AN ESSAY
Four Gardens of Reflection
Community
| Introduction | The Arts | Children | Nature |
There are some things we just have to decide together, and we have to be able to live with each other's decisions. In my college days and beyond, I was drawn like a magnet to community activism, participating in political, environmental, and other civic groups, and learning more about our democratic system all the time. I moved to Iowa to head up a statewide public interest group and became familiar there with labor and farm issues.
Ultimately, in my thirties, I returned to graduate school and became an urban planner to help improve the quality of those decisions as they affected the physical and built environment. Planning is an interesting discipline in my view—in parts technical knowledge, in parts communication, in parts facilitating citizen participation in the planning process. It is the ultimate collaborative process if done right and a means of creating a community vision that can guide development in sustainable directions.
We planners are often asked what planners do. There is no simple answer because ours is an eclectic field, full of complexity not so much because of its technical knowledge, although that is part of it, but because its complexity stems from the rainbow of considerations that enter into good community decision making. A community's comprehensive plan is a great balancing act considering anticipated growth, the allocation of limited public resources, ways in which the community can balance social equity, the environment, and economic prosperity to produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. And in this big picture are all the little details to which we must attend if quality of life is to flourish. These details include the design and orientation of park benches and street furniture to facilitate positive interaction among citizens seeking a moment of relaxation, the size of city blocks, and the mix of land uses, and whether, for instance, these encourage or discourage pedestrians. How does the ability or inability to walk to the neighborhood store or movie theater enhance or diminish physical fitness among residents? In the things no one notices lie a wealth of influences on our everyday quality of life.
It troubles me that there is a growing trend in our society toward assuming that what we do does not affect others and is no one else's business. We do not want gun laws; we do not want helmet laws; we do not want environmental laws. There are incessant challenges to government's right to regulate on behalf of the environment or the community as if City Hall were completely divorced from the wishes of the citizenry. Occasionally that may be true, but if so, the corrective is more and better democracy. There are legal and constitutional limits to what our neighbors may demand of us. Often, however, they are legitimately concerned about what is happening in the neighborhoods we all must share. What we need in many cases are better community visions that can only stem from better, and more informed, citizen participation in the planning process. And we need a stronger sense of our need to work together on such visions rather than remain apart, as if every citizen were an island.
| Introduction | The Arts | Children | Nature |