Description
Reflection essays should integrate readings and class discussions. You may choose one of the following prompts for your essay.What are obstacles to “community development”?Do you think it is easier to do development in rural or urban communities?Who should determine if a neighborhood needs to be developed or redeveloped? And why?Should we invest in people rather than places?Reflection essays should be three pages in length (approx. 900 words), typed in Times New Roman, size 12, double-spaced. Outside sources are okay to utilize but please also utilize the one provided.
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Action Strategies for
Community Development
In politics one hears “where you stand,
depends on where you sit.” The same can
be said about strategies for neighborhood
development. The answers to fundamental
questions like: “Where do we start?”,
“What do we want to achieve?” and “How
do we get there?”, will be much different
depending upon where one is “sitting” in the
community development process.
Our starting point is the neighborhood
organization – and that makes all the
difference in building strong communities.
While the perspective of the book is
neighborhood residents and organizations,
the approach is to create critical
partnerships among the many individuals
dedicated to community development.
These include
• neighborhood residents
• volunteers and paid staff of community
organizations like neighborhood
groups, local churches, and Community
Development Corporations
• employees of area or region-wide
community development organizations
like the local affordable housing builders
and the Enterprise Foundation
• the staff members of school districts,
city planning offices, social service
agencies, health care providers,
economic development organizations,
and other similar groups.
Many people working together are
necessary based on a critical appreciation
of the importance of neighborhood
organizations and local residents.
The stepping off point comes from the
inspiring efforts of a low income community
in Boston called the Dudley Street
Neighborhood. Their story is in a book titled
Streets of Hope. After many years of work,
Dudley Street residents said their strongest
tools were: “the concept of the master plan
and the action of aggressive community
organizing.” (Medoff & Sklar, p.265)
This chapter will cover why this is so and
what it means in terms of neighborhood
planning.
What Is Covered In This Chapter?
The following topics will be addressed
below:
• Lessons from a short history of
neighborhood planning.
• A definition of “social capital” and why
social capital is of critical importance to
neighborhoods.
• Values that underlie community
development work.
• Three different planning models for
community development: Rational
Planning, Assets Based Community
Development, and Community
Organizing. We will talk about what
they are, how they work, and in which
situations they are used.
• Some long-term guidelines for
neighborhood development activity.
• Roles of planners and roles of
organizers.
Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative
The needed critical partnership for
community development involves
convergence of the work of many,
coming together from neighborhood
homes, businesses and churches; local
school rooms and offices, government
agencies; banks and developers’ offices;
and many others. This coming together
requires an unwavering dedication to
neighborhood improvement, social capital,
1
and empowerment. It also requires
an understanding and sympathy for
the bureaucratic requirements of job
descriptions, demands, and hierarchies. It
means creatively engaging the programs of
large organizations like local governments
and school systems that reach out to
communities, such as Community Oriented
Policing and Community Schools.
acre, about 30% greater than in Bombay,
India at the time. Tenements often were
poorly built and dangerous. By 1900, more
than two-thirds of New Yorkers (2.4 million
individuals) were living in tenements as
defined by law. (Ford, pp. 84, 187, 202)
The approach is about openness,
communication, creativity, empathy,
patience, and flexibility. It is always with
one’s eyes on the prize of safe, enjoyable,
and well-functioning neighborhoods.
A Short History of Planning, or
“What Is Past Is Prologue”
The field of urban planning began as
neighborhood planning and had its roots in
the teeming tenement districts of New York
in the 19th Century. The city was a sleepy,
mostly rural place in 1800 with only 60,000
residents. As New York changed from a
merchant and finance center to an industrial
one, it expanded rapidly. There were once
farms and cottages in the upper part of
Manhattan. By 1860, the population grew
to 814,000 and the city entered the 20th
century with 1,850,000 residents. (Ford,
Slums & Housing, pp. 72-79, 140)
Confronted by this rising tide of humanity,
property owners greedy for quick wealth
prevailed on the New York Commission to
subdivide the city into a grid block system
of 25’ x 100’ lots. This was the most
flexible and marketable subdivision of land
(“the most cheap to build”) and few sites
were left for public facilities. Into this
dense grid were built the housing tenement
buildings – often two buildings to a lot, each
rising four to seven stories. One floor of
the tenement typically contained four small
apartments with two rooms (sometimes 12’
x 10’ and 10’ x 6’ in size). Each room might
contain as many as six persons. Owners
were dividing the living spaces into the
smallest area capable of holding human life.
