not equal high performance.
Consensus does not equal justice. Or equity.

Conversely…

Lack of consensus does not equal lack of equity.
Lack of consensus does not automatically undermine justice.

Yet, in the fields of planning, urban design, transportation infrastructure, energy futures and resource management, very few can, or have, published more thoughtfully on how to design effective, high-performance processes that do not rely on, demand, or expect “consensus.” Nor have many researchers collected data on what stakeholders really think of these processes.

Here are just a few interesting facts about the data above and some other findings.

Fact: the planning profession doesn’t relish these data being published in its journals – search for “Arnstein Gap” and wonder why it’s documented in many other forums but not in its apparently most suitable home of planning. This analysis can’t be silenced, however.

Fact: the spectacle of transportation designers, planners and other consultants spending – literally in some cases – hundreds of millions of dollars of public money in ways that affect thousands of citizens, but without being held accountable for delivering a fair, equitable, inclusive and efficient public involvement process is almost ubiquitous.

Fact: many agencies and contractors, including engineering, planning, and design, find reasons why quality evaluation shouldn’t be undertaken. The idea of citizens openly evaluating the planning/design process quality, at large public meetings, using electronic polling to ensure simultaneity, independence and equity in stakeholder valuations, seems to cause problems. We’ve done this for years and don’t see why we shouldn’t always evaluate our process. If it works, let citizens tell us. If not, also, let them tell us. Let this become a normal practice. Let processes that DO NOT contain evaluations be defended against normative expectations.

In the course of our research and professional work, we’ve amassed data on many aspects of public processes, much of which contradicts not what we hear, but what is often being done..e.g. supposedly “consensusal” processes resorting to exclusion to ensure “difficult” “ill-informed” or “problematic” people or views don’t “derail” “subvert” the process…. how ironic! But, how unfortunately typical.

The most interesting finding though, is how often even logical, well-educated professionals want to retreat from, or flatly deny, hard data. Including public process performance data such as the quality evaluation. Example: we hear that processes that don’t aim for consensus don’t – or can’t – “work”. But there’s no definition for “work” and no “data” other than informal evaluation by agents of the design authority, sponsoring agency or other consultants. This situation is, to put it mildly, not consistent with the democratic goals that are espoused by many of these agencies in their mission statements.

Let’s have factual process criteria, let’s measure them, and publish the results openly.

Ultimately, an Executive Order that mandates process evaluation will be needed. This could be similar to the 1994 EO on EJ.

Why not? We know this evaluation can be done. We’ve done it with thousands of citizens, in real and controversial projects. This clearly should be done. With all the effort being directed into public processes, why are we apparently the only ones in the world who possess such process quality data?

But there are numerous vested interests who do not want this to be realized. In spite of a strengthening rhetoric on participation, inclusion and public process quality in many professional and academic fields, when confronted with a metric involving , the fear is palpable. This is precisely why political movements such as the Tea Party are making accountability a centerpiece of their platforms. It is important to citizens, and they’re going to take action.

Reactionary thinking is out of date, out of touch, and increasingly indefensible. The systemwide rhetorics on public involvement need to be replaced by higher performance processes. These processes need to be measured against hard quality criteria. It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s soon going to be the only thing to do. This can’t come soon enough to improve governance in democratic societies.

Having just passed the 2 year mark in Vancouver I’m still forming my opinion of what it’s like to leave Toronto and do business in Lotusland.

I find both cities have a similar mixture of workaholics, laidbacks, and middle stream folks. Aggressive driving seems to be the norm in Vancouver and surrounds but drivers don’t use the horn with the same frequency and gusto as they do in TO.

Your reference to Vancouver as a growing tree really hit home. That’s it. That’s what is so different here. There is a nurturing sensitivity that can be misperceived as cliquish.

Thanks for writing this.

Tangential to your main point: I still find myself wondering what we miss when the public realm is increasingly inhabited by people who are in some way elsewhere — on the phone, listening to music on headphones, playing video games, etc. I also wonder whether we use these devices to numb ourselves to all that rubbing up we have to do with people we don’t like.