Urban Planning and E-Government

This post is Part 1 of my public participation in urban planning series, adapted from my urban planning final paper, Citizen Participation and the Internet in Urban Planning, which received the University of Maryland Urban Studies and Planning Larry Reich Award for Best Final Paper.

Since the advent of information technology, there has been intense interest in its potential use to enhance and improve government functions. Despite innovations in many areas of governance, the use of the information technology in general and the Internet specifically to facilitate citizen involvement in urban planning has been limited. Two fundamental reasons explain this: the unique character of public participation has made it difficult to replicate online, and professionals have hesitated to work on the Internet due to the unequal distribution of Internet access. These reasons also serve to describe the obstacles that must be overcome before effective online participation can be realized. New tools and expanding Internet access address these concerns.

Limited Online Work by Planners
The Center for Technology in Government defines e-government as “the use of information technology to support government operations, engage citizens, and provide government services.” The four broad government functions reflected in this definition are: the electronic delivery of services (e-services), use of information technology to improvement management (e-management), use of the Internet to facilitate citizen participation (e-democracy), and the exchange of money for goods and services over the Internet (e-commerce).(1) Although e-services and e-commerce have spread rapidly, the development of e-democracy tools has lagged behind. To the extent there has been innovation in the area of participation, it has been to facilitate individual communication (e.g. email) to government officials.

Although enhanced participation in government decision-making has long been a theoretical goal of e-government advocates, its actual implementation has been limited. By 2008, the vast majority of planning departments and commissions had at least posted plans and other information online, many posted contact information to government officials, agendas and minutes from government meetings, and many have also begun to experiment with putting geographic databases online.(2) Consultants have emerged specializing in workflow management, online document production, and even receipt of public comments for proposed plans in electronic formats.(3) Despite broad adoption of some level of Internet use by public sector planners, few have elevated it to an important place in their work. A 2003 study of 60 urban planning processes in Florida and Washington states found just 5 percent used web sites as a “central role in providing information.”(4)
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June is Public Participation in Urban Planning Month

Although there may be no such thing as “Public Participation in Urban Planning Month” that I know of, I’ve decided to declare one on this website at least. That’s because I’ve decided to use June to publish a series of posts describing the research and recommendations contained in my final paper for graduate school, titled “Citizen Participation and the Internet in Urban Planning.” (Download the entire paper below)

As I have often written, the Internet provides urban planners with new tools to facilitate citizen participation in planning. Instead of studying and evaluating existing technical tools to facilitate participation (whether email lists, blogs, or private vendors systems), I decided to focus on the history and theory of participation to guide the development of a new model. How have urban planners engaged with the public in the past? What academic theory and professional values guide conventional (offline) participation processes? I then use my findings to describe both why and how the Internet should be used by urban planners.

This month I’ll post four major posts on these topics.

E-government, or “the use of information technology to support government operations, engage citizens, and provide government services” has been an area of intense interest. However, the use of the Internet to engage citizens in urban planning has been constrained. Part 1 will describe public participation in urban planning in the context of this movement. Internet participation in planning has been limited due to the availability of suitable technical tools and concerns about digital inequality, as well as a lack of a clear understanding of how technology can meet the needs of citizens and professionals. I describe how new Internet technologies and expanding Internet access addresses these concerns, and why urban planning requires a distinct technological approach from other e-government initiatives.

Involving the public in planning American cities has a long history. After completing the Chicago Plan of 1909, city leaders evangelized the plan through public lectures, coordinated sermons in churches, and a required textbook on city planning inserted in the public school curriculum. Part 2 will review the history of participation in American urban planning in order to describe an early, expansive approach to public involvement useful today. Before winning government powers over private actions, early planners communicated directly with citizens in order to build the political support necessary to achieve their plans. Model enabling acts adopted widely by many states as the framework for planning and zoning defined the legal context for official participation practices.

Although taking place largely outside the public eye, academic and professional planners have intensely debate the definition of and rational for public participation in planning in professional literature. Part 3 will describe this theoretical history, and the current “best practices” of today. These theoretical debates and professional practice of offline public participation can provide perspective and values for a new, Internet-centered model.

