Reconstruction 5.3 (Summer 2005)

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Placemaking: A Democratic Project / Lynda H. Schneekloth and Robert. G. Shibley

Abstract [1]: Democracy in a post-industrial society such as the United States is increasingly characterized as a system of governance orchestrated by the media to shape a mass of passive consumers who live in non-places. Because of the scale and structure of the political economy, we have come to understand the body politic as an adversarial system in which the primary responsibility of the citizen is to vote and consume. After 9/11, an additional alienating element, fear, has entered into our national imagination of passivity leading many people to believe that they are collectively powerless in the face of unknown terrors. If one is committed to democracy as a social structure of human organization and politics, the question must be asked: Where does one learn to be a citizen? How do groups of people communally engage in democratic action and develop community intentions?

The authors propose that the practice of placemaking offers a unique public space in which webs of relationships interact to create a common world in specific locales. Placemaking is the ongoing work of transforming the places we find ourselves into places in which we can truly dwell as individuals and communities of people [2]. The practice of making our places changes and maintains the physical world and our ideas about it while it also creates communities of people who share concerns, interests, hopes, desires, and fear.

The authors present two stories of their own practice to offer insight into the tasks of placemaking: the opening of a dialogic space, the dialectic of confirmation and interrogation; and framing action. These tasks offer an approach for interrogating place, revealing and resolving conflict, and taking action in places such as neighborhoods, cities, public agencies, offices, and intermediate institutions. This theoretical and practical lens attempts to demonstrate how placemaking as a critical practice supports the struggle to create and maintain democratic societies, addresses the problems inherent in work normally assigned to experts, and establishes placemaking as an act of resistance and hope.

Introduction

A deliberately democratic civil society is a precarious achievement, an on-going struggle, not a natural fact (Forester, “Rationality” 213).

<1> In the United States the practice of democracy in everyday life is radically inconsistent with our democratic ideals. While the rhetoric of democracy remains strong, the reality is that attempts to actually practice democracy are undermined by private interests that are privileged over the public good. The scale and structure of the political economy has created the conditions wherein people sense little control over their lives, and increasingly believe and practice a form of “democracy” that consists of voting occasionally, paying taxes reluctantly, and consuming regularly. People refer to themselves not as “citizens”, but as “taxpayers” or “consumers.” The voice of “the public” is no longer heard through active citizen engagements on issues but is now passively recorded in opinion polls and votes, denying any sense of collective public agency or action. We have become dependent on largely autocratic expert cultures to make local and regional place as well as define our nation state.

<2> Government in this environment is reduced to the role of a reluctant vendor of services demanded by experts speaking for citizens as taxpayers or consumers. It delivers these services with increasingly scarce resources, and in a manner that protects the private business interests. Middle and upper class citizen-consumers are beginning to imagine they can get more and better service through private sources. All this has resulted in serious and often successful attempts to dismantle public institutions, compromise the constitution of the public realm, and reduce public services in the name of “liberating people” from the oppression of the State while increasing the States “efficiency.” Efficiency, not democracy, is becoming the imperative of placemaking activity at every scale.

<3> Those leading the tax revolts and espousing privatization are those who can afford to seek services or create quality places outside the public domain, and in such acts, they are depriving the government of an ability to offer services and quality place to all of the people. To be sure, the process of deciding on the level and type of public work and service to be provided in a democratic government is contentious and difficult to negotiate. This is certainly true by comparison to simply delegating such services to the profit motivations of the “private sector” [3]. Privatization is not likely to foster democratic processes but, rather, will increase economic stratification, making the existing gap between rich and poor still wider. As Korten puts it, “. . . under conditions of unequal economic power, a society ruled by the market is a society ruled by those who have the most money – the antithesis of democracy” (Korten 84).

<4> If one is committed to democracy as a social and cultural structure of human organization and politics, the question must be asked: Where does one learn what is means to be a citizen, particularly a citizen in the increasingly privatized post-industrial world that tends to deny responsibility for the collective good or even the greatest good for the greatest number? Where do people learn how to be citizens? How do groups of people communally engage in democratic action and develop community intentions regarding their places? The practice of democracy is tenuous and fragile -- it requires ongoing attention and diligence. If we wish to further the aims of democracy we must create sites of resistance and critical dialogue that both affirm the sense of powerlessness at the root of calls for “less government,” and frame actions that advance the possibility of good living.

