Interface

Abstract

Interface: Practice Challenging Theory in Community Planning

Participatory Planning and the Roots of Planning for Real: A Profile of Tony Gibson

Commentary on Tony Gibson's Profile

Commentary on Tony Gibson's Profile

It's Tony's World

Saul Alinsky Would Have Liked This Guy!

Tony Gibson Responds

Interface: Practice Challenging Theory in Community Planning

JOHN FORESTER, Editor

Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Introduction

I made it a practice that people who have lots of skills are given the opportunity to use them: that counts. And this is really the basis of everything else.

Tony Gibson

In this issue of Interface we present Tony Gibson's story of the genesis and character of the community planning technique, Planning for Real, developed abroad in Europe, Kenya, South Africa, the Caribbean and the U.S. Tony's “practice story”, as we shall see, challenges accepted theory and practice as well.1 Our commentators on Tony's work include architect-planners Reinhard Goethert from MIT in Cambridge, MA, and Iolanda Romano from Avventura Urbana in Torino, Italy; community planners Michael Parkes from London, UK and Ken Reardon from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Here in Tony's account we see an evolving style of community planning that does a good deal more than celebrate local knowledge, for it integrates the search for local knowledge with community-building and capacity-building too. All of a sudden, what the theorists treat abstractly as “social learning” becomes even more important as a community “skills inquiry”, for example, one that provides a subtle means of developing working relationships of trust and confidence among community members who otherwise might be quite unlikely to turn up for traditional planning meetings.

Tony's story challenges academics too to think far more smartly about what some call “process design”. Perhaps the challenge from practice to theory comes most starkly in appreciating each part of the working slogan that Planning for Real's advocates developed: “Eyes down, hands on, rubbing shoulders, a lot less Big Mouth”—for these pithy physical descriptions express orientations of joint community work that planning students and researchers alike have appreciated all too poorly.

“Eyes down” rather than off in space or eye-to-eye, Tony says: we're attending not first of all to personalities or what I want versus what you want, but instead to the shared space in which we live, this neighbourhood or community territory, this derelict building on this street, this intersection by the school and this place for putting the rubbish bins. Tony is not subordinating interests or values or desires here, but he asks us to express those interests, values and desires in terms of what they really involve; he asks us to keep our eyes on the ball!

“Hands on” rather than hands off the model, he says. Here Tony reminds us of what any musician or athlete or writer knows: we have to practice, to try things out, to try a passage this way, to try it that way, not to imagine what we hope to do but to try to express it, to try to make it real. And Planning for Real allows us to try to design a neighbourhood or project in virtual space, over a working model, to try it with our hands and not just via concepts. Architects and carpenters, musicians and cooks all know the wisdom of trying things out before making commitments, of practice before final performance—and Tony's story urges us not simply to get our hands dirty but to create the infrastructural space for creativity, to create the space in which affected residents can cluster together, hands on the model, in a virtual space that lets them explore together what might be possible where they live together (Sclavi, 2006). “Hands on” is no simple rejection of theory, and not a rejection of theory at all; it is a plea to try the theories out via a planning model, to give specific meaning in this case to the abstractions of “protect the environment” or “improve accessibility” rather than to debate them without seeing what they can mean as built forms, as implemented options, “now” “soon” or “later”, as Tony tells us.

“Rubbing shoulders,” he says, too, unlike anything we read in the planning theory literature. “Together, shoulder to shoulder we will change the world,” he argues. But rubbing shoulders, he explains, is something else again; it is

just that kind of intimacy in which you're exploring possibilities. You've made no commitments, it's non-committal, and a non-committal thing, to my mind, is pretty important because people are turned off at being asked to sign up for this or that.

Tony Gibson challenges planning researchers and theorists here to explain how relationships of collaboration and participation might depend on enough intimacy to allow us to explore our possibilities together in the places in which we live: how can such exploration of possibilities so crucial to imaginative planning depend in turn on a freedom of being non-committal, a freedom to play and explore and imagine and propose—rather than having the responsibility of being an official representative, of being asked to sign up for this or that.

So Tony's allusion to rubbing shoulders speaks to even more than bodily position, grandmothers hunched next to youth next to city officials working on a model they are all clustered around. For that bodily position, he tells us, has everything to do with an intimacy and a non-committal freedom to explore possibilities together, to create together—with proposals and options, as he puts it, “no longer identified with a particular gender, or race, or caste, or age group”. Here we find the practice of community planning in concrete cases challenging theory to do it justice!

Not least of all, Tony's slogan urges us, “a lot less Big Mouth”. As Tony explains, he has no brief against dialogue and deliberation, but he is all too aware that quiet people have no less to contribute than louder ones, that some loud mouths dominate and intimidate others and make groups more stupid as a result rather than more well-informed. We might interpret Tony as asking for less “big mouth” and more “little mouth”, more bits of ideas, insights, suggestions, “what if…s” and practical comments rather than larger pontifications or speeches. I have similarly argued recently that planners would do well to distinguish carefully what we do with our mouths—that we distinguish when dialogue, or debate, or negotiation might be called for, so that we do not, à la Big Mouth, run these all together (Forester, 2006b). In any case, Tony's injunction, “a lot less Big Mouth” clearly reminds us: too often our planning processes substitute hot air for practical proposals, exaggerated talk for exploration of possibilities together, rhetoric for working together over models, hands on, seeing what we can come up with together. Tony does not shy away from what is at stake here: as he puts the promise of the process and the emerging recognition of participants,

Because we see that it could be done—and recognizing what could be—we see our role in making it for real. That's the turning point.

Even so, some might wonder, “But what about deep value differences? What then?” Let me suggest one line of practical (and no less theoretical) response to this question: Community members may be deeply divided by religious belief, by cultural practice, by historically inherited suspicions, and yet they may also agree on where the stop signs should go to protect their children from traffic.2 In the profile that follows, Tony Gibson shows how an insistence on a critical pragmatism can invigorate and fuel creative and productive efforts to do community planning in northern and southern hemispheres as well. In the face of power differences of voice and position and more, Tony Gibson tells us, bottom-up community planning can accomplish a great deal. Here's how.

Participatory Planning and the Roots of Planning for Real: A Profile of Tony Gibson

I was working for the BBC. I was doing lots of programmes particularly dealing with school and youngsters, teenagers and so forth, and I wanted to see what happens at the other end. It's all very well to do a radio programme or a television programme, but what are the results? Part of the job was to go out to schools and find out. That began to make me think, you need something to handle as well as to listen to, something to put your hands on, to do something with. You need to have something [so] that you can actually—on the spot if possible—make your response in a way that corresponds or replies to what you've been listening to or watching. So we began to experiment with, first of all, half a dozen schools—mainly with nine to twelve year olds. Later on we did the next step with nine year olds up to sixteen and seventeen year olds.

I had studied at Cambridge and read history and later on I worked for the BBC. Before that I was a conscientious objector, and when the big Blitzkrieg started in 1940, I signed up with an outfit called Pacifist Service Units. I went into the Dockland area, which was the focus of bombing in London and organized a group of others like myself who were helping in various ways. What we noticed was the way in which local government had been more-or-less dislocated by the bombing. One bomb had dropped on the telephone system, and another bomb had dropped on the filing system and that put the council out of action.

Beginning to See How Communities Improvise

So all sorts of local institutions and co-ops and clubs and unions began to improvise their own response. So there were youth clubs, and there were churches, and there were trade union groups, and they improvised shelter accommodation. They improvised follow-up help for people who had been bombed out—this was the work we were involved in.

My particular bunch specialized in emptying the shit buckets in the shelters which had been improvised. We'd do 200 shit buckets in the morning, and in the afternoon we'd clean out the second-hand van, and we'd rescue bits of furniture out of people's houses. In the evening we'd do a cocoa round to shelters, and in the late evening we'd go around and the foot patrol would go round with first aid bags. (“Shit buckets” are just what they sound like. Not garbage, but human garbage—feces and urine.)

I just noticed that this improvising was happening. Earlier on, I'd been on a trip to the Welsh mining valley, where 90% were out of work, and I'd seen what they did there. Later I did a BBC programme about youngsters in two little villages, and I discovered that in those two little villages, there were seven homemade operas improvised and in rehearsal and production in just those two villages.

I made a practice of seeing that people who have lots of skills are given the opportunity to use them: that counts, and this is really the basis of everything else. I subsequently went as part of the Quaker Friends Ambulance Unit, first to Sicily, and then to south Italy, and then to China where I found the ability to improvise against disaster.

This connects to Planning for Real in a way. When I came back from China, I wanted to raise the roof about the way the British government was neglecting what was actually happening in China and tying up with the Nationalist Kuomintang, which was corrupt.

In China, the Friends Ambulance Unit had been starting up hospitals or reviving them. I went with an English doctor, a Chinese nurse, and a Chinese agricultural student and we started in a small village outside a city that had been drowned by the Yellow River which had been diverted in order to stop the Japanese. This was in 1946, just after the war. The civil war was already starting, and the Yellow river was more of a frontier between the Communists and Nationalists.

So we got the local village to improvise various things. We set up a clinic, and that was our base. People came from 50 miles away and they queued to get in. So, with the help of the other members of the Friends Ambulance Unit, which is scattered all over China, with trucks trucking medical supplies, we managed to import a selection of animals. We got a Berkshire boar, a Holstein bull, two Leghorn chickens, and one or two goats…

There was a queue of people waiting. They'd come from far off. So they began to bring their sows and their cows to be serviced by our Berkshire boar and our Holstein bull, and they were serviced on the spot, so that was a good combination of time and energy, etc. And then the Chinese nurse began to start up a small cooperative for weaving. Then they started up a little co-op to sort out the wool from the sheep. They managed to raise up enough money for a hand-operated carder, to card the wool and then they began to make fabrics and so on.

