Agency, Trust, and Vision Issues
Larger societal forces continue to make it hard for us all to have a shared, and coherent, vision of the future
Now that we got that “I’m a small-business-owner-so-listen-to-me” post out of the way (but seriously Biden Administration and popular press, we’d be happy to give you nice pull quotes on anything concerning small business, because it seems like you go to the same old Chamber of Commerce people), let’s get back to the problem of democracy.
We’ve been been obsessed with ways to support residents in making democracy an every day thing, working on The People’s Festival, Block Builder, LA Innovation, NYCLU Listening Room, amongst a whole other host of projects. We think that democracy promotion is needed right here in our neighborhood.
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Project Stoa Update
Now that we’ve completed the first installment of Block Builder (more here), and are synthesizing our findings, we have more time to go back to Project Stoa. This is our ongoing research project to redesign public consultation and feedback.
We continue to interview people in this space, be they civic practitioners or those supporting them in the private space. We also are joining every feedback session we can find in NYC, and in other places we feel we can offer true and constructive feedback.
Here, in no particular order, are some early thoughts:
Intersectional Problems
Many of the pressing issues found in cities with more than a dozen stoplights are problems which cross subject matter, org chart, and time scale. Housing is a zoning problem, is a transportation issue, is an equity issue, is an investment issue, is an overhang from discriminatory practices, is a climate issue, is a, is a, is a.
We are asking our civic professionals, organizations, and residents to deal with intersectional problems. We are working without the tools required, without shared historical understanding, and without a clarity of vision needs to point us to a better place.
No wonder partisans label a minor rezoning of the SoHo/NoHo district evil.
Sidebar
I lose all patience with people who are endlessly negative, who have exactly zero amounts of putting things in perspective, and constantly imagine the worst intentions of everyone around them. It seems like the consultative meetings I’ve been joining is chock full of these people. Please. Just stop.
No trust causes vision Issues
We have vision issues. We can’t all agree on what the larger vision for our neighborhood or community should be.
Get 100 community members in a room, and you will get 101 ideas of what a vision for their neighborhood is. My hunch is that we all aren’t coming to the problem with the same set of information and expertise, and we all have different levels of trust in the system.
We all want different things for the city, for our families for ourselves. Yet the amount of vitriol aimed at civic professionals is shocking.
the anger and fear about removing mandates for single family housing in California, Minneapolis, and other places is breathtaking. Even Tucker Carlson is brining his brand of reactionary rhetoric to this topic once again. It isn’t helping. One side is saying, “Let’s let landowners build a few more units on their land.” The other side says, “You want the neighborhood to be like Manhattan, and other people will move here. And I hate you.”
These vision issues, and lack of shared idea of how we can grow our communities, come back to trust. I get the feeling that people don’t trust their neighbor to not build a 20 story building, so they don’t want their neighborhood to change at all. It’s a reactionary hedge, based in fear and a scarcity mindset.
It’s hard to imagine the future
This reaction kind of makes sense. We don’t have perfect vision to the future. And we don’t control the future. And in the future, we’re going to die. It’s scary.
We don’t have agency on the future.
This perceived lack of control puts us into all sorts of not-great mental mindsets. I wonder if part of our problem stems from not having the skills to look into the future, paired with not trusting our neighbors, and not having control or agency.
Maybe we all need to take some futuring classes, so we can have a better toolset to look at the future through scenario planning, cones of probability, and trends.
Residents want their cake and eat it too
I get it, engaging with the city is tough, often time the meeting time and dates aren’t aligned to your availability, and it sometimes feels like you are repeating yourself. I’ve been trying to make it to one of the many public feedback times for the NYC Congestion Charge, and I haven’t been able to make a single one.
It’s tough to find the space and the mental preparation to offer feedback, when life intervenes. But then I see this, and I melt a little bit:
This is something I’ve heard countless times, with lots of variations of, “I’ve already given you this feedback, get going.” Yet also, residents want the option of giving negative feedback on a project, and if they missed the window they get a healthy case of why wasn’t I consulted. This puts the junior staffers at departments of transportations, water, sewer, planning, and the like at a huge bind.
Many of the consultative meetings I’ve been going to have a healthy 15-20 minutes of preamble, going over the rules of decorum, what the project is, how they’ve advertised and gotten feedback to date, etc. It’s a hugely defensive measure, often made by a staffer who has her shields up, waiting for someone to call her evil or racist. No, seriously, this happens all the time over zoom, in person, and on twitter.
The problem here is that engaging and consulting the community (though all know that community is constructed) is a slow boring of boards, and it’s hard to see the small wins which add up to impact.
We wonder if we can do a better job of showing how all these meetings, small moves, and data points can ladder up to a larger evidence of impact or vision. Something like housing scarcity is both a macroeconomic issue and an issue which hits at the kitchen table.
Context collapse has warped our sense of nuance
Our sense of trust continues to be tested (or eroded) through a host of forces ranging from communication media to political partisanship because everything is nationalized these days. This erosion of trust isn’t surprising since we are in the 18th month of a global pandemic, where national and international organizations didn’t do all that great. Not to mention the blistering amount of propaganda created by actors who stand to profit in lulz, advertising dollars, or altering the geopolitical situation (PDF).
Our commonwealth needs mending, and we’re not sure how to do it besides on a block-by-block basis. The problem is difficult, multidimensional, and intersectional which sounds dire, but there really is good news:
The NYC DOT is doing a great job of creating a full spectrum of feedback opportunities, with in-person sessions, zoom sessions, and multiple sessions at different times of the day and week, and online form feedback.
This is a “known known” problem, and soon more federal and state resources will come online to support positive engagement (stay tuned)
When asked, residents will offer useful feedback. A municipal leader in Texas said, “I don’t think anyone I’ve spoken with hasn’t had 2 minutes to give me feedback when I asked.”
While we’ve observed the negativity in current consultative and public feedback sessions, it feels like we are coming to a hinge point where something has to change. We hope it’s for the better.
Going forward
So far there’s some interesting threads we’re going to pull on:
New tools (this is what Block Builder is pushing on)
Ways to look at the future to build and maintain agency
Building & reinforcing points of trust for residents
If you are interested in giving feedback or being interviewed, please fill out this google form and we’ll contact you shortly.
Things we are reading
Paper: The effects of how and why thinking on perceptions of future negative events
Paper: Race, Neighborhood Poverty, and Participation in Voluntary Associations
Rereading this paper: Racial Disparities in Housing Politics: Evidence from Administrative Data
The US government spends much less on child care than other developed nations
Feel free to share this with your network. We’d love your feedback on this early synthesis.
So there we are. Another Friday, where it’s 76ºF in NYC in OctoberBe kind to each other.