Creating New Community Paradigms by Building Better Blocks TEDxOU - Jason Roberts -

Opposite to the business as usual ‘top down’ concept of urban design is the community based BETTER BLOCK process, founded in Dallas’ Oak Cliff by Jason Roberts and Andrew Howard.

The Better Block project is a demonstration tool that temporarily re-visions an area to show the potential to create a walkable, vibrant, neighborhood center and shows How to Build a Better Block.  It has the feel of flashmob architecture and an occupy your community approach to community development.

The idea and the charrettes to realize it have quickly spread to cities like Memphis, St. Louis, New York, and Boston. National media coverage includes NPR, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

The BETTER BLOCK approach is action oriented as opposed to a process of deliberative consideration and advisement under the auspices of a recognized body of authority like a City Council.

While the BETTER BLOCK approach did not do anything particularly criminal, it obviously did in some cases thumb its nose at city regulations and policies.  It does, however, follow some important principles that it discovered in creating the process of building a BETTER BLOCK that are aligned with the process of creating new community paradigms and with a Strong Towns approach.

Below are some of the key elements needed:

• - Identify a location with a block of buildings that has a good pedestrian form, but lacks a complete street. Typically pre-war built areas, or former streetcar intersections.
• - Assemble team of grassroots community activists, artists, and DIY’ers. If possible, work with existing area non-profit leaders or organizers (Community Gardens groups, local volunteer corps, etc.)
• - Create groups to develop and install temporary “pop-up” businesses to show the potential for what could be if the street had a more inviting presence. 
• - Include as many people-friendly aesthetics. We worked with a local props warehouse to bring in planters to help divide the street, and temporary street lighting. You can also build your own planters from old pallets, build sandwich boards. 
• - Paint your own cycle track! You can use a lime green paint in the typical parking area and paint a 5′ stripe. It’s also good to add a 2′ buffer zone (painted white diagonal lines) to allow for adjacent parking/door zone clearance.
• - Invite artists to perform in the street. Music is a key component to having an exciting street. Use a guitar amplifier and pump out tracks from an iPod, or invite DJ’s, drum circles, et cetera.
• - Remember that people want a reason to stay and be apart of the environment. Be sure to provide plenty of seating, things to read (maps, build simple kiosks to use as community boards, food/drink). Chess boards, et cetera. Print out and post the story of the block (its history, its present, its future as a neighborhood place).

The final piece of advice from BETTER BLOCK is to:

- Invite your Mayor, council members, city staff, so they can see the possibilities for themselves. Be sure to track sales to show the increase in area business (potential for increased tax revenue is a city’s largest motivator for change), and spotlight how traffic slows but people still have easy access and come out.

Breaking through the complications to face the complexities and coming out whole.

So far we have begun to delve into three broad areas, those being the basic physical livability of communities [Livable Communities wiki page], the community-based governance of those communities [Governance wiki page] and creating economic viability from communities [Economics wiki page]. We will be going more in depth into each and exploring how each supports the other two. We will also be developing additional resources at the New Community Paradigms wiki.

It is still important though to be reminded that this experiment in creating a whole new paradigm for the governance of communities will not be easy. It is an experiment because it has never been tried on a large scale. It needs to be recognized that this effort is starting from a very small beginning and is attempting to leverage rather extensive resources. Providing resources is one stage of this process, showing how they can work together is another, but we still need a process by which to implement these in the real world when the reality is that there will be many challenges in doing so. 

One significant potential challenge is dealing with the complications of City Hall politics while at the same time dealing with the complexities of the issues with which need to be faced. This is not to say that all City Halls will be obstructionist or do not fully represent the policy desires of their constituents but the current system of spectator participation in municipal elections every for years instead of real, authentic community participation in establishing policies is falling short of our society's true needs. This is particularly true at the local level.

While there is an intention as part of this effort to find the means of flanking the complications of dealing with a City Hall laying behind a stonewall, there is still a need to face the complexities inherent within any system of governance and the challenges it must face. 

There is an organic complexity found within the communities with which we are dealing.  Jane Jacobs, author of the seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is given credit for having recognized this organized complexity.

This issue has been touched on before with the post Why is this so hard? It's complicated and it's complex but that's OK but actually trying to put this all together even if just on "paper" is certain to bring up even greater complexities.

The goal of new community paradigms is to find ways of recognizing these complexities and finding the means of communicating and addressing them in a manner so that the public at large is not put off or overwhelmed and can deal with them in a meaningful way. This defines a new role for professionals in the field of being communicators and facilitators to a far greater extent.