By 1890, one section of New York had an
average density of nearly 1,000 persons per
Lower East Side of Manhattan
Compounding the press of sheer numbers
was the virtual absence of sanitary sewer
and water facilities. Privies were located
in tenement basements and in small open
areas between buildings on the small lots.
By the close of the century, the City was
described as “one elongated cesspool.”
Regular epidemics of typhus, typhoid,
yellow fever, cholera, dysentery, and
smallpox broke out. (Ford, p. 130)
In the midst of this squalor, urban planning
emerged from the activities of the
Settlement House workers. The first U.S.
Settlement House was University Settlement
established by Stanton Coit in 1886 in the
Lower East Side of Manhattan. The first
Settlement workers were from the middle
or wealthier classes, inspired by religious
tenets of service, and lived among the
people whose lives they worked to improve.
(Coit in Pacey, Readings in the Development
of Settlement Work)
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Their goals and circumstances in these
neighborhoods drew them into a wide range
of community improvement efforts. (Lurie,
Encyclopedia of Social Work, p. 690) These
included:
• availability of regular education,
kindergarten, pre-school, and afterschool programs;
• recreation, parks and playgrounds;
• sanitation, potable water, and garbage
collection;
• libraries;
• public safety;
• legal aid;
• social services for the elderly, homeless,
and the disabled;
• health care;
• job training; and, above all,
• housing reform.
The settlement house workers focused on
the neighborhood as a whole, attempting
to create a “harmonious whole” by
strengthening the family and residents
working cooperatively to eliminate local
problems. In the course of their work, many
Settlement workers recruited and trained
local leaders. (Alden in Pacey, p. 56)
Tammany Hall politicians had their hands
in the profits of the tenements. They
controlled the Department of Buildings,
appointment of judges, real estate
transactions, and public works projects.
While they garnered the political support of
tenement residents through small favors,
the reformers of the era knew that these
politicians “sell out their own people” and
“cause the troubles they relieve.” (Steffens,
Shame of the Cities, pp. 211-212)
Housing reformers focused on the obvious
need for effective, government regulations.
Scores of studies between 1800 and 1900
by State legislative committees, mayor’s
committees, charitable and religious
organizations, professional associations, and
other governmental agencies underscored
the abhorrent tenement conditions.
Tenement Housing laws were drafted in
1867, 1879, 1887, and 1895, but even
when adopted they did little more than
prevent conditions from worsening. “Model
tenements” projects were built by reformers
but had little impact on over-all conditions
because a handful of good dwelling were
built while tens of thousands of slum units
were raised. (Ford, p. 202) Some of the
commentaries seemed to place blame on
immigrants for their condition: “congregated
armies of foreigners …. They bring with
them destitution, misery, and too often
disease.” (DeForest & Veiller, The Tenement
Housing Problem, p. 72)
It was not until an effective political
force coalesced between 1884 and 1901,
uniting the housing reformers, Settlement
House workers, social service groups,
community and religious leaders, that
progress was made. Jacob Riis had written
local newspaper articles about the plight
of tenement residents for 20 years,
culminating in the book How the Other
Half Lives (1890). A series of widely
publicized public meetings were organized
by the Tenement Housing Committee
in 1900 attended by more than 10,000
people. After 15 years of effort to educate
the public, the housing reform movement
in New York gathered enough strength
to break through the obstructions of
politicians, bureaucrats, and tenement
owners and enact the first truly effective
set of regulations, the Housing Reform Act
of 1901. (DeForest & Veiller, pp. 110-115,
Ford, pp. 123-124)
The description of inhumane conditions
and a sound program for improvement
were finally joined with a moral and ethical
position and effective political organizing
to overcome economically and politically
entrenched interests. Nearly 100 years of
facts and moral suasion had been ineffective
absent an organized political force.