Although Internet technologies are new, the practice of engaging citizens in urban development processes is not. Collectively, the posts contain a critical re-evaluation of planning participation history and theory in order to propose ways Internet tools can be used to realize more inclusive, democratic, and equitable planning processes. Thus Part 4 will conclude the series with a description of a new model of the use of Internet technology for public participation.

In between these posts I’ll post several sidebars, taking a look at related topics in more detail. So far I’m thinking about discussing the hierarchy of Internet literacy, the problem of extreme voices, and a software company that’s flooded the D.C. metro with ads seeking government clients interested in civic engagement. I’ll also tackle other issues as they come up in correspondence or comments.

As always, all these posts will be open for comments, so I look forward to a lively month.

Calendar
Introduction
Part 1: Urban Planning and E-Government
Part 2: A Brief History of Public Participation in Urban Planning
Part 3: Participation Theory
The Internet as a Participation Tool

Download my master’s degree final paper, the basis of this series:
R. Goodspeed - Citizen Participation and the Internet in Urban Planning (PDF)

View the Citizen Participation and the Internet Index

University of Maryland Graduation Remarks

Last week I graduated from the University of Maryland with a Masters in Community Planning. I was one of the graduating students invited to speak at the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation Commencement Ceremony. Here is the text of my speech. Thanks to my parents and Libby and her parents who were able to attend.

Urban planners often have the opportunity to reflect on our profession. This is because we are constantly asked to explain precisely what it is that we do. Upon hearing I studied urban planning, someone I met recently exclaimed, “oh good, maybe you can explain to me what it is.” She was the roommate of one of my program classmates. I sometimes only half seriously explain urban planning is the “they” so often invoked in casual conversation. You know, they should really do something about those vacant buildings. They should make housing more affordable. They need to improve public transportation.

In professional circles it sometimes seems we’re a profession under attack. Architects are superior at making persuasive drawings. Scientists speak with authority on natural systems. Engineers lay out our roads and transit systems. Politicians make decisions about baseball stadiums, convention centers, and other big projects.
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Review: A Better Way to Zone

I have mixed feelings about zoning, which may explain my thoughts about Donald Elliott’s new book about it, A Better Way to Zone. A land use law consultant in Colorado, Elliott’s book is dedicated to making “simplicity and understandability not just an aspiration but a guiding principle in zoning.” While I agree with much of the sentiment of the book, I’m not sure he’s struck upon the new way to zone he seeks.

Organized around the goal of making zoning “better, more efficient, and more understandable,” the book contains a brief history of zoning, a critique of the current system as used by most big cities, a discussion the legal framework and values of good governance, and finally a discussion of “ten principles” to improve zoning. Filled with lists of reasons, lessons, principles, and cross-references, this book is obviously the work of an order-oriented legal mind.

Elliott’s concise accounts of the origins and logic of most cities’ “Euclidean Hybrid Zoning” would serve as a good primer on the subject for students or citizens new to the field. Convinced that “almost no one outside of city government, zoning lawyers, and very committed citizen activists can explain how the system works” Elliott passionately argues “zoning ordinances should not be understandable only to lawyers or zoning staff; they should be understandable to average homeowners.” I think the mantra about simplicity is the most important part of the book, and completely agree with Elliott that “the more the public knows, the better they can participate at the policy- and rule-making level.” Let’s hope his call for simplicity and transparency is heeded.

The book’s “10 principles for more livable cities” will come as no surprise to informed readers: 1. more flexible uses (simplifying the number and type of uses regulated), 2. the mixed-use middle (simplify number of zones, create mixed-use zones at the heart of the code), 3. attainable housing (reduce regulatory barriers to affordable housing), 4. mature area standards, 5. living with nonconformities (legalize some nonconforming uses), 6. dynamic development standards, 7. negotiated large developments, 8. depoliticized final approvals, 9. Better use of the internet (he oddly uses the word “webbing” for this section, which I’ve never heard used this way), 10. scheduled maintenance.

While most of the topics discussed under these headings are sensible and needed reforms, all together they don’t add up to anything close to a “new” way to zone. In fact, Elliott is convinced our strange combination of conventional Euclidian zoning, planned unit development regulation, and form-based zoning, will continue. While some communities have implemented the form-based SmartCode, I agree with Elliott it doesn’t appear likely it will totally replace the existing tools in most communities.

