Abstract
In recent years, the field has witnessed a discernable trend toward the retrenchment of autocratic approaches to city-building and more passive approaches to public participation in major planning and design work about the future of the city. Too often today, expensive public processes are failing to result in popularly supported policies and plans. A growing chorus of notable city-building professionals have expressed frustration with the public backlash to their work, decrying the spread of NIMBYism and denigrating the citizenry they are reliant upon for support. Ironically, this trend runs parallel to an ever-increasing public appetite for meaningful involvement in decision-making processes. Many localities are struggling with limited capacity around facilitated public processes, leading to a marked increase in conflict, controversy and distrust as high stakes public conversations are often poorly designed or mismanaged. The resulting decline in the quality of public processes and civil discourse is adversely impacting our collective abilities to make key decisions to meet our core challenges, ranging from urban systems to housing to climate change. Preparing urban professionals for the 21st century requires an education in democratic techniques. Well-designed public processes that involve citizens in city-building pay huge dividends. The lessons of the past half-century are clear: When urban democracy expands, cities flourish. Democratic Urbanism represents more than a planning or design exercise. It is a method of city-building that integrates democratic ideals into the urban design process and applies broader shared governance models to the implementation of community aspirations, creating places of deep meaning that are broadly “owned” in the civic mindset. It is a process that carries forward in the implementation of a collective vision, through actions small and large from all sectors of society. Ideally, it involves the intentional alignment of individual and group interests and actions in pursuit of a collective vision for the future city. It is dependent upon a healthy civic infrastructure. This interactive session will include a number of case studies, short films and exercises from the American Institute of Architects’ half century of work in its design assistance program. These cases demonstrate the value of democratic approaches to city-building, highlighting communities that have applied democratic urbanism to achieve remarkable transformations across a variety of contexts. Some of these stories are young, representing nascent efforts, while others show impacts lasting over decades. Collectively, they form a hopeful narrative that demonstrates our civic capacity to overcome the stark challenges of the 21st century and reinvent our communities. They also illustrate the advantages of a democratic method for city-building that is broader than conventional practice, one based in a collaborative approach to governance that offers guidance to local leaders across the world working on the front lines of change today.
