Planning in the Face of Conflict

The Surprising Possibilities of Facilitative Leadership

John Forester

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351177498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Bikers and hikers. Sex workers and social conservatives. Agencies and activists. The people involved in planning for a site—or a community—can be like the Hatfields and McCoys. And the process brings them together face to face and toe to toe.

How can planners take conflicted communities from passionate demands to practical solutions? Facilitative leadership offers helpful answers. Cornell University's John Forester has produced a dozen profiles of planning practitioners known for their successes in helping communities turn contentious conflicts into practical consensus. This remarkable book tells their stories in their own words.

Lisa Beutler shows the way she got California's off-highway vehicle users and recreationists on the same track. Michael Hughes shares the search for common ground for HIV prevention in Colorado. Shirley Solomon recalls how lessons learned in South Africa helped her build trust between Native Americans and county officials in the Pacific Northwest.

Forester and his panel of experts offer no simplistic formulas but a great deal of practical guidance. From mind mapping to the Hawaiian concept of Ho' oponopono ( making things right), readers will come away with a wealth of ideas they can use to move from the heat of confrontation to the light of creative solutions in their communities.

Part 1
Better Governance When Interests and Values Conflict

Chapter 1
Mediation and Collaboration in Architecture and Community Planning

Laurence Sherman

This profile begins with an early formative experience of designing a new hospital and the practical lessons it taught. Seeing the users talk and negotiate among themselves, architect and planner Laurence Sherman understood that designers and planners might harness the actual stakeholders’ energy and differing interests, special knowledge, and practical creativity to reach better outcomes and to produce better projects and products. So he tells us pointedly, not just that “I didn’t switch careers and become a mediator,” but “I do mediation to do better planning, architecture and public policy.”

Sherman worked on issues involving urban transportation, natural resource management, local economic development, and more. Whether in cases of architectural or urban design, larger urban or small community cases, Sherman shows us how our listening and learning can help to evoke smart and responsive proposals for planning projects and then implementation. He shows us no rocket science, no esoteric magic, but instead wise, sensitive, practically pitched, and critically informed planning practices. We see here the seamless integration of process skills, technical expertise, and substantive planning knowledge. —JF

I love doing this work—and there is almost no issue I won’t take on. It’s never predictable—it’s never what should happen—it’s never the textbook. I just love the way that it unfolds. It’s almost like writing a great novel where the actors take over and tell you what to write.

I was originally trained as an architect and later did graduate work in architecture, urban design, and planning. I started practicing planning and urban design in communities, and it became clear early on that the folks in these communities had a lot of important information that we planners just didn’t have. So we had to go to them somehow and find out from them, very often in different cultures.

I worked in Philadelphia in the 1960s during the Model Cities days in the poor ghettoes. The stuff that we knew downtown to put on maps was not the really essential information we needed from the people like residents, youth gangs, and community organizations. I began to realize that if you would listen—and if you would trust what the people were saying to you—you could probably get the goods that you really needed. So we started working on the skills of listening and of getting the people involved in what it was that we were planning.

Later I got more involved in architecture and architectural programming. I found out that the architect typically goes door to door and asks the clients, “What do you need?” And they’ll tell you, but when you add it all up, they can’t afford it.

An Early Discovery

We devised a way of programming very complicated public buildings—like hospitals—not by going door-to-door and asking people what they wanted in their new hospital—but instead we would build a plastic 3-D model showing the limit of space that the budget would allow you to build. It was the amount of space that the government allocated per dollar or per bed. Then we would color-code chips of the various functions of the hospital, scaled to the model, and we would invite everyone who worked in the hospital to come in and start talking (to us and to one another) about where their colored chips should be located on the model.

They would show us different locations and functions, and we would ask why they did it this way, and they told us. So we would begin to learn what they knew (and we didn’t) about how to lay out the hospital—such as the way they worked and the way they would like to have an arrangement of rooms and functions. They would tell us where they’d like to have the entrances and how they’d like to separate the ER from the main entrance—all those kinds of things. They could do it in a three-dimensional way on the plastic model simply by moving their chips into place.

The interesting thing was that they began to have a dialogue of their own; people agreed, people didn’t agree. The more they talked about their problems with how they put those chips on the model, the more we realized that they were negotiating among themselves for solutions right then and there. They were the staff of the hospital, and I said to myself, “If they’re negotiating, then what the heck am I doing?,” and then I realized, “I’m facilitating—I’m not designing the hospital yet—I’m mediating their attempts to resolve their issues.”

