Entrenched City Halls Defined then Disrupted

In the last blog post, the idea of combining disruption and innovation was suggested as a strategy for implementing New Community Paradigms in communities in which politically controlled bureaucratic government institutions are entrenched.

This post will provide clarification as to what is meant by an entrenched city hall or a politically controlled bureaucratic government institution that is no longer serving the community by reviewing past arguments made over the course of this effort.

The potential push for disruption against an arguably entrenched city hall is based first on the philosophical premise that the democratic basis for the power of governance is based not on the authority of government institutions but on civil society.

The idea of ‘entrenched city hall’ started taking form back in 2011 with Why is this so hard? It's complicated and it's complex but that's OK which promoted the idea of a community creating its own community paradigms despite the complexity of doing so.

There has been an unstated assumption throughout the posts of this blog that ‘City Hall’ has failed to adequately address the need for an economically and environmentally sustainable and livable community. That is obviously not going to be true for all cities and the degree to which it is will be different from city to city. In some cases, the effort will find a willing partner and the collaboration will create a new more expansive form of community governance. In other cases, there will be pushback from the incumbent institutional government. The key issue is whether City Hall truly represents the community as a whole or only special interests or privileged key community members. If it is later, then there are pathways that can be taken to weaken and subsequently disrupt that control in a sustained and innovative manner.

For this to happen requires greater Community Governance - Third Path to City Government, a move away from current entrenched forms of closed city government to more open forms of community-based governance. It also requires recognizing, as did Governance by the Community or Not - Getting with or past City Hall that:

There is a difference though between governance and government. New community paradigms do not assume that people will take turns being the city planner or a city council member for a day. It does work under the premise that the relationships with community leaders and city employees (maybe better would be community-based employees) need to change and become different. How community needs are met and community standards enforced would also likely be different. How to make this work is another challenge for new community paradigms.

The idea is that the community itself makes more of the decisions directly through some system of direct deliberative democracy or a hybrid with the current system rather than indirectly through a mayor and city council system. Support for such an approach will be considered in greater detail in the future but for now, the focus for this post is on the factors involved when Community Governance Takes On City Hall in determining the balance of influence between political leaders, public sector and the community at large. 

The standard argument is the degree to which the process of running communities should be by politicians or by the public sector. This can, however, be a false choice as politicians and the public sector or bureaucrats often come together in a disjointed form of control in which city council members use their political power to force short-term decisions that make poor long-term sense for the community and city management works to protect the political self-interests of the city council members. Even when this is not overtly excessive, it can still significantly define the culture of city hall.

Each component ends up working to support the dysfunction of the other to maintain its own survival and the entire system becomes more closed. This does not always happen, perhaps not even as often or as significantly as my experience leads me to believe but when it does, it creates a culture of entrenched institutional government control and despite appearances to the contrary discourages community participation. 

The second problem with the standard approach to institutionalized community government is that it can discourage ongoing community participation in city government as A Ladder of Citizen Participation by Sherry R. Arnstein explains.

The usual claims that change can come about through elections every four years have little merit as there may be in reality minimal opportunities for true community participation between elections and elections are always under processes controlled by the status quo power culture. Not necessarily in mechanical terms of voter suppression or such but by the culture already instilled by the daily process of city hall control that results effectively in disenfranchisement. Worse, any successful election of a new slate of officials often times only changes the players, not the game. There may be superficial changes in policy when one political clique replaces another but it swings back a few years later and the deeper culture of the existing status quo power system stays in place.

Again, it should be stated that there is no claim that this situation applies to all cities or even in the fullest extent to a substantial number. It does happen though and one of the worst examples has been the City of Bell though on the positive side Bell can also be seen as An Example of Civic Renewal From Broken City.

The City of Bell was an example of what was the worst of local municipal governance with both politicians and top public sector management taking self-serving advantage of the community. Yet, how many California cities looked at the City of Bell with derision when the difference between Bell and those cities is not really one of kind but in truth only a matter of degree. Not that there is any claim that there are numerous city councils or administrations currently breaking the law. Rather, how many city halls adopted policies whether official or not that in the words of newly elected Bell City Council person Ana Maria Quintana, instituted a lack of inclusion by the public in decisions having an impact on the public, whether intentional or through negligence.