But when the river had been diverted, as a result of the United Nations and Nationalists' effort, the city was exposed, and it was just massive mud with just a few things sticking out of it. What was sticking out of the mud, for example, in one place looked like a beautiful marble bench, and then you realized the marble bench was still the top of an ornamental door. Anyhow, people were coming back, and the idea was that we had sorted something out at village level, which we could then transfer to city level. So what began as a clinic ended up as a hospital, which is still there.

I came back and I started writing articles about the disgraceful way in which we were ganging up with the Kuomintang, and neglecting the fact that in the early days of the communist development it was a very good thing. They were organizing the guerrilla attacks that defeated the Japanese. They were organizing their own village cooperatives and so on. In that way, they seemed to me to be deserving in some respects. In fact, the Nationalists managed to divert the Yellow River ahead of schedule with the intention of flooding the Communist area. So I wrote these articles, including the first article I wrote for The Times newspaper, because they were very interested.

I got an interview with the leader writer of The Times and he said, “Well, give me some notes.” My father said, “Don't write notes, write the article.” They printed the article, two columns, unaltered. So I then cut that out and sent it to everyone else, and began to get a lot of freelancing. BBC then picked it up, asked me to broadcast first as a freelance, and then invited me to come on the staff. I had seven years there.

Getting People Involved in the Schools with “Hands On” and Fewer Words

With the BBC, I went to the schools to try to understand how they were reacting, and I diverted from the BBC mainly in order to do some research which was backed by various institutions on how you got people involved. In particular, how you could involve them with the help of closed circuit television.

This is about late fifties, early 1960s. Closed circuit television was something that for the first time you could handle, if you were lucky enough to have a rather elaborate camera. The then Leader of the London [County] Council, who is now the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, had this idea of having closed circuit television available to every school in London. So I was asked to set up a sort of training establishment for teachers. What I wanted to suggest was that the television should not be viewed in big lumps where you sat and gazed at it, and when that was over, you went on to something else. It should be used in small bits with something in between which you could do. So we experimented with the something in between. One of the experiments was to produce a pack of materials, all of which dealt with changing your surroundings. The materials were things that you could use. We had a little video lasting seven minutes to kick it off. Eventually, we found the video wasn't even necessary.

We played the seven-minute video, and then we issued the various materials for a number of different groups working simultaneously in the same classroom. One group had a big model of a room, and it was no more than four pieces of cardboard hitched together—four walls. They were equipped with bits of fabric to choose the curtains and the carpets, paint cards, and instant bits of furniture that you simply cut out and stapled together including a television set. They had some moveable windows, which you latched on and you could push them around, and a moveable door. That particular assignment was to design what room this was going to be and then design how you're going to lay it out. We didn't say you should have the television where it is not in front of the window—that they should discover for themselves. And then they'd figure out the costs: measure the carpet you're going to use, the wallpaper, the number of pots of paint you want and go and find out the cost and do a little bit of comparative shopping to see which is the best buy. So in doing that, they got a bit of social recognition. They got measurements and so on, got numeracy, they got a lot of literacy.

Recognizing Local Knowledge and Local Capacity

The experience was good. We waited to see what the teachers would reply: that was what I was interested in. What does this do to the teachers who are used to handing everything out—in a way that they still do to a large extent, all over the place? They hand out worksheets, and they tell people, and they do stuff on the blackboard all the time.

We had half a dozen or more different activities. We then formalized each one of these activities in a pack that we tried out in 200 different classrooms. This was because the first experiments in six schools were so impressive. The teachers said, “I didn't realize that my kids had this capacity.”

They were astounded, flabbergasted, amazed. They didn't expect that not just the academically bright would go further than usual, but the so-called “passengers”—the dead beat people who are not very good at writing and not very good at talking—they were pegging-level with the academically bright: they were just as good and they were joining in because we wanted to encourage groups not to consist of carefully graded groups— the bright group here and the slow learners there—but to be mixed in. When they were mixed in, they were just as good at designing things as the academic brightest, sometimes better.

They would say, “Look, this ought to go here,” or “Now, look, if we've got the television set there, then it's going to reflect the window, so maybe we ought to move the television set or move the window. And look, if we have this kind of carpet…” and so on, you see.

The same applied to the various other elements in this kit. There was another big layout that was meant to be a patch of brown field in the middle of a city site—just a devastated area, and houses around it, and a big main road: “All right, here's a bag of houses—put the houses on the site…”

Groups of children would do this: one simultaneously with another group doing the same kind of thing in a green field site. Another group [in parallel] was doing changes to a plan by an architect for a community centre. The kids have got ideas about this, so they were moving the walls around. They've got cardboard with cocktail sticks that they could spike on to the polystyrene base and change them around.

Eyes Down, Hands On, Rubbing Shoulders, a Lot Less Big Mouth

So, in each of these activities, there was the opportunity to get your hands grasped around the subject matter—to be looking at it as you were talking about it, to indicate things to others without having to do it face to face in a formal or semi-formal relationship. It was a clustering round. We used a slogan lately which goes, “Eyes down, hands on, rubbing shoulders, a lot less Big Mouth”: “Eyes down”—you're looking downwards, you're not looking at the blackboard or a big wall chart, you're all clustering around whatever is spread out on the table or the ground. Eyes down means you are not looking directly at people all the time. You're sometimes talking out of the sides of your mouth as you would if you were working together.

I discovered the importance of this when my own kids were reaching the point where they could answer back, which was fairly early on. I decided that what we should do if we had a problem or an opportunity, we should sit around the table and talk it over between us. I forgot what actually happened, but a democratic Dad talked it over while all the other ones were yawning. But it so happened that when we did the weekly wash-up after the Sunday lunch together, I happened to mention something, a subject worth discussing, as we were washing up. No problem, it went like a dream, because everybody joined in: we were all able to talk. It went very well—and why? Because people were looking at what they were doing, washing up the dishes—there might be an awkward pause in a formal relationship, but there is no awkward pause when you're moving away to stack the dishes and then coming back and joining in again. And people were talking out the side of their mouth to each other, including me.

This connects to the planning work later, because we're now talking about the schools and what the kids were doing. This experience took off with six schools—followed by 200 classroom trials in a further 180 schools scattered across Britain. Then the Department of Environment, a government agency concerned with regeneration all over the country, said, “Why don't you try this out in housing estates where there may be the same gap between the professionals—who think they know best and think they're good at telling people what's good for them—and everybody else who's bored stiff by the professionals and who don't think they amount to much, because the professionals promise things and never perform the way they should? And anyhow, what they think is good for us is not necessarily what we really want.”

Creating a Different Relationship Between Professionals and People in Glasgow

There's this communication gap. So the Department of Environment said, “How about trying something out which would enable people to sort out for themselves what is needed in a neighbourhood and maybe to bring in the outsiders, but in a different relationship?”

So first of all, we produced simulation packs. We said, “Here's a model of a neighbourhood—it's not yours, but pretend it's yours.” We'd take it to various neighbourhoods.

This wasn't in Glasgow yet, but it was in many other places. When we got to Glasgow, they said, “We have this nice game and it's very interesting. But we would like to have it for real, for Dalmarnock, not an imaginary place, not just a game.”

So that very weekend, we converted the dummy model into the real one of Dalmarnock itself with the help of the Dalmarnock residents, who knew where things were. Because our models were very simple, it was very easy to convert, because we got lots of little cardboard cut-outs that you could make for houses, and you got string and wool to make the outlines of the roads and paths and set them out roughly and then mark them in.

This is something where people themselves are the world's greatest living authorities on what it's like to live in Dalmarnock, or wherever. And once you recognize this, they can say, “That's where the real trouble is—with these big heavy goods vehicles going down the road. They're dangerous, and that's where the kids are crossing to get to school” and “This is where all the rubbish is accumulating” and “Here is where the drainage is not going right.”

The people in the neighbourhood were making a model first. The process was that the model was made by local people with the materials we provided, and more than that they'll improvise. We provided sheets of cut-outs for houses, tower blocks, and public buildings and so on. They make the base and they plant everything where it should be, and they maybe make some more things to put on. So the first step is getting people to put their input into whatever is on offer—it's their model, not someone outside's, not Tony Gibson's model, but theirs, in Dalmarnock. And then we'd take it round, where other people gather. So you'd go to the laundromats, you'd go to the schools where there are parents waiting to collect their kids, you'd go to the taverns, wherever.

Initially, it was the government ministry that funded this to be done. I formed a unit at Nottingham University which we called the Education for Neighbourhood Change unit. We reproduced these packs, and we were experimenting with them as well as trying to persuade.

But otherwise, it would be a local neighbourhood organization, a church, or a bigger institution. It eventually took off so much that I was asked to set up a special institution called the Neighbourhood Initiatives Foundation, which we set up.

That was in 1988, and I was its first director. That was backed partly by the government, partly by the Housing Associations Charitable Trust, and partly by the Town and Country Planning Association in order to promote all this.

Taking it Round: “Have We Got it Right?”

But I've not mentioned the essential part. The preliminary part is to take it around and catch people's eye wherever they happen to be. Out of mere curiosity, “What's all this? Oh, it's a model of the neighbourhood.”

So we'd ask, “Have we got the model right? Could you check where your house is?”

The model is usually on styrofoam, backed by cardboard, and made in squares about a metre across, so one can carry it around. But often with the professionals there's all this paraphernalia for erecting an enormous thing, which can't be moved out of the foyer in the Town Hall and has to have a big protective dome over it saying, “Do not touch!”

The idea here was that you touched this a lot. You interfered with it, but you also could carry it about easily. The metre square you could carry under your arm. If you were a group, you could take half a dozen or a dozen, in some cases 50 or 60 squares. Mostly it was 20 or 30, and it would take a lot of space up.