<5> Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux among others argue that public school is a potential site for the active engagement of democracy because it can provide a public space for exploring political and social relationships. Giroux writes about the practice of education as a “public space:”

By public space I mean . . . a concrete set of learning conditions where people come together to speak, to dialogue, to share their stories, to struggle together within social relationships that strengthen rather than weaken the possibility for active citizenship (“Schooling” 100).

We are suggesting that placemaking provides another powerful “public space” for the critical practice of democracy. We employ the term placemaking to mean the processes by which all of us -- not just professional architects, planners, and so on -- decide on how to make the world around us. It includes building and tearing buildings down, cultivating the land and planting gardens, cleaning the kitchen and rearranging the office, making neighborhoods, mowing lawns, planning and designing greenways, taking over buildings, understanding and restoring cities, and working for a good life. It is a fundamental human activity that consists of the daily acts of renovating, maintaining and representing the place-people contexts that sustain us, and of special celebratory one-time events such as the ribbon cutting for a new park.

<6> What is profoundly important about a critical practice of placemaking is that it not only changes the world -- unmaking places as much as making them -- but that it makes communities and connects people with each other. In other words, placemaking is not just about the relationship of people TO their places; it also creates relationships AMONG people in places. Borrowing from Giroux's text, placemaking creates the conditions that “. . . strengthen rather than weaken the possibility for active citizenship.”

<7> One could argue that over the last 100 years, people in modern cultures have lost the ability to make and maintain places of dwelling. Our North American cultures tend to denigrate the simple daily acts of maintaining the world, activities such as keeping the house clean, dealing with our wastes, and maintaining street trees and playgrounds. Furthermore, the actions of planning, buildings, and renovating our places are considered technical, rational acts conducted by experts rather than essential, poetic ones. The public space for dialogue about making places has been appropriated into the modernist projects of professionals.

<8> As professional placemakers, we share a practice concerned with the making of places as a full-time vocation. We take pride in the work that we do in helping make the world. And yet, it is argued by people such as Illich that the allocation of such work to a few professionals is disabling to others by denying them the critical capacities needed to take responsibility for their own places. How do we deal with this tension?

<9> Through our own professional and academic practice of over twenty-five years, we have struggled to create an enabling practice of placemaking for both ourselves and those with whom we work. The sites of our struggle vary widely, involving many different communities. We have learned from our practice that placemaking can facilitate democratic action and agency. Specifically we see placemaking as a way for citizens to participate in a civil society [4], not as uncritical and passive consumers, but as active social and critical participants in the construction of their lives [5].

<10> This paper, first, offers a description of foundational beliefs and a review of the tasks of the practice that are derived from such a belief system. Then we will offer two brief stories to demonstrate our ideas and to place the theory in the context of place and our professional practice.

<11> The first story is about the development and implementation of a city-wide process of engaging citizens in governmental decision making in Buffalo, New York, an action that reversed sixteen years of an authoritarian city government that had operated primarily on special interest and private power. The second story tells about an ongoing engagement with a neighborhood organization representing low-income people of color. It recounts their struggle to maintain themselves in the face of disinvestments and physical deterioration. One represents placemaking work from within the power structure; the other from without. Both teach us of the critical capacity of creating public space for dialogue that advances democratic projects and the “possibility for active citizenship.”

The Practice of Placemaking

<12> All practices, whether in the domain of education, science, or cooking, have aims, intentions, and beliefs that guide the work. Placemaking is no different. The foundational belief of placemaking is that people desire to live in beloved places. People care about their places; they want places they can love, places that are healthy for working, building community, and raising families. Further, inherent in the practice of placemaking is the assumption that people will work, individually and collectively, on their places, and that they are competent to engage in such work. The third belief is that the unit of work, or of analysis, is people-in-place, not just people or just place. This is a practice concerned with relationships -- of people to place and to each other. In spite of virtual reality, post structuralist philosophy, and many cultural messages to the contrary, human beings still inhabit discrete places on the earth and the places themselves are active participants in the construction of human cultures [6].

