We encourage citizens to attend this public forum on best practices in Northampton city government. Here is the agenda from the Best Practices Google Group:

Agenda Best Practices Public Forum #1 When:  May 13th, 2008 7:00 – 9:00 pm    Where:  Jackson Street School Facilitator: Lisa DePiano
Topic	Time
History & mission of BPC, intro of work group Forum Purpose: * Generate answers to two questions: § What reactions have you had to the ways the Northampton city government has made its decisions? § What could it do differently?  (We will take your ideas back to the BPC.) * Enlist committed volunteers for sub-committees Evening Agenda * Intro * Vox Populi Video * Warm-Up * Small Group Brainstorming * Report-Backs * Call for Sub-Committee Volunteers * Conclusion Forum Guidelines: * Speak your mind!  Contribute your ideas. * Keep small group discussion balanced.  Stay involved, but let others do the talking, too. * Remain open and respectful to all ideas and all people	10
People-on-the-Street Video To get you thinking, we have an amusing video of people on the street talking about Northampton	5
Warm-Up Exercise/ Silent Idea Generation: Take 3 minutes to write down your ideas to this question:  What reactions have you had to the ways the Northampton city government has made its decisions?  We will collect the cards and turn them in to the Best Practices Committee, but you can elect to not turn yours in.  Regardless, they will remain anonymous unless you choose to include your name.	10
Small Group Break-Out Sessions: * You’ll be working in facilitated groups for the next 45 minutes.  You’ll generate ideas that we will take back to the BPC. * Break into groups of 7 by finding a flipchart and standing near it. * Please try to distribute yourselves across groups:  Try to have no more than one city official or employee in each group, if you came with friends, split yourselves up if you’re comfortable doing so.	55
Reassemble for Report-Backs: What ideas really stood out for you?  (Allow people to stand up and point out ideas.)	15
Solicit volunteers for BPC work groups.	10
Conclusion: * Any additional points/questions?  These will go back to BPC with the 3x5 cards & flipcharted ideas. * Hand out evaluation forms, explaining that we WILL read them and use the feedback to structure our next forums.	15

 

See also:

Gazette Guest Column: "Give residents a role in city issues"
Since most people are not experienced or comfortable with public speaking in front of large groups, the mode of reaching out and obtaining information could include interviews, written answers to questionnaires, e-mail, or some combination of these approaches...

When changing zoning ordinances so that development can occur in established neighborhoods there is a conflict between whether primacy is given to the quality of life of the residents who live there or to the wishes of other city residents who want more housing options and to developers who want to generate more business...

For there to be sustainable citizen involvement in the future of Northampton, input on issues of consequence to the lives of our residents needs to be both actively solicited and facilitated so that critically important opinions are not coming in a delayed, after-the-fact manner, where the opportunity for true discussion has then been missed.

Gazette Lead Editorial: "A public role in planning"
While the Planning Board's options are limited statutorily, in our opinion there needs to be a way for the board to garner public opinion earlier in the process and work with developers sooner to address design concerns...

...Northampton would benefit from a review of its planning process - with a particular eye on its public notification efforts to ensure that the public is involved early in the process.

Fran Volkmann: Planning Board Needs to Consider Proposals in their Broader Context
At its meeting on Thursday night, the Planning Board addressed only a few of the many "tree" questions and essentially no "forest" questions...

...At no time did it address a single idea, question, or item of information submitted to it in an extensive set of letters and public comment.

The quality of decision-making on the board may well be the single most important determiner of the quality of major projects such as this hotel. The way the board reaches decisions also influences in important ways the level of acceptance of projects by the community. And, not least over the long run, the board's approach to decision-making determines the level of trust and confidence that the public has in the board and in the Planning Department that guides its work.

Letter to Gazette: Planning Board too lax with Developers
In the case of the proposed Beaverbrook Estates project here in Leeds...citizens have repeatedly expressed profound unease about the project's impact on the environment, traffic, pedestrian safety, water pressure, and storm water drainage... Rather than contend with these issues directly, the Planning Board has repeatedly followed the Office of Planning and Development's staff recommendations and granted the applicant multiple waivers to state and local regulations. Waivers should only be granted if the project is in the public good, and this has hardly been demonstrated. In the end, narrow private interests seem to trump the greater good.

Letter to The Republican: "planners and most board members are out of touch with the city's residents"

Seeing Like a State: Planning Gone Awry in the 20th Century
Scott proposes guidelines to reduce the potential harm from plans. These include:

Take small steps. In an experimental approach to social change, presume that we cannot know the consequences of our interventions in advance. Given this postulate of ignorance, prefer wherever possible to take a small step, stand back, observe, and then plan the next small move...

Favor reversibility. Prefer interventions that can easily be undone if they turn out to be mistakes. Irreversible interventions have irreversible consequences. Interventions into ecosystems require particular care in this respect, given our great ignorance about how they interact...

Plan on surprises. Choose plans that allow the largest accommodation to the unforeseen... In planning housing, it would mean "designing in" flexibility for accommodating changes in family structures or living styles...

Plan on human inventiveness. Always plan under the assumption that those who become involved in the project later will have or will develop the experience and insight to improve on the design... (p.345)

Scott concludes by calling for a healthy respect for diverse lifestyles and the wisdom of ordinary people. In the case of Northampton, we urge planners to respect the preferences of families with children, as this has been a major issue in other Smart Growth cities like Portland.

The power and precision of high-modernist schemes depended not only on bracketing contingency but also on standardizing the subjects of development...

This subject was singularly abstract... Standardized citizens were uniform in their needs and even interchangeable. What is striking, of course, is that such subjects--like the "unmarked citizens" of liberal theory--have, for the purposes of the planning exercise, no gender, no tastes, no history, no values, no opinions or original ideas, no traditions, and no distinctive personalities to contribute to the enterprise...

To the degree that subjects can be treated as standardized units, the power of resolution in the planning exercise is enhanced. Questions posed within these strict confines can have definitive, quantitative answers...

What is perhaps most striking about high-modernist schemes, despite their quite genuine egalitarian and often socialist impulses, is how little confidence they repose in the skills, intelligence, and experience of ordinary people.

...the high-modernist urban complex represents an impoverished and unsustainable social system...

Complex, diverse, animated environments contribute, as Jacobs saw, to producing a resilient, flexible, adept population that has more experience in confronting novel challenges and taking initiative. Narrow, planned environments, by contrast, foster a less skilled, less innovative, less resourceful population. (p.345-349)...