Conflict, Improvisation, Governance

Street Level Practices for Urban Democracy

David Laws, John Forester

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317685975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Conflict, Improvisation, Governance presents a carefully crafted and edited collection of first hand accounts of diverse public sector and non-profit urban practitioners facing the practical challenges of "doing democracy" in the global/local context of the interconnected major European city of Amsterdam and its region. The book examines street level democratic processes through the experiences of planning and city governance practitioners in community development, youth work, public service delivery, urban public administration, immigration and multi-cultural social policy. These profiles and case studies show widely shared challenges in global and local urban environments, and new, "bottom-up, " democratic and improvisational strategies that community members and public officials alike can use to make more inclusive, democratic cities.

1

A Bias for Practice: Stories of Improvisation in Governance

This book presents a collection of first-hand accounts from a diverse group of public sector and non-profit urban practitioners who face the practical challenges of “doing democracy” on a daily basis. The context for their stories is the rich local (and global) environment of urban neighborhoods in four adjacent European cities—Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht—and the smaller cities and towns that surround them. The challenges and opportunities we explore through their accounts include learning on the job the complexities produced when local and global influences interact on the street; working to recognize and respect plurality and difference, acting responsively and creatively in the face of passionate and conflicting local claims, fashioning new relationships of social and political coordination, and, not least of all, reconstructing de facto citizenship in the face of class, ethnic, and cultural differences.

We examine street level democratic practices through the eyes, experiences, judgments, and reflections of practitioners working in community development, social housing, public administration, urban planning, immigration, and multicultural social policy. So this book takes advantage of a particular historical reality. In the small country of the Netherlands, whose economy has depended historically on vast trade networks, Dutch professionals are keenly aware of their interdependence with others, both internationally and domestically. EU policies and immigration tie the Dutch to their neighbors. The polder tradition of consensual politics is often linked popularly to the precedent of shared labor to reclaim and protect land from the sea.

The experiences of Dutch policy practitioners illuminate widely shared challenges of learning from the particular in the face of complexity. These practitioners are prototypical “in-between” actors who must attend to global, structural, and policy changes while improvising regularly from the ground up. Exploring how these improvised democratic practices work “on the ground,” the book shows how community members and public officials can engage complexity, plurality, conflict, and collaboration simultaneously (cf. Hoch 1994, Mouffe 2005, Healey 2009, Innes and Booher 2010). And, of course, the book invites others to produce carefully framed and situated comparative materials.

By presenting first person voice profiles of practitioners, systematically produced to illuminate challenges of on-going practice (Forester 1999, 2006, 2011, 2012, cf. Forester, Fischler, and Shmueli 2001), we build upon both previous scholarship and a decade of work with successful teaching materials. So this collection complements existing works on democratic planning and administrative practices—most famously Michael Lipsky’s monumental 1980 Street Level Bureaucracy—by taking what we hope is a fresh approach. This book differs from any existing literature—though it builds upon teaching materials the authors have used for years—because it presents detailed practice stories (Forester 2006, 2009, 2011; Laws and Forester 2007a,b) that show narratively what others have typically claimed abstractly. We assume, following Lipsky (1980), that the goals of urban planning and public administration are multiple and ambiguous and, thus, that planning and public administration must always be improvised responsively as problems, clients, demands, and political environments change (Wagenaar 2011, Barrett 2012, Wheeler 2013). We wish to build upon existing literatures on democratic governance, public participation, and multi-stakeholder negotiations. We will invoke, as needed, concepts of negotiation, interdependence, and problem solving from students of public participation and thus dispute resolution and mediated multi-stakeholder negotiations (e.g. Susskind et al. 1999, Laws and Forester 2007a,b, de Souza Briggs 2008, Fung 2009). We will extend ideas of reflective and deliberative practices, the former more social-psychological, the latter more socially interactive, from the work of Donald Schön (1983) and others (Forester 1999, Innes and Booher 2010, Wagenaar 2011). We hope to show that agonistic ideas of plurality—of ethnic, cultural, and interest-based kinds and value differences as well—threaten to be “one hand clapping” if we ignore practical resolutions, working agreements, de facto reconciliations that bridge but do not erase differing commitments (Tully 2008; Laws 2013; Forester 2014a).

