Finding Pathways for Vehicles of Change

This blog post is going to break from the current Systems Practice focus (most recent post first) of the last two blog posts to update the newest resource additions to the New Community Paradigm (NCP) Wiki. This time though it will also tie them to a location on the recently unveiled Kumu based NCP Wiki Map, that was rolled out over four blog posts and which now has a home on both the NCP blog and wiki. If this is the first time with the NCP Wiki Map then there is a tour which provides a general explanation. 

The NCP Wiki map seeks to develop connections or bridges across sectors. All of the updates in this post are part of or are in some way connected to the Places map but can be followed to Healthy Communities or to Community Ecology. 

It is the resources, available online, found in the New Community Paradigm (NCP) Wiki that are the vehicles for change. The NCP Wiki Map connotes possible paths that could be taken. The posts of this blog are but one rationale or mental model for taken a particular path or using the suggested vehicles, one among many possible. 

The State of Placemaking 2016, brought more than 450 dedicated public space practitioners, and policymakers to chart the future of the placemaking movement structured around ten major issues that converge in public space,  referred to as “transformative agendas.” Placemaking, as a determining aspect of Places, can be seen as being most comprehensively defined by the Project for Public Spaces (PPS).  

In the NCP Wiki Places map, the circled Project for Public Spaces is seen as arising from Places and being related to the more general Community Places. (double clicking a circled element opens up wiki page, clicking “On Kumu Wiki Map” at top of a wiki page opens up the map). It is the wiki page Community Places that contains the blog posts, near the bottom of the page, seeking to define the developing NCP mental model for placemaking.

Place as Social and Economic Engine was one of the first wiki bridge pages and an early basis for developing a mental model for NCP as defined by blog posts listed at the bottom of the wiki page. It was so named, again as an extension of the correction to the same erroneous presumption underlying placemaking, that the strata of the geographic community below the businesses, city hall politics and those residents connected with city hall were of secondary value. While in truth, it is the created physical attributes of a place that are the dynamic foundation or engine of the community’s social and economic generation.

Place as Social and Economic Engine is the home for Strong Towns, who introduced the newest addition VERDUNITY, a team of civil engineers, planners, and sustainability specialists with expertise in land use planning and zoning, municipal finance, transportation planning and design, stormwater management and green infrastructure implementation, and urban design and placemaking. They started VERDUNITY  because they realized that elaborate, expensive infrastructure projects were making things more economically fragile and unsustainable. This was a disruption in their way of thinking, of their mental models. They are now working on changing other people’s mental models of how they think about the way we have been planning and building our cities and neighborhoods. More will be said about VERDUNITY in a future post.

Place as Social and Economic Engine on the NCP Wiki Map is seen as a bridge between Place and Economics (access between Places and Economics via a link is in the narrative section to the left). 

The newest addition to Planning the Urban Landscape is New Urban Mechanics, a network of civic innovation offices that explore how new technology, designs, and policies can strengthen the partnership between residents and government and significantly improve opportunity and experiences for all. It could have arguably been put under Community Change Agencies but personal choice and only personal was that these programs were more closely related to the existing underlying physical, placemaking, and political infrastructure of a community. The related blog posts, again listed at the bottom of the wiki page, provide some perspectives on a past effort in Los Angeles history to redefine the larger urban landscape. 

Planning the Urban Landscape approaches Places from a broader perspective looking not from the build up of smaller changes over time but the accumulation of those changes overall. It is seen as a bridge between Places and Community Ecology. 

Under the wiki page Healthy Cities is the recent addition of Bridging Health & Community, an extension of  the previously listed Creating Health Collaborative which aims to transform how we approach health so that it goes beyond institutional healthcare and public health to include fostering community agency, strengthening the field of practice that bridges those in the health sector and those who foster community agency helping to establish the critical link between a community's ability to make purposeful choices and its health. Being able to measure differences in life expectancy by income across areas and then to identify strategies to improve health outcomes for low-income Americans would be a useful ability. Health Inequality Project uses big data to help accomplish this.

The bridge from Places to Healthy Cities, under the Healthy Communities map, is Planning for Healthy Communities. It could also be an element in the Pathways to Healthy Communities map and the Art and Healthy Communities map. Two specially constructed maps that put together a path that incorporated elements that are often placed in silos and considered distinct and separate. 

