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Urban Geography, 2012, 33, 3, pp. 420–441. http://dx.doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.33.3.420Copyright © 2012 by Bellwether Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved.

PUBLIC INPUT/ELITE PRIVILEGE: THE USE OF PARTICIPATORY PLANNING TO REINFORCE URBAN GEOGRAPHIES

OF POWER IN SEATTLE1

John Carr2

Department of Geography University of New Mexico

Abstract: This article begins to address why cities continue to use public participation–based planning processes to shape their public spaces, notwithstanding three decades of criticisms of such approaches. Based on ethnographic, activist participant research into Seattle Washington’s planning for public skateboard parks, I argue that the mobilization of two ostensibly incompatible paradigms for planning—one vesting discretionary authority in experts, the other using the plan-ner to develop consensus through inclusive public input processes—are popular precisely because they can be used together to frustrate truly democratic urban planning. This case study demon-strates how elites used the public input garnered by planners as a form of “shadow referendum,” determining in advance whether there were any powerful actors that might oppose proposed poli-cies. And by shifting between or combining the two planning models these elites could justify adhering to the demands of powerful neighborhoods, while discarding input from less powerful neighborhoods as politically irrelevant. [Key words: participatory planning, public input, political advocacy, skateparks.]

In June 2008 I went to visit the recently completed Lower Woodland Skatepark. The first public skateboarding facility ever built by Seattle Parks and Recreation, Lower Woodland includes terrain for users of a variety of skill levels in a large, lushly green, multi-use park. On that bright, balmy summer morning, the skatepark was populated not only by half a dozen teen males (who constitute the vast majority of skateboarders)3 but also a young girl on a “razor” type scooter who had come with her mother, and a group of four mid-30s boarders from Portland, Oregon—two women and two men—who had stopped by on a weekend skatepark tour through Washington. I was particularly proud to be standing in a clean, well landscaped site, watching a multi-generational, unusually gender inclusive group of users enjoy a top-grade facility, as I had worked as a public space activist and researcher for several years with a number of other skatepark advocates to ensure that Lower Woodland was built.

And although it was easy to feel like I had been one of the “good guys” in the politi-cal processes leading to the creation of Lower Woodland skatepark that summer day, to

1I would like to thank Steve Herbert at the University of Washington and Ric Richardson at the University of New Mexico’s Community and Regional Planning program for essential input into early versions of this article. Tema Milstein, Melinda Harm Benson, Karma Chavez, Kadishia Matthews, Sara McKinnon, and Kathleen Washburn also helped guide my thoughts and writing as members of our Transdisciplinary Research Group at the University of New Mexico. Finally, I would like to thank Elvin Wyly and the anonymous reviewers for their insights and constructive suggestions.2Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John Carr, Department of Geography, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131-0001; telephone: 1-505-450-1775; fax: 1-505-277-5041; email: carrj@unm.edu3Reflecting long-standing trends for skateboarding, data from 2004 indicates that 83 percent of all skateboarding participants are under 18 years of age and 81 percent of frequent participants are male (SGMAI, 2005).

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a number of residents of the nearby neighborhood I was unquestionably a villain. These neighbors had strenuously objected to dedicating a portion of “their” public space to a skatepark on a variety of earnestly asserted grounds: noise, increased traffic congestion, loss of green space, and insufficient user data. From their perspective, Lower Woodland was the result of special-interest politics at their worst; a small group of activists had claimed to represent an overstated constituency for their own selfish reasons, displacing the real users of cherished public space and eroding the property values of surrounding homes.

Addressing the criticisms raised by these skatepark opponents might have been easier had that facility been the product of a transparent and defensible planning process. Unfor-tunately, I was all too familiar with how inconsistent application of planning practices and political influence had actually served to enable a number of privileged actors, including me, to more effectively navigate city power structures to shape Seattle’s public spaces. For those familiar with the planning literature, this is likely an unsurprising proposition. Over 30 years of criticisms have been levied that planning as a discipline often fails to meaning-fully broaden the democratic scope of city government and enables politicians and plan-ners to manipulate planning outcomes.4 And while my research on Seattle’s recent master planning for public skateboard parks certainly offers another case study of how planning fails to provide democratic results, I also offer this case study to start to explain why certain structural contradictions within planning have rendered contemporary practices both immune to reform and central to the creation urban public space (McComas, 2001). Additionally, I use these structural contradictions as a starting point for suggesting what can be done to render the practice of planning more meaningfully democratic.

Based on my ethnographic, action research in Seattle, I argue that the often subtle mix-ing of two ostensibly incompatible paradigms—what I describe as the “expert- rational” and the “procedural-participatory” models—within most U.S. cities’ planning practices structurally undermines the democratic functioning of urban planning. Moreover, the continued popularity of planning processes that participants, government actors, and planners all admit are “broken” may at least partially be traced to the ways that urban elites—including elected officials, powerful economic actors, and well organized interest groups—are able to shift between these paradigms to facilitate the pursuit of their politi-cal goals. As described in more detail below, the expert-rational model vests the planner with discretionary authority to make decisions about urban space—ostensibly based on either expert knowledge or scientific data—under the guidance of democratically elected supervisors. In contrast, the procedural-participatory model is based on the belief that the planner’s ideal function is to facilitate a ground-level democratic process by which urban residents share that discretionary authority in providing direct input about contemplated governmental programs that could impact them.

While the ability to pick and choose between these planning paradigms—or simply combine them—has the potential to empower elites in a variety of ways, I will focus on

4Critiques have long been raised that public input processes fail to sufficiently empower citizens (Arnstein, 1969), allow government agencies to undermine citizen resistance (Heberlein, 1976, p. 200), and merely legitimate agency decisions (Checkoway, 1981; Dennis, 2006). Likewise, those providing input often represent the privi-leged and powerful instead of the public at large (Anderson et al., 2003; Gurstein et al., 2003; Bridgman, 2004; Laurian, 2004; Cameron and Grant-Smith, 2005; Herbert, 2005; McComas et al., 2006; Bond and Thompson-Fawcett, 2007).

