Citizen-Centered Cities, Volume I

Paul R. Messinger

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781606496596
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Sector de servicios

Modern cities are increasingly involving citizens in decisions that affect them. This trend is a part of a movement toward a new standard of city management and planning—falling under the names public involvement, public engagement, collaborative governance, civic renewal, participatory democracy, and citizen-centered change. City administrators have long focused on attaining excellence in their technical domains; they are now expected to achieve an equal standard of excellence in public involvement. Toward this end, Citizen-Centered Cities provides a body of experience about public involvement that would take years for municipal administrators to accumulate on the job. The opening chapter summarizes nine challenges for public involvement, together with over sixty aspirational recommendations. Subsequent chapters provide detailed case studies illustrating these challenges for a range of projects—a new bridge, a light rail line, a highway interchange, neighborhood street modifications, urban streetscaping, bicycle routes, movement of freight, and a transportation master plan. The close government-academic cooperation required to carry out this project builds on an innovative partnership between the City of Edmonton and the University of Alberta called the Center for Public Involvement.

PART 1

Challenges and Opportunities for Putting Citizens First

CHAPTER 1

Nine Challenges for Public Involvement 2.0

Paul R. Messinger, Marco Adria, Edd LeSage, Fiona Cavanagh, Moein Khanlari, Heather Stewart, Rosslynn Zulla, Michelle Chalifoux

Service delivery increasingly involves users co-creating value with a service provider. Users co-create value by doing many activities as self-service. Users also cooperate in service design by offering suggestions on what is needed and providing feedback about prototypes and new service offerings. New services have leveraged the Internet, mobile, and other new technologies to facilitate co-creation of value only a few clicks away. This book focuses on how cities are increasingly incorporating co-creation of value with citizens in municipal service delivery. For municipalities and other democratic governments, a major component of co-creation of value consists of “public involvement.”

Public involvement is an evolving concept in an emerging field. Related terminology with similar connotations in this area includes public engagement, collaborative governance, civic renewal, participatory democracy, and citizen-centered change. These terms have shades of difference in meaning, based on the degree of action implied for citizens. Public involvement is the broadest category of activities in this domain. We define public involvement as inviting, encouraging, and using contributions from citizens about important issues that affect them, in ways that lead to better decisions and improved democratic outcomes.

Cities are increasingly carrying out public involvement, particularly in North and South America and Europe, facilitated by new technology. But despite the best of intentions, it has proved difficult for cities to do public involvement. Several factors in the current environment relevant to successful rollout of public involvement are the following:

• To involve citizens in decision-making meaningfully, cities require a healthy, vibrant culture, along with widely supported political and social practices. Cities in North America are facing rapidly shifting demographics and complex problems, including infrastructure development, that require thoughtful, informed responses by citizens.

• Online public involvement has not yielded the positive results for which its promoters had hoped. Online participants can suffer from groupthink or seek influence out of proportion to their numbers. Methods of combining online information and interaction with face-to-face processes are necessary.

• Public involvement is an antecedent of civic renewal, but it is not a substitute for concrete change. Citizens and their governments must be prepared to follow up meaningful public-involvement processes with an action agenda.

In spite of these factors, the positive outcomes and benefits of public involvement are substantial and well documented. The research literature identifies at least six expected benefits of high-quality and comprehensive public-involvement practice, summarized in Table 1.1.

Further benefits of public involvement include the following: (a) Effective public involvement has the potential to build trust within society. (b) Online public involvement can attract individuals and groups who otherwise would not participate in civic matters. (c) Cities can attract the interest of young people at institutions of higher education, in particular, who may be more likely to make those cities their home after graduation. (d) Enhanced information systems can facilitate systematic and routine incorporation of citizen learning and preferences into decision-making. (e) Cities can draw on innovative methods and the civic history of other municipalities.

Table 1.1 Six expected benefits of public involvement

Legitimacy: Decisions that account for public values balance “fact-based” or “expert” decisions, and add legitimacy and depth to decisions. Better decision-making: Drawing on the diverse experiential knowledge of the public informs decisions that can then be made based on real needs. Reduced polarization: Well-structured processes, with intentional opportunities for dialogue and deliberation, save time and resources by seeking “common ground” and by constructively uncovering and utilizing conflict. This increases “public-minded” decision-making and responses to policy problems. Improved capacity: Citizens acquire skills and competencies for listening, problem solving, and creative thinking. Engaged citizens: Citizens develop a civic sense of purpose in their lives as they devote energy and time to shaping public policy. Inclusiveness: Mechanisms are created to take advantage of the diversity of the population by reducing barriers to participation, especially for minority and underrepresented groups.

Building on this last point, this casebook is designed to help cities learn from each other about experiences with public involvement. These cases illustrate standard difficulties that municipalities encounter when carrying out public involvement. For convenience of data collection, the nine cases come from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (a metropolitan area of about one million people), and the cases deal with transportation services in one form or another. On the basis of extensive communications with city professionals from other cities, including Calgary, Vancouver, and Chicago, the problems identified in these cases appear to be common in many cities; so the learning from these cases is not restricted to one medium-sized city in western Canada. (Moreover, to provide broader depth across cities, in a companion volume, we also provide twelve overview descriptions of public involvement as it is carried out in six U.S. cities and six Canadian cities.)