Taking a higher altitude perspective, the Wiki Bridges Map connects all the New Community Paradigm sectors, including Places, Healthy Communities, and Community Ecology, together. 

A closer look at the pathway for Places indicates that at under the current New Community Paradigm configuration, Healthy Communities and Places are well integrated together but Community Ecology is somewhat isolated. 

Could Bridging Health & Community and Creating Health Collaborative under Healthy Cities be integrated with New Urban Mechanics under Planning the Urban Landscape and extended from Places to Community Ecology integrating the two together more closely?

There are also other deeper pathways that could utilize the online resources found in the NCP Wiki. Under Project for Public Places (click the URL or double click the circled element to open the wiki page) is Agenda Spotlight: Placemaking and Health - Project for Public Spaces.

There is growing evidence showing that place impacts people’s health on multiple scales. From obesity and chronic disease to depression, social isolation, and increased exposure to environmental toxins and pollutants, the world faces very different health challenges today than it has in the past, and many of these challenges are directly related to how our public spaces are designed and operated.

It could be an important component of the Pathways to Healthy Communities map and naturally be expanded to be encompassed by Community Ecology. How it is used could be determined in a number of different ways depending upon the needs of a particular community. 

It is believed though it has not been adequately examined that finding specific potential pathways for the utilization of online resources will greatly help in the development of new community paradigms. 

Mapping Connections Between Healthy Communities, Planning, Placemaking and Asset Based Community Development

Now that New Community Paradigms (NCP) has a more effective map with which to find new pathways it is possible to go back and reconnect with some that may have been missed or left behind. In general, the trend has been away from institutions or more institutionally based systems and toward more complex systems of greater community involvement but this does not and should not mean abandoning institutions entirely. A greater emphasis on ground-up community placemaking should not mean an abandonment of a more traditional role of planning. It is the relationship between the two that should be redefined.  

This goes to a wider issue of the difference between complicated top-down management systems and complex community governance systems. Despite an obvious preference, at least if you have been following this blog, for the later, the need and benefit of the former are still recognized under the proper circumstances. It is the correct relationship between the two that needs to be defined. 

One area in which this could be seen as being helpful is Planning for Healthy Communities, a new page under the NCP wiki. We are using the term “planning” in the sense of the American Planning Association, the foundational, professional, educational oriented organization behind city hall planning departments across the USA. It is able to suggest policy on a national scale and in the case of the Planning and Community Health Center, focuses its efforts on projects and policies that prioritize active living, food systems, and health in all planning policies.

Many local governments have begun Planning for Public Health by including goals and objectives that promote healthy choices of where to live and how to get around, the ability to access healthy foods and opportunities for physical activity, which affect broader issues of social equity, clean air, and water, and more into their comprehensive plans. More specifically, Plan4Health Projects and Initiatives are launching across the United States in neighborhoods, cities, and counties. Plan4Health supports creative partnerships to build sustainable, cross-sector coalitions.

“Local coalitions consisting of American Planning Association (APA) chapters and American Public Health Association (APHA) affiliate members are committed to increasing health equity through nutrition or physical activity with each coalition seen as being dedicated to meeting the needs of residents where they live, work, or play.”

The American Planning Association’s Planning and Community Health Research Center has also partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Healthy Community Design Initiative, on the CDC - Healthy Places - Healthy Community Design Checklist Toolkit. This toolkit, which can help planners, public health professionals, and the general public to include health in the community planning process, is composed of four elements that work together to achieve this goal:

1. Healthy Community Design Checklist.pdf
2. Healthy Community Design PowerPoint Presentation.ppt
3. Creating a Health Profile of Your Neighborhood.pdf
4. Planning for Health Resources Guide.pdf

It is still, however, a generally top-down application of policy and may never be initiated or fully realized without the intervention of grassroots efforts as well as, as suggested by Paul Born, grass-top organizational efforts.

“In the early days of a collective impact approach, we often find that one of two mistakes is made. One is that we gather only the grasstops. That is, we think somehow it’s about shifting power. So we bring the powerful players into the room. The other mistake, almost as common, is that we don’t engage any of the power players because we’re afraid that it will be perceived as a grass-tops initiative.”

There is underlying data that can be gathered and used to inform all perspectives, Health-Impact-Assessment-Can-Inform.pdf, the State-of-Health-Impact-Assessment-in-Planning.pdf, and the HIA-Toolkit.pdf. 