People would be attracted, “What is all this?” Hanging around if they've got five minutes in the bus shelter or the pub or the laundromat, “What is all this? Have a look. It appears to be our neighbourhood.”

“Excuse me, have we got it right? Could you just have a double check? Is there enough rubbish there?”

They would note this, and the people who made the model, who would be on hand, would say, “By the way, we're going to have a big event next Tuesday at 8 o'clock in such a such a place and we're going to use it, not just point at it. So, perhaps you'd like to come along?”

So, having attracted people's curiosity, we made it clear that they weren't going to be turning up at a public meeting, where everyone is just sitting in rows in front of a platform party who's going to tell them what's what. This was going to be something about this model.

This would be a big difference, and maybe there would be other things going along with it—maybe some refreshments made by some people, maybe some music made by some people, maybe someone was a good juggler. That's another element of this…

A Different Kind of Public Meeting

What would be different about this meeting was that it was totally unlike the usual public meeting. There was no platform party: no “important people” telling us what's what. No audience sitting in rows or possibly sitting in circles around a flip chart with someone armed with a felt pen dominating the flip chart. This is something where people could gather around in a cluster. And it's a big model, so there's lots of room for people to cluster. They get off their butts. They're not sitting. They're standing and moving, they're moving around to look at it all the way around. So they're jumbling it up a bit—not just sitting in sections according to the particular street they live on, or the particular religion they follow, or whatever it happens to be. It was a process of mixing them up around what was common ground. The common ground was the place they lived in and this was what we could all agree on—if we've got it right, if we've got enough rubbish on the rubbish areas, and if that road is right—this is what's common ground to all of us.

We'd had disagreements about things already because we'd taken it around. And if there were points, then we'd adjust. But largely speaking, there's not really much problem there, it's pretty obvious.

In these meetings where people were gathering around, what was really important was not just looking—which we'd done before when we'd taken it around. Now there were many more people, not just a dozen people but 20, 30, 50—the most we've ever come across was 900, but I think that was too many. In other places, we'd have the model in one place, and then we'd have it in another place, the same model. In Birkenhead we had it in seven different localities within the city, within a one-mile wide strip of the city which was particularly vulnerable.

The “using it meeting” is a good example of what you do when you look at what needs to be done. For example, there's a sports pitch. There's a badminton pitch, and there's a children's play area—each of them to scale, and in that particular colour. And there's another colour for greenery. There's a little park with hedges and trees.

We've got houses there already, that's fact. Now, what's up for discussion is what extra there should be. There's this building that is derelict. Someone puts a card on, “Share this building” or “Convert it to something”.

There's this patch here that's a derelict patch full of rubbish, and someone puts “Clear it up” and someone else puts, “Children's play area” on it—about what should be done. So these are all option cards. These are options, and most of them are to scale, so you can see if the children's play area would take up this space or that space, and you can of course move them around. Don't stick them down at first because there needs to be a little bit of re-arrangement, by and by.

Generating Proposals Inconspicuously to Separate Inventing from Deciding

But first, everybody, individually, without any direction whatsoever, without anything more than just random conversation, puts their ideas on the model and there are blanks for new ideas. So they can put new ideas as well as what we've provided in the kit of option cards. They can make new options. Nobody's thought before of a judo course, or a karate course, or nobody's thought of starting up a small co-op to adapt old people's houses.

So people are writing down these new ideas on scraps of cards and putting each where it should be. First of all, there's the same principle that you start with: everybody putting their own ideas wherever they choose and not altering anyone else's ideas. In practice you may already have three or four, or you may only have just one. All you are showing is, these are the ideas that we are generating.

So everybody is clustering around and moving around with hands on the model, and in the course of this they're rubbing shoulders, and they're talking out of the sides of their mouths about, “You know, I think that's an area where it would be very good to have a play area—after sorting out the rubbish.” And “That old building—we can do something about that building, it's a shame to leave it empty.”

So they're sort of having little chats about it, in the same way they were having chats when they were first looking at the model. But now, they're beginning to say, “I think that's a good idea for that play area,” or they put a little piece on that, showing that's where a play area could be. I put another piece on that building, showing my suggestion to everyone else.

In ordinary meetings, the people that are good at talking will talk, and the other people will be dead bored and they won't come to the next meeting. Furthermore, the fluent talkers will tend to dominate, in particular, the facilitator, or whatever he happens to be, from outside. And they're looking at each other and they're saying things aloud and therefore they're identifying themselves with their suggestions—that's what happens at the usual public meeting or group meeting, the conventional type of stuff which we're trying to displace.

If I'm talking to you, it's face to face. And what I say is identified with me. I feel a little bit exposed by what I say. I'm trying to dominate you. I'm invested in it, you see. There are all sorts of things, a whole set of personality interactions here.

When I stand, the eye lines are different. You're looking down at the stuff, you're talking out the side of your mouth to someone else, you put something on the table and once you put it there it's no longer identified with you.

Place, Commonality, and Creating Common-sense Options

So this changes the group dynamic. People cluster around and they move around, and they're no longer stuck in chairs with some guy telling them what's good for them.

So, you begin by putting everything on the model, and everybody has just the same right as everybody else—in areas where there's a minority of gender, or of race, or of caste, just as much right—to put something on. The things there are no longer identified with a particular gender, or race, or caste, or age group or whatever.

So you can get people gathering around, and they aren't subject to the usual pressures to conform within a particular group, unless that happens to be a good idea: the idea is what matters, not the grouping, not the affiliations.

So they put all this stuff on, and sometimes it looks as though there's this great big model which may be the size of four ping-pong tables put together and all moving around it. There's all the stuff and it looks as though there's been a giant inverted confetti bag over it because there's all these different coloured things—yellow for sports, red for traffic and transport, green for greenery, and so on—and some blanks for new ideas.

So lots of suggestions and lots of new ideas are assigned to a particular space. So then you say, “Well, we've got a lot of stuff here.” I once counted sixteen adventure playgrounds cut out on the same model in the first 20 minutes. This does not mean that any of us want sixteen adventure playgrounds, but a lot of us want at least one. So the next stage is to go into groups, and usually the groups form around a particular interest, sometimes it's about a particular area.

You've got about 20 minutes, half an hour, for everybody to put stuff on, and then “poof”, you have a cup of tea and you form groups.

Sometimes it's a group of a particular area—let's say it's an entire block—and where people are just living immediately around it and within it. They're concerned about the amenities needed for that entire block. That might be one kind of group. Mostly that group's concerned with, let's say, one kind of amenity, or one kind of enterprise in particular. So, the group might be concerned with possibilities for small children, possibilities for teenagers, opportunities for micro enterprises, traffic problems, garbage problems…

In the groups they'll each have a big sheet and at the top of the sheet, in big letters, it says “NOW”. In the middle of the sheet it says “SOON”. At the bottom of the sheet it says, “LATER”.

The group is asked to put their heads together first, “Okay, we're concerned about children's play areas, and we're thinking in particular of either this area or that area.” Now whichever area we're going to start with, what do we need to do? Well, we've got to organize a working party—so that's one card, “Organize Working Party”.

What are we going to need? Well, we're going to need some plastic bags to put the rubbish in. “Plastic Bags Needed”—that's another little card. And we need dumpsters to put the stuff in.

Now they're identifying practical steps to do something. What do we need to do now? What do we need to do soon? What do we need to later? We're just putting what's needed. We don't even say yet, “We are going to do it”, because that's a stage that emerges—you get sucked in.

You get caught. You get caught originally just by looking at the thing—curiosity—and then by handling the stuff and putting them on. And now you're beginning to look at a practical way in which this could be done—it actually could be done. And then you add, having done the now–soon–later, you add the opportunity to disagree.

Everyone's laid out cards without asking anyone's permission or even talking about it, the same way they laid out the cards on the model. Now we have a good look at it, and I might think, “Well now, this card that someone's put in the ‘now’ section, I think it's a very good idea—I don't think we could do it now though; I think it ought to be soon.” So very quietly, maybe while I'm talking to someone else, I quietly turn it upside down, and on the back of the card it says, “Disagree”.

So you've got an inconspicuous, non-identified, non-committal disagreement expressed. Nobody noticed it was me doing that, because we're all busy doing our own thing. I don't have to be heavily identified with it any more than I had to be identified with my suggestions on the model. I discovered that there were other people concerned with that suggestion, so that's confidence building.

Everybody has done as much disagreement as they choose. We find that in practice there are comparatively few disagreements. Most of the cards stay face-up. In other words, it's common sense. “So, we've all agreed on all the cards that stayed face-up?”

It's also consensus, but common sense is using your head in an ordinary way, not in an elegant academic way. It's just what's common sense: it's obvious to all of us, for example, that we need to clear this site before we do anything else.

Generating Agreements on Now–Soon–Later

But the proportion of the agreements to the disagreements is actually confidence building. Furthermore, we don't have to discuss the agreements very much because we've agreed on them. That process might take half an hour, sometimes more. It depends, because they also need to discuss the disagreements.

So they discuss the disagreements in the NOW section first. They may come to some conclusions about it. “Well, actually, yes, it shouldn't be “now”, but it could be “sooner” rather than “later”. Let's have a vote on it.” And we vote in the groups. So we sort these things out, and on some of the disagreements we say, “It's really too difficult to decide now—we'll just leave it on one side.”

So then you add a new coordinate to the sheet. So far, you've had the vertical coordinate of now–soon–later. You now have the horizontal coordinate which can be all sorts of different things. Probably what it begins with is, “We could do this on our own”—one column. “We could do it with a little money”—one column, “We could do it with a little money and some expert advice”—next column, “We could do it jointly with an outside body (like a support agency or a council)”—next column, “We can't do it, but we know exactly what needs to be done and where and when and how and who should be doing it, and we're going to push”.