Della Rucker of Wise Economy Workshop recently did a post on Jane Jacobs’ organized complexity, and why we keep failing to deal with it well from an economic development perspective on what had been a more planning oriented perspective taken in an article by Michael Mehaffy that ran in Planetizen.

Both defend Jacobs against recent critics but also make apparent one of the possible pitfalls to applying complex concepts in addressing complex challenges.  There are not only multiple possible solutions to any problem, some workable in reality, some not, there are also multiple perspectives of those solutions making implementation all the more complicated.

One of the greatest problems in understanding the influence of Jacobs on cities and planning is that she became a victim of her own success. Her complex ideas have been simplified to the point of slogans and urban legends, and she has too often been venerated uncritically.

That attitude is changing and Mehaffy gives Jacobs critics, such as planner Thomas Campanella, economist Ed Glaeser, sociologist Sharon Zukin and Mechaffy's own friend Anthony Flint who suggested that Jacobs was a libertarian with a mixed legacy of NIMBYism a platform for their views.

He then goes on to defend Jacobs.

What I find remarkable about these accounts – speaking as an instructor who regularly uses her texts - is that in almost all cases these were things that Jacobs herself simply never said. She was clearly not against planning, but against failed planning; not against government, but against government badly organized; and not against new buildings, but against rushing monocultures of the new. She was for a deeper tactical understanding of how the "inherent regenerative force" of "self-diversification," as she termed it, can be put to work to provide more diversity of income and opportunity, as clearly has happened in cities throughout history.

Della Rucker of Wise Economy Workshop also appreciates Jacobs insights into organized complexity.

It’s an understanding of “organized complexity,” as she called it – the dynamic inter-relationships of systems, of processes, of self-organization. This was not a mysterious world, but a comprehensible one – it was just a different kind of world than we had been envisioning. A city, certainly, was a different kind of problem than we had thought. And therein she identified a huge obstacle to learning and progress, and one that is largely still with us.

This does not mean that there will be a smooth path in bringing all of this together and delivering on the promise of new community paradigms. This effort requires not only a very substantial change in the way in which economic development is done to benefit the community but also a very substantial way in how the community relates to community governance and local economic development.  This second factor may be the most idealistic part of this endeavor as its objective is to change the way people think about their role in the community but it is still worth the attempt if only to better understand the process.

The point is not to get everyone in any particular community thinking about community governance or economic development 24/7.  It is to open up the perspective of the traditional institution of City Hall and get more members of a community involved in actively creating the type of community they want through direct democratic means. This involves emphasizing the importance of understanding economic development in relation to the long term sustainability of the community.

There is also not an assumption that everyone in every community will be interested. The good people of Parochialville may be quite happy with the way things are in their community and the good people of Innovatitown would likely already have such a system in place.

It is further recognized that even if there is a strong movement to start a new community paradigm process within a community it is, besides being potentially complicated because of political reasons, also a very complex process.

This needs to be broken down and made accessible to a "general" public audience. The quotes around "general" is to make the point that there is no such thing as a community made up of general type people and that there are hidden resources within the public audience that are often left undiscovered under the traditional system of institutional government.

The best way of dealing with complexity is head on in a authentic and transparent way. One advantage in being a web-based effort is that resources are available from around the world.  Gluu is a digital agency out of Denmark with a focus on engaging members of a business, group and arguably a community in delivering ongoing organizational improvement.  They recently wrote an article on organizational complexity and what happens when Complexity brings paralysis.

We don't see it coming. What starts as a simple idea quickly becomes far more complex than anyone imagined. Before we know it all the good ideas lead to a form of paralysis.

The article points out what happens all too often within City Hall these days.  As Gluu points out, the different department functions become siloed and getting anything done becomes more and more complicated, not complex which has the potential for inherent solutions within the complexity, but complicated as the hinderances that are part of the system are often created by the system for its own survival and not the benefit of those it was designed to serve.

If you look at each of the new ways of working and tools in isolation then most of them make sense. They are introduced by smart people with good intentions. The trouble is that when companies employ thousands of smart, highly paid people and then place them into the pigeonholes of a corporate hierarchy, then people do what they get paid for. From each of their pigeonholes they develop intricate systems, structures and processes that they broadcast to their colleagues.

Using Online Communities to encourage Direct Democracy for On-The-Ground Communities

One of the greatest challenges facing anybody attempting to implement a new community paradigm within their own community will be how to organize venues that allow for decisions through direct democracy on behalf of the group or organization or even entire community. Usually this is left to the traditional political body but this effort would not be seen as necessary by the community if that was already happening to the full extent to which it needed to happen.

In this post, we are introducing other resources available through the New Community Paradigms Wiki related to Governance, particularly the Community Governance and People’s Governance wikipages.

