Design confronts politics, and both thrive!/Creativity in the face of urban design conflict: A profile of Ric Richardson/From mediation to the creation of a “trading zone”/Conflict and creativity in Albuquerque/Reflecting on a mediation narrative from Albuquerque, New Mexico/From mediation to charrette/Physical clarity and necessary interruption/Ric Richardson responds

Can innovative urban design and extensive participatory planning co-exist? Can resulting design proposals then satisfy designers, planners and the city council too? “Fat chance,” skeptics will say, “When politics trumps design in so-called participatory processes, we get not a sleek horse but a camel instead.”

But University of New Mexico's Professor Ric Richardson's story should make us less presumptuous, less cynical, less likely to keep designers and activists apart. Richardson has not only integrated adaptive and innovative urban design with legal and engineering expertise – in a multi-stakeholder process dedicated to redeveloping a 4.5 mile (2.7 km) transportation corridor – but he's done more, too. His work provides lessons for “institutional” or “process” design as well as for urban conflict resolution and spatial problem-solving.

Richardson's work began when a two-year consultant's study was dead on arrival after being announced to the public: commercial and neighborhood interests, agreeing on little else, agreed that the consultant's plan had to be stopped. So much for the city's investment in expert help.

Against that backdrop, two years of public investment coming to naught, a reputable planning and design firm's work stopped cold, Richardson's phone rings. The Albuquerque Director of Redevelopment says, “We're in some trouble. Can you get us going again?”

Richardson helps, but he does not start calling meetings so that the warring factions can fight for the remaining spoils. What he does forms the heart of this Interface symposium, and we can learn both from his story and from the astute and instructive commentaries that follow – from designers and planners in the UK, Germany, Italy, and the US. We see design thinking spurred by political conflict; stakeholder participation and diverse expertise are both crucial; stereotypes fall as creative solutions take shape; legitimacy emerges from stakeholders' ownership of their creations and from planning commission and city council approvals. Students and practitioners alike will find Richardson's practice story – and the critical yet appreciative views that follow – both engaging and eye-opening reading.

Creativity in the face of urban design conflict: A profile of Ric Richardson

I was in my university office one afternoon, working away, and the phone rang and it was the Director of Redevelopment for the City of Albuquerque saying they were in the process of preparing a corridor plan that was both a redevelopment plan and a sector plan, simultaneously – a sector plan in Albuquerque is the regulatory plan that establishes zoning; a redevelopment plan is a strategy and mechanisms for employees to do redevelopment – and it had grown so controversial that it had been stopped in the Environmental Planning Commission. There had been so much and so well organized opposition, led both by merchants and landowners along the North Fourth Street corridor as well as the neighbors, that the Commission had stopped the review process.

  This area, called the North Valley of Albuquerque, includes some of the oldest and the most well organized neighborhoods in the city, ranging from quite low-income, close-in neighborhoods to some of the highest incomes, with very large homes and large lots, but mixed. The corridor spans four and a half miles, going from the northern edge of downtown Albuquerque to the city limit, and then going on into the Village of Los Ranchos, another jurisdiction.

The plan had been stopped. There had been a two-year effort on the part of the city and its consultants to plan for redeveloping the corridor. It had become a major thoroughfare for residences, businesses, and then, further out, for mixed industry and heavier commercial activities.

So Fourth Street could become – depending on who you talked to – the continuation of more intense commercial and redeveloped industry, or commercial mixed with residential, or even a small-scale neighborhood-serving street and set of businesses.

Before the corridor planning effort I had been – together with two other colleagues and a group of students – asked by the neighbors at the far north end of North Fourth Street to come in and hold a set of visioning workshops.

There was a roadway that provided access over a bridge crossing the Rio Grande to the whole west mesa, and it was a very congested place. So the neighbors there wanted us to do workshops so they could get organized, because the city had offered them a full-fledged design charrette to solve their intersection problem and spur development. This was just at the beginning of this two-year process for the Fourth Street corridor planning.

So two years before the phone call, early on, I got to know very, very well the actors and the issues at the northern end of the corridor. That early work resulted in the neighborhood giving to the City Planning Department and the Redevelopment Agency their four major goals for redevelopment. That helped them guide a charrette with professionals and city staff and others.

As the consultant team for the corridor plan was formed – a very respected planning firm, a landscape architecture firm, along with transit and transportation consultants and market analysts, the right ingredients – the consultant team began their work and I was interested, but I didn't follow it closely. It seemed to be a legitimate, straightforward planning process with good technical advice, and a citizen advisory committee that included merchants, representatives of the neighborhood organizations and advocates for transit and transportation.

So the consultant process had all of these elements. They were off-and-running, and there was no controversy. There was no chatter, no newspaper articles, and no visible activity either pro or con.

So then, almost two years later, I get this phone call that the corridor-planning project had been stalled. The consultant team had completed their work. They had prepared a draft, and that draft was the lightning bolt for extraordinary opposition – from both the neighborhoods and the merchants – to the strategy, the zoning system, that had been recommended.

A business association that was almost nonexistent – within three weeks of the plan being published – mushroomed to 50 members and had become very well organized. Their economic activities could easily get the attention of the Mayor, the City Council, and the planning apparatus in the city.

My impression at the time of the call was that the opposition pitted merchants against neighbors: neighbors wanted one thing and merchants wanted another. The proposed plan didn't satisfy either of their concerns.

I listened to the Director of Redevelopment on the telephone, and she characterized the controversy like many development disputes. It's the landowning development apparatus saying, “Let's keep things the way they are,” or, “invest in making them bigger and better” versus the neighborhood who doesn't want anything, who're anti-development or redevelopment.

I just knew a couple things. This 4.5-mile long corridor goes through very different kinds of places. I also knew from the visioning workshops that even in a much smaller area – let's say, four blocks, 3000 neighbors, and a smattering of businesses – there were many viewpoints of neighbors and property owners about what ought, or ought not, to be done.