So you've now begun to lay out what could be. It still isn't an absolute commitment. But in the process of going step by step, you're getting nearer and nearer to a commitment. “Look, this could be done. That should be done. Hells-bells, it must be done. Let's do it”. It's that process.

They're getting gradually sucked in. They've made suggestions on the model together; they've now gone into groups. The groups have generated these ideas and agreements of now–soon–later and how to do them. So they're now beginning to evolve an action plan.

Skills Inquiry, a Different Kind of Survey, and Community Building

Now this needs to be backed up by knowledge or resources. One of the things that may have occurred earlier, a skills inquiry, is sometimes used to spark off the whole process before you start taking the whole model around. You get a few people, maybe no more than four or five, and you say to each one, “Here, try out between you this form, the Skills Inquiry form.” It's got a little picture representing each skill, doesn't have more than a word or two to identify the skill, such as skills in sports, chatting people up, knocking things down and demolition, building things, cookery, gardening, sewing—you name it and it's probably there: like computer technology. We haven't included brain surgery yet. We're inquiring about all the skills that are latent in the community.

First of all, they tried it out on themselves, which is a bit of a laugh, and it generates conversation. So that's the same process of tempting people in. “I never realized that's a skill I've got” and “I never realized you had that skill too.” So they're relating in a way, and having a bit of a laugh and a conversation in the same process.

They discover that this is different from the usual kind of academic or commercial survey, where someone stands with a clipboard, and he or she knows the questions and they then ask you the questions and they tick the little boxes with their questions that they've thought up—and that have left you pretty well tied up. And they're going to go out and use this—for what purpose you're not entirely clear.

This is different because it's shoulder to shoulder. You're sharing the form, you're looking at it together, and you're talking it over, and as you go you're ticking off the little boxes. There are two columns for every skill. One says, “I'm interested as a beginner” and the other column is, “I'm interested because I'm experienced in it”. So you end up with this, which includes some new skills we hadn't thought up, which were added to the form. So we've tried it out, just with half a dozen people and they've got the interest, the curiosity. So we say, “Now could each of you try this out with ten people that you feel safe with?”

We aren't even talking about meetings yet. It's something entirely on its own. We just wanted to find out who's good at what. Each member might do this, or sometimes they'd pair off and do 20 between them, because they feel a bit safer if it's two. But they start off with getting an average of ten with each of the four or six. Thereby you've got 40 or 60 visits, and they're visits to people you feel safe with—family, including family you're on speaking terms with, your neighbours, and the shopkeeper, and friends: people you feel safe with.

You don't mind going to them and asking them questions that they don't mind being asked. So you try it out, and you come back, and you have a laugh sharing the results. “I never realized old so-and-so is actually a such-and-such expert. You see, I did this thing which is absolutely foolish, and he told me differently.” So that's sharing the results within the four or six people. Coming back, they're feeling much more confident because they've done this and they've shared the experience.

Ordinarily, if you ask someone to go and interview somebody, they feel they've got to be something like a university researcher or a government inspector or something, but this is quite different. They find that, “You know, I got asked in for a cup of tea.” And “Mrs So-and-so said, ‘Would you come back again?’” Now that's not what normally happens with the conventional kind of academic or commercial or government-based research. It's much more impersonal. This is personal 200%. It's rubbing shoulders and doing something together, and in the course of it having a bit of a conversation.

So, the first group has done between them maybe 40 or 50 interviews. Well, one or two of them slammed the door and said they don't want anyone. Okay, they've taken that, but everybody else is quite pleased to be asked what they're good at, which is quite different to being asked what their income is, or how long they've been out of work, or what their affiliation is to this or that party. It's quite different.

The relationship is a different one between the asker and the teller. They're asking about things that the teller likes to tell about. “You know, I've always been interested in cricket, I'll tell you what… I reckon I'm pretty expert as a bowler; I'm not so good as a batsman.”

So then, the group that's done it comes back and pools the information. So they count how many carpenters, how many gardeners, how many computer operators, how many “chatters up”. The “chatters up” are very important, sort of good at chatting to people. That's a skill—if somebody feels good at talking with people, doesn't feel all sort of clammed up.

Well, they've counted up all the skills. They've now made one or several posters, and they say, “Look how much talent we've got in this neighbourhood. So many carpenters, so many brain surgeons, so many computer operators, so many cooks, so many gardeners… Look what we can do with them.” So this is like casting a very small pebble in a large pond.

What happens if the pebble goes into the centre of the pond? Ripples form, ripples, and ripples, and ripples. Each of the things that we're doing, whether it's taking the model around or doing the skills survey is like throwing a small stone: it arouses curiosity. The ripples extend and even the reeds on the edge of the pond begin slightly to move. And this is what's happening with the onlookers, the half-hearts, the people who've given everything up. They're involved because when the first ten or fifteen are done then, “Okay, let's do another ten or fifteen each.” This time it includes strangers, but we're now confident, and we may get one or two slammed doors, but it's unlikely.

And then the curiosity is extended because they see these posters and people come up and say, “You never came to me.” “Alright, we'll do you as well.”

We might have done the inventory of skills, or we might do it next, but we find out, if we could do this on our own, what skills would we need? What other resources would we need? And there's another kind of survey that teenagers are particularly good at doing if you can involve them: that's finding all the wasted resources in the neighbourhood. Teenagers—and very elderly people who like to be going out walking their dogs—move around the neighbourhood a lot.

An example of wasted resources would be a patch of ground that's littered, or a building that's empty. Or there are materials—some people in the middle-age group are already working at firms and they say, “You know, we could see a lot of stuff that's just junked, thrown away— containers and wrappers and useful things.” Or, “They've just decided they're going to have new computers, so we have computers going.”

So we've got spotter cards. Each one is a different kind of thing to spot. A different colour too, so you've got green spotter cards for empty spaces that might be recovered and turned into something attractive to look at with a bit of greenery, for example.

Using Local Knowledge and Planning Over Time

Small groups are at the verge of action planning—which means that they're going to look at what the resources are within the neighbourhood that are available, the resources of skill and experience. The resources that they've already identified are the local knowledge. We all know where the problems are. We know where the traffic dangers are; we know where the garbage is, etc. We know where the footloose teenagers are; we know where the drug spots are.

They're experts. This is the fact—that the people who live in the place know about it, and some of them know more than others. The elderly know a bit more because they've lived there longer, and they take the dog out and they walk around and see what's going on. And the teenagers are, of course, all over the place, so they see all that is going on. And the middle aged will know a little bit more about resources outside—like the stuff that's being thrown out—furniture, out-dated equipment, fabric ends of the roll, shelf timber and things that might be gotten hold of.

From there, you begin to say, “Right! Now who could help to get this particular thing done? We can see that there's this idea of the playground for the toddlers: who can we get who'd help to clear the spot?” Now, soon, or later? And also, we need some equipment, and so we might take the now–soon–later sheet and change the coordinate for the top, the horizontal coordinate, and we'd say, “What do we need to buy, hire, make, or scrounge?” “Scrounge” is a very important word.

So, what could we make—now, soon, or later—and what are the things we need? So we put all the things we need on little cards and say there's APRONS, and there's EASELS, and there's WORK TABLES, and there's maybe a SWING, and there's maybe a SLIDE, and there's a BLANKET, and a little PROTECTED SPACE where you can sit, read, and look at PICTURE BOOKS. And some OTHER BOOKS as well: we need to get those from somewhere. So we see all these things and we put them down in the same process. We disagree perhaps. We sort out what the practical things are that need to be attained from somewhere. We've already got some knowledge now of the skills, and we're adding to it the places which we've identified on the big model—the buildings, and the patches of ground, and the areas of traffic danger, and the rubbish bits, and so on.

Because the process is, “This is what needs to be done: it could be done sooner or later/ It should be done sooner or later/ It must be done sooner or later/ Hells bells, we'll do it, or at least we'll do part of it.” Because we see that it could be done, and recognizing what could be, we see our role in making it for real. That's the turning point.

So you can get your action groups formed around a particular kind of action to obtain this building: to convert it, to do something about this patch, or to set up this microenterprise that will help people who are house-bound, or which will insulate houses with poor insulation.

The time scale over which this planning process might take place varies. We're always in favour of boxing it up within a few weeks to define the resources, to define the priorities—to define resources, priorities, responsibilities.

It's dead obvious. As soon as you get going, you need to keep up the momentum: you don't want to say, “Well, we only meet once a month, so, I'm sorry, it has to be deferred until the next time, but we'll put it on the agenda.” That's absolutely ridiculous. The momentum depends a bit on doing it briskly—getting on with it, so people will meet in their own houses and flats, over a week or two.

Planning for Real and a Different Way of Planning in Dalmarnock, Glasgow

Here's the other element. The very first try out of Planning for Real was in Dalmarnock in Glasgow. People said, “We're going to try it out for Dalmarnock for real,” and that's what gave the name for the process. And we helped them remake the model, and they took it around to interest people, and having done thats they then decided and announced to all the local residents the place and time and date of the meeting when we're going to use the model, not just look at it.

So they put that down, and then they were saying, “Should we invite anyone else? What about inviting planners and architects and housing officers and police?” Some people said, “You're going to have trouble.”

There had already been several public meetings in which colleagues of mine in the BBC had been following up and videoing for programmes because the public meeting ended in bloodied noses because the people were so angry at the authorities for misunderstanding what was needed—and not doing it anyhow in time to be any use and telling everybody they knew best. They're all angry with each other about different sorts of pressure groups for this or that. So the residents coming for Planning for Real said, “We'll have trouble if we invite any of these outsiders,” even as others said, “We must risk it.”

