Communities, Planning & Activitism

The Atlantic Cities has an article by Anthony Flint, "How the Tea Party is Upending Urban Planning".  It looks at the activism of the Tea Party in local communities.  It begins, fittingly enough, with a recounting of how legendary urban activist Jane Jacobs spoke at a planning meeting insisting that the community have a real voice in the process, rather than the usual rubber-stamping that typically happened back then.

Flash forward to today's Tea Party.  Given the libertarian tendencies of the Tea Party, it's not surprising that those activists are opposing planning efforts.  Environment safety?  Nah.  Growth management?  Forget about it.  Rail?  Not a chance in hell.   Climate Change?  No such thing.  Smart Growth?  Why, that's Communism!

Of course, give the bias in the article, written by a planner, it's natural that the author would cast a critical eye on people that are opposed to the very work he does.

But, still...it's hard to take seriously people who ramble about "Agenda 21" and call people UN Agents.  See this (particularly comments) for a taste of their perspective on this. 

The way I've seen planning work in many hearings often involves making changes to proposed developments or projects to satisfy community concerns.  Sometimes this unnecessarily drives up the cost ("those homes must be brick or stone all the way around") and sometimes objections may be based in prejudice and misinformation (New Berlin). The author wrote at the end:

Yet, as in national politics, the Tea Party view doesn’t leave room for compromise. Even the most open-minded and free-speech supporting planner can’t operate when the framework for the dialogue itself has been invalidated. Where does one go from there?

So what's the answer? Ignore them?  That presents a peril of its own as planning commissions often have elected officials on them in addition to citizen members.

In the words of Jane Jacobs in 1952:

The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe …

 I left out the other half of the ending paragraph from the author, Anthony Flint, a while ago.  The other half was:

The skirmishes at town halls around the country over the past year or so means that planners will have to try even harder to make their case. But in the mean time, the chairman of that sleepy planning board hearing might be eying the exits, looking for a black helicopter, to make a run for it.