Okay, I’m not confident David Byrne would be all that excited about turning an ironic subtitle from the Talking Heads’ 1984 tune into a community engagement tactic. But stay with me here. Over the last few months, the urban planning universe has been all atwitter (literally) with concern over how “those people,” the Agenda 21ers and Tea Party folks, have been making life tough in public meetings and planning processes. In February, a “Facing the Critics” session at the New Partners for Smart Growth conference in San Diego attracted a standing-room-only crowd desperate for solutions to out-of-control meetings. Soon, the
American Planning Association will release a survey it commissioned to explore gaps between planning perceptions among citizens who self-identify themselves along the liberal-to-conservative continuum. And there will be
a panel at the upcoming Congress for the New Urbanism on new challenges for charrette processes. A lot of the talk is about “reframing the message,” which tends to focus too narrowly, I believe, on coming up with new words to say the same thing. Instead, maybe we should be talking about a reframing of perspectives, particularly from liberal handwringers who tend to be of the “why don’t these guys get it?” mindset. The Boston conference I attended was the annual Journalists Forum on Land and the Built Environment, co-sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Since it was full of journalists and recovering journalists (like me), the room probably tilted left of center and definitely left of right. But the Forum planners invited Samuel Staley, now in Florida State University’s planning department but best known for his work with the libertarian Reason Foundation. And Staley made the case for Tea Partiers and others “coming from a different planet ideologically,” compared to liberal planning advocates. You can see and hear Staley in the short video below and read his take on the Forum panel
here.
[Read More...]