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Lonely planners are waiting for YOU to tell them what to do

A quick note: Last week marked the 1 year anniversary of Street Stack. I’ve been humbled by the response to the newsletter, and earlier this month I was named one of Planetizen’s Urban Planning Creators to Watch, a totally unexpected surprise for me. Thank you for reading, and especially thanks to those of you who have shared my work with others. Street Stack will continue to be free for the foreseeable future - so spread the word!

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Did you know that right now, thousands of lonely urban planners are waiting around for you to tell them what to do? They’re waiting in elementary school gyms, they’re waiting in dingy community center rec rooms and city council hearing rooms. Increasingly, they’re lurking around online at the back end of Google Forms or Survey Monkeys. Yes, for the price of on-the-house, you can tell a credentialed professional what kind of city you want and why their ideas are stupid (or great), and they literally have to listen to you! It’s called “community engagement” and it’s the most essential and befuddling part of the planning process.

The best type of public engagement is usually some sort of design review or “visioning” - because for most people it’s a lot more fun to debate a tangible place than some obscure tweak to the zoning code or parking mandates. Last summer, I attended a workshop to redesign the barren plaza outside Brooklyn Borough Hall. The weeknight event was promoted by the Borough President and local city councilperson, and I showed up to a packed room of Brooklyn Heights residents. After a short presentation, the meeting broke into individual tables full of maps, markers, post-its, and stickers. This session, run by the urban design and architecture firm WXY, fell squarely into the “science fair style” category of public engagement - with lots of props, models, maps, and whiteboards to make the session as interactive as possible. The idea is for each table to have a civil discussion, doodle on the maps, pin post-its, and stickers where they want to see the playground or dog run go, and leave feeling like they’ve influenced the project. The designers get a rapid gut check of what the community wants and ideas for future design iteration.

Except it rarely works out this smoothly. At my table were two retirees from a local gardening association, a semi-retired architect who said he came out to “defend one of the most beautiful beaux-arts buildings in New York: Borough Hall,” a lawyer who sat on the local community board, and the president of a local tenants association. In the idealistic vision of community engagement, it’s the average Joe off the street standing up in front of the community and giving their opinion like in a Norman Rockwell painting. In reality, as my table showed, the people who attend these things are often those professionally inclined to above-average civic involvement or people, like retirees, with a ton of time on their hands. A working person, or even just someone with kids to make dinner for, might not have 3 hours to spare on a weekday night. They also have to know the meeting is happening in the first place.

Our table quickly descended into an airing of grievances. The gardening ladies hated the current plaza garden and wanted to see more native plantings and shade trees. The tenant’s association president was adamant that bikes had to be banned from crossing the plaza since e-bikes had been menacing her while she shopped at the plaza’s farmers market. The architect wanted to “preserve the integrity of the view axis between the steps of Borough Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge.” The maps and markers sat on the table unused. No one was exactly arguing, but there was a lot of ego, and a clear sense that everyone thought their issue was what everyone should focus on.

After a couple of rounds of complaining, an administrator from the Borough President’s office took charge. If the tenant’s association president didn’t want to see bikes cross the plaza, which adjacent roads should get a bike lane to reroute bike traffic? Where should the shade trees go? What parts of the plaza need shading? Slowly, all the complaining was channeled into a more tangible discussion of the space. A discussion of the skateboarders who do tricks off the steps of Borough Hall went in a direction I didn’t expect. The skaters are a constant feature in the otherwise sparsely used plaza, and everyone agreed that the plaza would feel empty without them and that they deserved a place to skate in the future plaza. It was a conclusion I frankly didn’t expect this largely elderly, likely affluent, group to come to - and something the designers hadn’t thought about. Despite the chaos and hot air, a more nuanced understanding of the plaza had eventually emerged, designers and architects left with valuable inputs, and about a hundred local residents left feeling heard and consulted. Yet something was also clearly missing. Despite the acceptance that skater kids were the main plaza users - not a single skater, or even a kid, was in the room.

In a democracy, most would agree that citizens should be involved in decisions that affect their lives. Planning takes this principle quite literally. There is no public comment period for national laws. The US Senate doesn’t hold a hearing when considering a bill that anyone can come testify at. Citizens influence these processes by voting for politicians and advocating on behalf of causes they care about, but their involvement is always slightly removed. However, planning in many countries legally requires the state to make a concerted effort to involve the general public. Planning processes have required public comment periods and hearings built in. In some processes, like environmental review, planners have to demonstrate that they’ve made good faith efforts to address public comments and may be subject to litigation if they don’t. To most planners, this is also a philosophical requirement, a belief that communities know what kind of place they want to live in and it’s the planner’s duty to help them articulate that vision and bring it to life. Local residents also know details about their neighborhoods that planners working from municipal offices don’t. Public engagement is a way to close the knowledge gap. The code of principles of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) states:

Our primary obligation is to serve the public interest and we, therefore, owe our allegiance to a conscientiously attained concept of the public interest that is formulated through continuous and open debate.

