Copyright 2011 Phil Heywood

Introduction to Sessions

SESSIONAL FORMAT:

1. Lecture and Discussions 2.Tutorial Workshops:3.Guest Lecturers from practice

Aims & Intended Outcomes

On completing this unit, you will be able to:

1.Understand explicit community planning theories and apply them to a range of current, real life planning scales and situations;

2.Identify the issues, concerns and roles of various community planning stakeholders including community organizations, government, the private sector and individuals;

3. Analyse and respond to complex community issues through appropriate formal and informal planning strategies and techniques, including community engagement, cultural mapping and planning, negotiation processes and social impact assessment.

Objectives

Intended Capabilities:

a.Knowledge of community planning frameworks, actors, agencies and co-ordination methods

b. Capacity to communicate ideas effectively with colleagues and stakeholders

c.Ability to employ effective listening and collaborative skills in facilitating community workshops

•Understanding of social and ethical responsibilities, international perspectives, and land use implications of social and economic change

a.Effective analytical thinking and creative problem solving.

Lecture Program

Lecture Program

Lecture Program

• Recommended Assignment 1: Individual –Literature Review, Set in Week 2, Submitted in Week 7 or 8–Worth 30% of all Assessment

• Assignment 2: Self Selected Group 2-6 members –Community Planning Proposal, Set in Week 7 or 8, Submitted in Week 14–Worth 50% of all Assessment

•Assessment 3: Individual –participation week by week, Lecture & Tutorial Workshops–Worth 20% of all Assessment

Assignments & Assessments

1.What Community Planning does & why it is needed

2. Where it is coming from & where it is going to

3. Buzz pairs :In pairs, discuss style of different types of community planning

4. Some positive examples

5. Conclusions

Lecture 1 Outline

What is Community Planning?

One definition: Planning for the needs and aspirations of people and communities through strategic policy and action, integrated with urban, regional and other planning activity

- Planning Institute of Australia, 2005

What is involved ? Why? How should it be done?

• WHAT?Needs, wants opportunities and links for different activities, facilities and land uses

• WHY?Aims to produce integrated proposals for particular and specific actions and activities

• HOW?Holistically, within a framework of general human and social needs, acknowledging rapid social change.

• BUT Focussing on specific initiatives linked with other community activities and levels of governance.

Range and Relevance

Whole people need whole places

The Scope and Levels

Community OrganisationsCommunity Organisations

1.Order : “Great Leader” & Fascist regimes of Mid 20th C

2.Competition: Free Market doctrines

3.Social Control: Centralised politics & command economies

4.Collaboration: Mutual aid & diversity

Where it’s coming from:Competing world views to meet these challenges

Social Darwinism views evolution as : “A Giant Gladiatorial Contest” leading to “The survival of the fittest & elimination of the weaker “–Thomas Huxley & Adolph Hitler

•The need to optimize and manage the “Selfish Gene” (Richard Dawkins, 1976), leading to communities dominated by “Great Leaders” like Caesar, Genghis Khan & Napoleon.

Bad 20th C experiences with such failed “Great Leaders” as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Salazar, Mao Tse Tung, Idi Amin and Mugabe

1. Order:Through genetically driven dominance

• Community Planning implications of Command & Control doctrines: : - walled communities & controlled and regimented shopping malls & spaces; - unequally structured cities and levels of income; - emphasis on planning as leadership and planners as visionaries- Distrust of public participation

Order:Through genetically driven dominance

• Belief in the goodness of self seeking, personal ingenuity and “deal doing”

•Adam Smith & “the hidden hand of the laws of supply & demand” & Milton Friedmann’s Monetarism

•Spending money as the best indicator of choice

•Critiques of the “Tragedy of the Commons”

2. Competition & Productivity

• Planning Implications:

- Individualism & privatisation (“There is no such thing as society –only individuals & families”)

- Contraction of public funding of community services –loss of affordable housing

- Private financing & control of public infrastructure – UK: Thames Water & Rail systems; Australia: Telstra, Origin Energy,

- Boom –bust cycles & recurrent market failure

Competition & Productivity

• Plato’s justification for regimentation : “ends justifying means” .