They were really telling me what the best arrangement of rooms should be within that budget, within that three-dimensional model to meet their functional needs. Very often, they asked for more than there was space for—very often the chips would actually fall off onto the floor when there wasn’t enough space left on the model.

So, I would ask them, “What about this chip?”

They would say, “Oh, we have to have this chip.”

I’d say, “But there is no room for it.”

They’d say, “But we have to have that one.”

I’d say, “OK, tell me about this one.”

They’d say, “That’s the public eye clinic that operates on Tuesdays and Thursdays every week—we have to have it.”

And I’d say, “There is another chip on the floor—what’s that?”

They’d say, “That’s the dental clinic that operates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We have to have that one, too.”

So I’d say, “Are you telling me that maybe we should use the same room for two different purposes—and maybe find some space in this model for it?”

Their replies were, “Oh, no, that’s absolutely impossible—because of the technical nature and the safety of the equipment.”

So as the designers, we had to come up with a way to safely store the equipment so you could use the space for another purpose. They negotiated among themselves to come to the conclusion about how this could work and where it should be in the hospital.

These early experiences never left me. I have a wonderful photograph of these people working on their hospital problem. A surgeon came in wearing his greens, straight from the operating room. He grabs a cup of coffee, and he’s participating in this discussion over the model. It occurred to me later that he came in because he didn’t want to miss this meeting. He wasn’t going to go somewhere else to get what he wanted because his community was discussing the problems and creating the options; I realized how very important it was that all the stakeholders made the meeting, and they did. Then from there with the information we needed from them we’d go on, and we’d design it.

I began to put these experiences together, and I thought that architects, urban designers, and urban planners also need somehow to become facilitators, to help people have constructive dialogue. And sometime after that, in the mid-1980s, I met Larry Susskind of MIT, who was a prominent planner, educator, and leader in collaborative problem solving and consensus building; I learned from him some of the more scientific aspects of this, and I have been practicing this way ever since.

For me, my earlier work in the ′60s and ′70s now made more sense—this was a dimension of urban planning and design that I wanted to be a part of. I didn’t switch careers and become a mediator. I mediate to do better planning, architecture, and public policy.

I run a lot of these simulated projects for building design in my practice. In planning it’s more difficult to sell—even among my own partners. There is a fear that they will lose control of the planning process that they’ve been hired by the public client to carry out, to have a plan done. It’s not as clear to them that if they get into the arena of discussing with stakeholder parties what the issues are, what the program should be for the planning, where the priorities should be, what the terms of reference should be—that they can still manage the process. It’s not as clear to the planners that they can still participate—and with the critical information they need.

But the acceptance is coming. Every time, we learn more about our clients and more about the dynamics between the parties, and the parties in a community learn more about how they can legitimately participate in a structured process. It’s not willy-nilly—it’s not a public meeting that everyone comes to in order to talk and then they go home.

A Big Breakthrough

This brings me to a turning point in my work, the Calgary Transit case. One of my earliest projects involved transportation planning for the City of Calgary. Our firm had planned the fixed rail transit in the northwest sector of the city, and we’d designed all the stations. All the feeder bus lines in this sector of the city were based on the terminus being at a certain place. When the city council got the money to extend the transit line farther out, they needed to then replan all the feeder bus systems to work with the new terminus along the extended line.

The council, in this case, did not trust the transit planners to go to the public and conduct a participation program on a fairly massive scale of rejiggering all the bus lines because they simply didn’t think staff had the people skills to do that. So I was hired by the council to facilitate a public process to see if I could get some kind of involvement from the public on what this plan should be.

At our first public meeting we had representatives of 24 neighborhood associations, a major hospital, a major university, the five shopping centers that were served by this system, and the special interest groups, such as seniors and schools, that had big stakes in this system. I insisted that the transit planners and our own technical planners not a make a presentation to begin. Instead, we started out by talking about process. Technical issues can initially intimidate the public. I decided that the transit planners should not be allowed to come on as technical experts until the public understood they needed them; when the public perceived that need, then I had a collaborative relationship develop between the two.

I encouraged that relationship by going to the city council and asking them to give me the parameters within which they would accept a plan generated by the community. They gave me the limits, which were fiscal. They said, “The community can make any plan for the buses that they want to, but they can’t spend one dollar more than the present transit subsidy to this sector.”

I went back and told them that at the second meeting. They said, “How can we do that?”

I said, “Well, for example, if you double service on one route, then you’re going to have to divide it on other routes.”

They said, “How are we ever going to keep track of this?”

I said, “Why don’t you ask the transportation experts who are here?”