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one example for this article. In Seattle, a variety of players—activists, government staffers, and elected officials—were able to use the input garnered by a procedural-participatory planning exercise as a “shadow referendum.” That is, the process allowed those elites to determine in advance whether any other powerful urban political actors might oppose specific proposed skatepark sites. And when powerful neighborhoods or governmental actors objected, the combination of both expert-rational and procedural-participatory planning approaches enabled pro-skatepark actors to simultaneously capitulate to those demands, while discarding as politically irrelevant negative input from less empowered areas of the city.

METHODOLOGY

This study is based upon immersive ethnographic, participant-action research. Loosely defined as combining activism with “research [that] is undertaken collaboratively with and for the individuals, groups or communities who are its subject” (Pain, 2003, p. 653), par-ticipatory action research represents a promising means for actualizing the goals of criti-cal geography (Kesby, 2000) by dedicating the privilege of the researcher to the service of the researched. And while participant-action methodologies can address longstanding concerns about the treatment and representation of academic research subjects, the con-flation of researcher and activist roles poses a host of potential dilemmas (Khanloua and Peter, 2005), including the challenge of maintaining a proper ethical stance toward one’s research community (Gatenby and Humphries, 2000; Fine and Torre, 2006).

As discussed at greater length below, between 2003 and 2007 I was involved with approximately 10 different public skatepark projects in and around Seattle either as a polit-ical lobbyist, organizer, and activist, including service on the “Taskforce” supervising the master-planning process described in this article. While I had not initially envisioned my involvement with the public skatepark movement as part of an action research project, the imbricated nature of my developing research interests and political work led naturally to a participant action approach. Throughout this work I took daily field notes, which I subse-quently coded to identify major themes, trends, and developments. My observations were supplemented by an analysis of over a thousand different textual artifacts generated during these projects, data collection from public on-line bulletin-boards, and a series of supple-mental semi-structured interviews with professional skateboarders, activists, skatepark builders, governmental actors, and planning professionals, a number of whom I quote in this work to substantiate and encapsulate my own observations.

My work combining the roles of activist and researcher provided a mix of methodologi-cal challenges and advantages. By serving as an activist in a variety of different political capacities, I was able to gain a uniquely multidimensional perspective on the inner rela-tionships between elected officials, city hall, the Parks department, and private planners. This enabled me as a researcher to personally experience those moments when democratic purpose succumbed to political expediency at different levels of city government. At the same time, the sometimes contradictory nature of many of these roles, especially my ethi-cal duties as a researcher to critically evaluate my own actions and motives, as well as those of my colleagues and those we worked with in city government, has continually challenged me to simultaneously maintain a critical and a respectful attitude toward those who enabled my research.

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POLITICALLY CONTEXTUALIZING URBAN PLANNING

A profound irony lies at the core of the argument that contemporary planning processes lend themselves to anti-democratic ends, as planning has been refined since the 1960s to render governmental decision making about urban space more transparent, accessible, and democratic. The failure of much planning to realize these goals cannot, however, be laid entirely at the feet of the planning profession. Rather, the co-existence of differing models for how planners should go about their jobs enables urban decision-makers to shift between and combine these models based on political expediency.

In the United States, planning has been profoundly shaped by a series of cultural and political shifts. Representing the “high water-mark of modernist optimism in the post-war era” (Taylor, 1998, p. 65), planning emerged as a discipline in the 1940s based upon an expert intensive model—which I describe as “expert-rational”—that sought to bring sci-entific methodology and objectivity to urban development and decision-making (Filion, 2001; Brooks, 2002). In practice, however, planners were given broad discretionary author-ity, basing their decisions on intuition, experience, and political expediency in a technique Lindblom famously referred to as “muddling through” (1959, 1979), while enjoying the common assumption that their, “expert advice reflected community interests” (Slater, 1984, p. 140). The planner’s role in enacting change through sweeping public projects in the 1950s and 1960s—such as urban renewal—was contingent upon the Roosevelt-era expansion of Federal government power into previously prohibited areas of social and economic regulation (Balkin, 1990). Under this model, democratic overview of planning processes is to occur though the election of executive authorities who then choose, super-vise, and remain politically responsible for appropriate experts to address a host of social needs and problems.

Beginning in the 1960s, growing disillusionment with this approach to electoral politics accompanied increasing dissatisfaction with the fruits of planners’ efforts. The response was a call for planners to begin shifting authority over planning to the public in order to enable those impacted by state action to gain a direct democratic voice in those decisions (Arnstein, 1969; Brooks, 2002). This “procedural-participatory” model initially took the now familiar form of requiring advance notice of major government projects and ensuring opportunities for public comment regarding contemplated actions. In turn, the planners’ role was to administer public input processes while using their expertise to help narrow down “the area of argument or choice” (Campbell and Marshall, 1999, p. 470).

While procedural-participatory techniques have continually failed to garner fully representative and democratic input, planners have responded by working to increase participation rates among stakeholders (see, e.g., Bens, 1994; Bridgman, 2004; Cameron and Grant-Smith, 2005) and ensure greater transparency (see, e.g., Becker, 2001). In an effort to address concerns about representation and fairness, new approaches to planning have been adopted under the rubrics of “communicative” (Campbell and Marshall, 1999), “collaborative” (Dennis, 2006), or “deliberative” planning (Forester, 1999; Anderson et al., 2003). Seeking to build consensus across political divides, these rely on exhaus-tive rounds of meetings, discussion, and community building—sometimes extending for months or years. Even where consensus-building approaches are fully embraced by city governments, however, they cannot guarantee truly democratic results, as urban elites can still “stage manage” them, predetermining their outcomes (Maginn, 2007).