This argues that new alternative methods of community transformation need to be developed to change the balance of power in favor of a broad-based community vision and away from entrenched city hall bureaucratic politics when the supposedly democratic process has become corrupted not through blatant illegalities but through the small corruptions of a system turned to protecting itself at all costs and turning away from the real needs of the community.

It should be recognized though that arguing against the existing system is different from arguing for a system proposed to replace it. That will still continue to be needed to be done in future posts. There are though additional challenges beyond getting past an entrenched city hall.

This blog has advocated for ‘radical’ community engagement and through it the far greater inclusion of Non-Experts to Create New Community Innovations.

This has its own set of challenges:

This brings up the at first seemingly unattainable chasm created arguably as a symptom of the current system of local political and economic power. Most people are not involved enough in their communities to make the necessary changes. Many currently have zero involvement because they have been turned off by the current system of power which becomes all the more entrenched because people are not involved. This is a matter of learned helplessness which can be unlearned.

Others continue to try to make changes but are locked out by the current benefactors of politics occupying city hall which often has the appearance of a democratic system but the culture of entrenched power.

In future articles, it will be asserted that this is not as unattainable as may be seemingly apparent. While members of a community may have different degrees of involvement in their community, it is still possible to organize to generate the necessary community will for change.

Finally, many city halls constituted under the current form of local government structure are becoming increasingly unable to adequately address the ‘wicked problems’ facing our communities because it means adopting a complex approach to finding solutions as opposed to the more traditional, complicated, machine-based approach as was argued in Complexity as Cradle for Creativity and Innovation.

Public Sector organizations though, particularly at a local level, are often not able to do this as well. Instead, reacting to protect their status they end up imposing unseen additional layers of complicated or closed processes that are essentially subconscious from an organizational perspective that in time become culturally implicit. It is a means of maintaining power by becoming entrenched as a system both operationally and culturally. This is why so many local city halls or other public sector organizations prefer the more traditional organization as machine approach in which complexity is seen as chaos and why community engagement in some communities remains stuck at the bottom rungs of Arnstein’s Ladder.

Connecting Complexity with Community

So far the overall approach in the exploration of complexity by this blog has been from more of a business perspective. Complexity is seen as one of the major challenges for business in the twenty-first century by, among others, both the Harvard Business Review (HBR) and the Economist Intelligence Unit. Three posts coming from very different perspectives, and while none gave a full picture of complexity, together they form something that begins to look like an elephant.

The first of the three separate perspectives on complexity was from a global, systems approach. The second examined the industrial approach of the twentieth century, now seen as being inadequate to the challenge of addressing complexity. (One note before moving beyond management based on complicated, mechanistic processes as opposed to complex processes. A substantial part of the world is still based on algorithmic processes that can be managed through a command and control approach. The argument is not that this management approach is no longer relevant. It is that it should not be applied over the long term to complex challenges.) The third perspective began moving towards a twenty-first-century approach by demonstrating some of the weaknesses in the industrial models of the last century.

More still needs to be said though about the twenty-first-century approach set forth in part by the HBR articles Embracing Complexity An Interview with Michael J. Mauboussin by Tim Sullivan and Learning to Live with Complexity by Gökçe Sargut and Rita Gunther McGrath. These HBR articles from 2011 require us to understand that complexity is largely unpredictable and therefore unmanageable using a traditional management framework and methodologies based on reductionist approaches and "machine" analogies. The twenty-first-century approach requires managers to instead set clear limits and goals than to a large extent "let go" while still providing support systems to the people implementing solutions to assist them to 'self-organize' toward that well-defined end. It requires respecting that those closest to the problem understand the required actions. What is more important is recognizing that this isn't a straight line process. It is a process that requires establishing more trust as opposed to greater control.

We are reaching the point that almost every issue in business is by its nature complex with numerous 'actors' and an ever-changing internal and external environment resulting in the creation of an adaptive system. The same is true for communities as well. Complexity for both businesses and communities is in large part complexity created by adaptive systems as studied by the UCLA Adaptive Systems Laboratory or by Scott Page, Professor of Complexity, Political Science and Economics at University of Michigan and external Santa Fe Institute faculty, who has been cited previously in the posts Systems Thinking as a disciplined process for Community Governance and New Community Paradigms Thinking Requires Systems Thinking. There is still the need though to connect in a meaningful way to the community. Complexity, although it may not be perceived as an apparent direct threat, is still a significant problem for communities.

The biggest problems facing communities today are seen as complex and difficult enough to earn the label ‘wicked’. Complexity can have even greater negative effects without the community realizing that it exists by hiding the true sources of problems while at the same time obscuring avenues to possible solutions. It becomes worse if the institutions responsible for addressing complex problems are unable to correctly ascertain the nature of those problems and are inadequate to addressing them continuing with the same failed approaches and false assurances. Complexity is a problem for communities when local conditions appearing or made to appear simple or if complicated under control give a false sense of security while the larger environment is in truth complex creating unforeseen and detrimental effects. Complexity is a problem for communities if fear and misunderstanding, sometimes propagated by government institutions, whether implicitly or explicitly, keeps the community from realizing that the source of creativity and innovation within their community is connected to complexity. That while their active involvement can increase complexity overall, it will at the same time make complexity far more coherent (see Complexity Addressed From On High).

Organizations dealing with large populations have difficulty managing or even understanding complexity because they are not able to see the myriad of interrelationships within the environment or ecosystem that makes complexity a reality. The most complex aspect of the world facing both businesses and governments today is the necessity of dealing with multiple free agents or what are more commonly known as customers and constituents. Over time, more and more people are moving from being passive recipients of directed by market desires to having an impact on their world by being engaged creators of community. This may be actually more true of the economic realm than it is in the political realm where so many merely serve as paying cheerleaders for a particular political party or candidate or remain effectively disempowered or disenfranchised or merely disinterested because no actions result in meaningful change.

One can imagine an individual in a community with little involvement in the community’s civic matters, perhaps due to the difficulty of working through the politics or bureaucracy of city hall, sitting in a traffic jam with no idea of what is occurring ahead of him. He might fume about the price of gasoline and wish for more roads to be built to solve his traffic problems or about climate change but likely if one asked about the role of complexity the response would be a blank stare. In the mind of this community, member traffic is not complex, it is merely tedious forcing one to wait for apparently no reason. The price of gasoline is not complex, it just goes up. Climate change is not complex either, just big businesses polluting too much but what can you do? None of it is worth bothering about since nothing can be done, at least not by members of the community like him. It is not even particularly apparent how it is all interrelated, so where do you start? Dealing with City Hall and trying to get anything done through it and their experts. who we supposedly hire or elect to solve these problems, now that is complex.

Individuals alone, regardless of the level of authority, cannot address a high degree of complexity within a system, whether that system is one that arose naturally or one that was created, only another system can through a natural or an organizational interface. Individuals though are at the heart of such a system which often means working collaboratively through a network.

The point that needs to be stressed is that complexity should not and cannot be ignored or deferred. That it should not be seen as an ominous dark cloud sucking creativity and life out of everything. It should not even be seen as a problem but as an opportunity. Even though the perspective provided by the systematic, global approach may be in isolation impractical, it is still true as the post Complexity as Cradle for Creativity and Innovation argues.

Taking a position on the matter is important because it will become a foundational stone for what will be proposed in the future. New Community Paradigms needs to deal with complexity as it is a fundamental factor in transportation infrastructure, community ecology, and urbanization, as a significant influence in the increasing economic consolidation or concentration in metropolitan areas in parallel with expanding economic globalization and other significant areas of concern.

Having a handle on complexity will also be essential in determining how to bridge an ever increasing chasm between government institutions and individual citizens or constituents left floundering to choose between what has been termed objectless protest by the Economist Intelligence Unit or acquiescing to offerings of commodified government services while in reality having a diminishing or no real say in the forming of their own communities.

Complexity provides an institution or community with other options or pathways that when properly addressed adds to its ability to be competitive and sustainable, and therefore should be embraced.

Community paradigms as a set of community relations

The relationship between new community paradigms efforts and existing city hall governments, including their political and public agency elements has been raised in past articles concerning other matters but not directly addressed. This needs to be clarified further not only in relation to city hall but all components of a community as a new community paradigm would not be possible if just one component of a community were to undergo fundamental change, all do, both individually and collectively.

A community taking a new community paradigm approach as its path for future growth would not be dependent upon institutions, though it could and would use them. The glue that holds a new community paradigm approach to community building would be a concept of civil society. This concept of using civil society as a platform for new community paradigms was discussed last month on this blog. Taking some relevant definitions from that post, as put forth by the Australian Centre for Civil Society, first what it is not:

The term does not refer to 'politeness' or 'civility' in public life, as important as this is.

