The Art (and Science?) of Designing Urban Planning Processes

In June I published an op-ed in the Detroit News describing my research on urban renewal in Detroit in the 1940s. I concluded with the observation:

The voices of citizens affected by renewal must be heard. Dramatic, large-scale projects can have harmful and unexpected consequences. The history of urban planning has shown success occurs through a careful process of building consensus, detailed analysis and cooperative action.

In response Marja Winters, the city’s deputy director of planning and development, wrote an editorial arguing the process has been highly participatory, involving 28 city-wide meetings and 10,000 citizens, and large numbers of participants said they agreed they had had the opportunity to share ideas and opinions.

(As an aside: She objected to a line which read “The plan calls for closing neighborhoods, cutting services and cultivating new industries.” I agree with her criticism: the words aren’t mine, but those of a Detroit News editor. The manuscript I submitted read: “The Detroit Works Project — Mayor Bing’s roadmap for the city’s future — has proposed dramatic solutions: closing neighborhoods, cutting services, and cultivating new industries.”)

I have not attended the Detroit Works public meetings or examined the process, so I cannot critique it in detail. The first major policy initiative coming out of the process was announced in July, but amounted to the selection of some priority areas for city services. The proposal left some puzzled. Where was the grand vision, or bold proposals? Perhaps there is no need for “planning” at all, just better urban management? (See “Questions dog Detroit Works plan: Advocates want to see long-term strategy“)

This situation and Winters’ article raises interesting questions: is all participation alike? Can the design of the process affect the outcome? What models exist for planning for “shrinking cities”?

It is common for major urban plans or policies to be developed through quite elaborate processes. For example, I collected this diagram that was circulated in the early stages of the Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan:

In general, their design is left up to professionals who draw upon professional experience. Most process designs characterize several aspects: problem definition, deliberation and participation, analysis, policy design, and decision-making. Under each of these, details include:
- The number, type, mission, membership and missions of committees
- What expertise and analysis is required, and how they are involved
- The timing, nature, and purpose of broader participation such as meetings, surveys, and online engagement
- How decisions will be made.

One of the cleares descriptions of how processes are designed for local contexts comes from Barbara Faga’s book Designing Public Consensus. After several case studies, the book presents the following public process plan as a starting point:

This way of thinking is not unique to urban planning. As the field of risk assessment has become embroiled in value-laden controversies, experts have had to re-assess their approached. In 1996, leaders in the field proposed an analytic-deliberative model that seeks to tightly link the needed analysis with involvement from affected parties.

Perhaps the most common process theory for large-scale planning is scenario planning (PDF), adopted from methodologies invented by the private sector for corporate planning. Although providing guidance for how thoughtful “scenarios” can be used to consider options for the future, scenario planning’s participatory logic is underdeveloped.

The crowning achievement of process thinking in public policy may be the consensus building approach (CBA), a method for resolving dilemmas often associated with Larry Susskind, a MIT professor of urban studies and planning. This negotiation methodology has strict requirements for the nature of the problems where it can be applied, how stakeholders are identified and included, and how negotiation should move forward. However it’s not clear how this approach — designed to intervene in acrimonious public debates about clear problems or decisions — applies to the problem of urban planning.

If there is an art to process design, can there be a science? It is rarely studied for a variety of reasons. First is the argument that process doesn’t matter. It could be that the outcome is the same regardless of what is done, or the real decisions that matter are being made elsewhere — by powerful elected officials or market actors. Second, from a social science perspective, studying them is maddeningly difficult. There are too many confounding variables and no clear to measure. What would you measure, and how? For this reason there are many descriptive case studies that steer clear of specific details. Lastly, analyzing processes requires a different form of knowledge than found in most research. Instead of theory that describes reality, we need a theory of what would happen given a certain sequence of events or actions.

Theory aside, how do you plan for Detroit? A good process would focus first on the goal. What is the “problem” in Detroit, anyway? It could be too much land, too few jobs, high crime, or a lack of revenue for government services. Although they are related, tackling any one means clarifying what the priorities are.

The most direct case for Detroit is the Youngstown 2010 project in Youngstown, Ohio. This process involved large-scale participation and a vision and plan adopted by the city council which anticipates significant changes to accommodate a permanently reduced population. Here is the process diagram from Faga’s book:

Where Detroit Works — or any other large-scale planning in Detroit — should go depends on what the local stakeholders seek to accomplish. Although any process must be locally tailored, the process designers aren’t starting from scratch. The models described above can be used to design a process that reflects both values and practical needs to involve the public, detailed analysis, and come to agreement on a solution to public problems.

