Community Planning, Today and Tomorrow

© 2011 Phil Heywood

Values based planning: Driven by community objectives

• People’s values determine what they want. Human aims are about more than acquiring money or possessions- they are about fulfilling values.

• In specific situations and places, such values generate more targeted objectives which can be identified , discussed and integrated into sets of community preferences and priorities

• These objectives can be explored and expanded to form the basis for community planning

© 2011 Phil Heywood;

Mixed scanning and the management of complexity

For community planning to be effective, focus must also be directed to understand the potentialities and impacts of the wider scales of regional, national and global contexts.

Specific policies in community plans must take account of the objectives and proposals being developed for other activities in that community.

Local Action:Creativity in the context of universal patterns:

Emily’s Earth’s Creation

Mixed scanning means, for instance, that to build a really successful garden shed, you must first contemplate the human condition and consider the physical state of the world and the relations between its many elements and centres , as Emily has done below!

Emily:Many centres; many activities;

many places; all connected

The expanding roles and impacts of communications

• The importance of mixed scanning has been increased by recent revolutions in information and communications technology creating a ‘global village ‘ of instantaneous and universal exchange of information about facts, values and opportunities.

• Impacts are now inescapable: communities who plan carefully will increase their levels of success and autonomy. Those who do not may be swamped by externally generated changes.

Collaborative Planning for Democratic Communities

In developing consensual plans, innovations in communications technology can help to collect and review a wide range of community objectives and maintain inclusive dialogues about trends, options, choices and proposals.

In democratic societies planning can become the practical expression of political choice, with regular public debate over aims, options, evaluations and choices.

A Seattle artists view of a non-consensual approach to community planning:

Plural planning, negotiation and conflict resolution

• Planning methods are needed which can manage multiplicity and complexity.

• Synthesising techniques based on progressive problem solving are designed to process multiple interests and objectives

• Community consensus can become a good habit, as with development of Netherland’s ‘Polder model’, and tradition of collaboration among Britain’s ‘policy communities’, to maintain green belt polices, irrespective of political parties

Representation, participation & consensus in governance & planning

• Representative government provides visibility, accountability, explicit programs and intentions, but lacks responsiveness and creativity.

• Participatory governance offers inclusion, insight, energy and initiative , but lacks mandate and good capacities for coordination: the two approaches require each other’s support.

Relations between government& planning

• Role allocation is also needed between politics and planning: • control is the rightful preserve of political decision; • planning is required to explore and develop possibilities and

options; • to work well, they require each other’s contributions.

• Truly inclusive collaborative planning can combine immediacy and responsiveness with mandate and legitimacy – as in Amsterdam’s Bijlmermeer redevelopment.

Adaptations and inventions to manage and harness change

• People need to express and have acknowledged their concerns about ‘the shock of the new’

• Voicing and negotiating over problems can generate small solutions and inventions such as ‘pocket parks’ , ‘community gardens’ and ‘industrial incubators’

• These can lead onto significant adaptations of social systems and spaces such as and universal cell phone networks.

• Social problem solving inventions & community initiatives such as micro credit systems and macro economic credit cards can enhance community life.

• The upward spiral of challenge and response which has driven science and technology to their remarkable recent achievements can also be applied to ensure that communities benefit, rather than traumatise themselves, from change.

The Power of Reciprocity

• Inclusive approaches can promote empathy within and between community groups and individuals which can build resilience, symbiosis and a culture of understanding and tolerance

• Communication and coordination among practitioners of different activities can ensure:

• rationally sequenced development, • shared use of infrastructure and urbanization and l• ocalization economies of scale.

Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government (1348) – Illustrating the ideal of collaborative community life

(Palazzo Publico, Siena)

Reciprocity between different specialists is as old as the city and its communities. It can assist coordination, create synergy and foster the development of places where people are happy to be and to meet as in Lorenzetti’s mural painting of 14th century Siena below: