I don’t have any solutions here, but I think about this issue all the time. The community meetings, surveys, events, pop-ups, and conversations we rely on in planning are incredibly time-consuming. https://twitter.com/prernajagadeesh/status/1361328304217874433

So much of the discourse around outreach and collaboration in planning is about meeting people where they are and bringing people into the process who aren’t typically inclined to be involved at all.

That’s good, but you still need to contend with the fact that time and attention are finite. How much can we depend on taking anyone’s time away from work, family, church, leisure, volunteer activities, etc?

Even if we put together a truly inclusive outreach and collaboration strategy, it’s biased toward the people we actually hear from. That sounds self evident, but it’s good to say it explicitly from time to time.

I’m sure there are people out there who say “I go to work, I pay my rent/taxes, I (maybe) vote, I go to church, I volunteer. What more do I need to do to get a city that just works?”

We’ve got democracy in the form of elections, but then we’ve got all of this other quasi-democracy around all sorts of government decisions. I think it tends to muddy the accountability waters.

I don’t have the answers. There are all sorts of ways that electoral politics leaves many, many people behind. And there are ways that more direct decision-making by electeds can be bad (aldermanic privilege, anyone?)

But I think we’ve gone pretty far down the path of adding more deliberation points on top of the electoral process. We need to put more thought and effort into making existing electoral politics more responsive and accountable to everyone.