Charrette or Charade?
In the previous post, Don talked about the planning charrette to discuss the future of Newberry Village and surrounding area. What purpose does the charrette hold in the formation of public policy?
The misty-eyed answer is that charrettes provide a means of community participation so that all concerns are addressed and all voices are heard.
In fact, there is a textbook about charrettes and I’m not far off the mark: In The Charrette Handbook, published by the American Planning Association, Bill Lennertz and Aarin Lutzenhiser say, “Charrettes engage citizens in envisioning new possibilities for their communities. They foster the collaboration, creativity, and consensus necessary to define a vision shared by citizens, officials, developers, and other stakeholders.”
Note the operative phrases: “engage citizens” … “collaboration” … and “shared by citizens.”
The answer in reality is significantly different. Very few regular Joes and Janes attend charrettes for the obvious reason that charrettes are usually scheduled at times when most people are working. They’re also all day events that are sometimes spread out over two or three days. Very few ordinary citizens can afford (in either time or money) to sit through the whole thing.
Plus, charrettes are process-oriented. They build to a conclusion, or “drive an outcome” as a planner once remarked to me. Thus, one needs to participate in the entire charrette to really have an impact. This becomes an excuse to reject public opinion when it emerges. If a handful of citizens can make only a part of the charrette, here’s what they will experience.
At the beginning of the charrette, they’ll hear community leaders or invited speakers from other cities wax philosophical (er, “envisioning”) about the ideal living arrangements in a particular area. If they show up midway into the process, they’ll get to write their concerns on the poster paper (e.g., traffic congestion) only to be told their specific issue was addressed earlier in the presentation. If they show up at the end to complain about the results, they’ll be told they missed the important collaborative exercises earlier in the process.
The average citizen rightly concludes, “Even if I can squeeze out a long lunch to come to this thing, my view is still inconsequential to the outcome.” It’s as if by design charrettes are used to exclude public opinion while laying claim to the exact opposite.
I’ve sat through a few charrettes, so I’m speaking from experience. I’ve heard the dismissive remarks of planners and other government officials to some very legitimate concerns raised by citizens. I’ve heard a public safety official (who was not on the agenda but came of his own initiative) express concern about how roundabouts would impede the movement of emergency service vehicles only to be told, “We’re confident you will be able to manuever fire trucks successfully and respond in a timely fashion.” (You’ll notice there was simply no room on the agenda of a three-day event to cover public safety concerns regarding the transportation and land-use plans of this area. Curious, no?)
I think readers of this blog would be interested in seeing exactly how many people attended the Newberry Village Charrette and, of those, how many are unaffiliated with government or special interest groups (developers, Sierra Club, etc.). In other words, how many ordinary Joes and Janes took two work days and a Saturday off to participate?
So to get back to my initial question: What purpose does the charrette hold in the formation of public policy? Charrettes are used to legitimize planning decisions under the guise of public participation. They claim to produce a “vision shared by citizens, officials, developers, and other stakeholders.” What could be more representative than that? They claim dynamic participation by all concerned people. What could be more democratic than that? Hey, wait a second … we’re a representative democracy, right?! What a brilliant mechanism for policy decision-making!!!
Elected officials like charrettes because they can claim the results a) represent the will of the people and, when the people finally show up at meetings to object to the implementation of the results they can b) dismiss the will of the people.
This I’ve witnessed, too, especially on the controversial issues like the design of SW 24th Avenue and the narrowing of Main Street. “All of these concerns were discussed in the charrette.” “If you cared enough about this issue, we had a open event where you could have brought this up.” ”It’s a little too late in the process to begin rewriting all of the hard work put into this.” I’ve even heard elected officials express personal discomfort with the transportation plans but vote for implementation anyway because “the people weighed in on this at the charrette.”
The bottom line, therefore, is that charrettes enable planning ideas that are unpopular with the general public to gain legitimacy and approval from elected officials. They allow unelected planners and special interest activists to drive policy decisions, and they allow politicians to both claim popular support for their voting decisions while dismissing popular opposition to their voting decisions.
In practice, charrettes do not ”engage citizens” or ”foster collaboration,” and their results are certainly not “shared by citizens.”
Since I started following the Sheriff’s race, I have been hearing all kinds of accusations against Sheriff Sadie Darnell. I heard those accusations directly from her opponent on my porch, wrote about it here, and made it plain that the Sheriff could weigh in on this. I went to two political forums where these accusations were made in public, and the Sheriff did not respond to the charges of corruption and mismanagement that were laid at her feet.
There have been a few stories in the Gainesville Sun lately about Alachua County’s Property Appraiser, Ed Crapo. (