Rescuing and Recapturing our Oral Traditions

We can capture the richness and range of the chapters to come as follows. Part I introduces the underlying challenge of governance that the entire volume explores: the more complex the political and social reality, the more public officials and civil society leaders must improvise creatively and responsively rather than try to rely upon any a priori rules (Schutz 1970, Barrett 2012). So we see how Ellen Hiep—as a consultant hired to help a Housing Corporation design and implement a planning process to upgrade hundreds of housing units—explored community development through the lens of a process linking residents and professionals seeking to renovate housing conditions. But why, she leads us to wonder, do professionals know less, not more, about what’s happening in the housing corporation’s units the higher you go in the organization’s hierarchy? We see then how Simen van der Goot—working with stressed schools and social services professionals and police, often as an independent consultant—came to learn that his refined professional training became a narrow perspective that limited his creativity before he developed less presumptive and more responsive, more productive and more professional judgment as he engaged with troubled youth. In a broader community development setting, next, Joop Hofman shows us a bottom-up (land use and community) planning process he managed to rebuild devastated urban neighborhoods after a major factory explosion had destroyed lives and homes. His story teaches us about distrust, sponsorship, relationship-building, mourning and respect in ways that echo brilliantly Peter Marris’s work in and on Loss and Change (1975).

Part II turns to practices of learning in communities for the purposes of changing and improving conditions of life in those communities. Willem Giezeman shows us through the development of his career working in poor and multi-ethnic neighborhoods that there’s always more going on than we first see. His lesson of “only connect” stresses the significance of listening, attentiveness, openness to the unexpected, and the search for opportunity in work as simple (or as profound) as teaching Moroccan girls and women to ride bicycles. Tonie Boxman then teaches us how the pathologies of urban renewal and neighborhood disruption have produced deep anger and distrust. Boxman worked diligently and sensitively to diagnose community issues after threats of violence plagued a working class community center; rebuilding trust and working relations with community members and with networks of professionals as well, Boxman managed to revive a neighborhood planning process that was close to dead. No cookbook provides recipes for the community reconstruction process that Boxman illuminates for us. Mercedes Zandwijken too treats existing communities as presenting assets that can be capitalized upon or ignored. She shows us how she brought local community dialogue processes far beyond talk to innovative strategies of community planning and renewal. Creating local “Think tanks,” convening community members who were committed to their typically poor, immigrant, or multi-ethnic neighborhoods and willing to work with others to float, test, and implement suggestions for community improvement, Zandwijken teaches us about low cost, innovative potentials of convening those with passion, those with expertise, and those who can act for local betterment.

Part III addresses not simply immigration, but the challenges of diversity that any democratic political culture must face. We begin with shocking political violence and a major urban administration’s response and then turn to the more common everyday demands of diversity too. Marian Visser and Joris Rijbroek take us inside Amsterdam’s government in the days following the murder of film maker Theo van Gogh and the subsequent flood of fear: of immigrants of color, of uncertain loyalties, and of non-European cultural practices and languages. Visser and Rijbroek show us the bumpy evolution of new city policies and programs devoted to monitoring radicalization and alienation and to fostering social cohesion. From the vantage point of an elected politician and neighborhood leader, Martien Kuitenbrouwer shows us how inter-ethnic rivalries, conflict, and distrust can erupt in neighborhood incidents of violence that threaten to spread dangerously—or, in more sensitive and savvy hands, turn on the intuitive, gutsy action of a local leader to develop understanding and relationships. We learn from her about community development, neighborhood planning, ethnic relations, political leadership and more.

As we step outside of city hall and electoral politics, then, Halim el Madkouri provides an account of civil society leadership rooted in affected communities. He shows us the benefits of years of experience struggling with issues of social inclusion and immigration in the face of more traditional and more ethnocentric views of those of different skin colors or religious backgrounds. Trust, relationship building, responsiveness, diplomacy, networking, learning about bureaucratic systems all come into play in governance domains of immigration, education, economic development, and social integration.