New Roles and New Rules for Officials and Professionals

So what they did was invite fifteen or sixteen of these outsiders. There were three regional planners, two district planners, a couple of housing officers, the police superintendent, the local councillor, the secretary of the Citizens Advice Bureau, and one or two more. They were invited as guests. They turned up just out of curiosity, and also because they wanted good public relations, to show interest.

So they came and they said, “Very nice of you to invite us along.” As each guest arrived, he or she was given a little badge with his name and his job on it and a cup of tea. And while they were being offered a cup of tea someone was pinning a badge on them and saying in a very quiet way, “By the way, the rule of the house is that anyone wearing a badge keeps their mouth shut until spoken to.” So this was not what they're used to! So the VIP guests tended to cluster near the door and say, “Very nice of you to invite us around and do carry on with your game—we'll watch you doing it” and “very good.”

In the early stages we were making videos, unedited, of what actually happened from start to finish. We wouldn't interfere with it at all. In one particular video, there was a cluster of important guests by the door including the director of housing for the city. There he was standing with his cup of tea and his badge. Five minutes in, he was kneeling beside the model, he put his cup of tea on the model, and he was discussing the problems of defensible space with three housewives, and this was happening all over. The expert outsiders were being sucked in. People were saying, “Here, you're the engineer, and we have an idea of a play area on this patch—and you say there's a sewer across there. Now suppose we move it to this bit, would that be better?”

Using their expertise in this way was not the same as going to a public meeting or going to an interview in which you're facing somebody across the table and for everything he says, his views will be taken down and used in evidence against him—so he's very cautious.

This was instead more like what I described as the “washing up conversations”. This is a little bit of a chat with people, “Don't quote me on this, but you know, you are going to run into problems there. If you were to try there, and this way, it might be better, you know, but don't quote me,” says the professional. He's saying, “The idea of having a play area right here—some of you feel a bit bothered about that because there are three main roads for little kids to cross to get to it. Now if it was down here, it might be better, and I think the council would be keener on that.”

It's a whole different role for professionals. It's an exchange of expertise. Here we had local knowledge coupled with professional knowledge beginning to jive in an informal non-committal way. What we found was that the professionals liked to come back. They wanted to come back. And with the follow-up—since usually the groups followed-up in small meetings in someone's kitchen—the professionals would turn up for those as well.

The professionals said it's changed the relationship. In one place, Birkenhead, back in the eighties, one or two of the planning officials had heard about this and said, “Why don't we try this out?” and they got in touch with some of the residents, and they agreed to try it out—the whole process, or most of it. Because this involved a mile-long strip right through the centre of Birkenhead, we had the meetings in each of seven different localities—in a school or church hall—and in each case the model was there, and people clustered around and sometimes people went to every meeting, but mostly it was those within reach. Then we had a mass meeting in which all the stuff was identified and everyone's ideas were on it.

Then they went away to sort and sift and so on, and they then began to formulate the practical steps which could be taken by us or by them. So there were practical steps emerging from the preparation of the model, which took place in January, and then trying out the model in February, and some group follow-ups in March. Then there was a six-month wait while all the professionals went through all the bureaucratic maze in order to sort out what they could do in order to implement some of these schemes. Then they came back and they had another big meeting in which the professionals said, “We want the model again so that we can show how far we have got to meeting your proposals where it affected things that we should be doing.”

They put their proposals on the model in the same way as everybody else. Then there was some argument about that and discussion—some modifications were made—and the professionals went away again. They put up their revised plans through another series of committees and by March or April of next year, they were implemented through the normal committee procedure and I thought, “Well, that's that!”

Changing the Game: Local Knowledge, Improvisation, and Distributed Creativity

A year later, I was rung up by the chief executive, and he said, “You know, Planning for Real is still going on.” I said, “What do you mean?”

He said, “The relationship between my officers and people has changed. When people are grumbling, they ring someone up and they talk to him by his Christian name and he talks back by their Christian name, and they say, ‘Look George, you promised to do something about the rubbish accumulating—it still hasn't happened yet.’ And he says, ‘Well, Margaret, the situation is this, but we will try to hurry up a bit.’”

Now this was because of the changed relationship—a relationship which had formed initially around the big model, and subsequently in the follow-up groups where it was a non-committal relationship. Non-committal. They weren't having to make promises, but they were seeing what could be: What could be done by us, what could be done by them— “Us” being the professionals and “them” the residents, and listening to each other and sorting out and looking all the time, going back to the models saying, “If we shifted it here, it wouldn't be this problem of the sewage pipe and so on.” So in that way you get an interleaving and intermixing, a different kind of working relationship. Not just a talking one, not just us saying, “We want you to do this,” or “We want you to stay quiet and accept what we're doing for you because we know best!”

And given that we've begun to recognize that the residents know a lot already, the professionals may not invariably know best. The professionals know a lot already, and they do not necessarily know best. It's only when you get this fusion, this diffusion of knowledge and experience and preference and practicability and formal technical and legal limitations and so on: it's a big mixture that's got to be sorted out, and the sorting out process is fundamental to this.

It's like a jigsaw puzzle. If you take a jigsaw puzzle and bring it out at Thanksgiving or whenever, you throw a party, and everybody comes together with the puzzle. They're talking and talking and sometimes talking in a rather snide way. Someone comes in with a jigsaw and has lost the lid, so I can't remember the picture; we haven't got the picture on the lid. We all remember as kids we used to do this with a stagecoach outside an inn. “Let's do it together.”

What actually happens, what usually happens then, is that people look for the corners because they are quickly identifiable. Not sure which corner yet, but they put them in some corners. Then they put the straight edges and then they find that you've got to move this corner over here to match up with the straight edge and they get an outline, simply a frame within which to work. No more than that—it doesn't tell you anything about the picture, but there's some sort of frame as it might be in the Planning for Real process. Then you get Auntie and the two kids working on finding horses' heads, and putting the horses' heads together. And you get uncle and somebody else finding out how to get the landlord fixed. Each group is working on their own cluster. They're not sure where the cluster goes as yet; so each cluster is independent to begin with. Then you begin to see, you can lock in to the framework here, or it can lock in—the landlord is actually by the side of the horses and we can fit them together—and then gradually the picture forms. And it's a picture that all of us have helped to form, even though we began working in separate clusters.

Planning For Real in Europe and Africa, the Caribbean and USA

We've done Planning for Real as well in Jamaica, St Vincent and Dominica in the Caribbean, various parts of Germany, to a lesser extent in Holland. We've done it in Africa, South Africa and Kenya, but it's all a particular thing. In Kenya—it was in a big city, about the third largest city on the edge of a lake. So there's also the seafront where there were great big problems of pollution. The things that came out were a Credit Union to serve a big market which was the biggest market in East Africa. They set it up within the time I was there. They got 54 people straightaway: then they got up to 70 people and they thought they'd have 105 by the time they finished.

In Kenya, the second thing was taking materials that were discarded and beginning to transform them, a co-op to do that sort of thing, collecting recycled materials. The third thing, which they were just beginning to get their hands around was a herbal centre which would be perhaps concentrating on the uses of the castor oil plant, which is a great success in India, where many businesses had thrived on it, but it is just thrown away as weeds in Africa. So, those are three things which are at the beginning—and they built themselves a bridge across a dangerous stream.

I mentioned Birkenhead and the chief executive who rang me up a year later. He said, “So far, we've done things which were mainly small-scale planning changes. But now,” he said, “there's this great big building which is a College of Art, and we've shifted the college elsewhere. It's this huge great Victorian building, what can be done with it?”

So the upshot of Planning for Real there was to apply the same methods to the building—model, etc. etc., working out how to change it, how to adapt it, when to change the walls and so forth—and it ended up not just as an art centre but as an enterprise centre and a focus for all sorts of things. It lasted two or three years until the council in their wisdom, having changed the chief executive, decided to have another centre in a well-off area.

You can't control the future necessarily, but that while it lasted, things really happened. And incidentally, it won the top award from the Prince of Wales, the Times and the Royal Institute of British Architects. The German project won a top award from the Bundestag for community enterprises that went straight for a Planning for Real effort in order to engender community involvement in all sorts of small ways.

There's a rural one. This was in St Vincent in the Caribbean, in a village and they wanted to have a community centre. While I was there, they planned the building, they raised the basic funds and they organized a system whereby the skills available could be employed and in some cases paid for. They could only raise a little bit of funds, so they said, “You're a skilled carpenter, will you work for pay for three days in the week and give two days more, free?” And to someone else: “You'll do some wheelbarrowing. Will you wheel barrow for three days in the week for pay and give two days more free?”

So in that way, and before I left, which was about six weeks later, they'd already laid the foundations. When I went back, there was the building complete. It was a combination of identifying skills, identifying a site, planning how you could develop a building from scratch in that site, raising money and so on. But they all came together once they could see that there was a specific objective which was what they understood, and what they wanted in the way that they wanted, but also using external money and some external advice.

In a school in Boston, USA, they worked out how they were going to change their playground and, I think, adapted and put amenities in it. So that's there now. I'm not sure about the aftermath of what the Planning for Real was in another part of the city.

Satisfactions and the Future

What I enjoy the most about this work is the fact that remarkable people are not a minority. You find kids beginning to feel they can be doing something that's fun and that's got an end product which can be shown, and they can see that “I had a hand in that. That's what we did between us.”

Now that is something we've made our mark on. The heart of it is that you are engaging a wasted resource without which the world cannot regain its sanity. It's lost most of its sanity in the divide between the affluent and west and the starving south. And the way in which people are fattening themselves up and polluting the atmosphere and spending their time on attacking each other's faiths or attacking each other's races. This is a nonsense, and it is a nonsense that is going to land us in deeper and deeper shit, to use the word. So, the question is, what's the missing component? If you take all the money available from taxes, and all the money available from charities, and all the money available from businesses that want to advertise themselves by donating or sponsoring, it still will not add up to enough.