So when I was asked for help, I said, “Yes, I'm interested, but not unless you give me at least a month, maybe a month and a half, to talk to people – that's the first piece of work that I want to do.”

I said, “I want to begin this process – and in fact I must begin it – by interviewing, by visiting with a variety of people up and down the corridor: merchants and residents, the corridor consultants, city staff, others that have had a relationship with this.”

I said, “I want to assess the conflict. I want to do a written conflict assessment, to give us some insight into what's going on – What are the issues? What's the history? What had the planning effort been like? – and then to recommend a way to go forward.”

She pushed back for much less time [laughs].

I said, “No, it'll take longer. It's going to take a month and cost X. We won't likely get anywhere – if we begin right away to have public meetings and get people talking, which is good ordinarily, but if we have no sense about what kind of forum, with which people, and under what conditions, if we're shooting in the dark, if we haven't talked enough.

I said that because actually the city has a good land-use facilitation program. They had, earlier, asked a couple of local facilitators to hold some meetings to get people together to talk. There had been two meetings, for an evening and a full day, that actually had exacerbated the conflict.

The first meeting was an open house: “Please come. Here's the proposed plan: Tell us what you think.”

I think they didn't anticipate the organized opposition – people who were deeply concerned, afraid of what might happen, wanting some things but not others – who all showed up and expected to and were given the chance to speak. And a well-managed shouting match went on!

During our assessment I talked to people who said that these meetings were getting more intractable, with people's positions really becoming more entrenched – that they felt manipulated, in an “open” meeting, where their comments were taken down, but they weren't going to make any difference.

Another meeting broke things down into zoning, streetscape, traffic lanes, transit and a couple of other areas, and people independently commented on those areas separately. The city got many good comments, but no emerging consensus, no ideas that overlapped or made a way to go on.

So from what the Director of Redevelopment had already told me, just having more meetings, maybe with different people, wasn't going to help – neither she nor certainly I understood the people, the place, the players, and the dynamics well enough to begin to even ask them for insights into what might or might not work. So she agreed.

That was, in retrospect, crucial in two ways. First, we had to do a good assessment, to find out who we should talk to, and then, second, we had to network with that list and find out from the people we're talking to, who else to talk to. By talking, you simply start with their perceptions of what's been going on, their relationship both to this redevelopment process and to the corridor, its life and history. From that you ask – what did they see as issues, things they think are good, and things they think are not good?

We went in with 10 questions [laughs] and a flipchart, and two sets of ears. They were structured questions, and we covered the terrain, but I typically didn't go, “Okay, the first question is … the second question is …”

I let people talk, and I guide the conversation by focusing their attention or making sure they address issues later, like, “Do you think it makes any sense to go forward with a process to get people together and try to solve problems with a consensus around what to do?”

I tried to get a sense of what they would like to see take place. “What do you think, the controversy aside, the future of this place is?” “What character should it have?” “What function should the roadway play?”

So I worked back-and-forth with the existing situation, with lots of feelings about who's done what, and why, and who wants what, and how we're not going to let that happen. Those feelings are really important, extraordinarily important, because this early part of planning is messy.

If you don't allow people to be themselves and don't understand on a deeper level why people feel as they do, you can know that they're angry, but until you find out why – it could be political relationships, it could be what they'd like to see in the future like a better pedestrian environment – they're not going to stop until they tell their whole story. So it's about the values people have, the way they perceive and value the problem differently. So that's a part of the process – to get at, “What are their interests? What are their values?” Feelings are important.

Second, we interviewed people both as individuals and then, often, in small groups, four or five merchants who had similar businesses, or merchants in the same area, and likewise with residents. The residents have always been very well organized in the North Valley, in neighborhood associations.

I really enjoy this work because it's an important part of planning. What I bring is a set of questions and something to write on. When I go to a small group, I'll bring a flip chart, and often, two of us work with the group, and part of the art is getting people to talk to one another, to respond to and build off of comments another person has made, and actually get them to talk about those shared interests that they've got, so people communicate in a way they haven't before.

We'd invite a small caucus or a coalition, with some shared characteristics, from an area, or a business type, or an age or economic group. I'd first ask an open-ended question: “So how do you see this dispute? Can you say how you've seen this plan emerge?” – and we'll go from there. We'll go from questions about history, to their relationships, to their key issues.

My mind changes through these interviews, profoundly. I kept going back to my first meeting with the business association, after the Redevelopment Department said, “Oh, we've got this guy who's going to work as a mediator,” and I had walked into a room, packed with [chuckles] 40 angry people.

They were skeptical at best about someone with a planning background who's been introduced this way: “Okay, we know he's a mediator, but we don't have a clue what that is, and we know that everything we've seen so far is either frou-frou or is going to make matters worse. But we're willing to all get together [laughs] and give it an evening”

I said, “I'm going to do the best that I can, and what I want to do is to organize and run a process differently than we had before, based on first talking with you, with your leadership, and then in groups.” We talked enough, that night, that they said, “Alright, we're willing to go ahead.”

I thought, on the way home, “I don't have a clue where this is going” – because this is very complicated, very dynamic, with many strong personalities and influential people.

When I went to the association of neighborhoods, there was a similar reaction, but they seemed a little more willing to listen. We met down at the City Planning Department. They had been burned in the past. They felt they'd put in time and effort and paid attention to the corridor planning, and now it seemed nothing good was going to result. “How was I going to make any difference?”

I said I needed their help to design a process, to go forward, to enable, and I think I used the term “a ‘set of negotiations’ between you and the merchants. But it's got to be based on some better understanding of the neighborhoods and the areas along the corridor.”

I hadn't said anything different to the merchants, but the term “mediator” had come up very quickly with them, and they had asked, “We've had facilitators and planners, what's a mediator do?”