This brings us to my mixed feelings about zoning in general.

On the one hand, zoning has caused lots of problems. Its separation of uses has encouraged driving and low-density development. Its parking requirements cover the land with impervious parking lots. It has been used as a tool of racial and economic exclusion in communities across the country. When used to require low density development, it consumes land and worsens global warming. Worst of all, it has often failed to achieve one of its original impetus: to separate polluting industries from residences.

On the other hand, just because a tool has been used poorly doesn’t mean the tool itself is flawed. It is the most important source of power for urban planners, and it can be used to sculpt the public realm, create affordable housing, and genuinely improve cities.

The problem with A Better Way to Zone is the book is mostly unaware of such nuance. In a discussion about an alternative to conventional zoning, the author observes that there may be parts of the city suitable for experimentation, but “in and around stable middle- and high-income neighborhoods, there will still be a demand for zones that produce more predictable development.” The reasons or implications for this go undiscussed. There exists an intellectual chasm between historians who observe zoning has been a highly effective tool of exclusion to the detriment of our cities and types like Elliott who are generally sanguine on its basic foundations. The book’s central strength — its focus on making zoning with simple, efficient, and understandable — is also its central flaw. After all, a simple, efficient, and understandable zoning code may not necessarily achieve a desirable, just, or sustainable outcome. For those we must turn elsewhere.

> A Better Way to Zone: official website, purchase from publisher
> Amazon.com: A Better Way to Zone: Ten Principles to Create More Livable Cities

An Architectural Aesthetic of Efficiency

“The principle of organic economy was too essential to the functioning of the society not to affect ethics and aesthetics profoundly.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin, from the novel The Dispossessed

Architectural sustainability, or the green building movement, is dominated by concern with buildings energy efficiency and use of sustainable materials. Left largely undiscussed is the question of the cultural values that shape our homes. American homes have increased in size, cost, and complexity, even while the building’s energy efficiency and materials have improved. Geoff Manaugh often points out the possibility that after technical fixes to fossil fuel energy have been perfected, we will still live in precisely the same way as before - with automobiles, large homes, and consumption. The most visible counter-trend, small homes movement, has had a limited cultural impact as its absurd minimalism contrasts so greatly against excessive cultural norms. It’s often pointed out we simply don’t have enough raw materials for billions of the world’s poor to live at the same standards as exist in the developed world. What’s lacking is a concerted effort to cultivate aesthetic and cultural models for more resource-efficient living.

Other professions involved in the planning and design of cities have dedicated considerable effort to realizing models for less resource intensive environments. New Urbanism proposes neighborhood-scale pattern for more efficient development. Together with Smart Growth, some think it is the nucleus to a new “sustainable urbanism.” The field of landscape architecture has sought to align aesthetics with ecology (PDF), and great strides have been made in seeking to design parks and landscapes that are both beautiful and beneficial to natural ecosystems. The architectural profession needs to engage in a similar effort.

Oddly the place best situated to cultivate a cultural ethic of creative and efficient homes are the nations where wealthy and deeply impoverished live side-by-side. Here the resources of professionals can be deployed within the limits of the forced austerity of poverty.

Vaughan Burns, a South African architect I met with last summer while studying abroad, has made it his life’s work to make humane low cost housing. In the country, government efforts to provide housing to the poor had pushed the architectural profession to the limits of economy. Every centimeter of cement or piping, every hinge, every ounce of paint makes a difference in cost when you’re building 2.3 million homes. Although Vaughan lamented how this tendency can result in inhumanely minimal structures (the model to the right is a new version, enlarged from the previously standard 380 square feet), he has taken it as a creative challenge to formulate a philosophy that maximizes the benefit for residents. Vaughn said he’d been commissioned by middle income and even wealthy clients to build homes much larger, but in the same style as low-cost government housing. The owners almost certainly could afford a conventional home, but found the simplicity, economy, and beauty of the “low cost mindset” more appealing.

In his view architecture had just four basic elements: floors, doors, roofs, and windows. These structural categories doubled for metaphors of four rules of design that have guided his designs.