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Although the procedural-participatory model has become the dominant planning para-digm espoused both in academia and among practitioners, the expert-rational perspective lives on both in the curriculum of professional planning programs and in the daily prac-tice of professionals (see, e.g., Ellis, 2005). Often legally mandated (Irvin and Stansbury, 2004) public input–based processes remain as “best practices” in many cities (Slater, 1984), having achieved “an almost sacred quality” that has rendered them largely immune to frequently leveled criticisms (Innes and Booher, 2004). These procedural-participatory approaches coexist, however, with both expert-rational and even communicative practices within the planning profession as a whole (Godschalk et al., 2003), with planners able to increase or decrease the discretionary authority vested in the public depending on when and how each approach is mobilized.

Regardless of which paradigm is deemed to prevail on a given project (or at a given moment), the claim that politicians undermine planners is a now a long-standing feature of many academic analyses of contemporary approaches. Unfortunately, the literature rarely offers any systematic explanation for this tendency. Instead, research from fields as diverse as communication, planning, public administration, and political science tends to simul-taneously bemoan government decision-makers’ unwillingness to obey community input while asserting that the “fix” is to render planning even more inclusive, efficient, and transparent (Bens, 1994; Anderson et al,. 2003; Culver and Howe, 2004; Ataov, 2007), and/or building consensus outside conventional circuits of “city hall” power (Anderson et al., 2003; Cuthill, 2004; Innes and Booher, 2004). What the literature (including from geography) has typically failed to address is why the very elected politicians who oversee most urban planning—or even urban planners themselves—would want to enable or fund planning exercises that might undermine their personal power.5

Pressing questions remain as to why contemporary planning practices remain both entrenched and resistant to reform, as well as what real reform might look like. Urban planning is a persistent form of “state territoriality” that profoundly shapes urban geogra-phies in the U.S. (Dierwechter, 2008). And while critical geographers have paid compara-tively little attention to urban planning in the past, a small but vibrant literature is emerging addressing a renewed interest in “locally scaled policy, planning, and decision making,” and the possibilities for “individuals and social groups [to exert] greater influence and self-determination in changing the urban places they inhabit” (Elwood, 2005, pp. 262, 263).6 I seek to contribute to this discussion by both calling attention to the structural con-tradictions that have rendered planning immune to reform, and to suggest some directions forward in working to make urban planning live up to its democratic promise.

SEATTLE, PUBLIC PROCESS, AND PLANNING FOR SKATEPARKS

The public skatepark Master Plan created in 2006 and adopted by the Seattle City Council in 2007 is a particularly apt case study because it comes from a city that typifies

5One exception is the recognition that consensus-based planning approaches can provide an appealing “fix” for politicians where political conflict has deadlocked a favored project (Forester, 1999; Innes and Booher, 2004).6For example, geographers are beginning to explore such issues as the importance of planning policies in broader global circuits of urban policy knowledge (McCann, 2010), the effectiveness of public input processes (Herbert, 2006), emerging geographies of smart growth planning (Dierwechter, 2008), and even what Lacanian analysis might bring to our understanding of planning as a discipline (Hillier and Gunder, 2005).

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the spirit and practice of conventional procedural-participatory planning. Seattle has a long-standing reputation as a politically progressive city (Kramer, 1969; Greer et al., 2007) with a rich tradition of embracing public input, resulting in a plethora of official and semi-official agencies, councils, committees, and groups all intended to ensure a high degree of citizen input into governmental decision making. Seattle’s “inclusive” politics reflect a tradition of participatory democracy in Washington state (Barker, 2006) and a statewide legal mandate for citizen participation (Brody et al., 2003). At the same time, its success as an international post-Fordist city has undermined Seattle’s claims to progressive inclusive-ness. By the mid-2000s, a strong regional economy and a growing reputation for livability had led to gentrification, displacement of the poor, and the departure of middle-class fami-lies (Gibson, 2004; Hackworth, 2006; Morrill, 2007).

During this period, between 2003 and 2007, public skateparks briefly emerged as a minor local “cause célèbre.” In the fall of 2003 the Parks department announced its inten-tion to demolish the Ballard skatepark—one of only two such facilities in the city—to make way for a new passive use park. Parks had not, however, anticipated the backlash from skatepark users and supporters—most of them white male professionals in their 30s.7 Newly minted advocacy groups including the Puget Sound Skate Park Association (PSSA) and Parents for Skate Parks (PFS), organized a series of media-friendly events including a “thousand skater march” from the Seattle Space Needle to City Hall, and a rock-concert “wake” for the Ballard skatepark that was covered live by the local NBC news affiliate. The skaters’ cause was quickly adopted by the city’s leading free weekly, The Stranger, and was covered by both daily newspapers and the local guide to upper-class living, Seattle monthly magazine (Moir, 2006; Seattle 2006a, 2006b). This push culminated with Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announcing that a space for skateboarding would be reserved in the new civic park (Jenniges, 2004). Capitalizing on their political and media successes in Ballard, activists then advocated for a series of successful skateboarding projects, includ-ing the master-planning process described in this article.

During this time, I gained increasing access to both the movement and a variety of play-ers in Seattle’s public space politics. After commenting in support of the Ballard skatepark at a Parks hearing, I was invited to join the nascent PSSA, which then led to a seat on the Parks department’s recently created citizen advisory “Skatepark Advisory Commit-tee” (SPAC), and then to an appointment on the Taskforce supervising the master plan. Treating the planning process as a continuation of our activism, the skatepark advocates on the Taskforce quickly moved beyond simply “overseeing” the Parks department and its subcontracted planning firm, adopting a host of roles within the political system. These included acting as technical advisors to Parks and its planning firm subcontractor, public representatives of the plan, political advisors to Parks staffers, and mediators between key Council members, Council staff, Parks, and the private-sector planners.