• Aim of Karl Marx & I.V. Lenin to supersede Great Leaders of Feudalism and Competition of Capitalism by imposing equal shares

• Marxists’ hostility to step by step progress which “masks underlying contradictions of Capitalism”

• Planning implications of these social control theories:- State monopolies of industry, housing & transport of Soviet & Maoist regimes resulting in poor feedback, lack of variety & low design quality of built environments.

3. Social Control

• Planning implications of these social control theories (continued):

- Reliance on “leading role” of one party politics, technicians and distrust of public participation & consultation as products of “Bourgeois false consciousness”, justifying top down plans & planning

- Strong but questionable Community Planning of Pol Pot’s Cambodia & Mao Tse Tung’s China

• Manuel Castells’ 1983 reformulation of Marxist planning (in Planning & the Grassroots): local coalitions could create Urban Social Movements ( as in 70s Madrid) that would enable genuine Community Planning & Social Change.

Social Control

1. Key role of communication in evolution of human species & society - enabling cooperation & joint action

2. Truth as a discovered outcome from exchange among ideas and experiences of different participants

3. Current Communicative Turn in Planning Theory: Habermas(1989) & Healey (2006) & The Policy Table round which proposals can be negotiated and agreed

4. Communication & Collaboration

4. Contemporary world of instantaneous and universal communication: The Web, International travel, Global economy of money & ideas

5. Past poor communications cause failures of some societies : people not facing facts [see Jarred Diamond’s Collapse(2005)]

6. Good communication can build consensus for effective joint action & creative cooperation: (Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid & Andrew Mawson & “Third Way” Politics

Communication & Collaboration

Communications & Community Planning

EXAMPLES 1. Community Consultation, Visioning, Charettes and Inquiry by Design2. Neighbourhood Planning & Committees3. Collaborative planning by Stakeholder negotiation- Jane Jacobs’ Systems of Survival (1992)

4. Community Preference Lists & Opinion Surveys5. Facilitated dialogue, consensus building and appreciative inquiry6. Public open spaces as meeting places for the communication which underlies democracy7. Public Transport as a sociable means of mass movement to enable shared activities and cooperation

Communication and Collaboration combine to create the t Social Capital that is the subject of one of next week’s lectures.

BUZZ PAIRS:

- In pairs, select two of the world views that have just been discussed

- Then, each think of one or two examples of community planning based on one of these world views and explains its style and effects to your buzz partner

BUZZ PAIRS

• City Farms –Northey Street in Brisbane, Surrey Dock in London

• Micro credit –Mohamed Yunus in Bangladesh • Worker Management –Mondragon Worker’s Co-op in Spain

• Urban Governance -Madrid Citizens Movement

Positive Examples of Collaborative Community Planning

• City Farms express shared ideas of environmental conservation in an age of dominant urban development

• They are both public spaces encouraging contact and practical expressions of shared values and social cooperation

• Together with “Walking Buses” and Vacation Camps they are among the most local and accessible forms of community planning, capable of transforming people’s lives and experience in the city

Local Space & City Farms

• Sub tropical permaculture gardens in Brisbane’s inner northern suburbs

Brisbane’s Northey Street City Farm

• Participatory Permaculture design : 5 year plan for expansion onto adjoining two hectares and re-design of the garden and orchards, to include 11 rainforest species & 4 large productive kitchen gardens with fruit trees

• Nursery and green waste recycling

• Working with unemployed people

• Food and Nutrition Program

• Workshops and training

• New Projects introduce bush foods, farmer's market, local food

A one hectare community garden: On the banks of Breakfast Creek in inner suburban Windsor

• One of many London City Farms

• One hectare site of old Surrey docks at northern tip of Rotherhithe peninsula opposite Canary Wharf-one of the hubs of the Global Economy

Surrey Docks Farm, London

• Founded 1975 by Hilary Peters to meet –

“buried need in people for reunion with each other and their surroundings” this city farm now involves schools, businesses, youth organizations and volunteers of all ages, including a blacksmith/ artist, who work on site every day, providing farm equipment, art objects and continuing interest.

