Pop-Up Civics in 21st Century America

Understanding the Political Potential of Placemaking

Ryan Salzman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000328998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

How people associate and engage in politics in the 21st century is notably different from similar behaviors in the 20th century. Ryan Salzman examines the political potential of placemaking, an increasingly popular set of behaviors that were unfamiliar to the American public until the last two decades. Placemaking exemplifies a shift that is occurring in the way Americans participate in their political system, and it appears that that participation is increasingly effective in the context of American democracy.

Informed by interviews, surveys, and material review, Salzman compares the process of placemaking to traditional political and associational behaviors, providing evidence that placemaking has tremendous political potential. Placemaking is an innovative set of behaviors, largely understood to influence economic and community development. From painting crosswalks to community gardens, Americans are engaging in their communities with real political and civic consequences. This text expands our understanding of placemaking, updating the way we think about civic and political engagement in the 21st century.

Pop-Up Civics in 21st Century America: Understanding the Political Potential of Placemaking will be of interest to those who study and research political behavior, civil society, arts and politics, social movements, and urban public policy.

1
Introduction

On October 13, 2018, a small group of neighbors in Bellevue, Kentucky, spent their Saturday morning painting a crosswalk in different shades of blue. Including the time spent cleaning and preparing the crosswalk the day before, the paint job took no more than six hours to complete. However, the scope of the project was so much more than those six hours spent with paintbrush in hand. This is placemaking – a people-centered practice that “aims to improve the quality of a public place and the lives of its community in tandem” (Silberberg et al. 2013, 2). The purpose of this book is to understand the political potential of placemaking.

The painted crosswalk at the intersection of Ward Avenue and Grandview Avenue was a project embedded in a larger movement in this town of 6,000 residents across the Ohio River from downtown Cincinnati. The larger movement is an exercise in localism, liberty, and policy-shaping in the 21st century. The crosswalk itself is at first glance an aesthetic treatment. Upon further reflection it is revealed to be the result of policy deliberation and civic engagement that can (and should) be considered political action, a testament to the importance of “place” today.

The painted crosswalk began from two separate but complementary starting points. First, the people living around the crosswalk identified an issue that deserved attention: pedestrian safety. The intersection in question is on the same block as the local elementary school, a place that is familiar and of elevated importance to one and all. As such, residents in the area are hyperaware of safety issues, particularly as students transit to and from school, often on foot. For as long as people talked about the intersection, the sentiment was that safety could and should be improved. And living in a walkable, urban neighborhood it was clear that need extended to all times, not just the days and times when students were transiting to and from school. Pedestrian safety thus inspired the effort to “improve” the intersection (River City News 2018).

The second starting point was community pride. The Bellevue community was developing like many communities similarly situated. It is a place on the rise. Fifty years of white flight and urban degradation, topped off by the Great Recession, had finally given way to the urban renaissance being experienced across many American cities, particularly in the Rust Belt (Goodman 2013). Since 2010, the floodgates of redevelopment had opened. A younger, energized population was moving into Bellevue, and this prompted a shift toward increased civic engagement. But instead of volunteering at food pantries or joining the local chapter of Kiwanis, residents were engaging in a different kind of civics, one that began as many engagements begin – identifying an issue that needs to be addressed – but veering into hyperlocal, place-based participation, often enabled by social media communication.

Block parties, public art projects, and pop-up markets are common after years of social decline. To be sure, high school football under the Friday night-lights and traditional membership associations remained through the downtimes, albeit significantly diminished relative to decades earlier, but now there are more opportunities for engagement across a wider range of activities with laser-like focus on specific places. And despite the fact that these activities appear disparate on their face, there are common threads running throughout, gathering these behaviors under the umbrella of placemaking.

Each civic activity is initiated to address an issue in the community. Pop-up markets are intended to activate underutilized commercial space. Block parties are planned to get to know neighbors and entertain children. Public art seeks to increase community pride. And so on.

Each activity faces policy challenges. Street closures require City Council approval. Public art has to reconcile with historic preservation guidelines. Pop-up markets are forced to deal with a wide range of issues from vacant land usage policies to parking concerns to regulations surrounding alcohol sales.¹ And then there is the potential of the city government to go beyond regulation enforcement to actually enable these activities through grants and other in-kind assistance (River City News 2019).

When all is said and done, the civic activities in Bellevue, Kentucky, require citizen engagement and government action to an extent that is unmistakably democratic. People actively participate in the development of their community in a way that informs and responds to public policy. And the seeming disparateness of the activities obscures what is actually a network of individuals, enabled by social media, behaving in concert in a way that represents a shift in culture toward place-based behavior.

For the neighbors at the corner of Ward and Grandview, the process of painting the crosswalk began months earlier in conversations with elected officials and the city administrator. With the support of elected officials, the city administrator contacted state-level transit authorities to investigate the possible impediments to such a project. At the same time, residents and staff developed a plan to paint the intersection in a way that would be doable and impactful for improving driver awareness in the area. The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet refused to endorse the plan – in fact, they sent a letter to the city making clear the liabilities they may incur if they were to proceed – but city staff signed off on the plan nonetheless. In short order the project was completed. According to the school crossing guard, the results have been everything intended and more: cars are driving slower, pedestrians report enhanced feelings of security, and the community buzzes about its newest feature.

