An Experience-Based Planning Framework for Future Civic Leaders: Interweaving a Braided Rope of Democratic Theory

Abstract

Building on the lessons of the considerable successes of post-9/11 civic renewal leaders outlined in the previous chapters, I will now turn to developing a theoretical model that future elected officials, civic leaders, urban planners, sociologists, and interested citizens can use as a map through the steps for a successful democratic planning effort, including a braided theoretical rope of democratic theory to guide these future efforts. As I have argued throughout this book, the post-9/11 civic leaders’ shared professional ethos was guided by their belief in understanding of, and experience with participatory democracy as their goals and motivation for developing venues for effective citizen participation in collaborative visioning efforts that aimed to influence key decision makers in the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan after 9/11. However, just providing opportunities for citizen participation is not enough to either really influence the direction of a large-scale civic project or to create a lasting social movement. The time process of guiding an inclusively democratic civic renewal movement from the first stage of organizing through experience and fact-sharing, teaching participants the process to work together as collaborators, deriving a feasible and desirable future vision with public and private decision makers through a process of implementation, and institutionalizing their participatory role in major decisions in the future is long and complex.

The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we can not unify them completely in our minds … it is easy to see the world’s history pluralistically, as a rope of which each fiber tells a separate tale; but to conceive of each cross-section of the rope as an absolutely single fact, and to sum the whole longitudinal series into one being living an undivided life is harder … the great world’s ingredients, so far as they are beings, seem, like the rope’s fibers, to be discontinuous, cross-wise, and to cohere only in the longitudinal direction … the world is unified by its many systems, kinds, purposes, and dramas.

—William James, “The One and the Many,” Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)¹

We need to develop a model of democratic societies that pays more attention to shared feelings and symbolic commitments, to what and how people speak, think, and feel about politics and, more generally, about democratic social life. We need a theory, in other words, that is less myopically centered on social structure and power distribution, and more responsive to the ideas that people have in their heads and to what Tocqueville called habits of their hearts.

—Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (2006)