I said I would spend time talking to them, in confidence, and that based, early on, on their insights, perceptions and recommendations, we would, together, design a process to go forward, to rework the plan, only if it seemed worthwhile.

I said something similar to the neighborhood group that came together although they were much more willing to say, “We want this plan to work, but, at present, the way it's going, it isn't going to work. What do you think you can do?”

So I talked again about how a mediator works, both with and between people and groups, and that I would rely very much on their insights, and hope to get the technical assistance we would all need to design something differently.

After the first meeting with the neighborhoods, I felt a little more hopeful, although I could see that there were fundamentally different views of what should happen to the street. The merchants wanted free-flowing traffic and the addition of transit to provide more and better visibility to their businesses, commercial enterprises and industrial operations. There wasn't much residential on the corridor, if any, with just a bit today. The neighbors wanted a street that they could use, that was pedestrian-friendly, more inviting.

This street opened up to three lanes in each direction with a median and a 35-mile-an-hour speed limit, which meant, at times that people drove 40 or even faster. So there were big concerns about pedestrian safety, and also about, “So when I get to the corridor, what kind of businesses are there that serve the neighborhood?”

This had become a strip with more region-serving commercial and industrial businesses mixed with fast food drive-ups, and so there were pretty profound differences. The more I talked to people, the more they began to suggest that, from the property owners' viewpoint, if you didn't jerk people around with new zoning and you let redevelopment occur with incentives of various kinds, that might be okay. They went that far.

Meanwhile the neighbors were saying, “We've never talked about wanting to take away someone's entitlements, someone's rights.” They were sophisticated, and honest: “No, we don't want to jerk the merchants around.”

One afternoon, I was interviewing one of the transit advocates, who said, “You know, we'd live with another lane of traffic if they would accept an overlay zone, one that brings in a form-based code.”

He said, “There's a new form of zoning that's based in the new urbanist movement.” The new urbanists had created a zoning code that regulated the form of a building, as it relates to the sidewalk, the street, and the pedestrian environment, rather than its use, as traditional Euclidian zoning required, which separated multi-family or family, or commercial, or residential uses. This was a different approach. An overlay zone could allow more flexibility about a structure's use on a property, and it could regulate, quite strictly, the building's bulk, form and height, and, more importantly, its relationship to the street.

He said, “I don't want you to tell anybody I said this. We're thinking about an overlay zone that would encourage the building forms we want, through a form-based code. We'd be willing to live with some of the traffic on the street if we could get that character of the street, and the pedestrian environment, regulated.”

In that moment I began to be hopeful. That's when I thought, “You know, there may be an ability to do something here. There are overlapping interests here.” You could see, here, an honest insight from the neighborhood's perspective about how the merchants looked at things.

We finished the interviews. We took two months and wrote a conflict assessment that said that the merchants and the neighborhoods involved were willing to go ahead with the process. They felt it was worthwhile to talk to one another.

Halfway through the interviews I had begun to float the idea, “What about having face-to-face negotiations, between representatives from landowners and merchants on the corridor and representatives from the neighborhoods?”

It was a bit startling. People liked that idea. There had been workshops, meetings, and studies, but now we would find a place, and bring together six representatives of each, and six alternates. The “alternates” could take the place of the lead negotiators, but they had to be informed, so the alternates needed to come to the meetings as observers.

So we proposed, in the assessment, that a process go forward and be based on face-to-face negotiations assisted by a facilitator, a mediator.

The assessment went back first to the people we had interviewed. The assessment report was for them, to reflect back what they had said, without attribution. In a good assessment you should tell anybody that you're talking to, “What we talk about is confidential, and we will not attribute what you say to you. We may use ideas that you've got, we may use suggestions that you make. We want those insights, we can build on them, but none of it will be attributed to any of you personally.”

We got very little feedback after sending back the assessment. We had done well enough that people said, “Let's try to do something. Let's keep the process moving; let's do it.” The assessment report went to the Redevelopment Department, who took it to the Planning Commission, who then said, “Great.”

We then suggested to the leadership of each group that we would still meet with each of them, and they said, “Representative negotiations are good,” and then we helped them brainstorm, “Representing whom? Or what?”

Each side came up with different criteria, based on what they felt was important in this corridor area. The businesses wanted to have small business, large business, auto-serving businesses, businesses from the north end to the south end of the corridor, property owners, business managers – people who worked there daily and people who had a huge financial interest, people who worked there or who managed the McDonalds, who saw the place daily.

The neighbors also felt that they may want to represent the geography from north to south, as well as their closeness to or distance from the corridor. They considered people that had been long-term residents of the areas and people who had more recently moved in. And, on their own, they said, “We also want to have somebody who's well versed in development.”

We left it to them, to the association of neighborhood associations and the merchant group, to choose their representatives: “You can carry out a process of nominating and selecting as you see fit. Give us 12 names and a little bit of information about each person.”

During the past month we had gotten to know many of those who became negotiators. One of the purposes of the assessment process was to see if it was possible to go forward, and another purpose was for them to get to know us. We ultimately involved others, but the assessment process itself helped people gain trust that we could help them in an honest, open way, and that they could understand what we knew and didn't know and how we could listen and how we could feed back issues. We were actively modeling what we were going to do by facilitating the small group interviews and listening and reflecting during our assessment process.

That process also made people familiar with our mediating, with our assisting negotiations, because each side had internal negotiations, too. That's why I wanted small groups: People didn't always agree, and they worked things out, and we would help. That's why we wanted six on each side – for diverse viewpoints, values, and interests.

So now with 12 people and their help we picked a place, on the corridor, a Center for the Arts, with a meeting room in the back, a funky space, very modest. We pushed tables together and put chairs around them, and we started the process.