Virtually all the leaders in the housing
reform movement had Settlement House
backgrounds. These workers understood
that it was not “contrivances [schemes,
technological or otherwise] but persons”
who will save society. (MacMahon in Pacey,
p. 108)
The preceding section described the
broad scope of the Settlement House
workers’ activity. Their methodology very
nearly defines neighborhood planning
3
for community development today. The
approach “looks for results . . . to the
neighborhood as a whole. Its first business
is to survey its field, to find out what
needs to be done. Then it seeks to make
contacts—to get in touch with all the
elements that go to make up the social
life of the neighborhood, to organize and
correlate the neighborhood forces for good,
that conditions may be improved for all.”
(White in Pacey, p. 92)
In 1909, Benjamin Marsh, the former
leader of the Committee on Congestion of
Population in New York, published one of
the first planning texts, An Introduction
to City Planning. The book strongly
emphasized the need for a community plan
and government regulation to achieve the
plan’s objectives. (Marsh, An Introduction
to City Planning, New York: Committee on
Congestion, 1909)
primarily by leaders of the Settlement
House movement. At its modern
emergence in the U.S., planning was
equated with neighborhood planning and
addressed a wide range of issues including
schools, housing reform, public health,
transportation, expansion of parks and
recreation, and more effective public
services. (Proceedings of the First National
Conference on City Planning, 1909) Over
time, this comprehensive approach
became more and more fragmented into
hundreds of specialties in land use planning,
architecture, social services, housing,
economic development, and so on. The
approach here of neighborhood planning
for community development strategically
pulls together these threads within the
boundaries of the neighborhood and
reclaims what was lost nearly 100 years
ago.
There is a strong line of connection
between the Settlement workers active
toward the end of the 19th century and
the Dudley Street activists in Boston nearly
100 years later. It always has been “the
concept of the master plan and the action
of aggressive community organizing” that
made the difference.
Social Capital: What It Is and Why
It Is Important.
We are all aware of financial capital
– wages, wealth, property. But we seldom
think of something that is more important
than financial capital – the concept of “social
capital.” Social capital is more important
to neighborhoods than financial capital,
physical capital, and even human capital,
and this section discusses why.
Marsh, An Introduction to City Planning
The first National Conference on City
Planning, also held in 1909, was organized
A visitor to the United States in its early
years, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed that a
key quality of our country was the tendency
of people in communities here to get
together to solve common problems. This
action is what we have come to mean by
social capital. (de Tocqueville, Democracy
in America)
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Social capital is:
• Located in neighborhood places.
• A broad and dense network of personal
relationships based on families,
friendships, and acquaintances.
• A large number of formal and informal
associations and neighborhood
institutions.
• Rooted in family life.
• A high level of involvement in
community life.
• Community norms of behavior and
values.
• Feelings of trust among neighborhood
residents.
• A process of communicating acceptable
behavior and values, monitoring actions,
and taking action when the norms are
violated.
• A shared belief in the neighborhood’s
capacity to organize itself to take action
in relation to needs.
• Connections among neighborhood
businesses, churches, schools, and
organizations.
• Linkages to extra-neighborhood assets
such as teachers, business owners,
bankers, elected officials, social service
officials, police, court officials, and
religious leaders.
• Effective neighborhood action. (See
esp. Sampson in Ferguson & Dickens,
pp. 253-265)
Social capital is no more complicated than
the ordinary actions of neighbors to know
one another, help each other, and work to
improve the neighborhood.
