Assessing
the Depth and Breadth of Participation of Seattle's Neighborhood
Planning Process |
| Neighborhood planning is the closest practice we have to participatory democracy. As Dewey put it, "Democracy begins at home, and its home is the neighborly community." Prompted by Washington State's Growth Management Act (1990), which required cities to prepare comprehensive plans that accommodated their growth allocations, the City of Seattle recently undertook (1995-2000) an extensive neighborhood planning process, which has been recognized as a successful model for participatory neighbourhood planning. The framework of the neighborhood planning process was the City's Comprehensive Plan (1994). Seattle's comprehensive plan adopted a strategy of concentrating new growth in a set of centers, from urban (e.g., Downtown), to industrial (e.g., Duwamish) to urban villages, to distressed neighborhoods. Seattle developed an innovative way of getting neighbourhoods to buy into the growth allocations-it left it up the neighbourhoods to organize themselves for planning, while providing them with guidelines (e.g., the extent of outreach required, a Toolbox of maps, data, examples), some technical assistance, and funds for hiring consultants (from $80-100,000 per urban village center). The City estimates that over 20,000 people participated in the neighbourhood planning process that produced 38 neighborhood plans. Also, Seattle established a distinctive way of reviewing plans for incorporation into the comprehensive plan, and for implementing such plans (e.g., reorganization of city services, and incorporation of plan recommendations into the capital budget). This paper, after setting out the characteristics of the neighbourhood planning process, examines the participatory aspects of the process, using the distinction developed by Berry, Portney, and Thomson (1993) that sets out various aspects of the breadth and the depth of participatory democracy. To assess the extent of participation along these two dimensions, this paper will rely on a review of city documents, including planning and budget documents, and a set of structured interviews with planners (both public sector and consultants) that were active in the process, as well as neighborhood activists. It will conclude with exploratory findings on the breadth and depth of Seattle's neighbourhood planning process. |