<13> Placemakers intervene in the on-going lives of people-in-places. Architects, planners, community organizers, facility managers, and so on, have the power to layer, enrich, preserve, and transform the lives of people and places. And when we are being honest with ourselves, we also know that we have the power to erase and destroy the earth and the continuous world-making activities of people in their everyday lives. These practices involve technical expertise and decisions, but must also be understood as primarily ethical and moral acts.

Dialogic Space: So what does a placemaker – landscape architect, government official, neighborhood leader, church group -- do when working with a community or institutional organization? We have learned from observing our own practice and the work of others either directly or through the literature that the first task is the opening of a dialogic space or what Giroux calls a “public space.” This is probably the most critical act because this creates the possibility for a public conversation within relationship wherein we collectively share hopes, fears, desires, and goals of how we want to live and how our world must be structured to support that life. This space must be “safe” because it is filled with people’s lives and experiences, with agreement and conflict. The opening and facilitation of a dialogic space begins the democratic process in placemaking. As will become clear, creating this dialogic space goes way beyond sending out a notice and hiring the hall. For the public space to facilitate dialogue, literally thousands of decisions are made regarding the collaborative development of venue, agenda, accountabilities, inclusions, and ground rules for the conversation itself.

Confirmation and Interrogation: The second task is the dialectic of confirmation and interrogation as proposed by Freire. We have found this activity to be critical if any group is to come to decisions about a place. People strive to make sense of their lives as they live them; their own thoughts and experiences must be confirmed as being their reality and feelings as part of a public conversation [7]. This includes the knowledge and experiences of the leader/facilitator. But his/her knowledge and experience is not to be privileged in this dialogic space; all knowledges are welcomed and affirmed [8].

<14> However, this sense of confirmation is not the same as agreement, nor does it assume that the values expressed by participants are necessarily in their own best interests or for the benefit of the community. The process of interrogation attempts to uncover basic values and assumptions forming human intentions and institutions.

If the preferences that determine the results of a democratic procedure are unreflective or ignorant, then they lose their claim to political authority over us. Deliberation is necessary if the claims to democracy are not to be de-legitimated (Fishkin 29).

Using the conversation, local experience and expert knowledge, we attempt to collectively describe and construct a reality that can be shared; to understand what and how things are done. This interrogation includes a critical perspective that addresses not only how, but why these are the conditions and further, who benefits from these conditions and situations. But this is neither analysis nor theory overlaid on the context; rather the insights are constructed within the dialogic space among all the participants, including experts. Part of the conversation is thus devoted to “situating” expert knowledge from somewhere else into specific circumstances without privileging either the experts or the local knowledge of citizens.

Framing Action: Which brings us to the last and third task -- framing action. The activity is always about processes of inclusion and exclusion and includes questions such as “who” should be involved? And what are the “boundaries for intervention”? What “methods” should be used both in the inquiry and in the project? These decisions frame the conditions for democratic action. Of course, not everybody can be involved in every decision about everything; judgments must be made. But they should be made consciously and accountably with an awareness of the ethical implications for inclusion and exclusion. Action becomes framed in the space for dialogic practice. Such a space is kept open through the accountable practices of confirmation and interrogation.

With this sketchy outline of the intentions and tasks of placemaking, let us tell two stories, and then return to offer some thoughts on the power of placemaking.

The Buffalo Summits

<15> Buffalo, New York is a city of about 280,000 people and has been rapidly losing population to the surrounding suburban region for over thirty years. In its hey day in the 1950s it was a robust 650,000 people. Buffalo is an American “rust belt” city that was home to several steel mills (now all closed) and served as a major transhipment point for grain and coal between the heartland of the mid-west of the United States and the east coast by way of the Great Lakes along the southern Canadian Border. The contemporary “Queen City” of the Great Lakes is in serious economic and social trouble.