Which Crowdsourcing?

I wrote this article for the most recent APA Technology Division Newsletter, which we sent out this week. Other articles include city apps, water quality mapping, TOD database, a VMT estimation tool, and online participation.

The expansion of the Internet has made possible amazing examples of the collaboration of large groups of people, a phenomenon often called crowdsourcing. Projects like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap have created new types of encyclopedias and maps. Other projects have coordinated thousands of volunteers to perform major outreach events, such as cleaning up garbage in Estonia or coordinating relief efforts for disasters such as the earthquake in Haiti.

As examples have proliferated, city planners have begun to explore whether the web can be used to tackle urban planning problems. Reviewing some well-known crowdsourcing examples with a focus on urban planning, I will describe four distinct models of crowdsourcing. Understanding these different models and their relative merits is required to integrate successful models of public sector crowdsourcing. The four types are crowdsourcing are:

• Soliciting solutions to problems
• Coordinating many individuals to achieve “collective intelligence”
• Novel combinations of incentives, processes, and staffing to achieve organizational goals
• Peer production of public goods

Some projects have used crowdsourcing as a way of soliciting innovative designs to a problem online. In Salt Lake City’s Next Stop Design project, Thomas Sanchez and Daren Brabham led a team which held an online design competition for a bus stop in Salt Lake City. In a recent article for the journal Planning Theory, Brahbam argues crowdsourcing should be viewed as a new type of public participation. He cites as an example the company InnoCentive, which operates a website where corporations post technical problems and “solvers” compete to win cash prizes for the best solution. “In essence, any urban planning project is predicated on a problem.” Brahbam writes, “Typically that problem is how best to accommodate changing populations with different infrastructure, all while considering the interests of residents, developers, business owners, and the environment. If a problem can be framed clearly, and if all the data pertaining to a problem can be made available, then that problem can be crowdsourced.”

In Melbourne, Australia, Mark Elliott and a team of collaborators took quite a different approach to crowdsourcing for a project completed in 2008. Partnering with an official city planning process, Elliot’s group created a wiki so the plan could be written in the same way as Wikipedia is – through the contributions of hundreds of different authors. In his doctoral dissertation, Elliott proposed a theory of “stigmergic collaboration.” Stigmergy is a theory developed in the natural sciences for a “mechanism of indirect coordination between agents,” such as the ways ant colonies can work in highly coordinated ways without a central authority. Elliott argues this type of cooperation and collaboration is made possible through technologies that create a “localized site of individualistic engagement” that reduces demands placed on participants.

A recent paper by MIT researchers argued crowdsourcing projects should be viewed as innovative arrangements of components, what they call a genome. Through a detailed analysis of the organizations Linux, Wikipedia, InnoCentive, and Threadless, the authors conclude each share a common set of ingredients which fall into four categories: the goal to be achieved, the structure or process of achieving the goal, incentives, and staffing. They observe these projects combine the components in different ways. For example, in the case of Linux, the crowd contributes new software code through collaboration for recognition, but only a small group decides which modules are included in each release through a hierarchy. In the case of Wikipedia, although the crowd creates articles, but the website uses voting and administrators for other decisions, such as whether to delete an article.

Finally, many have speculated that crowdsourcing should move beyond the realm of ideas. Citing examples of massive cleanups and emergency relief efforts, they argue city governments should use technology to crowdsource the production of public services. Instead of the government being the sole provider of certain public services, such as filling potholes or cleaning graffiti, could they simply coordinate citizens to help each other? I am skeptical of such claims for a number of reasons. Governments are subject to unique political and institutional arrangements which make collaborating with citizens difficult. Even if these barriers can be overcome, the flexibility of purely private organizations may be required for a successful project. However, even if governments can’t crowdsource their core functions, there may still be a need for a different approach in this new world. Bas Kotterink, a researcher in the Netherlands, argued in a lecture last summer that the expansion of private crowdsourcing may mean governments should take on expanded roles facilitating innovation, monitoring, and enforcing basic values such as privacy.

Although sharing similarities, each of these models contains distinct assumptions and approaches. Successfully using crowdsourcing for urban planning may require another approach entirely, taking into account the unique characteristics of each city and project. By describing some of the diverse approaches used thus far, I hope this article will help provoke ideas and innovation.

Originally written for APA Planning and Technology Today

Engaging Community … Through Technology

This semester at MIT I am taking a class titled “Engaging Community: Models and Methods for Designers and Planners.” It is co-taught by Ceasar McDowell, and Anne Spirn.