Additionally, Project for Public Spaces (PPS) recently released an extensive report of peer-reviewed research and case studies, sponsored by Kaiser Permanente, demonstrating the power of placemaking to improve health. 

"The Case for Healthy Places is already taking the public health world by storm, and we are confident that this is just the beginning of the Healthy Placemaking Movement!"

Before proceeding further, it should be advised that one could reach all of the following points on the Kumu maps and all others from within the New Community Paradigms Wiki Kumu map itself rather than open in multiple tabs or windows from here. Information on how to navigate through the map can be found through the New Community Paradigms Wiki Map Tour.

A new Planning for Healthy Communities wiki page means a new element on the New Community Paradigms Wiki Map. Wiki-pages are collections of resources related to that topic though are by no means exhaustive. In truth, they are merely gateways into essential, more in-depth studies of the area in question. Their corresponding map elements in conjunction with other elements graphically illustrate possible relationships. It will be noticed that some relationships are more explicit in feeding back to each other.  The idea underlying these mapped out relationships is to expand upon the concepts and avoid the siloing of policy thinking. 

More precisely the Kumu map Planning for Healthy Communities is within the Health Communities Kumu map. One can click on the map’s white space to reveal the fuller map underneath. Other Healthy Communities wiki page links are then displayed in the narrative section. 

Planning for Healthy Communities can be seen as a bridge between Healthy Communities and Community Places within the Places map. Clicking the map’s white space again reveals the numerous wiki pages, bridge pages and other related wiki pages from other wiki maps under the full Places map.

One returns to the collection of web links found on a particular wiki page using the URL within the narrative section of that map element, say Community Places, which focuses more on the community (as a geographic place) planning of building by the community (as social structure). 

Mousing over the highlighted Community Place element of the Places map or any map element shows those wiki pages most directly associated, other overlaying concepts of Place, the wiki focus page of Community Design, the closely related Project for Public Spaces, along with Soul of a Community, and the bridge to Healthy Communities through Planning for Healthy Communities. 

A similar set of relationships exists with the Healthy Communities element within the Healthy Communities map, including the bridge Planning for Healthy Communities and the related Asset Based Community Development or ABCD. It is the relationship of ABCD in this context that calls for the greatest need for future exploration. 

A short Twitter-talk with Cormac Russell on the CityLab article, The New Front Line of Public Health, on the growing number of community health workers taking a 360-degree view of the barriers that stand between their patients and better health, revealed an ABCD perspective.

“Relative to current malaise it's a quantum leap; relative to what's actually required, it's a mediocre shuffle in the right direction.”

According to Cormac, a significant shift requires seeing beyond healthcare and the proliferation of initiatives like Every Block A Village-Chicago Westside Health Authority.

All of these perspectives can be expanded structurally even further by going to the Wiki Bridges Map in which Planning for Health Communities can be found under *Places of the map’s narrative section. Again, click any white space to reveal the full map. 

More dynamic, complex relationships can be followed as pathways under the Wiki Bridges Pathways Map. Selecting Places Wiki Bridges, one can mouse over the narrative highlighting relevant pathways within the map connecting Places and its elements to other areas of the complete New Community Paradigms map. There isn’t any predetermined route, each group, organization or community determines its own course, preferably by making its own maps.  

Viva Local Economy Revolution!!

This blog has delved into a number of different concerns impacting community empowerment and economic development that don't fit the standard mold, systems thinking, complexity, radical community engagement and disruptive innovation.  It has done so by connecting with and benefitting from the experience and insights from a range of thinkers in different fields. One person of note based on the number of times she has been cited in this blog is Della Rucker.

Della Rucker, of Wise Economy and @dellarucker has been, as has been said before, an important resource for this blog and a source of many of the concepts developed here.  She provides a unique perspective having credentials in both planning (AICP) and economic development (CEcD) that she has applied to economic revitalization and constructive public engagement, concerns that are often found in conflict with each other. 

Della has now written a book The Local Economy Revolution: What’s Changed and How You Can Help.  I purchased the Kindle version and recently finish reading it. Not too surprisingly, considering how inline I often find her thinking is with mine, I enjoyed reading the book.  Anybody talking about revolution in the local economy is going to appeal to someone advocating for new community paradigms.  So it is easy to recommend the book, that though would not really be doing the book justice.