Our first step in the process was to feed back, again, in an aggregate way, much of what they had said about issues and approaches at the very first meeting. We began with self-introductions, why people wanted to be there, and then we went through the issues. Then I took a big risk and said that I felt there were three or four proposals that were near agreements, where enough people had said, “Let's consider this”, which I was echoing from what I had heard, of course.

Examples included the design overlay, the respect for private property rights, and the potential to solve the traffic problem – maybe by reducing traffic lanes. The idea of reducing lanes created a little wave, but I wanted to raise those initial proposals as soon as I could, although it felt like a big risk.

It worked fine. There was some grumbling about reducing lanes and access, and some about form-based codes, because people didn't understand what form-based codes were. We started the process from there.

We agreed to meet on Wednesday evenings for an education session, weekly. They wanted to move ahead. They said, “We've been at it a long time; we don't want this to take forever.”

On Wednesdays we'd hold education sessions. They would suggest, and we'd help them bring in people, who knew about form-based codes, who knew about transit options, who knew how the zoning system worked and what were its implications, who knew about pedestrian environments, or different crosswalks, mid-block, end-block. The negotiators helped set the agenda.

“What do you want to learn, and who should we invite to talk to us? We can ask them anything we'd like … We'll just have a two-hour meeting.”

Then on Saturdays, they agreed, they'd meet for three to four hours in a working session, every week. They skipped a few weeks, but they kept at it for five months. Wednesdays were designed to get together, listen, and develop a common language so we could actually talk together and use the same terminology and understand each other as we talked about planning for the corridor.

On Saturdays we'd have working sessions. We began to work out our differences about the issues, about proposals. That was a struggle. The meetings on Saturday were contentious. Some people really didn't like others across the table, personally. They'd bring out how “you” (pointing across the table) had fiddled with the process before, or whatever.

I have three vivid memories of the Saturdays. One was halfway through the process, saying to my partner, “I don't have a clue how this is going to go. This is like riding a roller coaster. I can't predict, with any certainty, that this process is going to produce some agreement – that it's going to work.”

The second one [laughs], was when one of the lead negotiators said to the others, “Look, let's just make a decision. Can't we work on something – what about if we just set boundaries for the corridor?”

This was late on a Saturday, and we made two agreements for the next Saturday. One was, “Let's all go out and walk, if we can, up and down the corridor.” The second was that I promised, “I'll bring someone to help us see the corridor and the visuals to begin to set boundaries.”

The negotiators came back to that next meeting, and it was astonishing. They began, for the first time, to work together. This was tangible, visible attitude, “Let's go down the corridor and set the boundary on either side so that we settle, “How far does it go into the neighborhood? How much does it affect and bound the commercial development?”

That came from, in part, their desire and frustration with, “We've been talking about this, and we have principles to guide the process. Let's decide something, something tangible, not necessarily easy.” They discovered a surprising amount of consensus on that.

We brought a guy in with a computer and a projector, and using Google Earth he brought up Albuquerque and then North Fourth Street and the corridor, and we flew over it at 40 or 50 feet, slowly, and talked about what we saw: “Oh, that's the old Safeway.”

“Yeah, I remember when it was a furniture store.”

From end to end, and then following one negotiator's lead, “Well, where should we set the boundary?”

We began to ask that question and said, “Well, how about in this area, half a block behind the commercial?” or “How about two blocks in this area, because, look, all those vacant lots are leftover from when it was industrial?”

So they could actually go, section by section, and it took a couple hours, but at the end they had boundaries.

Later, we went from setting boundaries to looking at a cross section of the street. There was lots of contention about the number of lanes, the width of the lanes, access for bicyclists, the width of the sidewalk, street trees, relocating utilities, making a better pedestrian environment, and allowing access for buses. A big issue was, “Where should crossings be?” – because that can wreak havoc with both continued access, but also truck access, especially large trucks turning left.

I said, “Let's have each of the sides develop a set of proposals themselves and talk to the other group.” Rather than go line-by-line, through an agreement, what we would do is have a package – one each from the neighbors and the merchants: “This is what we want out of the street and the sidewalk.”

Having those packages, as whole concepts, we could ask questions about what problems each was solving, and discuss that. The packages were combinations of lane width, sidewalk width, building setbacks, and that kind of thing.

Ingenious as I thought that was [laughs], in the end, that created another wave of frustration, because the negotiators were sophisticated enough and informed enough, and entrenched enough, that they got close, but they never were going to agree on an absolute package. So we were stuck. Would we need to send in two cross-sections and let the city decide?

Then I got a phone call on a weekend – this is my third vivid memory. One of the leaders said, “Listening to all we've gone through and what's actually gonna be there, I was sitting here,” he said, “and it occurred to me that the neighbors really care about what the development looks like, what it's going to be like when it happens.”

He said, “Look, I'm not very big on form-based codes.” This was a guy who'd worked with developers, and he had a long history with the City Redevelopment Agency as well as knowing the neighborhoods very well. He went on, “But in this case, that's what's at stake. That's what the neighbors really need, what they're really interested in – when the development happens, what's it going to” – and he used those words – “look like.”

He said, “But what the merchants care about is when and how any redevelopment can happen, what will be required when they want to do something.”

He asked, “Do you suppose that we could find a way for the neighbors to begin to design this way of zoning, a form-based code, and set that in motion, and ask the merchants to design the mechanisms that will trigger use of the form-based code, instead of the existing zoning?”

Ultimately, the merchants came up with five trigger mechanisms. For example, if you renovated more than 25% of your building's square footage, you'd have to renovate to conform to the form-based code: Build toward the street, put parking behind, have the sidewalk pedestrian. Or, if you build from scratch on ample vacant land, you need to build under the new code. If you're going to do adaptive reuse, take an older building and adapt that to a new use and rehabilitate it, you'd face no form-based code, because we wanted to encourage the new use of older infrastructure. Those were what they called the “trigger mechanisms.”

We had just tried to do the cross sections, which was pretty contentious, so there were some real frustrations with, “So what are we going to do next?”

