Balance Transparency & Privacy
Begin Planning In Privacy
Some governments, neighborhoods, or advocacy groups needed planning expertise on a piecemeal or incremental basis. Many organizations that need unique planning expertise hire consultant planners for one job at a time. Major urban development projects typically follow this model. Also, smaller communities reach out to consultant planners who act primarily as managers of ongoing planning functions. This is a context in which I have practiced for almost thirty years. It is fraught with major challenges, not the least of which is “transparency” in government and the public’s right to be engaged in the planning process.
As a consultant planner, one of my first questions concerns past plans. Was the last plan a partial success? Did the community implement parts of the plan? How would the community grade the plan outcomes? To be effective, consultant must get candid answers. We often tell leaders in the community that our discussions should be considered confidential. Among other answers we frequently hear that specific officials, elected and appointed, from the mayor to the town clerk, were villains or heroes in the outcomes of the planning process. We hear about past and current rivalries among officials as well as local residents with an ax to grind. Sometimes there are grudges among land owners that go back a century. All of these circumstances are typical part of local history. As a professional planner we need to maintain our integrity – when you promise confidentiality for good reasons, you cannot turn around and make all the information “transparent”.
You have to draw a line, usually near the start of the project, and make it clear that some issues and options will remain confidential. Whether we like it or not, the public must be disengaged at the start of the planning process. As planners, learning the political landscape candidly can be far more important than learning the landscape of the community environment, and both may require confidentiality. Moreover, the political landscape also includes a wide range of economic and cultural factors that have been disclosed in confidence. Amidst these early “private” conversations, planners will also begin to think about the visualizations that might be appropriate for solutions and how such visualizations may reveal or conceal confidential knowledge.
As stated earlier, the use of talent and team skills to create feasible visualization should occur near the beginning of the project. Some communities hire consultant planners as part of an official Request For Proposal (or RFP). Some RFPs are considered confidential and others include full disclosure. At times consultants are ask to propose initial concepts in a project to demonstrate their ability (but without engaging the community within which the project occurs). These procedures frequently create ambiguities in terms of critical knowledge which is private versus transparent.
How then, under these circumstances, can planners inform the public about the planning process, in a fair and robust way? If the political background and the potential visualizations are all proposed in privacy with presumed confidentiality how can planners claim transparency? Some planners might quip: “It’s easy, as soon as we know that we want to propose we will ask you what you think”. However, if you are a local resident, property owner, or business person you may want to be part of the first step, not the second step after the planners have already proposed a draft “solution”.
Require Transparency At The Right Time
Transparency has always been a two-edged sword. If no one knows your plan – if it remains entirely secret – you might say there is no plan at all. Plans must have some type of shared life. Maybe it is only part of a small circle of like-minded leaders with, hopefully, benevolent intent. Maybe it is fully public, published, on line, and well known. Most likely different parts of the plan vary in the degree to which they are “transparent”.
Transparency must go beyond simple public declarations. The plan must be understood by the audience. Not everyone will understand all the pieces. Just as Lincoln made a famous statement about how you can’t fool all the people all the time, the same is true about educating the public – you can only achieve partial success. As plans become more complex, as they seem less well-defined, as the outcomes imply both good and bad conditions, it become harder to achieve high degrees of transparency.
The public should be fully engaged, but not until the client feels comfortable with the ramifications. Usually this education of the public can occur immediately after the planning process has identified some initial directions for solutions. This moment is a critical inflection point in the determination of the outcomes. At this point planners have visualized some possible solutions and the question is – Do they fit the community? Can they be implemented? Can/should they be modified? Do they have fatal flaws? Planners should not be looking for a “vote” but rather insights into the values and aspirations of the community and the people who represent the different types of places.