Della takes the ideas contained in the book beyond its covers in particularly meaningful ways.  What I mean by this is that she connects with a recent history that we all share, she understands the affect it has on communities and the people living in them, not only on institutions and related professionals.  She does so in a personal, accessible fashion that can connect with everyday “citizens aiming to make their communities more robust” at the same time “condensing complex ideas while not oversimplifying”, as was observed recently by Wayne Senville, editor of PlannersWeb.  

So she has both the professional credentials and the ability to connect with the regular man or woman on the street needed to create a bridge from where we are today to where we need to be in the future.  The challenge is that bridges to the future always need to be built going uphill. 

It is her ability to span between populism of community desires linked with fiscal and economic constraints facing those made responsible for economic development that makes her a viable contributor to new community paradigms. 

It is one thing to show that you understand the problems facing people, it is another to show that you understand the people themselves.  It is one thing to demonstrate you understand how to achieve economic success, it is another to demonstrate that you know the affect of failure. Della has lived up close, personally and professionally through the changes we created for ourselves over the last few decades which have brought us to our current fork in the road and has learned those lessons deeply enough that she can speak truth to the imposed challenges that must be faced.

Della’s writing style strikes me as being conversational in tone making her critiques more like advice from a neighbor.  She demonstrates that she understands what individuals from different sectors of economic development, politicians, public sector management, professionals, specialists, advocates and constituents are going through trying to cope with the complex, often termed wicked issues, we are all facing regardless of what side of the table we are sitting on.  She doesn’t take a pundit’s perspective on issues making a laundry list of mistakes made by others but instead considers them as missteps made in common and that must be addressed collectively. I never got a hint of blaming anyone more than anyone else, more of we are all need to get up and across the same chasm.

Perhaps more importantly, Della also serves as an example that can be followed by anyone concerned about the health and wellbeing of our communities. The roots of The Local Economy Revolution: What’s Changed and How You Can Help not only run deep, Della has also provided the means of extending beyond the cover of the book into the future.

So instead, I’m going to point you to this book’s web site: localeconomyrevolutionbook.com. There, you’ll find a growing and changing collection of articles, papers and other information that will help you build the toolbox that your community needs.

                                                                                                             Della Rucker

The very act of creating her book is an example of how we can start creating a better future. The book is made up, in large part, from her writings, such as her blog, and online conversations, as in LinkedIn. I had already been exposed to most of the ideas expressed in the book through Della’s earlier writing, particularly in her Wise Economy blog or had participated in some of the discussions. 

It is helpful though to have them organized together in a holistic and comprehensive manner.  I am still endeavoring to do that with many of the ideas that I have been pursuing. It is not easy as the journey can have false turns, lead to dead ends and one can have doubts about the path being taken.  Writing a blog might be the most viable method of scaling the precipice because one can take short bursts that add on to each other.  It is especially helpful when someone creates a pathway for you to build upon even if they may not consider the effort as noteworthy.  Della did that for me with her Wise Economy Manifesto. 

So I wrote a thing called the Wise Economy Manifesto, and in it I tried to encapsulate everything I was thinking. Which is usually a really bad idea. And while I thought at the time that the Manifesto part had a cool ring to it, now it strikes me as a little pompous. But like most of what we put on the internet, it’s out there, and it’s my own baby, goofy as it may look.

                                                                                                                         Della Rucker

Trying to encapsulate everything that you are thinking is not necessarily a bad idea, just a very difficult one to do well, particularly in the first attempt.  One reason is that we, using complicated oriented means of management, have silo’d these ideas, and the people who have to make them real, for too long. One primary goal of the New Community Paradigms blog is to create pathways along those unrealized connections.  The blog post, from August of 2012, Seeing Economy and Community as Ecosystem; Another Way of Shifting the Paradigm was the start of the journey in finding connections with Della’s ideas. Those basic ideas are still to be found in her new book.

● Communities are human ecosystems. 

● That which makes you unique makes you valuable. 

● We have to focus on cultivating our native economic species.

● Beware the magic pill. 

● Crowdsourced wisdom is the best way to find a real solution. 

● We who have the job of helping communities work better have to be brave.

Della tells us in the forward to her book The Local Economy Revolution: What’s Changed and How You Can Help  that 'change sucks'.  A succinct if perhaps obvious observation of the ‘duh’ variety, it is still a required observation considering the level of change that is going to be needed. Della focuses primarily on getting communities to see that changes, often difficult changes, are needed to enable our communities to create a viable quality of life and she doesn’t do it in a way that makes everyone run for the hills. 