It all seems obvious, but the vast array
of governmental officials, bureaucrats,
business and development leaders, and
school administrators and teachers often
act, either consciously or not, to marginalize
neighborhood residents’ ability to improve
their own communities.
The following sections illustrate ways that
social capital has been found to improve
neighborhoods and people’s lives, as well as
how its absence frequently has disastrous
consequences.
Public Safety
People studying crime and public safety
have different views about its causes.
Some believe that high rates of crime
and fear are based on the break-down
of primary institutions (family, church,
kinship, neighborhood) and social bonds.
Others think that crime and disorder is
based on differing values of certain people
(“subcultures”, e.g. gangs). This is related
to the concept of a “culture of poverty.”
(Lewis, Working Papers, pp. 3-11) (Recent
studies found, however, that lower income
African-Americans and Latinos in high crime
areas actually are less tolerant of crime and
deviance than Whites.) (Sampson, p. 254)
Some studies linked crime, delinquency, and
disorder with poverty, high mobility, singleparent households, divorce, race, domestic
violence, immigration, and neighborhood
diversity. These do not look beyond the
simple associations to understand the
ways by which these conditions have led to
problems.
When other studies look at how social
capital affects crime and disorder, they
found something very interesting. In
neighborhoods with characteristics
apparently related to public safety
problems (e.g. low incomes, single-parent
households, high immigration, etc.), but
high social capital, the connection was
greatly reduced or disappeared. (Sampson,
pp. 259-261) In other words, social capital
intervened in and reduced the connection
between a number of social and economic
problems and crime, delinquency and
disorder. An important key for action was
found.
This perspective also points to something
else: that crime and fear of crime reduce
social capital by making people fearful,
isolating them in their houses, causing them
to be distrustful of one another, and making
it more difficult to work together.
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stereotypes of low-income people especially,
fueling their sense of powerlessness and
frustration. In such schools, neighborhood
social capital is actually broken down.
Social Capital and Public Safety
This view provides the foundation for
Community Oriented Policing (COPs) and
other techniques to forge partnerships
between neighborhood residents and the
police in insuring safety. These partnerships
attempt to build and strengthen
neighborhood social capital. (Trojanowicz
& Bucqueroux, Community Policing: How to
Get Started and Skogan, On the Beat)
Studies of the relationship between
community involvement and student
success show that many schools are missing
important opportunities for success. Anne
Henderson has been publicizing this linkage
for more than 20 years. (Henderson, A New
Wave of Evidence, 2002) Her work shows
that parental involvement in education has
positive outcomes on student achievement.
Involvement has been shown to improve
attendance, discipline, achievement, selfesteem, graduation and continuation to
postsecondary education, and reduce
parent-staff conflict. When schools address
the needs of students in a family context,
students also do better in school
Schools
Over time education has been increasingly
professionalized (teachers are service
providers, and students and parents are
passive clients). Responsibility has been
delegated by parents and communities
to educators, resulting in standardization
of what is learned, and separation of
schools (physically and socially) from
neighborhoods.
Sixty years ago, a perceptive teacher noted:
“Many schools are like little islands set apart
from the mainland of life by a deep moat of
convention and tradition.” (Carr in Minzey &
LeTarte, Reforming Public Schools, p. 63)
In many schools, low achievement,
disorder, and high failure rates are the
norm. The parents and residents of
these neighborhoods are seen by some
teachers and school administrators as
lacking assets and motivation, perhaps
even as threatening to the schools and the
students. Schools are kept in isolation from
the community. This reinforces negative
Henderson’s work also shows that the more
parents are involved in schools, the more
they attempt to improve other community
conditions, also enhancing student
achievement. Her work underscores the
importance of social capital in improving the
lives of students, parents, and communities.
In the world of education, this partnership
has been called “Community Education.”
Community Education is the concept of
service to the entire neighborhood by
providing for all the educational needs of
all its members. Local schools serve as the
catalyst for engaging community resources
to address community problems. (Minzey &
LeTarte, pp. 52-59)
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The Texas Communities Organized for
Public Services (COPS) found that “the
most common strategies for accumulating
social capital did not develop within the . .
