Contents |
Introduction
Public participation in the creation of a plan has become a vital part of the planning profession, and the practice of planning. Many communities short-change this part of creating a plan. That is a mistake.
Past Practice
Early in the development of the planning profession the “Rational Planning” theory was used to express the best way to develop a plan for a community. The theory was that the professional planner has a vast amount of knowledge that would be applied to solve a problem or would be used to best develop a community. So the community would go seek an “expert” and hire him or her as the consulting planner or as an employee.
The flaw with this theory is that no one person has the vast amount of knowledge to truly know everything there is to know about a community or its problems. This became apparent in the late 1950s (See Charles Lindblom’s The Science of Muddling Through) as a more accurate description of how planners might do their job.
Best Practice
In the 1960s and 1970s, during an era of “power to the people” various planning theories were developed – all of which included involvement of the public to a much larger extent. Since then the Communicative Planning Theory has been accepted as “best practice” and is currently the practice of choice among planning practitioners.
It involves an intensive citizen participation process, now seen as essential for a plan to be successful.
Planning is part of a democratic process that includes politics, a variety of stakeholder interests, and more than one government body that makes plan adoption and budget (implementation) decisions. Communicative Planning brings the data, or facts, forward from the Rational Planning practice to provide a place of knowledge for the start of the planning process. This is so everyone has a mutual understanding of the facts and data. The planning commission and professional planner’s function is to bring together a large number of people representing different stakeholders and view points and to facilitate, talk, and mediate toward a consensus represented in the adopted plan.
"Modern Planning Process: The Wexford County Example"
The Wexford County Example provides one case study of this planning approach. Key to its success was careful selection of every possible stakeholder organization in the community. All of them were invited to have a representative at the table to write the plan. Because people were empowered to actually be able to write the plan, many choose to participate and stayed with the project to the very end. The planning commission and department had enough self-confidence to allow their ego to be set aside – so they did not feel they had to write, or approve the plan. Implied was whatever the committee(s) of stakeholders agreed to, that would be part of the plan. When the plan was adopted, many felt direct “ownership” in the plan –it was truely “their” plan that they wrote. Many groups adopted various projects in the plan for implementation. Thus a local Lion’s club took on the building of a trail the plan called for, another civic group adopted another project, and so on.
When practicing Communicative Planning theory it is important to involve people early in the process, and empower them as much as possible. “A Ladder of Participation” by Sherry Arnstein (Journal of the American Planning Association, 1969) divides public participation into three levels:
- Nonparticipation: When the public is generally uninformed, or the “participation” is only the public hearing at the end of the process.
- Tokenism: Public might be informed, consulted, but does not participate in policy making – the public does not really participate in or actually write the plan.
- Citizen Power: The public participates actively in planning and policy making.
The goal in Communicative Planning is for participation to be done in the “Citizen Power” level. Your community planning process is not adequate if it only involves very large public meetings, public notice about meetings are only found in obscure places (like in the classified or legal notice sections of the local newspaper), or is only the hearing at the end of the planning process.
Many Ways to Involve the Public
There are many ways to involve citizens in the planning process. Below is a list of several, with links to more information on each:
- Public Hearing
- Public Meeting
- Visioning
- Focus Group
- Citizen Advisory Committee (See also Modern Planning Process:The Wexford County Example)
- Charrette
- Surveys
- Visual Preference Survey
- Negotiation and mediation
- Facilitation
- Delphi Technique
Finally, there are some communities which have a hard time having, or increasing public participation. Increasing Public Participation provides some further thoughts on how to do that.
- Kurt H. Schindler, AICP, Regional Land Use Educator
- Michigan State University Extension