I view the current situation with communities and economic development as being more dire as it is not only a matter of complex difficulty in the best of circumstances but is also constrained by opposition from those who seek to hold on to the old way of doing things because it serves to maintain their already established and even entrenched power.  I do place blame more squarely on the shoulders of politicians though see that all of us needed in building the bridge to the future.

This more dismal perspective, however, can be put aside for now.  Before one can have a revolution to overturn entrenched institutions one needs a large enough force to lead into the future. It is never enough to just talk about being against something on this side in endeavoring to create a bridge to a new future.

Most such attempts in creating a new future start on the far side of the chasm providing some vision of a shiny city on a hill, too often with no real means of crossing the span and, more often than not, no real grounded connection with this side of the chasm. This is where Della excels by taking what could be multiple complex concepts and making them not only more comprehensive, understandable and approachable but also initially, potentially addressable.  It will get more complex and difficult but Della provides a good foothold to begin the ascent.

My biggest worry is that not enough of the right people are going to read the book and those are people who see the need for new community paradigms to be created, the people who comprise the community.  It will be great if local politicians and administrators read the book and even better if they do something about it but in too many cases they will merely flatter it and then ignore it.  This is my general review of Della's book, but as I wrote above, in future posts the ideas in the book should be examined closer to truly pay tribute to her effort and to continue building that bridge to the future.

The Failed Olmsted 1930 LA Plan points to Complex Challenges for Today and Opportunities for Disruption Tomorrow

In the last post written on attending ‘A Place for Us: Re-imagining and Reclaiming’,' lessons learned from the past regarding the process behind the failed 1930 Los Angeles Playgrounds, Parks and Beaches Plan of the Olmsted Brothers, were discussed. This post will attempt to bring some of those lessons up to the present by connecting concepts previously considered on these pages with the concrete examples provided by history.

One lesson in particular is that even if there are surface similarities between then and now, this does not mean that the underlying premises and perspectives, or agendas are the same.  We sometimes pick the lessons from history or criticize mistakes of the past to fit our own current agendas. There are some aspects of popular initiated community building and development though that do seem to stay the same. Los Angeles in 1930 had its Hollywood stars has it has today and businessmen on the Chamber of Commerce could be swayed as they can today. Los Angeles had cars back then, more cars than most cities, and was concerned about water.  However, what they saw and what we see as the fundamental challenges and the visionary goals are very different.  This is not to point out that they were wrong but that they had different system wide challenges and came up with a different set of solutions based on the knowledge and resources that they had.  Although the perspectives and approaches may change, Los Angeles, as a community defined by geography, history and natural resources, is still continually trying to redefine, even create itself anew. 

Besides looking at the past, the panel for the ‘A Place for Us: Re-imagining and Reclaiming’ discussion also provided more abstract but still useful perspectives on the continual regeneration of cities over time. Cities overall, William Deverell pointed out, provide for the most efficient utilization of resources on a per capita basis and succeed far better as social engines compared to other versions of built community. Two newly learned and important metrics in the organizing of humans within a constrained geography were urban metabolism and friction of distance. A closer look at urban metabolism is provided by this slide presentation by Stephanie Pincetl and Paul Bunje of UCLA.   

While these are not the type of numbers that would be included in a city’s end of year report, they do help in the configuration of placemaking on a broader scale to optimize community ecology.  Community ecology is chosen as a more appropriate term, rather than the word environment, because it can be associated with a greater biological orientation to the concept of community and the process of relating to the environment. Placemaking, according to the Metropolitan Planning Council of Chicago, “is both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool for improving a neighborhood, city or region. It has the potential to be one of the most transformative ideas of this century.” 

This effort, in its initial stages, saw placemaking as dealing with the built environment but from an interactive social perspective by which the built environment became the canvas upon which the creativity of the community was manifested, and was in turn also transformed by that creativity to the point at which the canvas became the art. 

The use of these terms serves to define the system of community as one of adaptive complexity. Under a complex adaptive system we can assume that there are elements making up the neighborhoods that in turn make up the city that is part of the region.  It is at the level of elements that design thinking has its focus, that disruptive innovation seeks the job-to-be-done and that, as the moderator Claudia Jurmain challenged the panel, supports Paola Antonelli’s assertion that design allows for the negotiation of change.

