Planners often get too complacent with process. That is to say, there's a known and accepted way to interface with the public, get public input, and use it for future plans that the city is trying to put together. The only problem with that is it often gets stale.
I've been to too many public planning meetings set up in the rec room of a church or an auxiliary room in city hall with a slideshow or powerpoint presentation up at the front of the room. Usually question/answer or public input on a big sheet of paper happens next, and usually it's just the same old people who go to every meeting. They then commence stubbornly banging heads with equally stubborn planners and city staff. Sometimes the stuff they bang heads over has nothing to do with the project at hand.
They're just so used to the same old meeting format, they've got their axe to grind, and they can do it because no one else bothers to show up. On the other end of this equation are the planners who end up barely paying attention to what these people are saying because they can probably recite these people's talking points from memory anyhow. Clearly, something's not working; but we keep using this process anyways because we don't know what else to do.Well, today I saw something new. It was amazing. I was invited by my friend James Rojas to a planning exercise that he was doing at a high school in the Pico-Union/Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. James is a planner for Metro, but he's also an artist and owns a gallery space downtown.
The project we were working on with these high schoolers was what they thought their neighborhood should look like in the future. But instead of asking for ideas and writing them up on a big board, or taking a map and having them put little pre-made buildings where they thought new buildings should go, James took a new and creative approach: let them build it themselves. James has collected lots of little trinkets - wooden beads, buttons, mahjong tiles, Stratego pieces, strangely cut wooden blocks, things like that - and he dumped them all out on a big table. He then gave each of the kids a 1 foot by 1 foot cardboard square and had them go pick stuff out from the pile of trinkets and build the city themselves.
And these kids came up with some amazing stuff. They were challenged to use their creativity. Nothing was provided for them. They got to start from scratch and build their world up around them. This is an imagined business center with a overhead rail line, kinda like Chigaco's L train.
This guy imagined a great public space for people to meet and relax in. Restaurants and activities would be in the middle and it would be surrounded by dense housing and business. He really stressed that buildings should have interesting shapes because he was "tired of everything looking like a rectangle".
This guy had a ton of stuff going on in his really dense city, but I loved that he chose this crazy polygon shape on the left to be his museum.
This girl simply wanted more parks in her neighborhood. I wouldn't mind going here.
After everybody got to explain their project, we had each table combine their communities to make one big city. We got some cool results.
But what really struck me again and again about all these cities was the desire for more open space. Whether it was parks, areas for skateboarding, civic plazas, or just breaks between buildings, almost everybody talked about wanting more open space in their neighborhood. And that's important, because the Pico Union/Westlake neighborhood is not only one of the densest neighborhoods in LA, it is also one of the most park-starved neighborhoods in LA. Seeing this in the projects and the words of these kids was far more powerful than the jargon-filled talking points thrown about by city planners and neighborhood activists. Even better, these kids demonstrated what kind of parks and open space they want. Remember, a park can quickly become blight if no one uses it. There are efforts to remedy this problem, but we've still got a long way to go.But these are young people that you would never see at a strategic planning meeting. Planners need to focus more on ways to engage people that wouldn't otherwise bother. These high schoolers are going to inherit this neighborhood over the next 20 years, and they need to be a part of how its future is planned. The more people you involve, the better the overall vision you will receive, and the more you will minimize the disproportionate effect those who do go to these meetings currently have. Conversely, the more people you involve, the harder it will be for city staff to simply write off the feedback they receive when doing planning.
But really, the best part of all came at the end. When everyone was finished and feeling good about themselves and ready to forget about the whole thing once they stepped out the door, the teacher stood up in front of class and said "Okay, now how are we going to make this happen? I want a group of you to work on a project about the vision we've created today". Bravo, teacher.
Bravo.