7It may not be surprising that Seattle’s skatepark advocates were largely Anglo and highly educated, given recent data indicating that Seattle continues to be a as a predominantly “white” city, with the 2000 census data reporting both a relatively high 67.9% white population, and particularly high educational levels among that population (The Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, 2003).

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SEATTLE’S PLANNING PROCESS AS SHADOW REFERENDUM

Understanding why a project initiated in a city with such a strong tradition of public input as Seattle, and serving an ostensibly lofty purpose—creating recreational facilities for the city’s young people—could ultimately be shaped to serve the needs of urban elites requires a holistic approach. Only by looking at why the planning process was initiated, who stood to benefit, where resistance was raised, and how conflict was resolved might we begin to understand the structural flaws within the practice of planning that render it both appealing to political elites and resistant to reform efforts.

Seattle’s skatepark master plan provides a particularly Janus-faced example of con-temporary planning. To outward appearances, the project was an example of solid, if not cutting-edge, procedural-participatory practice, largely following the approaches long advocated by professional planning organizations (see, e.g., Institute for Participatory Planning, 1981). The mayor’s office appointed a citizen-advisory Taskforce—including skatepark advocates, representatives from the City’s public space administering agencies, a former Seattle Planning Commission member, a member of University of Washington’s planning department, and even one member of a neighborhood group that had opposed a prior public skatepark—to supervise the work of a private planning firm. Two sets of three public meetings were held to solicit input on potential sites and evaluation criteria for those sites. Parks staff and private planners endeavored to maximize the opportuni-ties for working parents and children in Seattle’s poorer and non-white neighborhoods to show up and have their voices heard—including purposefully holding public meetings in central and south Seattle,8 scheduling meetings for weekend days so that working parents could bring their school-age children, and having notices posted in each contemplated site in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Amharic. And I had the pleasure of seeing large, fairly diverse groups attend each of the planning sessions. For example, out of a “full house” of approximately 50 people attending the October 2, 2006 public meet-ing at the Garfield Community Center in Seattle’s traditionally African American Central District neighborhood,9 I counted about 10 young people and 15 women, as well as an estimated 20 percent or more of non-white attendees. At each meeting the planners made an introductory presentation. They then solicited comments first through a question and answer session, and subsequently through informal discussions at information “stations” presenting various components of the contemplated plan for detailed analysis. Parks also received substantial public comment by email and post. On the whole, the process leading to the master plan adopted on January 31, 2007 could be said to typify what is considered to be good procedural-participatory planning practice in many U.S. cities.

Successful efforts to render the process open and inclusive, however, are not sufficient in themselves to claim the resulting master plan resulted from a fully participatory process. Instead, the master plan must be considered from earliest conception to also be a prod-uct of conventional, elite-driven politics, and—at strategic moments—an expert- rational

8Notwithstanding the demographic predominance of whites in Seattle, the city is also home to substantial popula-tions of Asian/Pacific Islanders (13.5% of the total) and African Americans (8.3% of the total), with both of these groups largely concentrated in the poorer central and southern part of the city (The Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, 2003).9Garfield Community Center is in the heart of the so-called “central” district, which contains the two census tracts with the highest concentration (50.8%) of African Americans in the city (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000).

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approach to the planner’s work pursued under the guise of procedural-participatory plan-ning. The 2006 master plan was the product of a de facto partnership between City Council, the Mayor’s office, the mayorally-controlled Parks department, and relatively privileged and empowered skatepark advocates like me. That loose alliance began on September 28, 2004 with a series of meetings between key Council members and representatives of the PSSA and PFS to discuss the Mayor’s proposal to demolish and rebuild the Ballard skatepark 50 feet from its original site. While they listened politely to our arguments prais-ing public skateparks, the Council members all demonstrated the most interest in a matrix that we had prepared listing each of the constituencies involved in the Ballard debate to date (Fig. 1). Contrasting the small but vocal opposition to allowing a skatepark to remain (described as the “lone grouches”) with 4,000 signed pro-skatepark petitions, the matrix sought to argue that the vast majority of those interested in the Ballard controversy were not only in favor of saving the facility, but could translate that desire into votes. And while that matrix listed “the Citizens of Ballard” as one of the interested constituencies in favor of the skate facility, that assertion was based solely on the successful solicitation of pro-skatepark comment cards among attendees of a fundraising skate contest and concert. Overall, our constituency analysis delivered a message to the City Councilors that spoke to the democratic process without claiming to be democratically representative. That mes-sage was that the skaters had arrived as an organized and empowered special interest group whose claims the Council would need to address.

While skatepark advocates’ successes in the arena of city politics were due in no small part to hard work, good timing, and the built-in appeal of a largely youthful constituency, they were also the product of our privileged positionality. Mostly middle and upper- middle class, my fellow skatepark advocates and I had the time, resources, and self-efficacy that are the cost of entry for engaging in effective advocacy. And as a group of well-educated, predominantly white “creative class” professionals, we were able to speak the language of power to power. A City Council staffer who I interviewed noted:

The SPAC has been, actually, quite effective as a community group advocating for a specific thing. And that is the way, especially on the council, things tend to work … There is a lot of competition for money and the votes that go with [it]. So, that is why council is responsive to groups that are organized, articulate, and … polite for lack of a better term. So they can come in and say, “I know that you have other interests, we know ours isn’t the only one. But this is a reasonable request and here are the reasons for paying attention to our issue …” The SPAC has done a good job of that, and not getting frustrated, of consistently working.