Actually, a few participants had taken me aside one evening and asked, “What are we going to do next?” And I said, “You know, I'm not sure.”

Because I'd been feeling stuck, when I got this phone call it struck me that this could be a major breakthrough. I said immediately to the guy, “This is important. Let's figure out how to suggest that there's a way to go forward. Let's shift the agenda. Let's talk about these other really important pieces.”

So we got the two groups together, proposed the idea, and they said, “Oh, that's great.” They decided before anything was drafted that each side should identify “sore spots” that would be deal breakers in the part of the plan that the other side was drafting.

For the rest of the night, for an hour and a half, the neighbors had the floor first, and they could talk about the trigger mechanisms, “Look, be careful of X, Y, and Z. I'm really going to be concerned if you come back with A, B, and C.”

We said, “Just talk about the tight spots – places where you're going to cringe.”

Then the merchants' turn came, and they could say, “Well, when you're designing the form-based code, this idea of glass on 70% of the frontage is a problem – remember where we are in this city. I'm going to cringe because I know this is a high crime area, at least today, and windows are expensive to replace,” and form-based codes can be rigid regarding entrances, glass, windows, facades – articulating how much the building relates to the sidewalk, and other design elements.

So they went away and took some extra time, and each side came back with a proposal: What are the triggers and why, and how would the form-based codes work? What would the design and regulatory elements be?

That watershed suggestion occurred probably three months into the five month process, and they actually crafted the way it was to be regulated: how and who would be required to do what. That gave the group a huge breakthrough, a huge amount of momentum. They had resolved major aspects of the dispute.

Eager to go forward, we set the agenda to return to the cross section and to add design elements to crossings, and sets of incentives. We had triggers and regulations: were there incentives that we could encourage people to use?”

For example, if you proposed a project in compliance with the new code, you went straight to a building permit. After a review with the planning director, there'd be no internal departmental review, no public hearings. If you comply, you get a building permit. This was a major move!

The neighbors said, “This makes sense, because we know what we're going to get: We can see exactly what that's going to be.”

The developers said, “There's the time cost of money: This is a very big incentive: It's knocked six months to a year off my development process.

I had not appreciated how much accelerating the review process mattered – it matters a lot.

The parties came back and reconsidered the cross sections. They agreed – let's say 80% – and agreed to disagree about the remaining 20% because of things they just didn't know, like, “Well, how wide is the corridor once it gets to this spot?”

Once again, one of the participants said, “When they did this redevelopment over here in Nob Hill, before they finished agreeing on the design of the cross section of the street, they hired an engineering firm to do a 30% design study.” So then we suggested, “Why don't you talk with the city?”

We suggested that when it came time to hire an engineer, a 30% percent study was a good idea. Everybody said, “Oh boy, that makes sense. We could actually see where things are and what's going to happen and who's going to pay, potentially.”

We said, “Let's have that process guided by participants from this process – a cross section of this group.” So they all chimed in – it was a great idea to put into the agreement that the engineering study would be guided by an advisory committee in selecting engineers in transit and traffic, designing the RFP, the scope of work, and then guiding the process.

My partner and I said, “We have pieces here that we've all agreed to. There's a map, boundaries, the basics of this and that and the form-based code and the triggers. What if we draft a white paper for the negotiated agreement? We'll write the first draft to go from the committee to the city.”

They said, “Oh, that's a great idea!”

After we spent the next meeting carefully going over the white paper and this set of agreements they'd made, they approved it, signed it, and forwarded it to the Planning Commission, via the Redevelopment Department. They asked that the old draft plan be rewritten, based on the white paper's recommendations.

The engineering report had been a recommendation, not yet funded and not yet carried out. It was a proposal in the white paper, about which the city had said, “We'll provide the funding.”

The white paper didn't surface other disagreements because we had been pretty careful to reflect what it was they were saying, and they had made good agreements. It was a test, though – to see it as a full 10 pages. That white paper set the stage. The Planning Commission said, “Wonderful – rewrite the plan.”

So they bounced it back to us. The Planning Commission said, “The white paper's good. We agree with what it set out – the ideas seem good. Go ahead and rewrite the plan that the consultant had done before – the one that had stopped the whole thing. Go ahead and redo it.”

But who was going to redo it? We proposed that we work with a technical consultant who knew about writing form-based codes, and that we have access to transportation information, and that we would take the leader of the business-merchants' associations and the person who had emerged as the leader of the neighborhood organizations, to sit down, together, with the consulting team and a mediator.

This team met weekly throughout the summer. I continued as the mediator. That became an extraordinary process, line by line through regulatory code, being very careful of what was going where.

My concern, as I kept encouraging and urging these two representatives to do, was to stay in contact with their various colleagues and the groups they were representing. As Louis Kahn said, “God is in the details,” and surely there were some very, not heated but thorough, discussions about what went into that, because we were designing a regulatory plan. By the time the rewriting process was over, they were able to sell it to their own constituencies.

They had sufficiently stayed in touch. I got a few calls about being a little closer in touch, but nothing upended the process. Then the plan went out for public review – another draft.

The city posted it on its website, and they had several open-house meetings all along the corridor, and they invited everybody to invite anybody else who was interested to come.

The first open-house meeting was astonishing. Very few people came. We had display boards, and people by boards showing different parts of the corridor, and different pieces of the land use regulation and the urban design that was going to happen. We had a timeline of events. What happened was that the negotiators themselves, who all showed up, began to talk in a reflective way about what they had done, back and forth across the room.

They were saying, “You know, I never imagined that we would start where we did and get here,” and what “here” meant was that, “we'd been able to craft a way of agreeing and a way of seeing this area, unlike we ever thought we would. It hadn't been proposed before – and it is going to be different, and it is going to take time,” and others from the merchants' side added in, “But we understand how it's going to be, and it's going to fit with both existing development as well as new.”

