By Daniel Herriges | September 9, 2020 |
What does it mean that Americans obsess over national politics—which in 2020 were as toxic, vapid, and disconnected from the real needs of real people as I’ve seen in my lifetime—while very few engage meaningfully with local politics, where they would have far more ability to improve their own lives by getting involved?
Part of it, no doubt, is the relentless churn of social media and the always-on news cycle. But I think a less appreciated part of it is that people are alienated from local politics because local decision-making processes might as well have been designed to be as alienating and inscrutable as possible. People can’t find the entry point, even if they would liketo have a voice. And to the extent that citizens do have an effective voice, it’s usually a small handful of loud activists with a lot of time on their hands, an encyclopedic knowledge of the finer points of the zoning code, and a black belt in Robert’s Rules of Order.
At the same time, there’s a populist response to that—“Communities should hold more power, and arrogant, elitist so-called experts should have less!“—that has always rubbed me wrong. Some of that is likely defensiveness, since I have a degree in urban planning that I’d like to think is worth something. Some of it is that I know that if we put aspects of my own city’s transportation, housing, and development policy to a vote, the likely results would worsen our most pressing problems. The opinions of individuals on how to handle things like traffic congestion are often heavily informed by anecdotal experience and misguided conventional wisdom. Simply getting better at asking the public what they want is no answer.
My writings on the subject are my attempt to square that cognitive dissonance. The lightbulb moment for me was reading Ruben Anderson’s 2018 essay, “Most Public Engagement is Worse Than Worthless.” In it, Ruben makes a simple but brilliant observation: What we do wrong, 9 times out of 10, is we ask laypeople to advise technical experts on the matters in which the experts are expert, instead of on the matters in which the public is actually expert. And then we, predictably, disregard the input, leaving everyone frustrated and alienated by the whole thing.
If your city constantly insists that it wants your input, and yet you feel disrespected and disempowered by what you actually see happening around you, the below piece is for you. It’s an exploration of what we, the “experts,” get wrong when we simply ask the public what they want us to do. And what we should be doing instead if we truly want to engage—meaning not to invite the communities we serve to take a seat at our table on our terms, but to go humbly have a seat at theirs. — Daniel Herriges, Senior Editor