Our largely successful efforts to leverage our ability to be “articulate,” “polite,” and “reasonable” in our dealings with elected officials and staffers, however, inadvertently precluded the possibility for any subsequent planning to follow a truly procedural- participatory model. The political impetus that prompted the master plan largely prede-termined both the process of its creation and its ultimate content. We had pressed for the creation of a master plan in order to get skateparks built, hoping that the ensuing, presum-ably good-faith, discussion among citywide stakeholders could circumvent the site-by-site NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) type objections that had stymied prior projects. For elected officials, the planning process not only met the demands of an effective advocacy

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group, but also allowed them to avoid the appearance of executive fiat. That said, it is hard to argue that the resulting planning process was intended to develop ground-level consen-sus about whether there was actually a need for more skateparks, or to shift discretionary decision-making to the community.

Fig. 1. Table of constituencies presented to Seattle City Councilors at September 28, 2004 meetings. Names of individuals and businesses have been redacted for privacy.

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Rather, given the prior neighborhood-level resistance to skateparks in places like Ballard and Lower Woodland, the master-planning process was clearly envisioned by elected offi-cials and advocates as a tool to overcome, channel, and minimize resistance to future proj-ects. And this translated to a sense among the Taskforce, Parks staffers, and the planning firm that they had been given a procedural-participatory process as a tool for engaging in an essentially expert-rational planning project—namely using their discretionary authority to identify good sites for creating new skateparks, and getting those sites passed through the political system.

The tacit operation of an expert-rational planning model beneath the surface of a procedural-participatory process was evident in the formal presentations at each public meeting by the subcontracted planning firm. These presentations sought to promote public skateparks as healthy and inclusive amenities, while dispelling common negative associa-tions between skateboarders, youth, danger, and crime (Fig. 2). The tendency of the meet-ings to serve as “sales pitches” for skateparks, however, was not lost on often-skeptical participants, as reflected by this email sent to the Parks department:

I would like to discuss the June 17, 2006 public meeting … It is impossible to have a meaningful dialog based on misinformation and disinformation. It is also intensely disrespectful to the public that has raised these concerns before and it is disrespect-ful to the public process to continue to ignore public input. The city may have valid reasons for promoting skateparks, but those reasons are not evident from the data

Fig. 2. Example of slide from master-planning public presentations.

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provided. Further, no information was provided, correct or incorrect, that could actu-ally be used to develop siting criteria. A presentation on how great skateboarding is, even if completely accurate, doesn’t help to identify appropriate siting criteria … Stop trying to “educate” the general public and start listening.

Unsurprisingly, the “public input” during these meetings was every bit as polarized as the formal presentations. Recognizing the potential for resistance, Parks staffers repeat-edly urged activist Taskforce members to ensure a large turn-out by skatepark supporters at each meeting. And understanding the importance of a political show of strength, we endeavored to mobilize our constituency. As expected, the members of the public came to the project with strong feelings either in favor of or—more often—against skateparks. The rhetoric mobilized on both sides of the debate was heated and passionate, with skateparks and skateboarders often derided as loud, disorderly, and dangerous. As one comment to Parks during this process argued, “[w]hy disrupt places that are lovely and now utilized by young and old by inserting an ugly space designed to create noise by a very narrow segment of the population.” In contrast, young skaters listened to opponents equating them with criminals and drug users while their parents and older skateboarders spoke about skateparks in glowing terms, dismissing critics’ concerns out of hand. The “breakout” sessions that I staffed after the general question and answer sessions likewise failed to engender any real proactive dialogue. Rather, individuals would use these opportunities to advocate for or against the inclusion of specific sites near their neighborhoods. During all six meetings, only one member of the public openly admitted that his opinion of the master plan had changed as a result of the public presentation. Ultimately, but for a hand-ful of examples discussed below, the final master plan prepared by the planning firm and adopted by the City Council on January 31, 2007 fulfilled most of its advocates’ ambitions, identifying 26 Parks sites throughout the city for future skatepark development (Fig. 3).

An understanding of how the planning process worked, however, does not fully address why elected officials would choose to spend the time and money on using procedural-participatory planning processes as a predicate to building public skateparks. The literature suggests that urban elites tend to enact policy through ostensibly participatory planning processes so as cloak unilateral policy decisions in the clothing of democracy (Heberlein, 1976; Checkoway, 1981; Dennis, 2006). Experience in Seattle suggests that other, more subtle concerns are likely at work when city leaders respond to the demands of advocates with a planning exercise. While I cannot presume to speak to all of the motives of Seattle’s political elites, the skatepark planning process clearly enabled city officials—all the way from low-level Parks planners up to the Mayor’s office—to safely support this initiative while simultaneously protecting themselves from political backlash. While this took sev-eral forms, the most obvious was what I describe as the “shadow referendum” function. By using the public input garnered through procedural-participatory processes, city decision makers were able to predict the resistance that contemplated policies could draw from other important political actors and preempt that resistance through the selective applica-tion of expert-rational techniques.

The importance of this shadow referendum function was so important to Parks, as an agency directly answerable to the Mayor and tied to his political fortunes, that it shaped the planning process from its inception. While city decision makers may have little interest in devolving their discretionary power to planning participants under the

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procedural-participatory paradigm, they do have a vested interest in avoiding confronta-tion with powerful stakeholders. This became apparent early on, as the initial list of sites considered for potential inclusion in the master plan was determined by Parks staffers without public or Taskforce input. As a member of the private planning firm explained, this pre-approval process was intended, in part, to avoid antagonizing powerful neighbor-hoods and groups:

Fig. 3. Map of sites identified by the 2006 master plan.

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Oh, the parks department threw them out there. “These are the ones that we think are viable options.” So that was the thing that sort of bugged me. Was that they already ran them through Parks’ filter before conducting any objective analysis … We went to some parks that were not thrown in there by the Parks department and Parks would say “[politically] you are going to get your ass handed to you on a platter” [if you site a skatepark there].

For example, Parks staffers unilaterally removed potential sites from Laurelhurst, Capitol Hill, and other wealthy, largely Anglo, neighborhoods.10 Although Parks staffers claimed that parks properties in these areas had been excluded due to practical concerns—insuffi-cient size, conflicting uses, and the like—the lack of similar concerns about sites in poorer neighborhoods suggests that Parks was eager to avoid conflicts with influential residential enclaves and groups.

