Introduction: Resilience or Resistance?

Abstract

Many traditional methods of community engagement are useless to vulnerable communities. They attract outspoken residents who rarely represent greater neighborhood interests, and they reduce decision-making power to a series of sticky-dot votes instead of privileging the substantive power of collective conversation. Residents in lower-income neighborhoods often do not trust they will be heard by municipalities or speculative developers in a town hall setting because the meeting experience often includes imbalanced power dynamics, inconvenient locations, unclear marketing, and culturally inappropriate agendas; thus many residents do not see these meetings as the best use of their time. Low levels of participation and low-quality feedback absolve designers and planners of seriously considering any community input. The result is irrelevant public infrastructure at best, and resident displacement at worst. And yet, these presentation-heavy meetings remain one of the most common methods used to involve residents in the process of improving their neighborhoods.

“Inclusion” doesn’t undo existing injustices. In particular, viewing place as “common denominator” runs the risk of erasing major differences in the ways people experience place and public spaces. In the United States, these major differences cleave along racial and class lines....Persistent inequalities and decades of discrimination mean a code of ethics isn’t going to cut it. We need an actual politics of placemaking.

—Annette Koh, Urban Planning Researcher