<16> Two radically different approaches to address the ills of the City have been in evidence over the past twenty years through its governance. The first involved the sixteen years of service of Mayor James Griffin that ended in 1993, and the second began with the election of Anthony Masiello in 1994. While there are numerous differences in leadership style exercised by the two administrations, the primary differences involve the tendency of former Mayor Griffin to view his constituents as a voting public and not as active participants in the decision-making of the city. He wasn’t elected to ask the people what to do, he was elected because he knew what to do. Mayor Masiello, while certainly aware of the importance of constituent votes and expertise, also believes the well-being of the city depends on the capacity of the public to be actively involved in the day-to-day activities that make neighborhoods good places to live and that make cities good places to work and recreate. Even prior to his election a broad base of focus groups that were asked to help him frame his platform for governance characterized his campaign. The results of this effort placed a strong emphasis on the process of engaging the public, and not on preconceiving the results of such collaboration.

<17> Soon after his election Mayor Masiello worked with the local downtown business improvement district (Buffalo Place Inc.) and with the local university (University at Buffalo, State University of New York) to devise ways to engage citizens in what we came to call the summit process. In essence we were charged with devising ways for citizens to more clearly identify their vision for the city and how best to realistically achieve it. Shibley worked as the Summit Director [9] in collaboration with University, Buffalo Place, and City sponsorship. A broadly based steering committee was put in place and was charged to help define citizen visions for the future of the downtown, improve confidence in the public that the new administration cared enough to ask about this vision, to account for what it hears on a regular basis, and finally, to illustrate the degree of openness with which this administration chose to work. It was not clear at the beginning how this dialogue should be opened or what the exact form of the conversation should be. These decisions were part of opening the dialogic space.

<18> What finally emerged from this initial collaboration on downtown has been a city wide program now into its eighth year, involving (1) six large format public events on the development and implementation of the vision for downtown, and (2) eighteen events (two each in each of the nine political districts) on the problems, vision for, and priorities in the neighborhoods. Each of these events were designed with the participation of a wide range of stakeholders in dozens of additional meetings where the rules of engagement and accountability were openly discussed. Well over 8,000 people have participated in the public space which employed numerous small and large group formats, dozens of trained facilitators, all of the City Commissioners, and all of the City Council Representatives and a number of regional stakeholders.

<19> Downtown: The first downtown summit effort in October 1994 used twenty-five tables of ten to twelve people each with a trained facilitation team to brainstorm topics derived from a pre-event survey, elaborate on the specific visions they have for the topic, and to display the topic lists in categories on a forty foot x eight foot papered wall. Design and planning professionals as well as graduate students then worked on the first round of idea generation to provide possible images while a second round of small group discussions occurred. The event was televised throughout the city and broadcasted on the radio, where the audience was invited to call into phone banks. The initial follow-up event involved exhibits of materials related to the vision, progress on implementation, a videotape presentation on the results of the first event, and further discussion on the detailed requirements for success. A third event involved the unveiling of the resultant downtown vision and detailed opportunities to critique the vision from the perspectives of those assembled. A fourth downtown summit was conducted to further advance discussion with stakeholders in key areas and to further account for the way information was being used. From there the City commissioned a draft strategic plan for Downtown and put a three year implementation program in place that was designed to both vet the draft plan, implement the top priorities that emerged from the vetting, and to develop a final plan based on learning through the process of implementation. The final plan, The Queen City Hub: A Regional Action Plan for Downtown Buffalo was released in September of 2003 as part of a larger City comprehensive plan.

<20> Throughout this nine-year period, the city continued to invest in the emerging vision. It implemented the clear priorities from the summit discussions even as it continued planning. It was not a story about waiting for the plan, but rather a story of constructing the plan as it is implemented.