There is a shortfall and that shortfall is the largely untapped resource of ordinary people, what they could do on the spot and the way in which what they do on the spot could add up so that it reaches into the interior of government. It shows that this is the way in which housing authorities and planning authorities could get results instead of finding people that spit on them and vandalize them.

This is the missing component, but it's something that is not merely showing the professionals what they should do, but it's also showing ourselves what we can do as residents, and what we can do is quantifiable. This is not talking about citizenship as something abstract, but the fact that we live in this place and we can do something about it. So, we live in the place and we can do something to it on our own, and we do it even more if we get some of these guys in their offices to come out and give us a hand and release certain funds and overcome certain bureaucratic or legal barriers.

Together, shoulder to shoulder we will change the world. Rubbing shoulders is just that kind of intimacy in which you're exploring possibilities. You've made no commitments, it's non-committal, and a non-committal thing, to my mind, is pretty important because people are turned off at being asked to sign up for this or that. They are activists, of course, and they're the salt of the earth, but you need something else besides the salt to make a really good mixture.

Commentary on Tony Gibson's Profile

MICHAEL PARKES

Community Planner, London

Planning for Real has been a constant in my ever expanding armoury of participatory techniques. I have used it in my work as a community planner probably at least 20 times in the last 20 years of my professional life as a community planner.

The very first time was in fact early in 1988, on behalf of the Finsbury Park Action Group (FPAG) which had been established some six years earlier by local people concerned to see cross-borough action on all the problems of urban decay and anti-social behaviour that then afflicted that part of London. A particular site at Isledon Road presented many problems. Eleven acres in extent, it was derelict, former British Rail operational land and buildings, fronting on to a very busy part of the Finsbury Park gyratory system. Residential properties adjoined it to south and north, and across the road to the west. At the northern end of the site was a small park poorly maintained and attracting anti-social usage.

In 1987, a developer submitted proposals for this site comprising a fashion centre and 24-hour shopping mall surrounded by an enormous area of surface car parking. These met with much local opposition, and in December 1987 the Isledon Community Forum was formed with a secretariat provided by FPAG and their then planning worker. She approached Planning Aid for Londoners—which I co-ordinated at the time—and early in 1988, I facilitated a series of Planning for Real (PFR) events at the then Adult Training Centre at Isledon Road, Finsbury Park.

These were very well attended with both councillors and a planning officer in attendance—“on tap” as Tony would say rather than “on top”. Picking up on the “for real” element of the technique, I discovered that there was already a Local Planning Authority Planning Brief for the site and in fashioning the PFR options cards, I included every element of the Brief as well as elements representing the developer proposals and local needs and aspirations already recorded by the Forum and FPAG.

The eventual product was the Isledon Community Plan. The bulk of the Plan comprised social housing, together with managed workspace, some small shops, a community nursery, surgery, garden centre, a revitalised and repositioned park and improved security particularly to the large housing estate (the Harvist Housing Estate) immediately to the south. What was impressive was the common sense and realism of those attending. The relevance of land values and physical constraints such as noise, etc. was readily understood and a collective consensus reached in a way no conventional consultation could have achieved. It was held under community control, in a community-based local venue and facilitated by an independent planning organization.

The Isledon Community Forum/FPAG applied for and received £1000 from the RIBA Community Projects Fund to establish the feasibility of the Plan and develop it in detail. This was done by the then Hunt Thompson and Associates. The developer was so impressed by the level and quality of opposition to his proposals that no formal planning application was submitted. (From memory, no fashion centre option was ever placed on the model at any of the PFR events held.)

The Finsbury Park Community Plan however, went from strength to strength. Outline planning permission was secured for the Plan proposals early in 1989. The then Tower Hamlets Environment Trust advised on funding and realization of the whole development package. The costs were estimated at £33 million and a Development Consortium was assembled comprising Unity Bank, New Islington and Hackney Housing Association, Circle 33 Housing Association, ASRA (Asian Housing Association), St Georges Housing Association and London Industrial Estates.

The Finsbury Park (Isledon) Community Development Company was formed in late 1989. This is a rare example of a community actively creating a property development company partly to secure their own interests. The Board of the Company comprised:

•	3 people from the Isledon Community Forum
•	3 from the housing associations
•	3 from the financial institutions involved
•	Chief Executive of the Finsbury Park (Isledon) Community Development Company

In my subsequent experience vehicles such as community development trusts and more recently community land trusts, and less frequently urban regeneration companies, have commanded similar popular support as agencies with majority or significant community control over the delivery and onward management of the new development/refurbishment/regeneration.

Although for various reasons the development was not eventually built/managed by the Community Development Company, it has virtually all now been built. It includes some 214 units of social housing (designed by Hunt Thompson) including a number of very large bed units (four bedrooms and over). As an aside, some years later I was involved in a design game exercise carried out in a caravan positioned on the site to create the detailed designs for the new park, which has also now been built.

I first met Tony Gibson on the very next community planning job I did. It was in October 1989. By then I had left the Planning Aid organization and, working as a self-employed community planner, was appointed by the Prince of Wales' Business in the Community to work as the independent planning worker for the almost entirely Bangladeshi Community Development Group in Spitalfields. In those days a 27-acre development site had been assembled comprising the redundant Bishopsgate goods yard and Truman's brewery. Brick Lane runs north–south right through the middle of this site and was then, and still to a very great extent is, home to one of the most deprived and disadvantaged immigrant communities in the UK—the Bangladeshi community of Spitalfields.

In those days land and rental values were such that within the space of four blocks, Bishopsgate to Brick Lane, we were looking at a scarp face of rental values from £50 per square foot to £1 per square foot. Clearly if the former were to replace the latter then the fate of those who owned no land or buildings would be sealed. They would be “squeezed out” through the classic processes of “gentrification”, etc.

The Prince of Wales well understood this and had persuaded the joint developers up front to issue a commitment in their promotional brochure material that:

One of the most important parts of the development process will be the establishment of a Community Development Trust—a partnership between the landowners, the community and the local authorities—to guarantee the delivery of the community benefits once they have been identified by local people. The landowners propose to transfer to the Community Development Trust certain sections of the site. The CDT will also act as the community's voice ensuring that residents continue to have their say and be party to future decisions regarding those parts of the site earmarked for community use (Grand Metropolitan and London and Edinburgh Trust PLC. Promotional brochure. Good Relations Ltd (Planning and Development) 1989).

Such an up-front offer as this propelled the Bangladeshi (normally much factionalized) into creating the Community Development Group.

The tripartite master planning process that ensued entailed me working to prepare a community plan for the land. In this I had the enormous benefit of contacts supplied by members of the Group and credibility of being employed by the Group.

We decided to use a range of consultation techniques including at the heart of the plan-making process—Planning for Real. Tony Gibson came down to help instruct the young Bangladeshi men and women (mostly men and boys it has to be said) in the process of making the model and the buildings to scale (1:200), painting it and then preparing the land-use options cards. He was patient and firm and had a quiet authority which gave rise to natural respect on the part of all who met and worked with him. We had three day-long and absolutely exhausting Planning For Real events which confirmed again for me how absolutely sensible and genuine the product was going to be.

Every month I met separately the architects of all the non-office element of the developer's scheme and the Neighbourhood Planning Officer. By these means we were able to feed into the tripartite master planning process our various perspectives and the product of the work to date—which I am pleased to say were not so far apart.

Eventually the Community Plan was published (December 1989) and although there were significant differences with the draft developer's proposals, there was enough in common to reassure the landowners/developers that an offer of transfer of land could be made into a Community Development Trust (CDT). Initially this comprised all the land east of Brick Lane and subsequently this was improved to include a 25% equity stake for the CDT in the “Banglatown” element which was such a significant part of the Community Plan west of Brick Lane.

I am almost certain that had a planning application been submitted at that time it would have commanded the almost unanimous support of the Bangladeshi community in Spitalfields. Unfortunately the new administration in Tower Hamlets Borough Council insisted on trying to negotiate extra planning gain out of the developers and by the time that process was complete, the office market in London was beginning to collapse. Without the major office component of the scheme, all the other benefits could not be secured. To this day the goods yard lies derelict and the brewery has been semi-gentrified with a number of small retail, craft, etc., units, galleries, restaurants, etc.

Clearly this early success with the technique greatly enthused me and I have used it particularly successfully when working with tenants' organizations gathering their ideas and aspirations into community master plans for redevelopment/refurbishment of the large system built estates of the 1950s and 1960s. Again many of these have led to successful regeneration, e.g. Stonebridge in Brent, Holly Street in Hackney.

In conclusion, I would say that I have been an Associate of the Neighbourhood Initiatives Foundation for many years now. Both the Foundation and the Planning for Real process of facilitating genuine participation rather than the all too frequent tokenistic processes of “consultation” illustrate the Tony Gibson approach to people and planning (and I like to think I share much of this philosophy with him). He, and a few other trail blazers led the way in the 1970s out of the old-style paternalism/dependency of the forties, fifties and early sixties (this is THE PLAN we will provide, and you bloody well will receive) into our now more complicated, but oh so much more sensible, emphasis upon helping people to help themselves; trusting people; giving access to independent technical aid; devolution to neighbourhood level wherever possible; citizenship and personal responsibility; ultimately leading to the current Central Government rhetoric of sustainable communities and sustainable community strategies. The challenge, one Tony has faced with distinction and aplomb all his life, remains: to turn rhetoric into reality.

If I were to ask Tony one question now, it would be, “Do you think that planning obligations or charges to engage in Planning For Real exercises should be formally required as part of all new local area agreements—and if so, how so?”