. schools but rather in . . . neighborhoods.”
(Shirley, Community Organizing for Urban
School Reform, p. 253)
Human Services
The same story can be told about the
professionalization of human services.
Settlement House workers, now claimed
as their own by the social work field, were
active in the late 19th Century when little
distinction was made between the physical
and the human condition of neighborhoods.
Afterwards, community service became
institutionalized in federal, state, and
local agencies especially during the
Great Depression. As early as 1922, one
Settlement worker wrote: “when the idea
[service program], explored and developed .
. . by individuals, has made good, the State
comes along, appropriates it, and makes it
part of its own machine. Voluntary effort
has . . . triumphed all along the line when
it finds itself extinguished by the State.”
(Carruthers in Pacey, p. 151)
Over time, humans became categorized
and translated into an almost bewildering
number of needs. Helping one another
became a job. Neighbors were reduced
to “statistics” and categorized as clients.
Social services now are fragmented, crisis
oriented, suffering from insufficient funding,
and their effectiveness is frequently
questioned. John McKnight, one of the
leaders in social change, wrote: “The power
to label people deficient and declare them
in need is the basic tool of . . . oppression.”
(McKnight, p. 16)
Just as in the fields of public safety and
education, those in human services began
to realize the importance of social capital
and to see people as part of place-based
communities. Studies showed that family,
friends, and neighbors were the primary
sources for those seeking and receiving
help. (Froland, etc., Helping Networks,
p. 17) These “informal care-givers” were
found to be as helpful, or more helpful, than
professionals. Informal helping is voluntary,
spontaneous, based on the individual,
sensitive to personal preferences, flexible,
based on self-reliance, reciprocal, and
simply perceived as part of every day life.
(Froland, pp. 21-26, 35)
The most effective informal helping occurred
in social networks that featured:
• diversity,
• quality,
• interconnectedness,
• formal and informal organizations
• supportive, communicated, and enforced
traditions, norms of behavior, attitudes,
and
• neighborhood stability. (Froland, pp. 4041, 137-149)
A distinct approach to human service
work grew up around informal helping
networks and what are called “ecosystem”
approaches. (Meyer & Mattaini, in Mattaini,
7
The Foundations of Social Work Practice,
1999, pp. 3-19) The more traditional goals
of individual and family well being were
expanded to community development.
The main task for human service workers
became to identify and foster community
helping networks, working with them,
supporting and strengthening them.
Kretzman and McKnight take a different
approach that arrives at this place from a
different starting point – the neighborhood.
Their Assets Based Community
Development (ABCD) approach started
with community residents, identifying their
individual and organizational resources, and
building from there. This method is covered
below in this chapter and in the chapter on
neighborhood based human services.
In all, the U.S. workforce has become more
polarized by income and resources. Jobs
with the greatest growth in total numbers
are those paid the lowest wages and
with the least claim to benefits – service
workers, retail sales, cashiers, clerks,
janitors and cleaning people, nursing aides,
food counter workers. (Florida, The Rise of
the Creative Class, p. 71)
Economic Development
The United States went through a massive
economic restructuring starting in about
1970. While more than 40% of all jobs
at the start of the 1970s were lost during
that decade, the economy grew from
about 70 million jobs to 90 million in the
same period. (USDOL, Office of Secy, The
“New Economy”, http://www.dol.gov/asp/
programs/flsa/report-neweconomy) Older
cities like Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia,
and St. Louis lost more than half of their
manufacturing jobs during the past three
decades and employment shifted from cities
to suburbs.