More than fifty years after the “Model Cities” program begun under the Johnson administration we have still not addressed the social and economic injustices in our cities. It is important to remember that the Model Cities programs included powerful requirements for local improvement in our cities, substantial funding for programming and planning, subsidies for new improvements, and substantial public promotion. At that time, as a new student in planning, my role was to help administer a companion program that subsidized college students who were assigned as staff to help local organizations involved in neighborhood programs. These illustrations from 1968 Baltimore provide a partial glimpse into the ongoing efforts. Most of the project failed. Some may have succeeded. All the projects left an enduring imprint on the participants. Today we seem to be acknowledging that the problem persists but we may have forgotten many of the pitfalls and we have yet to define the ways whereby we can overcome the same obstacles present back in 1968.
Engage Effectively
(This subsection was adapted from an unpublished essay co-written with Ben Block)
Since the Covid pandemic the use of software for online meetings has increased dramatically. The tragedies of the pandemic have also left us with some new tools for community dialogue which cannot be ignored. This is especially relevant to planners because online meetings are far less expensive and more flexible. While online meetings are more distant physically, the up close imagery of laptop cameras creates a more personal experience between participants. New technologies allow for much faster, convenient, and user-friendly sharing from multiple websites and servers. Here are some of the key options that have changed the form and content of community engagement:
1. Leverage New Techniques For “Virtual” Meetings
Virtual online meetings have already begun to revolutionize our ability to engage the public in discussing plans and visions for their communities. Just as the telephone transformed communication with “virtual” voices, new digital software and hardware will continue to transform community dialogue. The virtual platforms of today already enable us to engage with issues and garner feedback more deeply and flexibly than what is feasible with in-person meetings. This transformation is far from over, especially now that Artificial Intelligence can actually become an Artificial Participant. Perhaps we can ask an AI system to independently identify the concerns of poor people, rich people, homeless people, six-year-olds, and the next three generations.
2. Broaden The Audience And Increasing The Impact
Audiences for community meetings should include many more participants than what typically happens today. Planners cannot always afford the added expense. With online meetings, engaging a broader audience becomes much simpler and much more affordable. Here too, online meetings (with or without AI) make it easier to:
Include people who have little spare time to attend onsite meetings (especially those that run on and on for hours)
Reach broad interest groups (not just NIMBY citizens and those who exaggerate special interests)
Engage families and others whose attendance can be too difficult logistically
Provide translations for non-English speakers (through interpreters and closed caption services)
Bring in people with passive interest (like folks who watch council meetings on cable)
Speak to students, teens, business owners, elected officials, people with less mobility, and those who may be our future leaders.
3. Make Meetings Less Contentious
Onsite meetings often draw citizens with strong emotions, especially those who fear changes in the community. Such feelings can quickly lead to angry confrontations, complicating planning decisions with partisan politics and unyielding positions. In contrast, online meetings can reduce confrontations, increase the diversity of opinions, lessen xenophobia, and maintain focus on evaluating balanced planning options. Here’s why:
Technological separation makes it easier for strangers to converse without anxiety.
Online meetings can be easily curtailed if it looks like they may “boil over” (hitting the mute button).
Participants can maintain anonymity more easily, especially in online polls.
More staff can be involved remotely to engage in small informal group conversations and chats.
As confrontation diminishes, our ability to listen openly and creatively increases – we can apply critical thinking skills to community discussions more effectively.
4. Include More Relevant, Detailed Knowledge
Onsite meetings give the presenters control over rapid-fire file sharing, while online meetings expand this capability to a much broader group of knowledgeable participants. In typical online meetings, many participants can share text and graphics from a variety of sources. Onsite meeting technology, however, facilitates only one dominant presenter, and the sharing of knowledge typically only goes in one direction. Here are some of the advantages we have seen in our online community meetings:
Every participant has the means to “share your screen” — knowledge sharing promotes collaboration and drives innovation.
Collaborative decision making can consider more variables and accommodate more perspectives– a much better way to address multifactor, complex problems.
Online meetings can easily assemble knowledge from geographically distant consultants, faster and with less expense – this is especially important for projects that cannot afford large teams.
All participants can quickly and easily drill down into detailed data with multiple online resources.
All the files, visualizations, and comments can be saved quickly through recordings, screenshots, and many other forms of recording verbal, quantitative, and visual data.