The public input component of the planning process likewise served as a “shadow refer-endum” by placing the citizen “Taskforce” in the position to engage in a similar weighing of neighborhood power and threat. After the public disclosure of the first draft plan, resi-dents from almost every one of the neighborhoods surrounding potential skatepark sites strenuously objected to those locations, usually associating the contemplated skatepark with the types of crime and disorder long attributed to groups of young men in the city (Irwin, 1985; Baumgartner, 1988; Fyfe and Bannister, 1998; Lucas, 1998). For example, after Cowan Park—a neighborhood immediately to the north of the University of Wash-ington that had previously organized to exclude transients, drug dealers, and homeless youth from its park (Koch, 2000)—was named as a potential site, most of the neighbor-hood’s objections complained that a skatepark would bring the return of past difficulties. As one Cowan neighbor argued in a phone call to a Parks department staffer: “if you let the skaters in, you are just opening our neighborhood to pushers, pimps, pedophiles, and prostitutes.”

Faced with this type of resistance, the Taskforce looked to Parks staff members to help determine what negative feedback posed a political threat, and what didn’t. In deciding which proposed sites would be included for City Council and Mayoral approval as part of the final master plan, my fellow Taskforce members and I tacitly weighed not only the con-tent of negative public input, but also its source. And in this task we were aided by Parks’ written, site-by-site summary of the comments solicited by the procedural-participatory public input process, and staffers’ oral evaluation of the political strength of each neigh-borhood. While race and class were never explicitly mentioned during this discussion, highly coded terms such as neighborhood “character,” socio-economic “transition,” and parks in need of a “clean-up” clearly signaled staffers’ awareness of the varied geographies of power underlying often identical comments from differently situated areas.

For example, when comparing two proposed sites in neighboring parks that had both received substantial negative public feedback—one in the largely white and affluent Myrtle Reservoir neighborhood, and the other two hundred feet away in the poor and

10In 2000 Seattle’s aggregate median household income was $45,736. In contrast Laurelhurst ($81,866) and North Capitol Hill ($88,834) enjoyed substantially higher median household incomes. Laurelhurst and North Capitol Hill were 86.2% and 84% white, respectively (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000).

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predominantly multi-ethnic High Point neighborhood11—a Parks staffer encouraged us to avoid political problems with Myrtle residents. Instead we were urged to push forward with High Point, as the community could “really use a skate facility” in an otherwise “weird” and “spotty” location often associated with teen crime. Based on this type of input and eager to maximize the total number of potential skatepark sites, we quickly but tacitly learned that while negative framings of young skaters could be expected to accompany almost all of the proposed sites, there were certain neighborhoods where that feedback mattered and others where it did not.

This type of political sorting was facilitated by the coexistence of both public input and expert-rational models for planning within Parks and the master-planning project itself. Where politically empowered neighborhoods had aggressively protested locat-ing a skatepark nearby, our decision to remove those sites from the master plan could be done easily, if reluctantly, under the rationale that we were responding to democratic, ground-level public input. In contrast, where other sites received similar negative com-ment from neighbors who did not pose a political threat, it was easy to leave those sites on the proposed master plan under an expert-rational, “planner knows best” reasoning that—notwithstanding the potential for low-level disorder associated with skateparks—the proposed facility would be compatible with the surrounding area’s “character.”

This tendency was particularly stark in the case of a proposed site in Genesee Park, an unusually racially and socioeconomically diverse park that stretches between the wealthy enclaves lining Lake Washington, up to the largely Asian and African American Columbia City neighborhood.12 As with other locations, comments from Genesee Park often referred to ongoing difficulties maintaining order over youthful populations, with one emailed com-ment arguing that a skate facility would exacerbate ongoing problems including “brutal fights between teens, drug use and dealing, cars driving recklessly around the area …and lots of late night noise … I’d hate to see a skatepark built that would just attract more unsu-pervised teens to our area at all hours.” And among all the proposed sites, Genesee was the only neighborhood to send somebody to directly address the Taskforce at one of its regular meetings, with a representative attending on October 26, 2006 to voice concerns ranging from defects in the planning process, a lack of analysis of neighborhood needs, concerns with preserving passive green space, and potential displacement of existing users.

Even though the objections lodged by Genesee area residents were similar in tone and quantity to those posed, for example, by Cowan Park neighbors, the Taskforce treated the two sites entirely differently, without explicitly addressing the differences in class and

11In 2000 the median household incomes in Myrtle Park and High point—immediately adjacent census tracts separated by 35th Avenue SW—were, $54,583 and $27,574, respectively. Myrtle Reservoir was 85.8% white and 3.7% black, whereas High Point was 30.9% white, 21.5% African American, 26.6% Asian, and 11.7% Hispanic (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000).12In 2000, the Census tract encompassing the Genesee Park area contained a population that was 36.9% white, 26.8% African American, and 24.2% Asian, with a combined median household income of $47,926. What these statistics fail to capture is the wildly differing demographics that occur from one end of the park to another, largely on account of the higher property values on the north side of Genesee Park near Lake Washington. For example, one census block randomly chosen at the far southwestern corner of the park (Block 2014) reflects a 33.3% white, 35.7% African American, and 19% Asian population. In contrast, a randomly chosen census block at the far northwestern corner of the park (Block 7003) reflects a 56.7% white, 10.6% African American, and 21.2% Asian population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000).

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racial composition between the two neighborhoods.13 Cowan was deemed a genuine politi-cal threat, in light of the neighbors’ successful past organization and lobbying to “clean-up” their park. In contrast, the objections raised by Genesee were largely dismissed as misconceptions about the nature of skateparks that could be remedied through proper sit-ing and facility design under a tacitly expert-rational approach to planning. Indeed, staffers and Taskforce members were particularly enthusiastic about the potential for locating the skatepark in the poorer, multiracial southern end of the park as a means to combat youthful disorder and crime in the area.