They talked about their earlier fears, but now they could joke, “Oh, what you want is four-and-a-half miles of coffee shops and bookstores, [laughs] and it ain't going to work!” The neighbors said, “Ah, no, we don't want Snob Hill down here, we want two and a half miles of coffee shops [laughs]. No! We want things like a grocery store.” When I heard that comment, “I never imagined we'd go from where we started to here,” I took it as a huge compliment to our process, a way of saying, “We all have gotten a lot out of this. We all have benefited, and we resolved problems that we thought were insurmountable” – and they were, at the time.

That happened first because they developed a way of talking with one another that they didn't have before. I mean the idea of a common language was important [to help them] see things and create things that they didn't before. They created a place, a redevelopment strategy and regulations to make it happen, that they had both imagined earlier in much more polarizing ways. Together now they had created something that served the interests of property rights and commercial activities and would create a more habitable, friendly street.

They didn't imagine that earlier, when they had come into the process imagining, “This is four-and-a-half miles of property that's a fixed pie. I'm only going to get what I want through what you give up – your boneheaded view of the world. As a merchant, the only way I'll get what I need is if you get off your high horse about making this into a boutique area.”

Not only could commercial and neighborhood interests be served, but also adaptive reuse was a pleasant surprise along the way. Not all of those old buildings were at the edge of the street. Not all conformed to the form-based idea, but the neighbors said, “No, no, no! We don't want to tear down old buildings! Wait, let's get the city to do an inventory to find out what really is there that we ought to be conserving and building on.” Well, that had not been on the table. So they invented a plan that met their needs and pushed beyond the boundaries of any image of a “fixed pie.”

The fixed pie idea not only says, “I only get something when you give up something,” but it says that if I want three lanes and I know that's the minimum to serve my business, I have to insist on four lanes, because I know that you're coming from the neighborhood, and you're not going to give up until you see two lanes!” So then you go tit-for-tat and design something in the middle – but that strategy makes no sense. So our process provided an alternative to that kind of bargaining strategy.

Meeting on the Saturdays and Wednesdays, having access to technical expertise, access to those outside of ourselves who could come in and talk to that – while we're not going to negotiate with them, we're going to listen, and we're going to ask questions, and we're going to try to understand things – all that was really key. It gave people – who didn't like one another, who were tired of fighting with one another, and who had huge things at stake – time to sit in the same space, sit in the same room and listen to somebody else. They alternately could pick the topic and the research. Sometimes the topic, zoning, would have two or three different resources: “Here's this form-based way, here's the conventional way, here's performance zoning” – here are different ways to think about that. It gave them time to learn about things and to mutually question another expert who, they agreed, was a good resource.

They didn't have to do that on the Wednesday evening sessions. They weren't negotiating – they were learning, mostly, and sometimes they both had problems with ideas that were on the table. There were so many things in this project that I had not done before. But there were a couple of personalities on each side that were great. This is true in many disputes, and it was true on a level here that I hadn't seen before.

What this reinforced was the importance of the pre-process conversations, the assessment: The importance of doing a situation assessment, a conflict assessment, listening well and using that as the basis for design. Also I was, maybe, becoming more comfortable with uncertainty, the kind of uncertainty in designing the process that we were talking – not being quite so compulsive. A colleague of mine, Carl Moore, will say, “There's two things that are important in processes like this. One is to start, and the other is to manage the drift.”

This experience taught me that and hammered it home, that “process” by another name, or “managing the drift,” is creating or co-creating the process that you put forward, co-creating what to do next with the participants. Actually, it's not so much what I'm saying, but about listening to the participants. There were some powerful suggestions made along the way, and one of my roles was to recognize the ideas that can help narrow the differences – and respecting that and using that artfully, the suggestions, as a way to proceed. Giving credit where credit's due, protecting ideas where ideas need to be protected, and taking responsibility for what I do. So, it's a creative process.

From mediation to the creation of a “trading zone”

Ric Richardson's interesting account raises issues similar to those I experienced in several participatory planning activities.

  A first important point involves Richardson's request to do a preliminary feasibility study of the mediation process. Quite common in conflict resolution, such a “conflict assessment” is a way to ascertain the process and avoid disillusion and disappointment.

In my experience this preliminary phase works in part with the public administration to ensure that those with formal authority to implement the results of a participatory process will really follow up. Too often, we have seen an exciting participatory planning process wasted after its results vanished into a black box of prevailing administrative procedures.

After this preliminary phase, Richardson says, the uncertainty about resolving the conflict was not so much reduced but an important and unexpected result of the assessment had been to gain trust among conflicting actors. Hardly a by-product of the assessment phase, this is, I believe, its most important result.

A second point concerns the nature of the process which has not followed standard rules of negotiation manuals: start from a discussion about principles and general objectives and then build specific solutions upon a common redefinition of agreed principles.

Instead, clearly, the objectives and values of neighbors and merchants were seriously opposed. We see, therefore, a distinctive process. After convening, negotiators started discussions about “near agreements” and then invited experts to inform possible solutions, developing a conversation about new opportunities. Somehow they started from solutions and not from problem re-definition and agreement about objectives.

I understand the interview as describing a process of creating what Peter Galison calls a “trading zone,” in the field of scientific innovations (Galison, 1997). Galison defines “trading zones” as infrastructures and concepts that function as “exchangers” for dialogues between different sub-cultures. He shows empirically how scientific innovations occurred historically – ranging from physics to nanotechnologies – and produced concrete spaces or conceptual spaces where scientists from different disciplinary fields had to find simplified, intermediate languages to work together. From such essential communication requiring partial working agreements, innovations were born.

A trading zone is a platform where highly elaborate and complex questions can be transformed into “thin descriptions” (not Geertzian “thick descriptions”), to enable exchanging information in a specific local context. This enabled building coordinated forms of mutual interaction, despite limited capacities of each group to understand the conceptions, methodologies and objectives of the others.