The obvious ambiguity is defining the “public interest.” Community engagement is meant to be the “continuous and open debate” that gives the “public” definition, but in a diverse city with a constellation of cultures and interest groups how do you know you’ve got the right “public?” If the Borough Hall session I observed didn’t attract any skaters can it be said that it is truly representative of the “public interest?” Are there many publics? What if some groups actively hate each other? Which gets to be in the public interest? Sussing out the middle ground is the endless challenge of public engagement.

These questions are exasperated by the premium public engagement places on showing up. The group that makes the time and effort to show up to meetings will influence the outcome whether they are representative of the place or not. The death of congestion pricing in NYC is a great example. The tenor of much of the public engagement around the plan was negative. Car commuters showed up and made a lot of noise advocating for their way of life. To judge the issue from these meetings you’d think we were a city of working-class drivers - but the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers don’t own a car, 85% of commuters into the congestion pricing zone commute by bus, train, or walking, and the average income of the car-commuter is 107k a year. Anecdotally, many of the meetings I’ve attended in NYC seem to be older, whiter, and richer than the demographics of the neighborhoods they happen in. How can public meetings clarify the public interest when they aren’t attended by a representative sample?

The New Yorker recently profiled the Austrian heiress Marlene Engelhorn, who decided to give her fortune away with a radical experiment in direct democracy. Engelhorn recruited a panel of 50 random people that broadly reflected the gender, origin, and income brackets of Austria. The panel - a microcosm of the country itself, was given full power to decide where Engelhorn’s fortune would go. In my past life in advertising, I was often involved in market research. If we were working on a campaign we would ask ourselves what the target audience was — who was currently buying the product and also who we wanted to buy the product — and we set out to find the opinions of the people in this audience. We would recruit panels of people representative of our target consumer for focus groups and interviews, send surveys to people whose metadata told us they were in our target, or on scrappier projects simply go out onto the street and try and talk to people. One of my first assignments was to go to a local basketball court and ask kids what they thought of a basketball player whose shoe we were developing a campaign for. These are active processes. Go where people are, intercept them, bring your questions and hypothesis to your audience. Public engagement is so often the other way around, it is passive. Host something, and hope you get a representative slice of people to show up.

What would public engagement that played a more active hand in soliciting participation look like? It would push beyond the hearing room to more actively pursue the input of key stakeholders. Maybe it looks like planners going to the Borough Hall steps, stopping some skater kids, and really asking them what they think — not hoping they show up to a meeting on a school night. The urban design and planning firm Interboro once used an ice cream truck to drive around a Detroit neighborhood and solicit opinions on a new masterplan - a creative way to engage young people who rarely show up to more formal meetings.

I recently spoke to Dana Chermesh, the founder of InCitu, an augmented reality platform that uses your phone camera to let you visualize a rendering of a building project in situ (get it). People passing the project area may see a QR code poster or notice inviting them to see the proposal (or better yet, a real-life InCitu employee asking them to participate) and then be prompted to give feedback, the whole process can happen right on the sidewalk where the project is taking place.

Whether with the power of new technology or with shoe leather, we should be soliciting opinions not just inviting them - there’s a difference.

Despite these issues, if you take anything from this I hope it’s encouragement to attend a public engagement event or leave a comment on a project in your neighborhood. For better or worse, individual citizens have a fair amount of power over planning and local politics in general. I’m about to go vote in a national election for which my vote will have little perceptible impact (I live in a solid blue state), but next week I’m signed up to tell a Parks Department employee what I think they should do with a new greenspace… and they at least have to listen to what I’m saying.

Some practical tips for how to become more involved

• Get on the newsletters of your local city councilman, borough council, community board, or whatever unit of hyper-local government applies. These will often be the people/orgs posting regular bulletins of planning applications or meetings in the area. Most of these entities will also promote meetings on social media if that’s more you thing.

• The NYC planning department maintains a page of all ongoing projects separated by borough. You can click on what interests you and see if there is an upcoming public engagement event. Most American cities will have a similar page somewhere on their planning department’s website. In the UK each Council has a planning portal for all pending and decided applications.

• Never, ever feel like you lack the expertise to offer opinions. The entire point is to gather info from the lived experience of people who live in or use the area in question (aka you).

• If meetings aren’t you thing, there are plenty of surveys and questionnaires to fill out.

Two cool upcoming meetings in the NYC area. I’ll post these at the end of newsletters from now on when something interesting crosses my path.

• Nov 7. The Parks Dept is holding a virtual visioning meeting for Hart Island - the small island in the East River that has been used as a burial ground for hundreds of years. The Department wants to increase the accessibility of the island to the general public and eventually turn it into a usable greenspace.

• Nov 7,13,18: The NY Economic Development Corporation is hosting tours and feedback sections for the Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Redhook. The City recently came into possession of this huge plot of waterfront land, which had been a largely unused container port. This is a chance to influence what could be the biggest slice of new development in NYC since Hudson Yards (let’s hope it turns out better than that).