<21> Neighborhoods: The agenda for each neighborhood summit was negotiated between City, Council, and community based organizations in meetings facilitated by the University. Even so, each meeting agenda shifted slightly during the evening according to the energy in the rooms and the sense of those in attendance about what seemed most useful. In general, the neighborhood summits used large group brainstorming with multiple microphones, multiple recorders, and local “hosts” to get initial impressions of key issues and concerns. These topics (usually numbering between eighty and a hundred) were recorded on large pads of paper, analyzed during brief presentations by city representatives of current work related to City service delivery, and organized into categories for further discussion and prioritization by the large group. These same categories were used immediately after the events in newsletter reports on the meeting and again nine months later in the second round of summits to report on progress and to frame small group discussion groups around priority topics.

<22> The City concluded its two rounds of neighborhood summits with a clearly articulated set of priorities from the perspective of neighborhood participants, an extensive report on both what was said and what actions were underway by both citizen groups and city staff based on the discussion, and finally a published account of all of it was distributed city-wide in newspaper tabloid format. Follow-up work built on suggestions to more formally involve intermediate non-governmental organizations, neighborhood block clubs, business associations, and City Departments to sustain the level of involvement in thinking and acting on behalf of the neighborhoods.

Gradually this process led to institutionalizing the Good Neighbors Planning Alliance, a consortium of neighborhood leadership in the City to complement the Common Council and serve as the citizen base for the Queen City in the 21st Century: City of Buffalo Comprehensive Plan also issued in 2003 as a draft pending an environmental impact review.

<23> While there were several unforeseen consequences in the entire process, one in particular describes the critical power of the opening and sustaining of a space for dialogue about placemaking. The top priorities in both neighborhood and downtown summit events dealt with concerns about crime and housing. When this became understood clearly as a shared agenda between the advocates of downtown and the advocates of the neighborhoods, it became vastly easier, politically, to define relationships between the inner ring of neighborhoods and downtown revitalization. The interdependencies between what had been conflicted territory in budget wars between downtown and neighborhood development has led to substantial housing inspection, renovation, and infill work in the neighborhoods with attendant interests in security and housing in the downtown area. These activities are reciprocally supported by downtown advocates and neighborhood advocates as good for both.

<24> The model of the summit series has expanded to multiple other venues. Buffalo has employed a similar approach to open dialogue throughout the city in its convening of a “Government and the Churches Summit,” an “Education Summit,” a “Tree Summit,” and series of open forums on public choices related to casino gambling, the historic interpretation of the Western Gateway to the Erie Canal, sprawl, the potential for a new convention center downtown, and the planning and implementation for the entire expanse of the Buffalo waterfront [10]. The process of opening the dialogic space, confirming and interrogating primary positions through the presentation and discussion of contrasting positions, and the framing of accountable action by a broad cross section of people affected by the action agenda, is becoming a way of thinking about place and democracy in Buffalo [11].

Trash and Garbage

<25> The Community Action Information Center is a neighborhood organization in Buffalo, NY. This neighborhood is plagued by constant deterioration because of absentee landlords, lack of income to repair homes, few employment opportunities, crime, sporadic city services, and so on. The existence of such spaces within U. S. cities is common these days, resulting from years of disinvestment and the alternative construction of the privatized suburbs as the location of choice. In the face of these forces of disintegration, community leaders such as Rosa Gibson work with neighbors to make this place home for themselves and their children.

<26> One of the problems facing this community has been the existence of trash and garbage in the streets and on vacant lands. The problem comes both from within and without. Trash piles up in the yards of some people who simply don't care; absentee landlords do not keep up the houses and refuse to pay for the demolition of burned out buildings. But the primary source of trash is from the outside; people bring it into the neighborhood and furtively dump it on vacant lots. This dumping has increased as a result of stricter environmental laws on landfills and higher disposal costs. People have found places to dump their unwanted trash and garbage in places they deem "away" in order to avoid paying tipping fees. And this poor neighborhood on the east side of Buffalo has been a target of such illegal activity. The work of community building and maintenance by individuals and community groups has been largely invisible because the forces of disintegration have been beyond the powers of a local community to halt.

