Zoning Out Guns

Just because the D.C. handgun ban has been overturned doesn’t mean you will ever be able to buy one in Washington. The reason? Zoning. This from the Wall Street Journal:

Washington has no federally licensed gun stores, so nowhere in the city can residents buy a handgun legally. Under federal law, buying one in neighboring Maryland or Virginia isn’t an option either. If gun dealers sell a firearm to a nonresident, they have to ship it to a licensed dealer in the purchaser’s home state, which then conducts the relevant background checks. “Without a dealer, there’s no place to ship the gun to,” said Mike Campbell, a spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

It is unlikely that Washington will get any new dealers, either. Federal licensing requirements mandate that would-be dealers meet local guidelines and zoning ordinances. Representatives of each of the district’s eight council wards said they would vigorously oppose a gun shop in their area. They also said discussions had already begun over which regulations they might use to keep one from opening.

This approach has been used successfully elsewhere - as of 2005 Minneapolis only had one store, and Washington has already largely eradicated nude strip clubs through onerous zoning requirements:

While the license allows an owner to open a club with nude dancing anywhere in the city that has commercial zoning, a club must sit at least 600 feet away from any schools, community centers and housing. Community members can protest the opening of such a club, and it must get approval from the District’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board.

The only problem? As of now, D.C. Zoning Code says nothing about gun shops. Another issue to throw into the mix over in the D.C. zoning update …

The Internet as a Participation Tool

This post is Part 4 of my public participation in urban planning series, adapted from my urban planning final paper, Citizen Participation and the Internet in Urban Planning

While the Internet makes possible new types of interactions between citizens and government, the purpose and structure of these interactions are not new. The section creates a road map for the use of the Internet as a civic participation tool by describing the technical implications of participation history and theory.

Despite scholarly interest of the web’s potential to improve e-democracy, most have viewed it as simply digitizing existing processes. Instead of corresponding with government officials through mail, citizens can use email. Instead of requesting pamphlets or reports they can download digital copies online. A 2004 study of the websites of 582 U.S. cities with a population of 50,000 or more in the 2000 Census found 35% provided an email address for citizens to contact the office, 74% offered the zoning ordinance and 55% had plans, and 37% had minutes of planning meetings.(1)

Most planning agencies have placed large amounts of information online, viewing it as something analogous to newspaper notices or the creation of an official record for public review in person. This means planning board agendas, meeting minutes, and a wide range of planning documents are posted online, often in PDF format. Furthermore, many have adopted web GIS systems allowing visitors to view GIS data and create their own maps.

The discussion above demonstrates a gap between the current theory regarding public participation and the state of government planning websites. While we have a historical basis for widespread outreach and education about planning processes, information is scarce and often missing. This section seeks to apply the historical and theoretical lessons to suggest a path for use of the Internet for participation. As a framework, it adopts the five choice areas advocated by Brody, Godschalk, and Burby for participation in general.
Read the rest of this entry »

From Online Politics to E-Government

Via techPresident I found this post on Open Left by Matt Stoller, who, inspired by a conversation with the UK-based nonprofit mySociety, concludes:

I’m going to guess that a good amount of 21st century campaigning will look like the 19th century, with a politicized business community, much stronger local political machines, and engagement levels at 80% or 90%. Local debating societies, nonprofits that do service work and voter turnout, and a blurred line between government and politics are probably in the cards. As social media and public spaces increase in importance in our culture, they will dominate our politics. Right now, internet campaigns take people who like public spaces, harvest their time and money, and use it to target those who want consumer politics. What happens when politics takes place entirely in social public spaces?

mySociety has developed tools that help British citizens become engaged in their community, communicate with elected officials, and even connect with neighbors to improve their street. It reminds me in some ways to Adrian Holovaty’s ChicagoCrime and EveryBlock projects, and the work of the NYC-based Open Planning Project. In a comment on Matt’s post I observed what he’s really talking about is e-democracy, and I believe there’s an important role here for governments to play, whether it’s providing data or hosting the conversation themselves.

Catholic U. Launches Urban Planning Degree Program

This fall Catholic University will begin to offer a Master in City and Regional Planning through their School of Architecture and Planning. The 48-credit hour program requires a planning studio and a master’s thesis. It features an optional design focus through a 12-credit summer session. The program is not eligible for accreditation through the American Collegiate Schools of Planning until it graduates 25 students.

The Catholic U. program brings the total of urban planning graduate programs in the Washington metropolitan region to three, the others being at the University of Maryland - College Park (where I just graduated), and at Virginia Tech’s Alexandria Center.