In the Albuquerque process, rather than following predefined steps from agreement about objectives to defining possible solutions, we see instead the slow development of an exchange language that allowed participants to agree on specific solutions that still satisfied very different value systems. No specific methodology led to the positive result but rather the progressive discovery of areas of partial agreements discovered through a new exchange language based upon trust.

Third, defining the boundaries of the corridor was a real turning point in the story: that created a real “boundary object”, something accepted by participants as an agreement precisely because it satisfied their different strategies. Such boundary objects are instruments in the process of creating a trading zone. Star and Griesemer (1989, p. 393) explain it this way:

[Boundary object] is an analytic concept of those scientific objects which both inhabit several intersecting social worlds and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them. Boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. These objects may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is a key process in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds.

A final observation concerns the sense of disorientation that always afflicts those responsible for participatory processes halfway. Having often experienced the same feeling, I wondered if this happens in any design process that moves from individual to collective rationality. For some time I interpreted this as the necessity of trusting in the intelligence of democracy – as if positive results would be the natural consequence of a fair process of interaction among interested parties.

But having had negative experiences too, I've changed my mind about the inexorability of positive results after a period of confusion. After reading Richardson's story I am only more convinced that you can overcome the confusion – generated by incompatible languages spoken by different parties – when you start to construct an exchange language that allows the actual creation of a trading zone. This depends less on any specific method for conflict resolution than on the capacity of building trust, as Richardson's interview makes very evident.

Conflict and creativity in Albuquerque

My response to Ric Richardson comes from a close reading of the text and sharing the questions that it raised for me. My reflections relate to the story as well as to the way it has been told, involving both the issues that have been reported and the process that the participants have gone through. Complex urban development processes have many dimensions, and space limits what this account can address. The narration of the story by someone who conducted it and was satisfied by its outcome would also locate it in a single, supportive perspective. Without doubting the accuracy and sincerity of the account, I was faced with some questions and looked for possible answers from within this text. I have never visited Albuquerque and have received no information about this plan from other sources, so I have responded to this report on its own basis. These ideas are, accordingly, no more than first impressions.

The text can be read at several levels. First and most explicitly, this is a story of the triumph of public participation and conflict resolution as narrated by a mediator and recorded, transcribed, and edited by an interviewer. The City of Albuquerque had hired consultants to prepare a corridor plan to transform the present and regulate the future of an area. The plan's publication, however, triggered furious opposition and conflict between two major groups of stakeholders: merchants and neighbors. The frozen planning process was rescued through a difficult course of mediation, which helped the warring sides work together to rewrite the plan with the help of experts. Mediation turned hostility toward collaboration, failure into success. The mediator's skills of breaking the whole into pieces, moving step by step, listening and talking patiently, maintaining confidentiality, looking for common ground, providing technical support, building trust, identifying and building on turning points, and coping with uncertainty had paid off.

Beyond the material directly provided by the text, we can identify contextual features that contributed to the success of this experience. One significant element was the area's social capital; merchants and neighbors both could organize themselves in protest, and this organizational capacity also helped the process of reconciliation. Furthermore, the city council's administrative capacity enabled it to build upon experience and take the initiative to get access to expertise in conflict resolution. A university-based mediator who had worked in the area offered both neutrality and familiarity. Without this three-way capacity on the part of businesses, residents and the public authority, and without patient and skillful mediation, the outcome could have been completely different.

We can also identify the value of urban design in bringing the two sides together, both spatially and temporally, designing a place as well as a process. A key role of a plan is to manage anxieties about an uncertain future, but the first corridor plan had exacerbated these anxieties and created new ones. The joint design process, in contrast, enabled the participants to visualize the future of the street and develop concrete steps towards realizing it. In this process, clarity of form reduced anxiety, providing a basis for negotiation and collaboration. Clarity of form combined with clarity of process, then expressed in “trigger mechanisms”, i.e. the circumstances in which change of form would be initiated. A division of labor facilitated the co-production of the plan: neighbors worked on the form and merchants on the process. The form-based code offered a solution, but it needed to be contextualized, which was made possible by the trigger mechanisms. Together, these two measures offered a spatial and temporal code. So the division of labor between participants and codification of the process helped to provide a level of certainty beyond what the first plan offered. The experience of co-producing a detailed image of what might happen and a process of how it might happen placed the design process at the heart of the reconciliation process.

Yet many questions remain. Why did the first plan fail? The city's Director of Redevelopment interpreted the controversy as resistance to change and disagreement over the character of the outcome. Was this a case of experts proposing an idea without public participation, or was there a city-wide rationale for the corridor, which was nonetheless blocked at the neighborhood level by partisan considerations? Was it a case of good ideas being badly explained or bad ideas all along? The plan apparently had a problem of legitimacy with locals who seemed poorly consulted or who felt that their earlier objections had not been addressed. They had lost trust in the local authority, a trust needing to be regained through painstaking work. Who would benefit from the altered corridor? What was the plan's underlying rationale? The city obviously cared about public participation – witness its good land-use facilitation program, local participatory projects, its 12-member advisory group for the first plan, its halting the planning process after strong popular opposition, and asking a mediator for help. Was the first plan's failure due to inadequate methods of participation, or also due to the radical nature of its proposals, combining redevelopment and regulation, changing the function and character of the street? Was it the plan's substance, as much as its process, that caused resistance?

What did the first plan aim to achieve? We gradually get to know what the neighbors and merchants wanted, but what did the city want, and why was it so controversial? The merchants' response, angrier and more quickly mobilized, suggests that they had felt more threatened. The main issue that they talked about throughout the process was the transformation of the street into 4.5 miles of coffee shops and bookstores, producing “a boutique area”. The merchants blamed the neighbors for this vision of gentrification and beautification, but where did the city stand? Had the corridor plan threatened the same, leading to the merchants' anger and protest?