<27> When Schneekloth began working as both a community member and board adviser to the Community Action Information Center in 1993, the city was not being helpful in keeping the trash levels down; from their perspective, it seemed useless. They picked up the trash, and the next day, there was more. Further, there were structural and legal issues that prohibited a more active role; the city does not have the right to remove debris from private property and much of the dumping occurs on vacant private lands. Moreover, it is almost impossible to get dumpers fined, because the person must be caught in the act of dumping.

<28> In a series of community meetings, the public space for discussion, the neighborhood organization decided it was time to engage in an act of civil disobedience to draw attention to their problem. They had struggled with this problem for many years -- attempting different actions and trying to get support from the local government. This decision was not made lightly but only after significant confirming and interrogating of the options. The action they choose was based on their experience that the city would not pick up trash on private property. They decided that the only avenue left to them was to move the piles of trash onto public lands -- sidewalks and streets. This was a courageous decision to engage in an illegal act in support their community.

<29> The first exercise worked well; not only did the city pick up the trash, but the community group received press attention for this activity, bringing the plight of the neighborhood into the public discourse. The second time they moved waste from private to public lands, the police arrived and arrested three of the community activists: two eighty year old men who didn't hear the call to "scatter" and the neighborhood leader, Rosa Gibson. The three were charged with illegal dumping and fined $3000. For various reasons, the fine could not be waived and the community people where charged with “littering” although their activity was clearly an attempt to clean up their neighborhood.

<30> As an organization, we had to raise the $3000 to cover their fines. We developed a series of events to further publicize the problem of the neighborhood, and to enlarge the group of participants engaged in the dialogic space. First, we organized a "Trash March" where people from the neighborhood and concerned city residents took to the streets. We walked through the neighborhood with carts and wheelbarrows, loading trash and carrying signs such as "Don't dump on my home" and "I love my neighborhood." A band and members of the press accompanied this public walk. We carried all the trash to a prominent vacant lot and built a trash sculpture, enlisting the assistance of the children in the community.

<31> We also organized and held a dance, "The Trash Bash," where we raised the funds to pay the fine. The irony of the situation was not lost on local officials and the press was very attentive in publicizing the story. As a result of all these efforts, the neighborhood became the focus of a serious clean-up and there was a decreased in the amount of illegal dumping. Public officials were present at the Trash March and Trash Bash, and contributed to the fundraising effort. The community did not engage in any more illegal trash moving, but they did have a final word when they delivered the $3000 fine to City Hall in pennies, carting the money into the comptroller's office in trashcans.

<32> This series of placemaking activities was a turning point for this neighborhood and the Community Action Information Center. It demonstrated to them that through collective action that they could make changes in their neighborhood, and further, that their voices could be heard at the level of city government. They have become an active player in the city, are vocal neighborhood and city-wide affairs, and are much more successful in bringing resources into their community. For example, the year following the Trash Bash, they requested and were granted the title to one of the city-owned dilapidated houses in the neighborhood to use as a community center along with funds to assist in the rehab. Community people did almost all the work. Through this effort, they began the transformation of one of the streets in the neighborhood because others started to fix up their houses as well. They received permission to clean-up and use a series of large vacant lots across from their new center as a public space and community garden.

<33> The Community Action Information Center is an active participant in the City’s Good Neighbors Planning Alliance, acting both within and without power structures strategically, depending on the goal of each action. They opposed the city when it proposed a new garbage fee to help cover the costs of trash removal, citing that it is a regressive tax and hurts those with few resources the most; on other issues, they work with city officials to improve their neighborhood. Both physically and socially, the Community Action Information Center has entered the public space of the city of Buffalo and begun to be a real player in the democratic practice of the city. And it began with their concerted efforts to transform their neighborhood into a place they could love and feel safe in -- a good place to live and raise their children.

Summary

<34> Democratic governments and bureaucracies are in need of reform; they are impersonal, inefficient, inaccessible and increasingly repressive. But the solution is not to remove their responsibilities from the public sphere. It could be argued that the opposite should be occurring -- more and more spaces, including the economic domain -- should be democratized and more localized, and that the reform should move toward more democracy rather than privatization [12]. Instead of privatizing the schools, we should be struggling to make them sites for democracy; instead of privatizing public services, we should be finding ways to open the processes and services to the influences of a larger community of people.

