Citizen Participation in City Planning

Abstract

THE most noteworthy thing about city planning today is that at long last it is becoming popular, because it is only on a basis of popular understanding and participation that it can be a vital force in shaping the modern urban world. Historically the planning of cities was successively the province of chiefs and patriarchs, kings and colonizers, captains of industry and grandees of land speculation; of individuals whom destiny had placed temporarily in charge of the processes of city building, planning on behalf of the thousands whose destinies would be affected by their handiwork. The citizens who lived and worked in cities had little part in shaping the urban structure that they occupied. They were the recipients of planning, beneficiaries or victims as the case might be, but they were not participants. DEMAND FOR PARTICIPATIONThe twentieth century brought the beginnings of a popular city planning movement, a faint stirring of demand of citizens for participation in the processes that shaped their daily surroundings. At first it was expressed in organized crusades for programs of physical improvement called city plans; later, in the establishment of official planning boards loosely attached to the machinery of local government in an advisory capacity. But as the century nears its midpoint a third and more significant step is in the making-a recognition that the establishment of a good environment for urban life is not something to be left to chance or to the advisory ministrations of an understaffed lay board, but is the very essence of the job which city governments are chosen to perform.Cities exist because aggregations of people find it advantageous to live and work in close proximity to one another; but the extent to which that advantage can be realized depends in large measure on the physical form and arrangement of the cities-their plan of organization as living and working places.All the citizens have a vital stake in these plans. If they are good, work is facilitated and opportunities abound for pleasant living; if they are bad, work is made harder and more costly and living is beset with irritations and discomforts. There is nothing in which the citizens of a city have greater common cause than in the planning of the place in which their lives are spent, no subject which better expresses the fundamental purpose of democratic government.Looking back with the historical perspective of 1945, it is difficult to understand why this truth has been so long in dawning in democratic America, or, indeed, why it is still clouded with such genuine confusion in the public mind. The explanation no doubt lies in the swiftness with which the urban phenomenon came upon us. In the early days of the Republic, city life was relatively simple, and our colonial forebears had established fairly good patterns for the structures that accommodated it.As it grew in complexity and as the size of urban aggregations increased, we were too preoccupied with empire building to discover that city structure had to keep pace with the new...

A History of the Participatory Map

“…One of the earliest advocates of the urban survey, Patrick Geddes (1909), conceived of the survey and the hearing as ways to remedy class bias (Goist 1974). As early as 1945, the methods had traveled to America, where the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was designing hearings so that black communities could formally protest programs of forced removal (Augur 1945). By 1951 Geddes-style hearings on urban planning were being organized in miners' neighborhoods in Lancashire (Presthus 1951).…”