At the end of the day, this “shadow referendum” function served to situate skateparks according to vectors of race and class, with almost all of the sites in the final master plan located in neighborhoods are at or below Seattle’s median household income level (Caliper, 2000). Moreover, the resulting map of future skatepark sites consciously excluded any concomitant analysis of whether proposed sites were either near to or accessible for Seattle’s youthful skateboarders under Parks’ oft-repeated rationale that planning should be for “future needs, rather than existing demand.” The only exceptions to the tendency to place skateparks in less affluent neighborhoods were four “skatedots” (small facilities of less than 1500 square feet), one of which had long been requested by the affluent Magnolia neighborhood,14 the sole “regional” facility (over 30,000 square feet) which for lack of any other options was located at a large converted air force base overlooking Lake Washington, and four sites located on properties slated for future parks acquisition.

The Taskforce’s treatment of these “future acquisition” properties provides a particu-larly vivid example of how the “shadow referendum” function of procedural-participatory planning can benefit elected officials. Three of the four “future acquisition” sites are city reservoirs that are scheduled to be covered and converted into park space pursuant to home-land security initiatives to protect municipal water supplies, and the fourth—the Northgate “Park and Ride”—is a parking lot for downtown-bound bus commuters. Due to their high elevations and placement in well-established neighborhoods, the reservoirs—including the aforementioned Myrtle Reservoir site—tend to be surrounded by middle to upper class residents.15 Parks had initially promoted each of these sites as politically “safe,” in that they are all large enough to allow a skatepark to be isolated from surrounding residences and because they offer the opportunity to build without displacing existing green space and uses. Upon the announcement that they had been identified in the first draft plan, however, each of the four sites received substantial indications of future political problems. In the case of the reservoirs, this took the form of a large number of comments from nearby resi-dents vehemently opposing their inclusion on the basis of noise, problems with parking, the loss of an opportunity to convert the reservoirs into more green space, and potential negative impacts on “neighborhood crime statistics, especially burglary, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, purse-snatchings, and drug dealing” (as per one email to Parks from a resident of the Maple-Leaf neighborhood).

13In contrast to the multi-ethnic Genessee park area, the Cowen Park neighborhood was approximately 78.9% white, and only 2% African American (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000).14The median household income in Magnolia was $60,410 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000).15For example, the neighborhood around the Maple Leaf Reservoir had a median household income of $50,351 and an 82.6% White population, while the nearby Roosevelt Reservoir neighborhood had a median household income of $66,066 and an 87.4% White population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000).

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It was the political feedback to the Northgate site, however, that most forcefully per-suaded the Taskforce to treat all four future parks sites differently under the master plan. Shortly after releasing the draft plan, a near panicked Parks staffer contacted the members of the Taskforce to inform us that the Mayor’s office had ordered the Parks department and its subcontracted planning firm to halt all work on the master plan pending an inter-nal review of its activities. Working under a tight timeframe, facing a limited budget, and having already scheduled subsequent rounds of public meetings, we were all concerned that the delay posed by this move could bring the entire project to a permanent halt. After frantic back-channel communications between my fellow advocates, Parks staff and City Council staff, the source of the problem was traced to a high-level aid to the Mayor who one Council staffer described to me as “the Mother of Northgate.” Expressing what a Parks staffer characterized as “the full range of NIMBY arguments, taken to the next [political] level,” this member of the Mayor’s staff had informally claimed political ownership of the Northgate Park and Ride redevelopment and was threatening to simply suspend the master plan rather than allowing it to locate a skateboarding facility in “her” park. In an effort to salvage the planning process, my fellow advocates and I engaged in a feverish 48 hours of phone calls, meetings, and negotiations with Parks staffers and City Council staff to work out a compromise that would allow the project to continue. Abandoning the procedural-participatory paradigm, we proposed simply deferring the struggle under the technical and arguably expert-rational excuse that because those sites were not yet parks properties they couldn’t be fully included in the master plan. Thus, Northgate and the increasingly problematic reservoir sites would instead be recommended for non-binding consideration of a potential skate feature once they were acquired and developed. Two days later, we learned through Parks staff that the Mayor’s office had accepted the compromise. After a pro-forma meeting between staffers for the Mayor and Parks the following week, the project was allowed to move forward.

Beyond averting an immediate crisis between the Taskforce, the master plan’s City Council sponsors, and the Mayor’s office, this compromise also represented a vivid illus-tration of how the use of such planning processes as “shadow referenda” can protect elected politicians. And while this battle played out at the staff level, the motivation for that battle and the stakes to be won or lost were attributable to the city’s elected officials. Just as the Mayor’s office did not want to see its plans for a major redevelopment of the Northgate property undermined by the City Council’s master plan, likewise the City Council did not want to see its project scuttled by mayoral resistance. By using the public “notice and comment” of the procedural-participatory planning process to expose potential conflicts between the Council and the Mayor, political insiders such as myself were able to forge a compromise before that conflict became public. And by allowing that conflict to be deferred, both of the two major forces in City Hall were able to simultaneously satisfy their internal and external constituencies while postponing the ultimate resolution of conflict over the site to some future, less politically sensitive date.

CONCLUSION

One of the profound ironies of Seattle’s master-planning exercise for skateparks is that, on a site-by site basis, the decisions the City made about its public spaces appear to be the product of sound democratic practice. When considering the plan as a whole, however, the

436 JOHN CARR

tendency of the planning process to undermine the democratic protections of both the pub-lic input model and the expert-rational model based on prevalent vectors of race, power, and privilege is much more problematic.