How can we begin to explain this Bellevue crosswalk project without invoking classical ideas about democracy and civic engagement? Were these residents effectively lobbying their elected representatives for policy change? Was federalism in play in the interactions between the state- and the local-level administrations? Is political culture part of the dynamic? Is this associational behavior that builds on and (potentially) directs social capital? These questions are but a few that come to mind when examining activities like painting a crosswalk and other placemaking events and programs.

Adding social media to our considerations, it becomes clear that we have entered a new era of political engagement. For decades social scientists have acknowledged that the modus operandi of 20th century political behavior is changing. But we have yet to come up with a clear understanding of what that change looks like. Simply adding “the internet” to traditional political action is inadequate. And so it is that this project will attempt to expand our understanding of political action to include behaviors that are increasingly popular in the 21st century with a primary focus on placemaking.

The expansion of our understanding will focus on “place,” both virtual and traditional. We will find comfort in the classical-ness of the behavior(s) under consideration. At the same time, we will recognize new technologies and the novel effects they generate. But first we must be clear that this work is needed.

Is the Sky Falling on American Democracy?

You don’t have to search very hard to find commentary lamenting the deterioration of American democracy.² Commentators are quick to pass judgment on our complex governmental system using shallow data points and anecdotes about political leaders. The news of the day is often the cause for alarm with clear implications: the American political system is breaking or broken.

To be clear, claims that the sky is falling on American democracy are nothing new. The economic and political crises of the 1970s introduced a degree of cynicism into the American lexicon that supplanted the optimism that seemed to dominate from the late 1940s until the late 1960s. Of course, the decades prior to the 1970s were no cake walk. World Wars, a depression, and a protracted, often bloody civil rights movement monopolized a generation of news coverage. But the results were positive on average, and the process seemed to reflect generalized optimism. The 1970s witnessed political and economic crises that were in many ways less severe than the decades prior, and yet the impact on American sentiment was somehow more negative.

The Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon that followed were a gut punch to political attitudes. “In the post-Watergate era … any digression, innuendo, or hint of scandal quickly spreads cynicism among voters who are now willing to believe anything untoward about their leaders, leaving the public with a familiar sense of betrayal” (Palermo 2004, 25). The energy crisis and the international sovereign debt crisis that accompanied it left many Americans’ confidence shaken further (Lipset and Schneider 1983). The rise of the modern, competitive primary system was a positive development for people advocating for increased democracy in the selection of party nominees for president, but it also made the process publicly contentious before the public was largely spared from that competition. Congressional rejection of Robert Bork, President Reagan’s nominee for the Supreme Court, was a watershed moment for relations between the executive and the legislative branches – along with regular Americans’ views of the judiciary (Selya 1995). And that was followed closely by the confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas, and the sexual harassment allegations that dominated what are now known as the “Anita Hill hearings.” The 1990s saw the adversarial relationship between President Clinton and a Republican-dominated Congress that culminated in the impeachment of President Clinton for lying under oath. As a result, there has been a marked decline in the confidence measures for American political institutions (Ghosh 2019). At the same time these political events were undermining the confidence of Americans in those institutions, another shift was occurring that further weakened American political society.

In his seminal work, Robert Putnam (2000) illuminated a troubling trend in American society: a serious decline in associational behavior. Beginning in the mid-20th century, participation in traditional American membership associations began declining. These associations were of a wide variety – Kiwanis and Rotary, for example, as well as labor unions and churches. Even participation in youth sports and bowling leagues, inspiring the title Bowling Alone, decreased at alarming rates during the second half of the 20th century. And these declines had a deleterious effect on social capital.

Social capital refers to connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called “civic virtue.” The difference is that “social capital” calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of social relations.

(Putnam 2000, 19)

A decline in association participation is a decline in networks that causes a decline in social capital. Societies with low levels of social capital are lacking “norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness,” which undermines the civic virtue required for democracy to function at a high level, debatably the only level at which democracy can function and still be considered a true democracy.

Taken together, the recent history of American political institutions and the decline in associational behavior have caused a decline in trust of all kinds (Figure 1.1). And there is clear evidence of that decline in trust:

Figure 1.1 Trust in American Institutions

Source: Gallup (n.d.)
* response options: great deal, quite a lot, some, very little, none, no opinion
* reported % = great deal + quite a lot

By these standards alone we can agree with those who proclaim that the sky is falling on the American democratic system. We can wring our hands and join in the lamentations, accepting a fatalistic future. But to do that requires that we ignore the potential that political and civic engagement is evolving, enabled by new technology and generational replacement. Even in his otherwise negative assessment of American society, Putnam (2000, 133) acknowledges that trends can improve when he says “the boomer cohort continues to be less disposed to civic engagement than their parents and even to some extent less than their own children” (italics mine). That’s right: The children are the future, and that future is now!

When Change Is Really Change

The word “change” is tricky to pin down. Change can be minimal or it can be monumental. In the case of political engagement, genuine change has been a long time coming.

Anytime there is an apparent shift in a specific behavior, there are strong pronouncements of dramatic change occurring. But even if change is underway, it is often misunderstood. We remain fixated on traditional behaviors as we attempt to benchmark and conceptualize the change that is (potentially) occurring. The best example of this tendency to remain rooted in traditional political behavior is our obsession with voting behavior.

To be clear, there is no more fundamental political behavior in the American democratic system than voting. It...