Part IV finally focuses upon the challenges of rethinking public administration. Erik Gerritsen discusses his efforts in the trenches as the City Manager of Amsterdam—as he faced, for example, the challenges of coordin ating a public response to “multi-problem families” touched by social workers, health care professionals, police, youth workers, and still others. We see here both classic problems of complex public administration and promising strategies of responding practically and efficiently so that care-givers and professionals overcome their own blinders and learn about the systemic, sometimes corrosive consequences of their own ways of framing the problems they confront. Henri Kardaun then explores governance from several vantage points as he shows us the worlds of school administration (as he directed a school for predominantly immigrant, Muslim children) and multi-service social policy administration. We see trust emerge from distrust, relationships created where they had been in tatters, services provided and coordinated where the systems of their delivery had been challenged if not dysfunctional. Kardaun’s work shows strikingly how local differences can appear as conflicts or as opportunities for learning and jointly crafting productive planning strategies.

Hardly least of all, then, Douwe Wielenga takes a case of environmental and land-use planning to show us how neighborhood residents in Den Haag first rejected a plan to redevelop their local park and then collaborated with the city and a second landscape architect to produce a widely acclaimed park redesign. We learn about the challenges of facilitation and its opportunities, about collaborative urban design processes, about trust and distrust of politicians and professionals alike.

Throughout we will see, as we shall argue in the Conclusion, that the work of street level democratization presents us today with new opportunities as well as new challenges. The challenges demand fresh strategies to ensure account ability and transparency, inclusion and protection of the vulnerable. The opportunities involve chances to rethink the meaning of local democratic politics and the meaning of local responsiveness, reconstructing it as not just pro forma listening but as harnessing expertise to act practically in the face of mutable, multidimensional social and political problems. These practitioners do not give us fixed or stable recipes, but they show us the practical elements involved in enacting democracy at the street level. They show us how professional knowledge can be crucial, but blinding, if not employed adeptly. They show us how the recognition of difference can run into problems when it is reduced to a neutral distancing, rather than a warm welcome. They show us that administrative systems can distract and frustrate or, alternatively, can unleash energy for change and learning, for recognition, and for substantive community building.

Implications for Pedagogy: Learning from Practice in the Trenches

We have spent several years asking diverse planners and public administrators how they have worked on challenging projects that reveal the real difficulties and the real opportunities of their work. We did not—not—ask them what they “thought” about these projects, working with a particular immigrant neighborhood here, a housing development there; coordinating social services here, working with troubled and delinquent youth there. Our interviews have been refined over 15 or more years (Forester 1999, 2006, 2012) to produce not just practitioner’s stories, but focused, grounded “profiles” that illuminate what is at stake and what is at issue when practitioners face the need to act on the street or in other front line settings. Similar interviews have produced effective and illuminating teaching materials and provided the basis for four books (Forester 1999, 2009, Forester, Fischler and Shmueli 2001, and Reardon and Forester 2015).

These are not just stories, then, and they are not just opinions: they are grounded, specific, detailed, practical accounts of complex, messy projects that reveal both complexities and opportunities of actual professional work with other agencies and other professionals and with clients, residents, and other stakeholders. Our experience with such practice stories over more than a decade gives us confidence that the profiles can provide access and insight through their rich detail, moving, at times inspiring, accounts of confusion and doubt and commitment and informed improvisation. They give readers the opportunity to identify with shared problems as they sense, “I’ve been in situations like that!” and empathize as they sense, “Yes, I know what that’s like.”

We chose the practitioners we interviewed by reputation, record of accomplishment, field of practice, richness of experience, multilingual competence, and diversity of background (breadth of training, interdisciplinary openness, multicultural sensitivities). We looked for practitioners who might be not typical but exemplary, not average but innovative. We were not interested in capturing “typical” practice as much as enterprising, innovative, self-critical, reflective practitioners who could share their surprises, risks taken, insights developed, and scars survived. Similarly, we were not interested in outliers, in h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A Bias for Practice: Stories of Improvisation in Governance
• 2 Challenges and Opportunities of Street Level Democratization, Improvisation, and Conflict
• 3 Conflict as a Stage for Improvisation in Governance
• Profiles
• Index