Role & Activities of Surrey Docks Farm

• A focus for local community life, recurrent fairs, festivals, & a café which is a regular stopping off point for walkers and cyclists along the Thameside Path, the small site is densely used and includes small fields for grazing , a vegetable patch along the river, a herb garden, a compost area, a duck pond, a wild life patch, at least one yurt (the yurts go out to schools,) a willow walk housing the bee hives & an orchard full of geese and sculpture everywhere.

• The blacksmith does inventive work with local children collecting the grot off the river beach and making recycled portraits of the farm’s animals

Role & Activities of Surrey Docks Farm

• Origin in mass poverty of War of Independence Bangladesh of 1972-5• Return of Economics Professor. Mahamed Yunus to university in Chittagong• Impact of 42 small loans totalling US$ 27 on creating economic independency• Foundation of Grameen Bank to lend to “Poorest of the Poor”-mostly landless women• Replacement of financial collateral by Social collateral• Organization into Groups, Centres, Braches and National Grameen Bank

2. Economic Justice & Cooperation: Micro Credit – The Grameen Bank

Diagram [Fuglesang & Chandler (1993)] of the organization of the local level of:Grameen Groups (now 1.2 mill) andGrameen Centres (now 200,000).

It is these regular weekly meetings which ensure the communication and social collaboration which the movement is built.

Mainstream of the Grameen: Local Organisation

The Overall Organisation:The View From Above

Aims & Achievements of Grameen Bank

• Aims:- Reaching the Poorest;- Reaching Women;- Building Financially Self Sufficient Institutions;- Ensuring Impact on the lives of clients and their families

• Record: Lending has grown in 30 years: - to over $US 7 Billion - to nearly 8 million members (over 97% of them formerly

impoverished women) - organized in 1.2 million groups - in 83,000 different villages

Aims and Achievements of Grameen Bank

• Achievements:- Grameen Housing -600,000 homes constructed or

reconstructed- Grameen Phone -Telephone Ladies in 80,000 villages- Grameen Knitwear –a weavers cooperative- Grameen Health Care Services –creating jobs & improving health

• Scale:- By 2001, the movement had spread to include partner

bodies in 20 in all 6 continents & is still growing.

• 1939: Father Jose Arizmendi, founded democratically managed Polytechnic School to explore cooperative ideas as a “third way” between excesses of dictatorship (Order ) and the social inequities of capitalism (Competition).

• 1956: Established ULGOR workers cooperative with unemployed Polytechnic graduates to produce “White Goods”.

• 1960s: Growth to a network of enterprises with 3,000 + worker partners all having a financial stake which is bought out on leaving, so that only the workers can own their work places & enterprises.

3. Economic Justice & Cooperation:Mondragon Workers Cooperative

• Control of the factories and senior management appointments is by Works Councils(all workers as voting members) appointing and sharing power with plant managers.

• 2008: The network had grown to include over 100,000 member owners, and become Spain’s largest producer of white goods, with the highest worker productivity of any Spanish firm, and branches in 3 other continents.

3. Economic Justice & Cooperation:Mondragon Workers Cooperative

Mondragon Arrangements

• > 10% of the profits must go to “second degree” co-ops providing community services of schools, colleges, clinics & research institutes, governed by factory co-ops representatives

• No factory may expand to > 500 workers, to maintain workers control & good communications. Wage differentials, originally fixed at a ratio 1:3, have been expanded but only to 1:6.

• Global re-structuring of employment due to automation of 1980s & 1990s posed sharp challenges, but employment levels remained at 100% -part of the Coop deal!

• New enterprises start with a group of people who are friends; the natural bonds of friendship are the basis for successful ventures, reflecting community as “friendly association”

1. Decline of Franco’s Fascist regime in late 60s Spain

2. Coalition of Citizens Movements demanding:- Replacement of inner city shanty towns for migrants with

planned settlements- Citywide construction of public housing - Provision of adequate urban facilities- Conservation of Madrid’s historic core

4. Governance:Madrid Citizens Movement, 1975 - 1981

3. 1975-83 New Madrid City Council adopted & accomplished much of these agendas.

4. 1983 Castells’ book The City & The Grassroots developed the idea of Urban Social Movements based on Place rather than Class

Cities & the Grassroots

Collaborative style & communicative methods combine to create robust, inclusive and effective community planning across many related activities at widely ranging scales from community gardens to national communities, unifying local spaces and the global economy.

Conclusions