5. Expanding Simultaneous Small Group Collaboration
Onsite meetings have historically followed one of the following formats – large audiences, open houses, or small group charrettes. Online meetings enable much more flexibility in how they are organized:
Online software allows for quick changes from large group meetings to small group discussions using ‘rooms’ and ‘breakouts. These can be established spontaneously as needed and do not require major physical changes in room furnishings or rescheduling.
Small side groups can be organized to tackle contentious issues with less animosity (e.g. battles over multifamily housing, environmental preservation, social justice, etc.).
Online meetings provide a major opportunity to overlap one-on-one conversations using “chat” functions and similar tools, which can occur and be recorded without interrupting the larger discussion.
6. Improve Face-To-Face Meetings
Face-to-face communications will always be essential. Just as digital technology transformed our use of paper and print, so too will technology change the use of traditional onsite meetings. There may not be as many onsite meetings, but they can become more valuable and impactful. This already happens with what might be called “hybrid” meetings in which some participants are online, and some are onsite. As with all innovations in communication, the distinct advantages and shortcomings of onsite, online, and hybrid meetings will become more apparent as we gain experience and try new techniques.
7. Reinvent The Charrette As A Hybrid Experience
Historically, charrettes involved a small group of architects working intensely overnight. Today, charrettes have become a preferred methodology for solving complex, ill-defined problems in urban design and community development. The costs of charrettes, however, have grown exponentially. Now, with digital technologies, we can plan charrettes and expand their application at much lower costs:
Allow for simultaneous visualizations by small groups (new software is being developed every day)
Provide visualization tools that can be used easily by both trained and untrained participants in both in-person and online meetings.
Schedule charrettes in sequential sessions that allows participants to “process” information between sessions,
Use recordings and file sharing, share the full flow of knowledge without overly constraining the content.
Evaluate Failures
A plan that does not fail is a plan that never succeeded. The question is – Does the plan have a meaningful legacy? Plans have a life cycle. It might be inaccurate to say that a plan “dies” but it does fade into history. If it gets remembered then the ideas may be recycled in the next plan. When I look back over 50 years of planning, most of the plans have long since passed their expiration date. Along the way, however, they created some significant changes in communities which have lasted and have influenced many decisions and plans that have occurred since then.
No planner succeeds or fails completely. In fact, the evaluation of outcomes changes over time. A successful urban renewal projects was a failed social program. A failed demolition was a successful preservation. Every project I have ever worked on yielded good and bad results. The question that we always must ask is “what lessons did we learn – good and bad?” This is always uncomfortable. No planner wants to admit defeat or error. National awards are rarely used to recognize the worst outcomes. There are, for example, some grade B movies that become cult favorites because of the way in which they magnify bad outcomes actually shows us something important about good outcomes. Maybe we need awards for grade B plans.
This photograph of Baltimore is from the same gallery as shown previously I this essay. The array of doors, stuck together, to create some sort of incomplete security fence stuck me as a visually compelling g image, intriguing and almost appealing. It represented, however, an extraordinarily disappointing reality of a neighborhood beset by trauma in which public involvement, no matter how transparent (or opaque behind the fence of doors) was simply a failure of planning and community morality.
In my early years in architecture school (1960s) we were asked to design a bridge, In this period of modernism we all aimed at designs for structural elegance and simplicity. At the same time a few of us decided to design the ugliest bridge we could imagine, just for fun. We created an eclectic, often ridiculous components of a bridge which, unfortunately, I neglected to photograph. You can imagine which of these approaches yielded the most discussion from our teachers and the most meaningful lessons.
Today it might be interesting to see if a group of planners could create the worst comprehensive plan, the worst plan for a complete street, the worst plan for a neighborhood, the worst plan for a downtown, the worst plan for a new city, and — above all — the worst plan for community engagement. I hope they would all look unfamiliar!
Topic Summary
Begin Planning In Privacy
Require Transparency At The Right Time
Engage Effectively
Evaluate Failures