The transit guys stepped up and said, “Well, this is what ‘level of service’ means, and this is what ‘headways’ mean, and we can develop a little laptop program that will balance the budget for you as you propose changes.”

They then went off, and worked on this together. For me, it was an example of joint fact-finding—where they jointly generated the information that they had to have—because they needed to.

Each constituent group had a representative that came to these meetings. We had about 35 people coming to these meetings to do this planning. Every two weeks we would have a public meeting. We did the whole plan in six weeks. We would take maps, mark them, and do all the kinds of things that people do around land-use and transportation planning. We would divide the groups up into neighborhoods, and there would be a few groups that would be in one district or neighborhood of the area. They would start to lay out where they thought the routes should be. Then they would lean over and start to talk with the next table because the two maps had to mesh, because you had bus lines that had to connect. Sometimes the lines aligned, and sometimes they didn’t, and the transportation experts would then have to help them when it didn’t work. Then together they would negotiate the best route for a bus that would serve their interests and that also worked for Calgary Transit.

Finally, they had a total plan worked out. Then I reminded them that they needed to go back to their constituent groups—they needed to have their plan ratified. Some representatives volunteered to help one another out because by now they all had a stake in the plan that balanced the budget and gave them the kind of transit service that they wanted throughout their whole sector.

We had another six weeks of ratification meetings with the neighborhoods because it was hard to get them scheduled. I then had to take this plan and present it to the city council, because it would actually make the decision, not these people. They had simply been asked to recommend the plan. Still, in 12 weeks we had the whole thing done, and I was back at the city council—but not only was I back in 12 weeks, but I was back in 12 weeks with a plan that represented the interests and support of all of these stakeholder groups!

They had invented it—they had worked on it and come to consensus.

So I made my presentation to the council, and then council members asked if there were any comments from the public. One lady stood up, and she wore a yellow lapel flower. She said, “Members of the council, I don’t want to take a lot of your time, but you’ll notice that there are 35 people sitting behind me in the chambers today, and they all have yellow flowers in their lapels. They all represent organizations and institutions that participated in putting together this plan and recommending it to you”— and (I’ll quote her here), “We don’t want you futzing with our plan!”

I realized, for me, two important lessons: One, the power of the consensus when it was presented back to a political body like the city council; I realized that the council could accept this without having to play referee, without creating winners and losers. And two, at the same time, the council had retained its authority over the product because it had set the parameters at the very beginning. So it wasn’t as if they’d waited until the end and then said, “We don’t like your plan, and we can’t afford it,” because the council had said up front what it could support.

This outcome represented a consensus solution struck finally between all the public stakeholders, including the city council: there were no losers. This was a very big breakthrough for me. I went back through other work that I’d done, including the hospital design and city planning, and I realized that when the public, or the stakeholder groups, could agree on something, then this agreement has a huge influence with the people who make the decisions. It’s very difficult for people with authority to go against the stakeholders if the stakeholders can agree among themselves what the plan is, as long as the plan is reasonable (i.e., it also meets the interests of the decision makers). If the members of the hospital could agree on the use of space within the allowable budget, it was pretty hard for the architects or the government who was going to fund it to say, “No, that’s not a very good plan.” These were the people that were going to use the place, and that was very important.

In the hospital case, three years after the programming, when they cut the ribbon to open the new facility, I gave a ride back from the event to a nurse that was there. I recognized her from three years before. As we were driving, I was quite proud of this beautiful building, and I asked, “So what do you think of the hospital?”

She said, “I like it—I got almost everything that I bargained for.”

And I realized that she still felt ownership from those first programming sessions. Now she wasn’t high in the hierarchy, but she still identified with the design, and her ownership and satisfaction still mattered.

In order to find a consensus, there are three things that any facilitator does. Communication is the first thing that people always have difficulty with, especially with a lot of people around the table because they’re not necessarily communicating very well about the problem at hand or about the design or whatever it is that they’ve collectively agreed upon as an issue that they need to deal with. Very simply, we help people to communicate by asking, by clarifying, by confirming, by probing—by getting people to clarify what matters to them.

The second thing we do is manage the process because people need a structure as an alternative to fighting it out in court or whatever else they do.

The third thing we do is help them to reach closure. People, particularly in large groups, have a hard time coming to a conclusion and sticking with it.

A Traditional Tool for Reaching Consensus: Talking Circles

The “talking circle” is in stark contrast to the typical participatory meeting. The talking circle comes from an aboriginal practice where only the person who is holding the “talking stick” gets to talk. You pass the st...