Incomes of the bottom 1/5th of households
have fallen while those of the top 1/5th
have increased rapidly. The wages of nonsupervisory workers dropped nearly 20%
between from 1970 to 1990. (“Spiraling
Down: The Decline of Real Wages”, Dollars
and Sense, April 1992) The percentage
of year-round workers paid low wages
increased by 50%, to nearly 20% of all
workers, just from 1979 to 1990. The
percentage of families with children in
poverty increased by more than 30% during
this period. (US Bureau of the Census,
“Workers with Low Wages: 1964 to 1990”,
1992; US Bureau of the Census, “Trends
in Relative Income: 1964 to 1989”, 1991;
Medoff & Sklar, p. 192)
The “Creative Class” of high-tech workers,
business managers, financiers, engineers,
lawyers, analysts, designers and so on, has
doubled in size and has prospered. (Florida,
pp. 68-70, 72-77)
In the course of the massive social
dislocation produced by economic change,
social capital has been pulled apart,
left in shambles in many low income
neighborhoods, and sometimes rebuilt in
other places.
In this context, some economists have
concluded that by asking people “to
consider the economic landscape from
a social perspective, new appreciation
of market power and opportunities . . .
emerge.” (Gittell & Thompson, in Saegert,
etc., Social Capital and Poor Communities,
p. 120)
Social capital can been found to foster
neighborhood economic development in
many ways. These include:
• securing financing;
• hiring, retaining, and training good
employees;
• identifying markets;
• finding suitable and affordable facilities;
• obtaining technical assistance related
to accounting, business law, analysis,
marketing, and management; and
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•
gaining support from local government
including public safety, city services,
and infrastructure. (Gittel & Thompson
in Saegert, pp. 115-135; Dickens in
Ferguson and Dickens, esp. pp. 404423)
articulates how planners and other agency
staff members may help neighborhood
efforts.
By the last tally, there were more
than 3,000 Community Development
Corporations (CDC) in the U.S. (Natl. Cong.
For Com Ec. Dev., Coming of Age, 1999)
These organizations are producing houses
and jobs and providing social services in
an evolving comprehensive approach to
neighborhood development. CDCs provide
good examples of how social capital can be
drawn upon and built up by neighborhood
economic development activities.
Personal values and the community’s
vision are the bedrock upon which all
neighborhood development is built, guiding
strategies and programs. They are the
fundamental litmus test against which
actions should be reviewed.
In summary, social capital has been found to:
• create and sustain neighborhood public
safety,
• foster educational success,
• meet human service needs, and
• foster economic development.
Neighborhood planning focused on
building social capital shows how these
efforts can be pulled together in a place;
provides a foundation for neighborhood
planning by identifying the starting
point of community development;
illuminates how neighborhoods can make
thoughtful decisions about approaching
community development; describes where
neighborhoods begin these efforts; and how
Back to Basics: Values and Vision
Without leadership that embodies personal
values that are consistent with community
development, programs are destined to
lose their way. What are these values? An
all-inclusive list is not possible, but these
values that are shared by different religious
communities – Muslim, Christian, Jew,
Hindu, Buddhist. They are held by people
who do not have theistic convictions such
as those in the Society for Ethical Culture.
Quite simply, they include humility, love,
service (good works), selflessness, respect
for community, reverence for life, and
include living one’s life according to these
principles.
Contemporary community development is
rooted in scriptural values. Notably, these
include the Interfaith coalitions supported
by Industrial Areas Foundation and Gamelial
Foundation organizers. Base Ecclesial
Community (BEC) organizing is mostly seen
in Latin America but is being used in Latino
neighborhoods in the U.S. presently. (Hanna
and Robinson, pp. 172-177)
The second critical foundation of community
development is long term vision for the
future. A vision statement is a description
of what the community will be like in the
long-term (such as 20 to 25 years), when
the community has been successful in its
efforts. The vision is comprehensive in
scope and covers topics such as young
people’s lives, education, housing, people
who are challenged by drug and alcohol
dependency, senior citizens, and so on.
Each of the parts should be a clear and
compelling expression of the community’s
love and respect for one another and its
9
hopes for the future. As a whole, it is a
shining expression of faith and a compass
that directs activities.