We, as a rule, though create artificial systems of complicated mechanistic algorithms imposed by top down management in an attempt to control the complex systems of nature or those arising through our interactions with nature or which then subsequently result.  The business world is already coming to the realization that the complex challenges of the twenty-first century cannot be addressed through twentieth century means of imposing solutions.  The public sector is though, in many cases, falling behind. 

The 1930 Playgrounds, Parks and Beaches Plan was based on the aspirations of the community of Los Angeles or at least that part of the community that had aspirations. This is different from the norm according to Tom Gilmore of Gilmore & Associates, who during the panel discussion asserted that most substantial forms of community transformation were based on some form of crisis.  This is aspiration that emerged through what is considered by this blog as a complex system of community.  Certain creative elements or a vanguard within the community saw a need to make the future more coherent. The actual creation of the 1930 Plan though was done through what can be imagined as being the complicated application of algorithms gathered and developed by the Olmsted Brothers over their impressive career.  They also incorporated local expertise of the territory and fauna but they did not seek general public input maintaining strong top down control over the process. 

The Olmsted's were also savvy enough to know though that the politics of the Plan had to be addressed before hand.  The community likely thought that it had but did not realize how, what this blog terms as ‘entrenched‘, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce or its inner sanctum was, allowing it to be the bottleneck that killed the efforts of the vanguard of the larger community.  

Entrenched power should be operationally defined as it is arguably the biggest obstacle to optimizing the system. The term ‘entrenched’ for New Community Paradigms, usually found as ‘entrenched’ city halls, refers to political institutions, usually local, that through an evolution of community culture have created subsystems of political and economic power that become entrenched regardless of any form of democratic intervention.  Surface changes of exchanging one clique of politicians for another might occur but there is no longer any real broad based democratic participation in the mode of the top tiers of Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation.  The label ‘entrenched’ was used to make such entities analogous to incumbent business entities that through their own successes had become myopic in their understanding of their own market and failed to see or appreciate the impact of competitors being empowered through disruptive innovation. Entrenched cities are not similarly successful, often quite the opposite, but they are myopic and they restrict or squander resources to hold on to power and often a past in which they had greater status.  New Community Paradigms is exploring whether disruptive innovation can, in some form, be applied to the public sector. 

Entrenched city halls and their like have been a target for this effort from its start.  It has also been said before that not all city halls are entrenched. That, however, is not enough. What should also be made clear is that if a city is not entrenched then it may likely be ‘adaptive,' as in existing as a manifestation of a complex adaptive system.  How adaptive would still be a question, adaptive enough to maintain the system until the environment changed too drastically or adaptive enough to recreate the system?  Furthermore, no community is wholly at any one particular stage.

The larger community or system had developed what was likely a complex resolution to meet a community need but without getting formal, explicit democratic agreement from the majority of the community.  It found a seemingly effective means of addressing that challenge which would have been likely adopted by the larger community if the opportunity had arisen. This system or community, however, had no means of addressing the entrenched power of the few members of the LA Chamber board once they turned on the Plan.  Another 'if' question for the future is whether getting formal and explicit democratic approval for the Plan from the larger community before and during its creation would have also derailed implementation of the Plan, not up or down approval but the crafting of the plan to the same level of widely accepted excellence. 

Another new area of exploration for this blog has been systems thinking. Communities are systems and it becomes increasingly difficult to meet new challenges facing these community systems. This is not “The System” of secret, behind closed doors political power and chicanery, but the larger, ‘living’ complex social system which encompasses civil society and economics extending from the local to the global.  This system endeavors to create components of itself through self organization and agent intervention that ideally functions to meet the ‘metabolic’ needs of the community effectively, efficiently and sustainably while meeting a desire for greater democratization by its residents while trying to get past the bottlenecks often created by that other “the system” of entrenched political and economic power.  These three components of the system can move in and out of conflict, usually because of different agent agendas, making the system potentially chaotic. 

A conflict or disfunction between entrenched power and greater community democratization or even between entrenched power with a truly well functioning system could be understood and appreciated.  A potential conflict between a well functioning system and community democratization might not be so obvious and its resolution not so apparent. Adding an entrenched entity to this last configuration only makes it, well more complex. However, even if entrenched power is successfully addressed, there is still a potential (though expectably resolvable) conflict between creating a well functioning system that addresses wicked challenges and full community democratization that could move the system back to control by entrenched powers.