Commentary on Tony Gibson's Profile

IOLANDA ROMANO

Avventura Urbana, Torino, Italia

Avventura Urbana regards Planning for Real not only as a work tool or a simple participatory technique. Maybe it could better be described as a “symbolic event”, something that recalls and simultaneously concretizes a different way to look at the world, as a whole and a polyphony at the same time.

My very first contact was in 1992. I was in London with Michael Parkes, for whom it was also one of his first experiences in this field. At that time Avventura Urbana didn't exist yet (it would become reality a couple of months later); it was more an unexpressed feeling, an earlier hope of looking at architecture and planning with an alternative approach, unlike what we had been taught in university. During that brief work experience in London I was lucky enough to meet Leslie Klein, who was working together with Michael Parkes at the CLAWSE (Community Land and Workspace Services). They were working in Spitalfields, right in Brick Lane, organizing a public meeting for urban regeneration of the area. Just to have a look, I helped them to build the plastic model and participate in some outreach meetings and discussions in other suburban areas of London.

To me it was a sudden inspiration, even if nowadays, after fifteen years in the field, I realize what a small part of the potentiality of the PFR-tool I actually understood that time.

What I saw in 1992 helped me to understand that another way—way, not world—is possible. What I perceived about PFR was its different way to communicate and to interact with the physical changes of the city and landscape.

In this way everyone is welcome. A PFR event is accessible, not just as it is open to the public, but because its setting is easily accessible from various profiles: physical, psychological, perceptual.

In this way people use a common language, based on 3D and images. The goal is not only to make the participants understand, but to let them be free to express their opinions, comments and preferences. Everybody gets a common source of knowledge. Information asymmetries and feelings of not knowing what others know, typical of traditional public assemblies, are no longer found. Informative boards explain exactly what is going on and the game's rules.

In this way everybody feels on the same level and they are able to find their own place, even if they do not belong to the “vociferous” category (as Nick Wates puts it, 2006), those who are used to giving public speeches.

I felt so deeply involved, that once back in Italy I called architects and students, some of them friends and others acquaintances, to involve them in this rough, but emotionally rich journey that began with Planning for Real and has then evolved in Avventura Urbana.

After the first experience, a participatory planning project for an urban park and some services for the community, in Nichelino (a small district outside Turin), we finally realized the real and strong potentiality of this tool.

During that consultation we built a big glazed wooden model, created 50 option cards and lots of boards with alternative design ideas, and even though it was snowing more than 300 people participated.

But we realized that we had undervalued the situation. We limited the consultation to the survey of the people's preferences, as it was a finer and more fun way to conduct an opinion poll. We were not yet prepared to observe and value how people gathered in a different way. The simulation game helped the participants to leave their positional attitude and to create a more virtual situation, where richer, different and more satisfactory solutions could be figured out through their interaction. Today we call those solutions, “creative conflict solutions”.

Since that winter in 1993, many years and many experiences have passed. In those 15 years Avventura Urbana has held around 200 participatory projects with the citizens,1 most of them realized as public consultations with some form of PFR. But the real function carried out by this technique, our first technique, was to enrich our creativity as process designers—and this is the real heritage of Planning for Real, for which we are indebted.

During these years we have adopted, experienced and changed many different participatory tools: brainstorming, focus groups, design games, open space technologies, citizens' juries, search conferences, town meetings, deliberative polling, alternative dispute resolution and many more.

In many of these occasions when mainstream tools were used, when they were not invented right away, we have fixed them to the local context and changed them until they perfectly fit it, in a way to facilitate what that particular context could express.

What eventually we have learnt and believe is that a participatory tool should simplify the making of creative solutions. In order to do this, the tool has to allow both the process facilitator and the participants to create an open context of work, informal, fruitful, creative, democratic, informative, and most of all one that can build strong relations. Participation—and in the end this is the great lesson—is not an extemporaneous consultation of preferences, but a process. This process could only evolve if we all learn and find the conditions to mutually adapt, in the search of common goals.

Tony Gibson's experience, in its simplicity, turned out to be revolutionary. We like to believe, as he did, that people have skills and that dialogue between citizens and public administration is possible, despite our cultural and political heritage. We also like to believe, as he did, that there are no deep differences between experts and non-experts, but what is important is to keep finding new ways to communicate in a society that changes so quickly.

If I could ask Tony Gibson one question about his work in our field, here's what I'd ask: We have always found it difficult to explain in the short term what are likely to be the outcomes of a participatory process. Usually people expect data (numbers of square metres of improved areas, or numbers of trained youngsters and so on...) and they mistrust stories where processes are described and no numbers are offered. But as we know, the main results of a participatory project are not simple outputs but instead different ways of approaching the problems, better relationships among the participants, new dynamics of mutual learning, creative conflict solutions, etc. Do you have, as a journalist and a “participative tool designer”, some good advice to give us—to help explain the results of participatory processes to others? Thanks!

It's Tony's World

REINHARD GOETHERT

The SIGUS Group, Department of Architecture, MIT

I first met Tony in the mid 1980s when we started our participatory programme in Sri Lanka. We had heard about his Planning for Real kit and his innovative work with communities, and we were most intrigued as to how he did this. We invited Tony to MIT to do a hands-on session using his Planning for Real approach—in the spirit of “learning for real” of course. The workshop was with architecture and planning students, and a community group fighting the school administration and the City of Cambridge over housing to be redeveloped for commercial use. This first encounter was memorable, and we continued to keep in touch over the years, and again in a workshop in Belarus in the context of the Chernobyl disaster.

I remember the first day very well: arms full with his props along with his famous brown cardboard box, the Planning for Real kit. Our disbelief may have been transparent when he showed us his crudely made kit and tools, for we expected something more refined and “worthy” of a person with such a reputation. But then he began in his quiet style punctuated with occasional bursts of energy, and we become converts. We were entranced by his performance—Tony is a compelling motivator and consummate actor. We were won over.

But what stunned me most was his deliberately crude planning kit: hand lettered text, simple inserts which looked like seconds, well-worn and sometimes torn sheets, and slightly damaged examples of models, all in a low-quality mimeo-copy form. Having been attuned to the slick presentation material of professionals, it was a shock to see the kit and its crudity. Why was it not typed? Why not printed in full colour, professionally bound and packaged? Where is the polish and sophistication after all his experience? [Tony Gibson comments: Reinhard saw a much travelled kit. The packs now produced by the Neighbourhood Initiatives Foundation are normally boxed and professionally printed on quality coloured card, at a relatively low cost but they still use informal text and thumbnails to keep everything cheap and cheerful.]

But once beyond the image we saw the kit and his approach as brilliantly elegant in its simplicity and clarity: no jargon, to the point, and moreover inviting to touch and to use without hesitation. The material was intended to be an active participant and not just to impress. It was intended to be deliberately practical and not a show-piece, where one is afraid to touch for fear of soiling or damaging. It was intended to be torn, marked on, and used up.

But Tony pays a price for this. When showing his material it is met with scepticism. The uninformed and particularly those who do not have practical experience with communities do not take his kit as “serious work”. It does not have the slick polished image that one expects. Even with communities there is sometimes reluctance at the beginning as to its seriousness. But to those who work with real communities and real people, they see the form as a deceptively practical and effective tool.

His deliberately unconventional approach in his books is also not in the expected style. In contrast to the dry style of books, Tony makes his books come alive! But like the kit they have not become as widespread as they deserve.

In both the kit, his books and even in his manner, it seems “the medium is the message” has become an important element in Tony's work. The form, the style, and even his mannerisms are integral to his message.

I incorporated aspects of Tony's ideas, and his influence continues in my efforts with communities, over a wide range of situations. In Banda Aceh, Indonesia, I developed a variation in rebuilding after the Tsunami. And more recently, I set up a programme in China in historical city-centre preservation. And in the many professional workshops I manage, the interactive, hands-on approach continues to be the most welcomed.

From a broader perspective, I do not know of any current project in any field that does not mandate participation in its objectives. But good “how-to-do-it” support is lacking and not widespread. Tony offers a way, and has successfully demonstrated his approach through real projects worldwide. He undoubtedly will continue to have great influence over practice worldwide.

And what would I ask Tony when I see him? “What have you been most satisfied with over your many years of working with communities?”

Saul Alinsky Would Have Liked This Guy!

KENNETH M. REARDON

Cornell University, Department of City and Regional Planning, USA

The life of Tony Gibson reads like a made-for-TV movie! He worked as a conscientious objector emptying “shit buckets” used by occupants of London's air raid shelters during the height of Hitler's blitzkrieg assaults. He did subsequent volunteer service in refugee rehabilitation and community self-help in Sicily in 1943–1945 and then in China at the onset of the Civil War, coupled with the flood devastation caused by the breaching of the Yellow River dykes. Returning to the UK in 1947, he became a script writer/producer for the BBC and a decade later was invited to help the newly independent Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation “change from white to black and from radio to TV.” Returning to the UK he set up TV training sessions for teachers, including those in Ken Livingstone's Greater London scheme for school-based educational TV. Then he led a four-year UK-wide classroom-based research on the use of eye-catching hands-on materials for neighbourhood change, which in turn spawned Planning for Real.

Throughout each of these experiences, Gibson consistently observes ordinary citizens coming together, often under the most daunting conditions, to mobilize others to analyse and solve critical environmental, economic, and social problems. For more than 30 years, Gibson and his associates, working with a variety of Labour governments, have been refining this grassroots approach to community problem-solving and development that citizens and planners in the UK, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean have successfully used to pursue transformative change.

Gibson's Planning for Real model builds broad-based support for locally generated plans by actively involving residents, business owners, institutional leaders, and elective officials in each and every step in the planning process. Through the skilful use of a series of what William F. Whyte, the noted sociologist, referred to as “social inventions for human problem-solving” (1982), Gibson's highly participatory approach to planning appears to be especially effective in engaging citizens who avoid processes that require written comments and public presentations before large gatherings. The latter approaches to citizen participation tend to privilege the more highly educated and professionally trained members of local communities while marginalizing others. His ability to encourage residents from often overlooked communities to play an active role in public planning processes would both fascinate and delight the followers of the late Saul Alinsky, considered by many to be the father of the contemporary citizen empowerment movement in the US.