It refers to that part of society that is not part of the state, hence the term 'civilian' when used to distinguish a person in civil society from military personnel or state officials, or the notion of a civil offence in law which is an offence between persons in civil society rather than a criminal matter.

What is civil society in relation to new community paradigms?

The term 'civil society' refers to the relationships and associations that make up our life at grass-roots levels of society, in families, neighbourhoods and voluntary associations, independent of both government and the commercial world. Our aim is to strengthen civil society and empower people within it.

As was said in the post on Visiting Innovatitown and Parochialville, this blog is directed toward the individual citizen of a community who has decided to take on the challenge of creating fundamental changes in their community and is seeking resources to bring that about. It is being designed for someone who sees themselves as being a producer of democratic governance and the tangible public policies that come from that and not merely a consumer of those policies.

Civil society as a platform for new community paradigms provided some insights to possible relations with traditional institutional and bureaucratic forms of municipal government. This relationship could be anything from a full partnership, an uneasy alliance, to direct opposition. An effort to implement new community paradigms would, however, need to go further regardless of cooperation of the existing local institutional political power structure.

It would require its own organizational structure. It is not the intention of this blog or the related wiki to create the basis for such a structure. It will work to suggest templates but each community will have to find its own form of structure that works best for it. It would hopefully be based though on the ideas of Community Governance as put forth by the New Community Paradigms wiki.

There will be a change in defining a different role for the citizen or under the concept of civil society reverting to an older role of ‘voluntary participation‘ as opposed to 'volunteering' in one’s community.

Volunteer can be defined as 1. a person who voluntarily offers himself or herself for a service or undertaking or 2. a person who performs a service willingly and without pay, which may imply placing one's self at the disposal of some institution. This raises its own set of issues but the focus here is taking on a role of greater active participation in not only achieving the community’s goals but defining those goals in an ongoing basis as well.

It seeks to answer the question from the post on Using Online Communities to encourage Direct Democracy for On-The-Ground Communities, How do we reach untapped "domestic reserves of energy" - people who don't vote, don't volunteer, or don't talk with neighbors? With the answer, It starts with participation, respect, and working together toward a common goal.

It does not require authorization or sponsorship by city hall as was shown in the post on the Better Block project, a demonstration tool that shows How to Build a Better Block by temporarily re-visioning an area to show the potential to create a walkable, vibrant, neighborhood center.

It does require, as was said in the post Second look at Making Cities Work, creating an environment from which there is more social capital from which to draw. This will require a good deal of voluntary participation from members of the community.

Voluntary participation is a better term, as defined in the post Civil society as a platform for new community paradigms, than volunteering as it is not limited to formal volunteering in a community through institutions but includes all altruistic forms of social interaction.

Voluntary participation, at its best, is a face to face proposition which means creating social connections within a community, helping to increase the democratic participation being sought.

It would also work to change the relationship with the professional workforce core of municipal governance, the planners, engineers, economic development professionals among others, who implement the supposed goals and objectives of the community.

This relationship has soured over the years because of perceived inequities between public and private compensation. There has also been the rise of a barrier of expertise between city hall and the community. This was touched upon in the last blog post Strong Towns and job creation - navigating between Scylla and Charybdis.

I hold to the belief that there is truth to the Strong Towns view that there has been too great of a dependency on government professionals. This is most often true when such a dependency is enmeshed in a bureaucratic or politically skewed system. A sizable portion of the responsibility of the problems facing communities needs to be laid at the feet of economic development and planning professionals. Individually, though, most people in government are endeavoring to make the community better.

The professionals in the field may complain that the layoffs, budget cuts and recent thrashings found in the media on too generous retirement benefits are unfair (and they are) but it is becoming an increasingly moot point because the fundamental nature of the economy and the interaction between government and citizens is changing.

Communities are either going to a commodified basis of government services in which employees work in a Mac’government role or communities will be pursuing some form of new community paradigms and government professionals will have an opportunity to participate in an emerging creative economy. Many of the old institutions will not be able to adapt to these changes. This will be explored further in future posts, in particular, the relationship between amateur community members and institutional professionals.

Finally, it means a change in working with and building strong relationships with other change-agent organizations and community groups. This is part of the reasoning behind the New Community Paradigms Facebook Connections wiki page. This aspect also needs to be developed further.