Engineering education for elementary and high school students focuses almost entirely on the mathematics and physics understanding needed for engineering work. Children build bridges out of drinking straws or catapults out of popsicle sticks, but a crucial element of actual engineering is missed. Real engineers not only have to work within teams of experts, they must also work closely with stakeholders to develop design solutions that are both ethical and useful. The histories of architecture and urban planning are littered with examples of technocrats bypassing the opinions of members of the public with disastrous consequences.
A classic example of not seeking input from the stakeholders of one’s urban design would have to be the entire career of Robert Moses. Moses’s massive public works projects gutted neighborhoods with highways that would have disastrous effects lasting decades. Moses has even been accused of deliberately building bridge overpasses along Long Island’s Southern State Parkway too low to allow bus traffic in order to prevent poor African Americans and Latinos from accessing Jones Beach. We do know that he did build the bridges too low in order to obstruct truck traffic as part of his ideology that driving on parkways ought to be leisure experiences for car owners without the negative effect of commercial traffic. Whether blocking bus access was an intended effect or an unintended side effect, the results were the same. City dwellers relying on public transportation had much fewer options for getting to Jones Beach.
There are also numerous horror stories in the run up to the Beijing and Rio Olympics of poor citizens being forcibly evicted and left homeless as their neighborhoods were torn down to make way for Olympic venues and athlete housing. The wealthy and powerful clearing out the poor for their grand projects is hardly anything new. In the aftermath of the fire that destroyed much of Rome in 64 CE, the Emperor Nero set about constructing a palace for himself on the ashes of the burnt out districts so grand and glorious that rumors began to spread that Nero himself had set the fire to clear land for his new home. Whether he was actually involved in the start of the fire or not, it was apparent that he had little interest in rebuilding what had been destroyed preferring instead to spend vast sums of the Empire’s treasure on his own comfort and glory.
An early developer of participation techniques was Brazilian theater practitioner Augusto Boal. During his involvement with workers’ rights movements in Brazil in the 1960s, Boal came to realize that the country’s peasant workers were not being given an opportunity tell their own stories. He developed a technique called Theater of the Oppressed that offered opportunities for engagement between marginalized people and those in power.
Boal eventually went on to be elected as a member of the legislative assembly for the city of Rio de janeiro for the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores). Boal used this position as an opportunity implement Legislative Theater as a way to involve the public in participatory planning. His efforts came during a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s where Latin America was experimenting with participatory budgeting such as in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre and decentralizing city government to smaller neighborhood units. Porto Alegre would go on to become the “world capital in participatory design” and lead to over 1,500 cities worldwide borrowing its participatory design method (Lerner, p. 88).
In his book Making Democracy Fun, Josh Lerner lays out the differences between the public participation around New York’s Atlantic Yards project and the participation around Rosario in Argentina. In New York, public forums were designed to create an adversarial environment between people for and against the project. Attendees were forced to classify themselves as either in favor or opposed to it without any caveats. This left the city bitterly divided and ultimately meant that valuable citizen input in the final design was lost. Sessions in Rosario, by comparison, were designed for bridging gaps in opinion and building a climate of collaboration between all of the parties.
One activity involved teams working together to complete puzzles, but unbeknownst to the participants, some of the pieces of each puzzle had been put in the boxes of other teams’ puzzles. The only way to complete the task was to eventually realize that they had to ask other nearby teams for help. Activities such as these can prime participants for thinking in collaborative rather than adversarial terms.
Good participatory planning though helps combat a problem that can appear when we have what seems like an excess of democratic involvement: NIMBYism. When it comes time for a new sewage treatment plant, airport, power plant, the response is the same: “not in my backyard”. This is where the experts become a valuable part of the participatory planning process. Experts should listen carefully to the concerns of local stakeholders in planning their designs, and experts also have a responsibility to convey the importance of those designs to the stakeholders.
Instead of relying on technocrats to design cities or policies that don’t work for the people being impacted by them, governments should seek involvement from citizens that both educates the public and provides input for the experts to take into consideration. These public conversations should make use of game mechanisms to build collaborative rather than combative experiences. It is imperative for the future of our species that we learn to build inclusive, supportive spaces that foster cooperation to build a world we can all live in.
Reference
Lerner, Josh. (2014) Making democracy fun : how game design can empower citizens and transform politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.