Gibson's Planning for Real model initially engages community residents by asking them to correct a simple three-dimensional physical model of their area—which they prepared themselves with the help of the Planning for Real kit provided—then taking the model round to laundromats, day-care centres, schools and pubs to attract attention, leading to a larger community meeting of everyone whose interest has been aroused, with the opportunity for everyone to put in their ideas, in the form of scraps of coloured cards scattered on the model; and then subsequently splitting up into smaller groups to sort out practicable options on particular themes of special concern to different groups, each group working out step-by-step, now, soon, later, what needs doing, where, when, how and who else might lend a hand. Parallel with that work on the model are informal skills surveys to identify residents’ own resources, which—coupled with what the local authority and charitable support agencies can provide—can make things happen.

The professionals themselves—engineers, planners, social workers—get a cup of tea to warm them up, and then are on tap, not on top, alongside the residents to offer advice and in turn learn about residents’ own priorities and the down-to-earth context of local needs and opportunities. By not putting municipal, regional, and provincial officials at a “high table” where they are expected to possess encyclopaedic knowledge of specific issues and well developed positions on the community proposals being discussed, Gibson and his associates have observed how much more open, forthcoming, and engaging these individuals tend to be. Impressed by the seriousness with which their constituencies appear to be “working” local problems, participating local officials often abandon their formal roles to join lay teams as members of their informal “kitchen cabinet” offering their technical knowledge, political insights, and professional networks to advance the residents’ proposals.

The hands-on approach to community planning that Gibson describes in his interview reflects many of the tools and techniques that advocacy planners in the US and elsewhere have used. What strikes me as the fundamental contribution of Gibson's Planning for Real model is its potential to develop new, highly skilled, civic leaders within poor and working-class communities where deindustrialization, suburbanization, and disinvestment have led to significant declines in popular participation in community organizations critical to the health of neighbourhoods, cities, and regions. Harvard's Robert Putnam, in his classic, Bowling Alone has documented how powerful structural forces that have undermined the economic health of many older residential neighbourhoods in our central cities have led to significant out-migration of skilled working-poor and middle-class leaders from these areas (2000). Putnam goes on to discuss how these losses have compromised the ability of local community networks, organizations, and institutions to carry out many of the key social functions that have supported the stability and viability of these communities. Among these functions are the socialization of youth into community values and mores, relief to those affected by local disasters (fires, floods), protection of neighbourhood residents and property from petty crime, defence of the community from powerful external forces such as profit-seeking developers, and community advocacy before important local, regional, state, and federal government bodies. The availability of experienced and knowledgeable civic leaders who know and trust each other and are able to work together on behalf of local community interests represents a critical form of social capital that communities increasingly require in this era of rapidly advancing globalization.

Gibson's approach to planning reaches well beyond the mobilization of existing networks of residents and leaders who are already involved in local community improvement efforts. The Planning for Real model successfully involves residents who are not currently involved in civic affairs in a serious community building and development process in which they are encouraged to undertake a series of outreach activities that begin with their families, extends to their network of friends, and eventually touches others whom they do not know. Supported through these activities, participants in Gibson's process enhance their outreach, interviewing, recruitment, facilitation, mediation, and presentation skills. They also enhance their knowledge of the local community's history, major identity groups, existing services, current conditions, and power structure. Through conversations with dozens of local residents and planning and design professionals, participants also deepen their understanding of the basic principles, methods, and practice of community organizing, planning, and development. As Planning for Real model participants develop, in the above-mentioned ways, they acquire a new sense of personal confidence and efficacy; qualities that enable them to devise and implement direct action organizing strategies that can influence key public and private investment decisions affecting the quality of urban life.

What question might I now ask Tony? I wonder, “Is there a single method or technique contained within the Planning for Real methodology that, over the years, has leveraged the greatest citizen buy-in?”

Tony Gibson Responds

Michael Parkes has asked: “Should there be a planning obligation to use PFR as part of a new local area agreement? If so, how?”

PFR is designed to catch the eye and tempt the hand of everyone involved—residents, planners, support agencies, the lot; clustered together around the model, home-made by residents themselves with planners joining in making it as time allows. This creates a working not just a talking relationship, based on a mutually rewarding experience not just a statutory requirement. Planning departments and residents’ groups new to the process should be required to visit other PFR schemes, to get the feel of the process and then judge its relevance to their own situation for themselves. If they concur on its value and relevance—well and good. If not, residents are still free to go it alone but should be entitled to a government grant in support, and be encouraged to convey their down-to-earth proposals to the planners, and by their own common sense and commitment gradually win them over.

The process depends on both sides pooling their resources—local knowledge, technical expertise, muscle power and financial clout. The law can enforce joint consideration of PFR as a possible tool. An outing together to visit a current PFR project, returning home on the bus, weighing up the pros and cons together. Thereafter, if it's to be more than a token consultation, the process depends on creating a group dynamic (my one and only piece of academic jargon!) —generating a shared job satisfaction, not just lip service to yet another government mission statement.

Iolanda Romano asks for my advice on explaining the results of participatory processes to others. Here are several thoughts.

Writing it up in planning jargon may relegate the process to a dreary footnote in someone's academic survey; lecturing about it carries a bit more conviction if it quotes first-hand experience. Listening in to the radio or a tape to some on-the-job participants begins to convey the conviction and commitment that lie behind effective PFR. But seeing has the edge: watching an actuality video or going one better and sending a representative to breathe down the necks of the residents and planners clustered round the model and the now–soon–later charts; coming back on the bus discussing the ways that people have become attracted, involved, committed.

It's the difference between charting a footballer's anatomy, or the team's strategy outlined by the coach in the dressing room—and seeing the ways goals are scored. Seeing is usually believing and, even better, is doing: fledgling groups could be trying things out on a small, non-threatening scale, collectively planning, and re-planning better uses of space and time. Beginning perhaps by re-planning the community centre, or deciding together how to green the neighbourhood, where to site the tree saplings and the flower tubs; pooling available transport for school and market visits, sorting out together the best uses to make of sunshine, water flow, insulation, to serve the community and avert disaster. Such initiatives are the thin end of the wedge that gets us (residents) and them (professionals) converging on bigger jobs at the next stage.

Kenneth Reardon has asked, if I may paraphrase his question, “What is it in PFR that grabs people and gets them turning the talk into action?”

I believe that most of us have been brought up on words and figures, plus carefully regulated sporting activities to exercise our bodies. But as children we filled the gap with all sorts of activities of our own devising which stretched our imaginations, bonded us with others like and unlike ourselves, created a busy buzz, without depending too much on formal talk. All this helped us to grow up and reach out.

I have written ten books (the latest, just out now) and hundreds of BBC scripts and magazine articles. So you could say I'm into words. But words fall short when it comes to getting the onlookers off the sidelines and on to the pitch.

PFR sets up situations which encourage bystanders to try something out, picking and choosing, singly and together. (That's how our human species has got where it has.) It grabs people by letting each of us start out on our own, drawing on our own experience at the coalface of the community, taking the initiative individually, choosing option cards without consulting anyone else at first, feeling free to have second thoughts and put forward alternatives, gradually noticing what others in the group are up to, joining in as and when we choose; putting our heads together, absorbing others’ ideas, adding our own; trying out variations; talking nineteen to the dozen as a background accompaniment to what we are doing together; without needing anyone to lead, instruct, or direct us. Back at long last to Homo habilis, pooling our practical ideas, calculating our shared ability to go first for what we find we can agree on, now, or very soon; leaving to later what needs a re-think all round.

Reinhard Goethert has asked, “What have you been most satisfied with?”

My first thought: the day when a group of teenagers confronted a driver whose van had backed into and damaged one of the row of saplings they had chosen to plant as part of the PFR process two years earlier. “What the hell do you mean by smashing up our bloody tree?” (The motto: we will safeguard what we have helped to create.)

As a runner-up: when the chief executive of one city rang me up, a year after completing an earlier PFR scheme. He said, “My officers are talking with residents and residents are talking with my officers, and they all address each other by their first names.” The upshot was to go for an even bigger project which became the first of two PFRs which got top awards by the Prince of Wales and the RIBA (rivaling the top award for the Berlin PFR by the German Bundestag).

Notes

1. For more information visit our website: www.avventuraurbana.it

[Iolanda Romano wrote this commentary with the translation assistance of Emanuela Galetto. Avventura Urbana is a company set in Turin (Italy) since 1992 that has worked together for more than fifteen years to promote participatory planning to deal with public policies in an innovative way. Experts of the group come from various fields: architects, city planners, political scientists, communicators, facilitators, web designers, social workers. Avventura Urbana deals with problems by using a “polyphonic” approach, and adopts participative processes to be able to achieve a joint result—not in assemblies, where the groups tend to take sides against each other, but in places where access is guaranteed, language is appropriate and the confrontation controlled, where everyone is able to understand and express a personal opinion, even about the most complex technical problems, through easy-to-handle materials and tools of support.]

1. John Forester conducted the original interview at MIT in Spring 2003. Thanks for transcription assistance to Nicole Kindred and Daniel Forester and for editing assistance to Ji Eun Park, Rebecca Liu, and Allison Lack of the Cornell Department of City and Regional Planning.

1. See: http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/practicestories/ and Forester (2006a) for work on practice stories as research and teaching tools.

2. I have written about this at length in Dealing with Differences: The Drama of Mediating Public Disputes (submitted for publication). Cf. Forester (2006b).