People’s Governance wikipage offers some direct and indirect resources for direct democratic participation.  One of the issues with Direct Democracy which means having community members having direct impact on policy issues is logistically coordinating a large number of people and obtaining the votes. There are tools and resources to address this challenge.  With very large numbers, it may work better to use other methods of ascertaining the wishes of the community as long as the members of the community are comfortable with doing that.

The Center for Deliberative Democracy  which is housed in the Department of Communication at Stanford University does research on democracy and public opinion and developed the concept of Deliberative Polling® which makes possible what can be called Deliberative Democracy.

This concept was applied in the What's Next California? Deliberative Poll | NextCA.org that took place last year.  The project was a first state-wide deliberative poll in California and the 30 proposals presented were deliberated by a statewide scientific sample of 412 participants.

What's Next California is an unprecedented attempt to bring the people into the process in a new way—one that is representative and thoughtful. A scientific random sample of the entire state will be transported to a single place for a weekend of face-to-face discussions, in small groups and in dialogue with competing experts. In California's first statewide “Deliberative Poll,” the people will be supported by factual information and will consider the critical arguments on both sides of issues, then will articulate their priorities for fixing the state.

More can be learned from watching CDD: California State of Mind: PBS Special which features excerpts from the PBS documentary on the What's Next California Deliberative Poll® on governance reform which aired last year.  What's Next California is also on Facebook.

More recently on November 1, 2011 the PBS Newshour did an in-depth report about California and featured "What's Next California's Deliberative Poll" and some of its results in the story California Voters Fed-Up With Gridlock as Budget Crunch Lingers | PBS NewsHour.    

Jim Fishkin of Stanford University, who originated the concept of Deliberative Polling®,  wrote about 100 years of California ballot measures, highlighting findings from the What's Next California Deliberative Poll that could be applied to the challenge of how to Fix California’s Democracy Crisis

SPUR or San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association will be holding a panel discussion on January 3, 2012 by three key organizers of the project — James Fishkin of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, Zabrae Valentine of California Forward and Lenny Mendonca of McKinsey & Company to discuss the project process and findings regarding the originally considered four basic areas: the initiative process, the Legislature, state/local relations and tax/fiscal issues.

MATT MISZEWSKI'S GLOBAL OPEN GOVERNMENT BLOG FIXING POTHOLES back in 2010 looked at the possible ties between Deliberative Polling and crowdsourcing.

The question I have is whether our newer social computing technologies and platforms can move this effort into a better set of outcomes. What if we utilized social media to crowdsource our deliberative polling efforts. The technology, and actually its constraints, can help policymakers better understand the effect of viral messaging within a population, a population that has self-selected interest in a particular topic via their profiles, tagging or other indicators built into new platforms. As a result the Social Deliberative Polling (should I trademark that ) would also be much quicker and provide much needed clarity within a much faster policy ecosystem.

This could allow a community to create a system that kept an eye on the community's vision on a fairly continual basis without being bogged down by endless meetings.  It is also possible though to have public input by all voting community members on very important issues in large American cities.  NYC Gives Citizens a Say in the Budget

"Participatory budgeting allows for citizens to get past that bureaucracy barrier and feel empowered about ideas and about making a difference in the community."

There is still though a need for Everyday Democracy and the organization of the same name, along with other organizations, works with both its website and the Everyday Democracy Facebook page toward the ultimate vision of local communities creating and sustaining a public dialogue for community problem solving believing that such strong local democracies can form the cornerstone of a vibrant national democracy.

Check out this TEDx video about civic empowerment beyond civic education. How do we reach untapped "domestic reserves of energy" - people who don't vote, don't volunteer, or don't talk with neighbors. It starts with participation, respect, and working together toward a common goal.

Completing “we” strongerdemocracy.org

There is no attempt to judge whether any particular community should want to use these resources to push for substantial change in their community.  The political body traditionally assigned the basic responsibilities of community building may be fulfilling this function so well that the issue never comes up. The political body may partner or help with the effort because it sees the potential benefit and realizes that it can no longer do it on its own or it may become more entrenched and oppose the effort to protect its squandered power.  This blog discusses only two communities, Parochialville and Innovattown and neither one of them actually exists.

This is not an effort that can be fully implemented by any individual alone. Individuals would have to gather as groups, groups would have to coalesce into a community-based organization and that community based organization would need to become integrated into the larger community of which they were all members by means of direct democracy, raising again other challenges.  Each level though can still be a catalyst to forming the next level of organization if the need is truly there.  What would also be needed is an environment conducive to dialogue and deliberation that would allow for  Community Governance  and that will be examined more closely in the next post.