See also: So You’re Interested in Becoming a Planner

Obama Reaches 1 Million Facebook Supporters

Around 10 p.m. last night, Barack Obama’s official Facebook page reached 1 million supporters. The news has generated buzz, and rightfully so. It dwarfs John McCain’s 147,000+ supporters, demonstrating his breadth of support. (techPresident has charts of various online popularity metrics) Politico’s Ben Adler reported the two campaign’s internal social networking tools have similar numbers - with my.barackobama.com over 900,000 and McCain Space reporting only “tens of thousands.”

I found it interesting it took so long to reach the 1 million milestone. After all, it took just 9 days for Stephen Colbert’s group to reach 1 million members in October 2007. Barack Obama’s independent “One Million Strong” group is only up to 566,000 after several months of trying. I don’t think it’s because of political apathy, especially since political groups opposing Bush and Clinton already hit the mark. What I think it suggests is that people take supporting a candidate seriously, even if that action is the single click it requires to join a virtual “group.” With five months remaining until the election, I wonder how high the numbers will go.

There’s no easy way to find a list of the biggest lists on Facebook, although a few lists exist. Here’s a sampling that have tasted the rarefied air of 1+ million supporters:

• Six Degrees Of Separation - The Experiment (4,911,727)
• Let’s set and break a Guiness Record!!!! Approved by guinnessworldrecords.com (2,822,768)
• If you remember this you grew up in the 90’s (1,538,571)
• When I was your age, Pluto was a planet. (1,306,606)
• 1,000,000 Strong For Stephen T Colbert (1,248,629)
• The Largest Facebook Group Ever (1,191,504)
• I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike George Bush! (1,001,973)
• Stop Hillary Clinton: (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary) (992,294 - was over 1M)

Software for E-Government

A topic I have begun to explore is the best e-government software to support public participation in urban planning. I’ve previously written about LimeHouse’s tool, which amounts to a web-based document management system that supports the equivalent of blog comments on document sections.

Adobe has been advertising their LiveCycle suite of tools heavily on the D.C. Metro and buses. It features interactive, online forms that interface with existing government databases and processes. Not a bad thing, but this is the type of one-to-one e-government I described in my blog post about urban planning and e-government. Online forms are necessary, but have limited applicability for planning exercises.

Today I noticed a recent announcement from Microsoft regarding their

“Citizen Service Platform (CSP), which will make it easier for governments to interact with citizens, streamline processes and, as a result, save time and taxpayer dollars. Together with its partners, Microsoft’s CSP offerings will help governments of all sizes more responsively deliver services to citizens via the Internet.”

While the list of features is promising, I’d like to see exactly how smoothly the entire package comes together. They claim to have some GIS support, something potentially useful to planners.

Finally, in my new copy of The Next American City (you should be subscribing if you’re not) I saw an ad for a “Survey of Open Source Software Use by Municipal Government,” that seeks to “discover if small to medium cities (population less than 500,000) can conduct business and provide services using only open source software as an alternative to commercial software. The results of this research may provide insight that can help cities reduce the annual cost of information technology and software through the use of open source software.”

Do you have experience with any of these or other e-government software packages? What are the best software tools available to local planners?

Public Participation Theory

This post is Part 3 of my public participation in urban planning series, adapted from my urban planning final paper, Citizen Participation and the Internet in Urban Planning.

The urban planning profession has developed increasingly sophisticated techniques and theories regarding how and why to involve citizens in planning processes, especially since the 1960s. Critics pilloried the effectiveness of citizen participation during the War on Poverty, suggesting a new theoretical approach to participation itself was needed. Despite theoretical disagreement about the proper definition of and practice of participation, professional literature reflects a consensus a variety of additional techniques can enhance the process and result in more effective and democratic plans. These debates suggest ways planners can craft strategies that take into account social divisions and inequality, and effectively incorporate Internet technology into existing processes.

The experience of limited participation during urban renewal and the debate surrounding “maximum feasible participation” in the 1950s and 1960s sparked an intense professional interest in the topic of public participation in planning. The political and social turmoil in American cities and the contested nature of urban politics raised serious questions about how participation should be structured, and how power should be distributed more broadly in the city.

A ‘Ladder’ of Participation
In this climate, Sherry R. Arnstein, a former U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official, published one of the most influential articles on the topic of public participation. Titled “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” her article described an eight-rung metaphorical ladder of participation.(1) The rungs are organized into three levels: nonparticipation (manipulation and therapy), tokenism (informing, consultation, placation), and citizen power (partnership, delegated power, citizen control). Interlaced with her description are anecdotal stories describing both flawed participation and successful examples where power was delegated to community representatives.
Read the rest of this entry »