PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT | Who Killed the City?
Why public engagement promotes the status quo and prevents infill.
ritten By Vaneesha Patel
This article is Part Two of a series on the forces, processes, and regulations that harm good citybuilding.
Public engagement, in both the way it is structured and the way it is carried out, is one of the largest culprits preventing favorable development within cities and towns. That’s because in asking people to voice their opinion regarding controversial issues, planned projects, or any other change, public engagement inadvertently reaffirms the status quo. This integral part of the American planning process is a key reason our built reality reflects so little of what the people actually want. It deserves more scrutiny.
For one thing, public engagement has long been plagued with accessibility issues. Most public engagement sessions are held on weekdays within working hours, times when many adults in the workforce are not able to attend. Even when sessions are held outside these hours, individuals are still faced with a trade-off: Attend the session, or do one of the many other things that is integral to their life.
When you consider the tangible payoff from participating in public engagement, it should come as no surprise that many people choose to not take part. With public engagement often consisting of multiple rounds spanning several months or even years, usually resulting in a diluted course of action aimed at appealing to a variety of opinions, sacrificing your time in order to contribute is ostensibly a worthless endeavor. As noted on Strong Towns, one of the biggest problems with public engagement comes down to expectations: “People lead busy lives, and they’ve been trained to expect to have little input.”
Furthermore, only a few cities include public engagement sessions that are translated into multiple languages, resulting in a language barrier that potentially keeps people from participating. This lack of accessibility immediately cuts out a disproportionately low-income minority population—a group that is also disproportionately impacted by the lack of pedestrian-friendly infrastructure. Those individuals who do show up are almost always the ones with the privilege of time and money, things that enable them to forgo work and other activities to voice their opinion. Cities in the South should do more to make equity a priority.
A decision to not do anything is a decision in itself—one that gives more weight to the preexisting conditions of development.
Aside from problems of accessibility, the structure of public engagement typically only presents opportunities to block or change projects. There are fewer opportunities for community members to bring forth projects of their own, resulting in inadvertent acceptance of development that is not the subject of public engagement. What’s more, the public process often adds expense and weight to a project, but it hardly ever reduces those factors. Although public engagement might lead to the addition of elements that the community sees as good things (e.g., more affordable housing, more stormwater infrastructure, or more trees), those things have costs and could make the entire project less viable if they get out of hand. It’s hard to think of any instances where a project gained density or reduced expenses through the public process.
So while there is an emphasis in the public engagement process on working with people and hearing them out, there is little to no room for asking about the status quo. And there’s the real rub, because a decision to not do anything is a decision in itself—one that gives more weight to the preexisting conditions of development. This leaves little room for incrementalism or progress in the future.
It’s true that public engagement still offers one of the best ways for community members to voice their opinion and advocate for change, but we must remain cognizant of its shortfalls. If the projects that get implemented at the end of public engagement sessions are colored by issues of accessibility and the outsized influence of advantaged groups, do they even represent the ideas and desires of the general public—the supposed intention that public engagement begins with? I think not.
Vaneesha Patel is the Spring 2023 Mencken Publishing Fellow on Urban Development.