The first, the “floor,” is client participation. Vaughan argues for participation both because it is important to creating good design and also because of its transformative impact on the clients.

The second, the “door,” represents multi-functionality of design. Buildings should maximize the use of every space, surface, and room. An architect specializing in alternative building techniques has observed “many standard homes built today feel hollow and empty until they are filled with possessions.” He observed his designs include window seats, window shelves, and creative flooring making the homes “quite pleasing even before you move in.” An efficient home could convince the occupant to choose a smaller space, and even “need” fewer belongings to live.

Third, the “roof,” is the principle of expandability and sub-divisibility to provide maximum future use of the structure. This may mean making halls wide enough to contain a narrow bed should it need to be converted to a bedroom, using easily recyclable materials, or allowing outdoor access to a bathroom to allow it to be shared among several small homes.

Fourth, the “window,” stands for the value of embracing symbolism. Fake traditional touches can be cheap but provide a sense of community or identity. Murals can transform a plain surface into something beautiful, powerful, and meaningful, all at the cost of the artist’s time and the paint involved. Rather than abolish symbolism as inauthentic or unnecessary ornament, Vaughn argues we must recognize the imaginary thing can be just as good as the real thing. After all, in his view through architecture we transform real things — raw materials and labor — into the unreal — comfort, shelter, and space for living. Perhaps someday, like in Le Guin’s fictional future, economy itself will profoundly affect our aesthetics as one of the desired unreal products of architecture.

Montgomery County Loves to Park

In a previous post on parking I reviewed some of the region’s bloated parking requirements. Today I was re-visiting the Montgomery County Zoning Code’s parking requirements and decided to post a more detailed list. Although these requirements can be adjusted somewhat for uses near Metro stations or in parking districts or for other reasons, this list is taken verbatim from the zoning code as the standard requirements. The next time you’re struck by excessive suburban parking, remember it is often our laws that put it there. The D.C. regulations can be found here, and they generally require a bit less.

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Web 2.0 for Urban Development

I’ve written before about potential applications of Web 2.0 to the field of urban development. On Planetizen, I described some of the ways the new tools could be used to inform and engage the public in urban planning issues. On this blog last August, I described how a well-designed interactive website could help the city keep track of vacant buildings in the city and also perhaps coordinate community response and ultimately redevelopment.

One of the most powerful potential applications of the technology to urban issues is to collect information about individual buildings. Much of the popular interest in planning issues comes not in the general categories used by planners (housing, open space, etc) but in reaction to specific existing or proposed buildings in the community. Projects generate controversy and evolve over time, and at Rethink College Park we’ve tried to adapt the blog format to do this by creating categories for projects and creating a project map on Google Maps, imperfect solutions at best. A private developer went so far as to posting information about an iconic building the company recently purchased on the Facebook.

While topical blogs can provide great forums for information, they’re not well suited to allowing groups of people to aggregate information or creating neutral community information resources. On a blog, the authors generally do the heavy lifting, and the public is relegated to the secondary role of commenters. Some have advocated creating hyperlocal wikis, however I find most wiki platforms to be still too technically intimidating and not structured enough for the purpose.

However, a new website launched by a German entrepreneur could bring the accessibility and ease of use of Web 2.0 technology to the urban environment. On Ourbania.com, the site’s users (they prefer “citizens”) create entries for urban items (generally buildings) with descriptions, tags, and links to Flickr photos. Thus far the site’s generally been used by European users to post profiles of their favorite buildings and stadiums and post comments about the design. However, I see some additional possible uses. The site could serve as a common resource for people discussing nuisance vacant buildings, monitor proposed new buildings, or even debate controversial public investments. Before this happens the site will have to overcome several problems: the taxonomy for several of the categories is too rigid, the site structure is biased towards entering newly constructed buildings, and the site will have to reach a critical tipping point of users in new cities to sustain long-term interest. The site founder suggested in recent interview they would create widgets to view and upload entries. If the site developed a set of widgets allowing users to display various information on private websites and blogs, it is possible it could become something of the lingua franca of the real estate blogosphere. However, before that happens in Washington it’ll need entries for more than a few buildings.