<35> Privatization can only mean less control is vested in public discourse and more is relegated to the demands of profit. As more and more public spheres evaporate, where do people acquire the skills of civic action: of having a good conversation, of understanding the views of others, of negotiating and mediating conflict, of finding communal rather than individual solutions, of learning from each other and together constructing our lives and our places? [13]

<36> More centrally, where do people come to understand that the popular “anti-government” rhetoric and the process of privatization is not at all about less government, but rather it is about a government even more aggressive in the protections of private (not public) prerogatives. It substitutes real people in accountable governance positions for abstractions like the free market and good business practices, rendering communication and democratic action virtually impossible. How does one have a real conversation with a “market” or a “good business practice”? In short, if the anti-government rhetoric is motivated by individuals seeking more control over their lives, and privatization is the response, then the results created by such a world will have the opposite effect except for the few who wield the power. Most people in a privatized world will be even more powerless to take collective action on their own behalf and individual action will be rendered meaningless except as a consumer. The less government rhetoric reflects a serious confusion between democracy as a political structure for governance and capitalism as an economic structure for the production and transfer of goods. The boundary between democracy and capitalism has shifted constantly in the over 200 year history of this country, always with the necessity of public action to control the excesses of capital when it significantly worked against the public good.

<37> In addition to the critique of privatization, we also argue that those in responsible positions of leadership ought to be working to build civil society, local capacity and self-reliance, creating a sense of competence, hope, and responsibility for collective decisions instead of instilling fear and a sense of helplessness. We have heard it argued at the highest levels that the United States wishes to export democracy into areas of the world like the Middle East, where it has not been a tradition. One cannot argue against this sentiment. However, there are two flaws in such good intentions. First, we have a responsibility to see that democracy is working at home, and as Forester states, this is a “precarious achievement... not a natural fact.” The structures that support democracy must be nurtured and people’s experience of civil society facilitated. Secondly, to “impose” democracy is not a democratic act -- in spite of good intentions.

<38> We have argued that placemaking is a powerful place in which to engage in democratic action because people continue to make and unmake their world daily. If this space is conceived as a sphere for the practice of democracy, it provides a space for the public to reconstitute itself as an active social agent of the common good rather than the passive recipient of goods and services created by a market economy.

<39> Placemaking as a democratic practice puts those of us concerned with people and places into the center of public action if we reconceive of our professional and civic work as something in addition to the offering of discrete professional and technical services. It frees professional designers and planners, community leaders and others from their dependency on the dominant social powers and encourages democratic practice even in institutional and corporate organizational settings [14]. This work is accomplished through the careful construction of safe public spaces for dialogue, through the activities of confirming and interrogating within relationship, and working together to structure interventions through selective action framing. And as we conclude specific activities of making places such as the construction of a new community center or tree planting or clean ups or regulatory changes, we find that those who have made the place with us retain the capacity to continue their placemaking work in relation with each other and to the place as always becoming.

<40> Some will argue that there is no “safe” public space for dialogue in the face of power and dominant social force. However, a transformation of the nature of the work of professionals, changes in expectations by the body politic, and an affirmation of public trust and related protections in a democratic culture can improve the safety of public dialogue, and help to equalize the power dynamics. Placemaking as a democratic practice, however, will always be a struggle, will never be completely safe, and does require courage.

<41> The practice of democracy as we have described it is almost always empowering and transformative. It is an act of resistance against the feelings and reality of increasing powerlessness in the face of a corporately run/government supported and privatized world in which we find ourselves, and a process that will free that same world from the pitfalls and ultimate calamity of an uncritical acceptance of that life. Our experience with the placemaking process described in this brief paper and the experience reported by other participants has been personally and professionally transformative. Warren suggests that:

. . . were individuals more broadly empowered, especially in the institutions that have most impact on their everyday lives (workspaces, schools, local governments, etc), their experiences would have transformative effects: they would become more public spirited, more tolerant, more knowledgeable, more attentive to the interests of others, and more probing of their own interests (Warren 8).