For example, from the perspective of a skatepark advocate, it is fairly easy to say that Seattle’s planning system works. Through hard work, a marshalling of bodies and data, and effective courting of elected officials and media outlets, a small group of committed activists were able to begin to realize a vision of the good city that I personally share. We made sure our voices were heard and we got our skateparks. Likewise, where Cowan Park objected to hosting a skatepark and Magnolia requested one, the City listened to their input and acted upon it, giving force to the very ground level democratic ideals underpin-ning public input–based planning. And where neighborhoods like Genesee and High Point objected to sharing their public spaces with a skatepark, the planners did their jobs by eval-uating negative public input for whether it should impact the plan, or simply consisted of the type of NIMBY backlash that accompanies all contemplated changes to public space—following a textbook model of the expert-rational model for planning.

The difficulty here is when and how these two planning paradigms were combined. While Seattle’s master-planning process did much to provide a broad range of people with a voice in the process, fully achieving the democratic promise of planning calls for far more than simply providing an effective forum. Rather, it requires a mechanism for uniformly translating those voices into policy. And on this account, Seattle failed. By treat-ing the process as shadow referendum, actors within city government were able to sort among the voices raised in response to the master-planning process in order to deter-mine which of them were important enough in the city’s electoral politics to listen to and which were not. While the tendency of political actors to filter public input along lines of class, race, and power might tragically fall under the rubric of “politics as usual,” the way that the procedural-participatory aspects of planning were used in Seattle was particularly unsettling.

My critique is not merely that, once again, politicians undermined planners’ efforts to render city government more fair and inclusive. Rather, two profound paradoxes spring from the uneasy and unresolved coexistence of expert-rational and procedural- participatory paradigms for planning given elected officials’ ambivalence to abrogating their political power. First, in this fraught political context, rendering planning processes increasingly inclusive may be seen, ironically, as serving to further disadvantage the city’s poor, less organized, less educated, and/or non-white residents by alternately soliciting and then dismissing their voices. Public input–based planning processes inevitably put committed citizens through an exhausting, confusing, and time-consuming regime of public notices, meetings, hearings of limited scope conducted largely in technical language, and core decisions presented as fait acompli, all leading to a sense that, to paraphrase Feeley (1979) by way of Herbert (2005), the “process is a punishment.” Unlike more privileged urban residents whose civic engagement is deemed meaningful and valid, this process doubly punishes those whose voices don’t “count.” They find themselves not only on the losing end of city planning, but also with their time, energy, optimism, faith in democracy, and efficacy squandered.

The second paradox that sprang from the disconnect between planning theory and polit-ical practice in Seattle is that, perversely, it is unclear whether neighborhoods that failed to carry the day in the master-planning processes should actually be deemed to have “lost,” as

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they may now potentially receive the admittedly mixed benefits of a public skatepark. To celebrate Seattle’s master-planning process as a success because it provided much-needed youth recreational facilities to poor neighborhoods over their objections is, however, prob-lematic. Such a move requires adopting a double standard by which the expert-rational, “planner-knows-best” approach decides how space should be used and regulated in poor neighborhoods, while in wealthy and empowered neighborhoods, the “neighbors know best.”

And while I do not mean to suggest that the phenomena that I observed in Seattle occur in all planning projects or in all cities, the well-documented coexistence of expert-rational and procedural-participatory approaches within contemporary U.S. planning practices may suggest not only why planning remains so resistant to efforts at democratization, but also, ironically, the very paths forward to creating real reform. Experience from Seattle indi-cates that planning—and thus much governmental decision-making about urban space—continues to face unresolved structural contradictions such that planners’ and theorists’ efforts at increasing participation rates and transparency are ultimately misguided. Instead, both the practice and the politics of planning must be rethought in potentially counterintui-tive ways.

If we are to recognize the lasting appeal of both the public input and the expert-rational models, as well as the risks of allowing them to coexist and undermine each other, then two potential starting directions suggest themselves. The first is to abandon current public input approaches while honestly re-embracing the expert-rational model, with its tradi-tional mechanism of correction through electoral politics. And here the case of Seattle is instructive. The political cover that planning provides city elites—whether or not in the form of shadow referenda—must be stripped away to expose the actual political agents behind proposed changes to the urban environment. This could take the form of requiring at least one elected official to be disclosed as the official “sponsor” of every planning exer-cise, and to be made available to answer questions at public input sessions. Likewise, the disclosure and presence of activists, groups, and lobbyists who are “behind” a given plan-ning exercise could further provide much-needed transparency in the process. Of course, formalizing city elites’ “ownership” of planning processes would counterintuitively under-mine the longstanding move to transform planning into a grassroots democratic process (at least at the level of appearances). Instead, it would provide a real democratic check on the practice of planning. By leaving the advance notice requirements of the procedural- participatory paradigm in place, elected officials would be publicly linked to specific plan-ning projects, thus rendering both subject to voter approval through regular elections.

The second—and I would argue mutually exclusive—approach is to really shift dis-cretionary authority over the built environment to ordinary citizens. Again, this requires counterintuitively reducing both elites’ and planning participants’ final say over planning outputs. Rather than simply having their participation rates increased, planning partici-pants would need to be meaningfully provided the ability to decide questions of not just where and how the urban environment will be altered, but also whether and when. And in order to place a check on the inherent power biases among planning participants, the outputs of those processes would then need to be placed in the hands of the public at large, through the form of referenda or some other form of general vote.

While both approaches that I tentatively suggest here require abandoning the belief that contemporary participatory planning can be a process through which meaningful

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grassroots democracy can take place, practical experience suggests that this loss is more rhetorical than real. Instead of simply allowing elites to continue to play the public input and expert-rational models off of one another, there must be concrete efforts to simul-taneously restructure the politics and practice of planning to follow the true animating principles of one or the other approach. Otherwise urban planning will continue to be yet another political tool for urban elites, and yet another potential trap for the city’s most disempowered residents.

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