Citizen-Centered Cities, Volume II

Paul R. Messinger

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781631576683
• eBook ISBN: 9781631576690
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Service Industry
• Index: Business

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 twelve city studies in the present volume were written to provide city administrators with a comparative perspective about how U.S. and Canadian cities carry out their public involvement activities. The opening chapter summarizes general themes and salient differences in approaches to public involvement across twelve cities. 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.

CHAPTER 1

Themes in Public Involvement across Cities

The 12 U.S. and Canadian city studies in this volume demonstrate that cities are not the same in their approaches to public involvement. There are common themes, however.

One theme spanning these city studies is that the larger the city, the more the conscious effort required to keep the public informed and engaged. Indeed, the biggest cities in this casebook (New York, Chicago, and Toronto) are so big that coordinated public involvement is a necessity for running a municipal democracy with complex, sometimes overlapping, administrative structures (often including regional transit authorities) and avoiding alienating citizens.

A second theme is that expectations have risen for digital outreach. Indeed, widespread online availability of data was indispensable for compiling these studies. Some further points of comparison and contrast are worth mentioning.

There is an interesting contrast between New York and Chicago. Historically, many parts of both cities were designed with the public in mind. New York had the foresight to create Central Park, for example; but on an even larger scale, the Burnham Plan of Chicago in 1909 had the foresight to keep almost all of the city shoreline on Lake Michigan as public parkland and to build the city around this marvelous natural asset.ⁱ (Toronto apparently lacked a similar early unified plan for the lakeshore of Lake Ontario, and Waterfront Revitalization remains a topic of heated debate in recent decades.) More recently, in the area of public involvement, Chicago and New York both have wide-ranging efforts, some of which are stimulated by requirements from the Federal government for matching funding. Both have to coordinate with large regional transportation bodies and diverse other organizations, with overlapping jurisdictions. But Chicago goes far beyond mere compliance with requirements for coordinated public involvement. For example, Chicago is one of only three U.S. cities to use participatory budgeting. Indeed, perhaps New York and Toronto are more similar to each other, with overall policy, carried out in different ways in various city departments.

To the West, Portland is one of the few cities whose wide range of activities across the public-involvement spectrum includes delegating decision making to public committees. San Francisco, like many Canadian cities, must assure public involvement for multiple language communities. Minneapolis and St. Louis are both generally progressive midsized Midwestern cities, with commitments to public involvement similar to Calgary and Edmonton, but in slightly different forms and under different names.

In Canada, the commitment to public involvement seemed to flow from West to East, with early concerted effort in Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton, more or less in that order. In the East, Toronto could only begin in concerted fashion after the municipal amalgamation in 1998, and by that time, Vancouver had already begun setting policy in 1996. Calgary followed in 2003, and Edmonton in 2006. Montréal displayed parallel early effort, but it operates within a complex city structure different from the Western Canadian cities. It is ironic, perhaps, that the capital of Canada, Ottawa, is still catching up with these other cities in public-involvement efforts.

Each city study in this book starts with summary statistics from U.S. and Canadian census data. To provide the governance context, a summary of the administrative structure for each city follows. The study then describes the city’s overall orientation and strategy toward public involvement, with a separate section on public involvement in the transportation domain. The role of noncity organizations in public involvement is also briefly examined for each city. Most of the studies also include one recent example of a particular public-involvement or public-consultation activity. We acknowledge that these city studies may be limited in terms of completeness by the availability of information about a city’s public-involvement practices on the World Wide Web. Demographic and nondemographic comparative statistics for the 12 cities are provided in Table 1.1.

The city studies in this book offer the following highlights:

1. The City of Portland has created a Public Involvement Advisory Council (PIAC), comprised of city authorities and community representatives, to provide guidelines for the conduct of the city’s public-involvement activities and to institutionalize a commitment to public involvement. The city also involves community advisory groups in the public-involvement projects, themselves, and delegates some decision making regarding the conduct and evaluation of public involvement to citizens through these advisory groups.

2. The City of San Francisco has specific provisions to reach its sizeable Limited English Proficiency (LEP) populations in its public-involvement efforts. In addition, Technical Advisory Committees (TACs) and Community Advisory Committees (CACs) are used to coordinate plans across different stakeholder organizations and to consider community input in decisions. The idea of an ongoing Citizens Advisory Community has also been pursued by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). This organization has appointed an 11-member Citizens Advisory Committee that meets monthly and is responsible for providing input on “nearly all matters that go before the Transportation Authority Board [of Directors].” This committee is also responsible for publicizing transportation projects and plans to the city’s neighborhoods and soliciting input.

3. Minneapolis has two notable principles of engagement: (1) citizen participation in design, and (2) communication of outcomes of citizen participation. The former principle recognizes the need for citizens to have a say on how public engagement is carried out, and the latter principle highlights the need to close the loop by communicating project outcomes to citizens. Also noteworthy, the city holds community meetings and informal outreach activities at diverse locations (e.g., grocery store gathering rooms, dental clinics, state fairs, and community events) to encourage participation. Cohosting community meetings with a local community partner to develop trust and credibility with the community is a lesson drawn from the Central Corridor Light Rail Transit project.

Table 1.1 Summary information about 12 cities

4. St. Louis manages citizen participation in a comprehensive way so as to avoid duplication of efforts at the local level. In addition, the citizen engagement principles in their long-range transportation plan recognize the right of citizens to be informed of how decisions are made and have their perspectives considered. One specific principle, “a right to voice their perspectives,” seems to imply that the onus of participation is put on citizens in long-range decisions, rather than the city being actively committed to ensuring public participation. St. Louis has valuable experience in active participation, from its “St. Louis Great Streets project,” where citizens participated in designing their own streets.

5. Throughout the City of Chicago, city departments and representatives, nonprofit organizations, media...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Abstract
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgment
• Chapter 1 Themes in Public Involvement across Cities
• Part 1 Public Involvement in Six U.S. Cities
• Part 2 Public Involvement in Six Canadian Cities
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index