The course is organized around several “approaches” to working with communities: advocacy, participatory design, consensus building, community organizing, and capacity and knowledge building. Many of the class materials appear on the course website, including the reading list which is a good introduction to these topics. In addition, the site hosts dozens of posts from the class participants analyzing the readings and issues discussed.

In addition to the discussion, small groups were asked to develop reports describing the history and theory of each approach. Instead of focusing on one of the approaches, fellow PhD student David Lee and I decided to focus on the issues of media and technology. In the report we discuss how technology can enhance or modify the existing models, and also consider in what ways technology shifts the nature of social behavior and organizations in general. It is posted online here – let us know your thoughts:
> Engaging Community: Media and Technology

What is Government 2.0?

With last year’s Gov 2.0 Summit and the explosion of social networking service GovLoop, “government 2.0″ has become a buzzword in technology and government circles. What does government 2.0 refer to? And what exactly was the government 1.0 that we’re improving on? This article attempts to define the term and unearth some of the hidden assumptions and implications that result from applying concepts developed in Silicon Valley technology startups to the complex and age-old problem of governance.

The term government 2.0 is a deliberate reference to the term “web 2.0,” coined by publisher Tim O’Reilly to refer to interactive, social websites like Wikipedia and Facebook, which have revolutionized how people use the web. Before delving into the meaning of government 2.0, we should consider government 1.0, the government analogue to web 1.0. Although less common now, the term most often used for this initial approach to technology in government is e-government.

The Center for Technology in Government defined e-government as having three components: e-management, e-services, and e-democracy. The first two have been largely realized. Governments have adopted, to varying degrees of sophistication, internal information technology systems such as networks, databases, and intranets. As we will see, government 2.0 practices often rely on these underlying systems. Governments have long provided e-services to constituents through websites, email, or APIs, including tax payments, service requests, and digital applications and paperwork. The last component, e-democracy, has been more elusive. In the web 1.0 world, this has most often meant emailing elected officials or signing petitions on topics. These activities have grown, although in the U.S. context exist mainly outside of government websites or structures.

At a lecture hosted by the Kennedy School Government 2.0 Professional Interest Council this fall, Nicco Mele suggested we adopt Tim O’Reilly’s web 2.0 principles as a starting point for government 2.0. My essay builds on his interesting lecture.

1. Government as Platform

O’Reilly’s first principle is “the web as platform,” adjusted for our purposes to be “government as platform.” The most obvious examples of this are where government agencies provide data or host competitions to encourage creative ideas that serve the public interest. The “apps” competitions in Washington, D.C. and New York and sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, are a start to this trend. In these competitions, government provides the data, and an ecosystem of third party developers and tools helps unleash the value for the public, creating new tools, resources, and analyses.

Another example where government acts as platform is the phenomenon of participatory budgeting, pioneered by cities in Brazil and now has spread to a number of cities around the world. This approach puts budgetary decision-making, or some part of it, directly in the hands of citizens, bypassing existing representative models of decision-making. The technical dimensions of this are only now being explored, and in the Brazilian case above deliberation and voting online complemented conventional public meetings.

When it comes to service delivery, it is less clear what “government as platform” means. It may echo a broader political agenda that has sought to re-define the role of government through systematic privatization of formerly government functions, such as education or public services. After all, when governments provide educational or housing vouchers, aren’t they acting as the intermediary, or a platform? The political implications of shifting government from a service provider role to a facilitating role deserves consideration. This issue is connected to a host of issues surrounding contracting and public private partnerships. Governments may want to retain some types of service delivery if the good cannot be contracted for, or the public wants to enforce certain service standards.

2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence

The second principle is “harnessing collective intelligence.” Obama’s Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government identified collaboration as a policy goal for the federal government. In fact, Obama’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government Beth Noveck experimented with collaboration tools to create an open government policy last summer. In other areas there are limited successes of citizen-government collaboration. The Peer to Patent program pools expert opinion to speed the patent process. The Next Stop Design project in Salt Lake City, Utah used crowdsourcing to select the design for new bus shelters. One of the people involved in the project, Daren Brabham, is writing a PhD dissertation on the application of crowdsourcing to public problems. In Melbourne, the consulting firm Collabforge ran a wiki as a component of a conventional planning process to generate the new city plan.

Fundamentally, this trend will face several types of powerful resistance.