What Warren is arguing is that the practice of democracy not only changes society, it is individually transformative. In other words, if people are given the opportunity to practice democracy, they will learn from that experience how to engage in the civil society. Our contribution to this conversation is our experience and belief that placemaking -- the making and unmaking of the places in which we live our daily lives -- is an important space for the practice of democracy. The activities we engage while making our places gives voice and transforms the world and our place in it as is demonstrated by the neighborhood organization and summit planning processes in Buffalo. We have found that people will engage, indeed are already engaged, in a sustained struggle to be the subjects of their own histories, their own communities, and their own places. As placemakers, we can participate in that project and can even foster it while we work together with people we come to care about to make places we can love.

Notes

[1] An earlier version of this paper was presented at Congresos Mundiales: Convergencia en Conocimiento, Espacio y Tiempo. Cartegena, Columbia, June 1-6, 1997. [^]

[2] We are using the language of dwelling as embodying the idea of people-in-place. See Heidegger. [^]

[3] This critique of privatization is not to suggest that all efforts to move certain functions from the public to the private sector should be resisted. Clearly some services are better delivered by the private sector. But the motivation should be grounded in the democratic project and the system of private action needs public accountability. [^]

[4] See Rifkin for a discussion of what he calls the third sector of society (the civic society) and the emergent “Civicus” international organization intending to further promote democratic and moral authority through intermediate organizations. In our vocabulary, most of these intermediate organizations are formed to facilitate placemaking at several levels. [^]

[5] See Schneekloth and Shibley (2000) for their critique of expert cultures in architecture and an alternative structure for practice that would implace architecture in a larger practice of placemaking. [^]

[6] See the body of work promulgated by the Bruner Foundation on the Rudy Burner Award for Urban Excellence for an illustration of over 40 case histories of placemaking including commentary by an expert selection committee, site visit teams of researchers, and self report surveys by participants in the projects at http://ww.brunerfoundation.org and the Bruner Archives at the University at Buffalo’s Lockwood Library http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/lml/ [^]

[7] See J. Forester (1989) for a cogent discussion about the need to create safe places for the expression of emotions, and even traumatic memories, within a public forum. [^]

[8] We have argued for multiple knowledges in Schneekloth and Shibley (Placemaking 198):

The postmodern condition of relativity is helping to resituate the practice of placemaking. The social construction of knowledge and place removes them both from the private realm and relocates them in a public and relational practice, a dialogue. People in places and professional placemakers can “legitimately” construct social and place-relevant knowledge to enable and empower communal action. The work of confirmation and interrogation contributes to this activity because it affirms each person’s interpretation of the world within his or her own experience, while at the same time questioning that knowledge in relation to the experiences of others and the work at hand. From this conversation emerges situated knowledges, informed action, and insights that contribute to the continual construction of generalized knowledge about how places are made.

[^]

[9] Shibley is a professor of architecture and planning at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, where he directs the Urban Design Project in the School of Architecture and Planning. The University role as “fair witness” and facilitator of the proceedings was an important part of helping restore trust between the people and its government. Our efforts to facilitate and account for discussion without bias toward either city official or neighborhood advocate helped to sustain a more open dialogue where all parties might have some confidence they would have voice in the dialogic space created. [^]

[10] See a series of publications on the work on line at http://www.urbandesignproject.org [^]

[11] See Shibley and Hovey, Experiments in Democracy: The Buffalo Summit Series. [^]

[12] See Rifkin for a particularly cogent argument about the self-defeating efficiencies of the current market economy. [^]

[13] Here we do not intend to construct false choices between that which is best addressed by individuals in the conduct of their lives and that which is best addressed communally. Instead we posit that even the utilitarian position that the greatest good for the greatest number requires some conversation about when a given action is best left to an individual or private interest and when it should be a topic of public conversation. The question is about where one joins this democratic discussion in the conduct of daily life or as Dewey says, “The outstanding problem of the Public is the discovery and identification of itself” (185). [^]

[14] See Schneekloth and Shibley, Placemaking for a case study on the work of democratization in a large banking institute. [^]

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