The Means of Community
Development
Our values and vision guide us forward.
The end product of what should be created,
supported, expanded is neighborhood social
capital. The examples above related to
Public Safety, Education, Human Services,
and Economic Development all point to the
critical importance of good social capital to
community development.
This effort is not so simple, because
underlying all the efforts to improve
schools, build affordable housing, provide
alternatives to gangs and drugs for young
people, and so on, is the matter of power.
Individuals, groups, and agencies that share
the same objectives often fight over who
has the authority to undertake the work.
Social capital is power and it should reside,
in large measure, within the neighborhood.
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Three Paths of Action
The approaches to improving the
neighborhood can be reduced to the
following approaches:
• Rationale Planning,
• Asset Based Community Development
(ABCD), and
• Community Organizing.
The table below summarizes the key
differences among these.
Assets Based Community Development,
in contrast, emphasizes mobilizing local
resources to improve the community,
carrying out this work locally.
Community Organizing takes a different
approach: the process is controlled within the
neighborhood, but it is focused on bringing
external resources to bear on community
problems.
Community organizations and planners
should be familiar with all of these
approaches. Each can be, and should be,
used depending on the circumstances, as
will be addressed below. Let’s move now to
a review of each community development
approaches: their natures, assumptions,
strengths and shortcomings.
Rational Planning, by and large, assumes
that external resources will be used to
improve the community and control over
the process and programs is outside the
neighborhood.
11
Rational Planning Model
Rational planning is the de-facto standard
for government agencies. The uses to
which this approach is applied are quite
large. All the following types of plans use
the basic elements of Rational Planning and
share many of the underlying assumptions:
• neighborhood,
• comprehensive,
• corridor and center,
• transportation,
• human service,
• housing,
• educational plans and so on.
“Couldn’t people
see what he
had done? Why
weren’t they
grateful?”
Caro on Robert
Moses in The
Power Broker
Modifications of the Rational Planning model
to address some of its shortcomings are
called “equity” planning and “consensus
building”, also discussed below.
It is unfortunate that this approach is called
“rational” or “scientific” planning because
it implies that those who disagree with
its outcomes are irrational or unscientific.
Rational findings and recommendations can
be quite different, for example, for rental
property owners and for their tenants.
There are several potential biases inherent
in Rational Planning that must be addressed
for it to achieve legitimacy. In the most
basic way, the plan process assumes
that everyone affected by the plan, the
“stakeholders” brought into the planning
process, are equally equipped in the tools
of “rational” analysis: verbal expression,
literacy, facility using socio-economic data
and maps, and so on. It is unethical to limit
certain people’s participation in the planning
process based on these preconditions and
doing so short-changes the educational
function of neighborhood planning.
A plan sometimes, however, can be
worse than no plan at all if it embodies,
legitimates, and sustains the status quo
of inequality and unacceptable human and
physical conditions. The Rational Planning
led to this outcome in center city urban
renewal of the 1950s and 1960s and in
many of Robert Moses’ projects in New York
City. This section includes preconditions
suggested for neighborhood organizations
to meet when participating in a Rational
Planning process.
Elements of Rational Planning
The handbook of planning, The Practice of
Local Government Planning, contains the
following chart of the Rational Planning
process. (Hoch in So, pp. 23-24) This
outline is from the State of California
and therefore contains greater emphasis
on environmental review than other
governments might include.
The mere effort, the mere intention to
plan, is liberating individually and for the
neighborhood. Withholding the opportunity
to plan for the neighborhood may be the
greatest way for those in power to sustain
powerlessness, inequality, and poor
conditions.
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Step 3. In this step, plan participants
first identify the actual conditions in the
community in relation to the goals first.
(What are the barriers to overcome? What
are the community’s strengths?) The
information to be collected is informed
by the goals. Only after this background
data has been collected and discussed do
participants consider why the unacceptable
conditions exist (cause and effect).
Step 4. As result of the steps above,
people are better informed about both their
community, t