First, it can run counter to traditional concepts of representative democracy, where elected officials work “down” through an expert bureaucracy to create and implement policy. Archon Fung has proposed “empowered participation” can be deployed as a governance method for specific issues, such as Chicago’s school committees or neighborhood policing committees. However, creating these structures depends on modifying existing forms of governance. Existing projects have avoided this in several ways. The apps competitions aren’t about creating policy, and the government hosts can always disavow responsibility. Idea-generation contests usually reserve final decisions to designated juries. Policy-creation projects retain the final decision-making power with conventional authorities. However, pushing this further into what Beth Noveck calls “wiki government” will require addressing this tension with existing practices.

Second, a host of public problems require technical expertise to analyze or solve. The question of how to integrate technical forms of knowledge with citizens is far from resolved. The cutting edge involves putting modeling tools in the hands of citizens, who use them as “decision support tools,” but this runs counter to existing models of professional practice and the very real need for significant expertise to complete complex analyses.

Lastly classified data and national security, a major governmental function, may never be opened to the public. Interestingly, Department of Defense has been interested in the collaborative potential of internal communication across their vast bureaucracy through wikis, for example launching a wiki to improve the Army Field Manual.

3. Open Data Standards

The third principle is the use of data standards. Expanding access to government data is a major trend, with initiatives underway at the federal, state, and local level to create data portals. The concept of linked data, emerging out of the Wikipedia project, seems poised to move into government datasets. In fact, greater linking and cross-comparison among the expanding amount of available government data will create a positive pressure to ensure cross-compatibility. Within Massachusetts state government, for example, town-level data has become a standard for comparison and analysis. With the federal government in setting metadata and other standards already, this may happen slowly but some signs are already in place. Using this to evaluate government may be misleading: the primary purpose of government isn’t to create data, although it is an important one. The technological viewpoint threatens to be reductionist, viewing the government as primarily engaged in collecting and hosting data. In reality, most money and effort in government is spent on delivering healthcare, education, national defense, grant programs, and regulatory actions, where data can play a supporting role (perhaps as indicators) but is not even always a mandatory input to governance.

In Boston, the author of a recent major report studying the city’s transit agency said in November he wouldn’t ride the busy Red Line due to serious maintenance issues that threaten to cause a train derailment. At roughly the same time, data enthusiasts were demanding real-time data about bus and train arrivals at the MassDOT developers conference. When our transit systems are in real danger of catastrophic failure, shouldn’t we spend all available funds preventing disaster for the existing riders, rather than inventing technology to make use more convenient? How can these important goals be balanced properly?

4. Customer Service

The last principle discussed by Nicco is customer service, based on O’Reilly’s “rich user experience.” An emphasis on customer services is undeniable at all levels of government. Cities have launched successful 311 systems for managing citizen requests, and governments have been subscribing to the “plain language” movement make government information more understandable and usable to citizens. However, just like “government as platform,” this principle too often reduces government to a consumer-producer relationship where the government provides services just like private firms might in the marketplace. Customer service is important, but so is engaging with citizens to generate ideas and implement solutions. In exchange for expecting service, citizens have the responsibility to understand the resource and legal limitations of government.

5. Incremental Policy

O’Reilly has several additional principles: end of the software release cycle, lightweight programming models, and software above the level of the single device. Of these, I think the principle for government is the advent of more iterative forms of policy making. The field of planning has developed theories of incrementalism or “muddling through,” to reflect the real-world pace of change. The web supports both short bursts of activity but also long-term archiving, and professionals are only now learning how to use the tools to develop sustained interest and engagement through ongoing conversations and communications.

Conclusion

What do we learn from this exercise? First, I’m not sure government 2.0 is yet a new type of government, instead a collection of promising trends. The adoption of new social and technical approaches of idea creation and governance don’t resolving age-old questions about what government should be doing, and how it should approach principles of equity and justice. In fact, what could emerge is a new, technically-enabled model of in the tradition of the “developmental state,” the concept that the state itself is engaged in economic and community development. This is perhaps the most important lesson of these trends: existing government processes should be examined and where they are not working be re-invented to take advantage of the ability of technology to expand the activity of governance beyond the institutions of government.

Virtual Reality for Stakeholder Engagement: A Conference in Second Life

The Alexandria, Virginia-based group Public Decisions offers a variety of training materials and events on how to involve the public in public policy and social issues.

A longtime user of Internet conferencing technology for their training class, they have taken the leap and are sponsoring the online conference on “Using Virtual Reality for Stakeholder Engagement: An Online Conference in Second Life�” The one-day conference will be held on Thursday, July 16th, and feature a group deliberation on global warming, field trips to Second Life islands where “stakeholders are being actively engaged on issues related to land, air, or water quality,” and a panel discussion on the best practices for using Second Life. The conference is $75 with membership to their free “Circle Club,” or $35 for students.