In this chapter, we introduce the topic by summarizing nine broad challenges for cities to achieving excellence in the practice of public involvement. Each challenge is followed by various recommendations. The recommendations collectively point toward an evolved approach to public involvement.

Conceptual Framework for Assessing Municipal Public Involvement

Although not required for understanding the challenges and recommendations below, a conceptual framework was used to guide the development of our analysis of public-involvement practices. The framework represents a service orientation to understanding public involvement. It consists of the three major components of service: Commitment, Conduct, and Outcomes.

This framework breaks public-involvement processes into Planning, Engagement, Impact, and Assessment/organizational learning. Conduct (or practice) is preceded by Commitment and followed by Outcomes. Several criteria for excellent public involvement emerge from Figure 1.1: (1) Planning, (2) Engagement, (3) Impact, (4) Assessment, (5) Buy-In, (6) Support, and (7) Outcomes. The Outcomes can be further subdivided into Quality Projects, Involved Citizens, and Perceptions of Usefulness. These criteria can be used as the basis for developing a “report card” for a municipality’s public involvement. Such an assessment of a city’s public involvement can be done through consideration of interview data or through surveys.

Nine Challenges for Public Involvement and Associated Recommendations

We propose that many cities today face nine challenges for carrying out effective public involvement, summarized in Table 1.2.

Figure 1.1 Our framework for public involvement

Table 1.2 Nine challenges for public involvement in city management

1. In pursuing excellence in public involvement, cities are facing rising citizen expectations. 2. Cities are increasingly expected to employ a transparent and predictable budgeting process for public involvement, but in some instances are not funded to do so. 3. Cities are struggling to combine excellence in engineering and planning with excellence in public involvement. 4. A culture of learning and innovation in the practice of public involvement has yet to be fully developed in many municipalities. 5. Cities are falling behind in their capacity to evaluate their public-involvement initiatives. 6. In public-involvement initiatives, municipalities are contending with the management problems of decision lock-in, hang time, participant churn, and misaligned expectations. 7. In public-involvement initiatives, cities are not always able to acquire a balance and range of public perspectives. 8. Municipalities are finding that the public-involvement spectrum, while useful, requires selective and strategic use. 9. Closing the information loop with citizens is emerging as a significant gap in public-involvement practice in municipalities.

We identified these nine challenges through the process of writing the cases in this casebook and the city studies in a companion casebook. We also relied on three additional sources of information: (1) interviews with administrators and professional staff in the Transportation Services Department of Edmonton, Canada, (2) a survey from 121 professionals involved with carrying out public-involvement activities in Transportation Services in Edmonton Canada (a 38.9 percent response rate from 311 professionals contacted who were judged to do public-involvement activities in Transportation Services), and (3) a review of city reports, articles in public media, literature combining practice-based and professionally oriented publications, and scholarly publications about public involvement generally and for public-transportation work specifically.

In this chapter, we do not attempt to “prove” that these nine challenges hold in all cities. Detailed documentation indicating the presence of these challenges in Edmonton, Canada, is provided elsewhere (Review of Public Engagement 2015, City of Edmonton, Department of Transportation Services, by the same author team). On the basis of our discussions with professionals working in several large and small municipalities in Canada and the United States, we believe that several of these challenges are applicable elsewhere. To some extent, assessing such empirical claims is tedious and very detailed—like what some say about visiting a sausage factory: “many of us like the product, few of us want to see it being made.” We leave it to readers to judge the extent to which these nine generalizations hold in their own municipalities.

For each of these challenges, in this chapter we provide several recommendations, more or less closely tied with the challenge itself. These recommendations are aspirational—in the sense that it is not realistic to expect a municipality to implement a large number of these recommendations at once. These recommendations are provided for generating ideas and discussion, to help organizations begin to identify the lowest hanging fruit first. Additional policies can be added according to what seems to work. We suspect that the larger the city, the more explicit the planning efforts have to be because there is greater danger of a “disconnect” between those making the decisions and those affected by them.

The recommendations in this chapter are designed to encourage the embedding of public involvement into the organizational design of a city and its departments. The central goals of our recommendations, each tied with one of the nine challenges, are summarized in Table 1.3.

The recommendations associated with Challenges 1 through 5 concern the development of an organizational culture that takes into account a clear strategy of public involvement. The recommendations associated with challenges 6 through 9 concern institutionalized processes for planning and carrying out public-involvement activities and for making use of citizen contributions.

Movement toward what we might call “Public Involvement 2.0” will require attention to some of the items in Table 1.3. It will require a well-developed learning plan for staff and increased development of key skills and competencies. To support this movement, evaluation criteria will need to be established, with the goal of creating a culture of best practices in which learning about public involvement is shared,...