Although requiring users to join and learn how to use a proprietary virtual world, Second Life is increasingly becoming a popular venue for conferences, including the one on education shown in the illustration.

With urban planners and other policymakers increasingly interested in using Second Life — or other immersive, 3D virtual reality environments — to support visualization and public engagement (such as the Hub2 project, or the Participatory Chinatown project some of my MAPC colleagues are working on), this topic will only increase in importance in the years to come.

Vacant Property Website Wins Round 2 in ‘Apps for Democracy’ Contest

A website inspired by my idea for a vacant property database has won First Prize in Round 2 of the Apps for Democracy-Community Edition competition sponsored by D.C. government. The site’s creator, Shaun Farrell, will receive a $3,000 cash prize and now has a chance (along with other contest apps) at a $10,000 Final Round prize.

My proposal for a social vacant property database website (originally posted here), caught the eye of a Shaun Farrell, a developer in the DC Apps for Democracy competition. His app, VacantDC, allows users to view a map of vacant properties in the city, view easy-to-read information pages for each property complete with photo, and even submit their own reports. Since it’s in “pre-alpha release,” being developed under the extremely tight limits of the competition, it’s a bit rough around the edges but clearly headed in the right direction. In an email Shaun explained the data in the system is from June 1, 2009, but DCRA has agreed to provide him a monthly set of current vacant properties.

I’m really excited about the site and wish Shaun luck in his development sprint for the final prize. Hopefully he will release the code under some kind of license so it can evolve into a resource for any city struggling with abandonment issues.

White House Launches �Open Government Initiative�

On January 21st, President Barack Obama issued the first memorandum of his presidency on �Transparency and Open Government,� charging the Chief Technology Officer, Directory of the Office of Management and Budget, and Administrator of General Services to coordinate the creation of an Open Government Directive. The memo articulated a tripartite analysis of the topic, discussing transparency, or disclosing �information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use,� participation, or government giving �Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information,� and finally collaboration, or �actively engaging Americans in the work of their Government.� Someone pointed out at the Princeton Summit I recently attended the three form an interesting logical hierarchy, with transparency required for good participation, and collaboration the culmination of the process. (Of course it leaves off the level included on some other participation scales, citizen power)

Today, the three individuals charged with creating the Open Government Directive launched the Open Government Initiative to �experiment with mechanisms for effective citizen participation� while developing the government�s policy, dividing the task into three parts: brainstorm (now), discuss (starting June 3) and draft (starting June 15th). The process includes �From the Inbox,� a collection of contributed comments, and �Listening Sessions,� or notes or recordings of meetings. Already in the inbox is collection of interesting documents mostly from established interest groups like GWU National Security Archives, Harvard�s Kennedy School of Government, and AmericaSpeaks.

Also today the White House launched Data.gov, an effort to provide a central repository of government data, and the start of a forum on improving Regulations.gov.

Reviewing the suggestions from the Kennedy School�s Transparency Policy Project, this suggestion (PDF) for an experimental project caught my eye:

The Departments of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Transportation could create a customizable platform to allow cities and towns to quickly deploy web sites that allow residents to report local problems (e.g. broken streetlights, abandoned vehicles, potholes, tunnel and bridge problems) in a geo-coded database and display system with mark up features. Cities and towns could deploy the platform on a voluntary, and perhaps incentivized, basis and integrate it with their 311 (non-emergency) incident reporting systems.

The project idea raises several issues. First, despite the fact the initiative is for the federal government as a whole, this suggest leaps all the way to the hyperlocal level. There seems to be something intrinsic about Internet technology that makes it particularly well suited for local initiatives, perhaps due to some of the factors I discuss here. Second, it raises the issue of to what extent government should attempt to create new technology. There actually already is a website that does more or less what the Harvard folks describe that I�ve been meaning to write about � SeeClickFix. In fact, here�s some potholes, broken streetlights, and other problems already reported on this private website:

Some have argued the government should focus on data sources nearly exclusively, but I�m more of a moderate on the issue. After all, the private sector may not develop technology that suits the unique characteristics of government. Lastly, this local suggestion implies the subtle ways the Obama Administration�s innovation in transparency, participation, and online engagement could trickle down to state and local government.

> White House Open Government Initiative
> Data.gov
> SeeClickFix