The neighbors were another major player. What was the level of interest and involvement of the residents of the five old, socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods? Were low- and high-income neighbors similarly opposed to the plan, similarly able to mobilize and organize, similarly interested in turning the street into coffee shops and bookstores, similarly involved in rewriting the plan? If different groups likely had different interests, objectives and roles, the question becomes: who participated and who didn't? Whose voice was not heard?

Other stakeholders – transit advocates, property owners, city planners, designers and developers – appear in the story, but stay in the background, relative to the organized merchants and neighbors. Richardson characterizes turning points as moments when one group comes to see key issues from another group's perspective, enabling a compromise proposal that could appeal to others. All parties seem to offer something, but it is not clear what the developers offered or what the economic implications of the proposals might be.

How did the plan's revision process respond to these problems and anxieties? The merchants cared about “when the redevelopment is going to happen”. The solution, therefore, seems to have included two methods. First, by delaying, staggering, and qualifying the street's transformation, through “trigger mechanisms”, changes appeared less immediate and threatening. Second, by concentrating on form rather than function, merchants could keep their businesses but only change built forms when making major changes to their properties.

The neighbors cared more about the street's image. One interesting turning point came with the realization that “the neighbors really care about what the development looks like”. Was this a shift of emphasis to the aesthetics of the place, or a concern about being able to visualize the outcome? Was this replacing content with form, activity with appearance, or combining the two? More importantly, where did this image of an urban street lined by buildings come from? How was the imagery of wide roads, suburban houses and shopping malls and strips replaced by an older typology of narrower, traditional urban streets lined by buildings? Answering these questions would involve an interesting study in cultural transformation, the ways paradigms change, and the ways particular images and circumstances can replace others.

The role of the educational sessions seems important, as the invited experts offered the participants visual and procedural tools to re-imagine their place. The problem was partially solved by learning, which informed their negotiating, as it opened up new options they had not thought about before. This opens up important new questions about the relationship of experts to citizens and elected bodies. If the experts provide the concepts, the image, the language and the process of shaping places, how much room is available for citizens' maneuver?

The corridor is a major urban axis, with diverse businesses and socio-economic circumstances of neighbors, an axis that would be affected differently by each of the plans. However, a long street in any city takes different characters in different areas, reflecting its history and geography. Did the planners and designers ever expect a coherent character throughout? Three competing visions of the future were put forward, from a major artery to a local street. Why could they not be all part of an overall vision of this long street, rather than one scenario ruling the other two out?

A key emphasis involves the contrast between conflict and consensus. The title, “Creativity in the face of urban design conflict”, suggests a tension between creativity and conflict, suggesting that creativity seems to offer the possibility of transcending conflict or overcoming the undesirable conditions it has caused, as if curing a disease. Another view holds that conflict creates the necessary conditions for creativity, as new solutions are sought for problems at hand. Better put, creativity may thrive under conditions of necessity and tension. The conflict that emerged around this planning process triggered imagination and urged the participants to seek alternative solutions. Conflict was a sign of vitality, testing the social fabric of the city, and helping people remember that they can change the shape of their city, rather than dutifully accepting the particular vision that had been proposed.

Reflecting on a mediation narrative from Albuquerque, New Mexico

As neo-liberal models of society have gradually discredited the public sector, and civil society is praised as an indispensable counter-power to the fading authority of political leaders, planning has become a difficult terrain. Citizens, increasingly, see planners as henchmen of market-led interests, doing the dirty technical work for politicians supporting private investments to secure local tax bases supporting tight local budgets. When local governments must reduce public expenditures, they cut staff numbers and limit careers. Cutting planning, they expect public applause. No wonder the professional competence of the public sector suffers. Nevertheless, organizing space in cities and maintaining livability for all citizens remain important public tasks.

  Under such conditions, unsurprisingly, mediating land-use conflicts and controversial urban projects has become inevitable. A new professional field beyond urban design, planning, communication and social studies has opened up. Although selected universities have begun to teach the art of mediation in planning, that “art” remains in its infancy. Approaches to mediation still come from individual skills and experience, depending on local conditions. Here Ric Richardson provides a stimulating case. Albeit all mediation is tailor-made and locally adapted, the case is inspiring in many respects.

The process narrative says little, though, about design beyond the size of the road corridor and aspects of zoning arrangements. How consultants designed the earlier controversial plan is not explained, nor the assessment of the planning commission, nor the reaction of the consultants to their reception. Was their job not satisfactorily done, or did they do just what they'd been asked to do by their client, as is often the case? Here the reader must use his own imagination of design quality before and after the mediated outcome. This is understandable because the process of mediation takes center stage in this narrative, not the design. Moreover, I wonder whether the case described in Albuquerque is just an urban design conflict. For me it is more than that.

Urban design is a creative competence, shaping the physical and aesthetic appearance of a site, even though a competent urban designer will take the social, economic and ecological concerns of those who will live or work on the site into careful consideration. Given the usual practice of architectural education, focusing on individual buildings, though, this is, regrettably, not the rule. Planners in turn are often characterized as being uncreative, just compiling information, applying legal regulations and developing possible solutions. But the Albuquerque case study presents not just an urban design conflict but a planning conflict, where, at least in theory, many city builders and others as planners, economists, and transportation engineers should have been involved, well before conflicts evolved.

Richardson's Albuquerque story illustrates clearly that visual design issues were dominant in this conflict, along with social, economic or financial issues that responsible urban designers can try to avoid but not solve. The reader should learn from this mediation process. The design, in the end, was not all that was at stake: what else was essential? This real world narrative from New Mexico offers several lessons.

Planning cultures differ. I do not know if planning processes in New Mexico are like those in Oregon or Massachusetts. I assume they differ from those in Europe, whether in Sicily, Bavaria or Burgundy. This implies that a mediator can only be successful if he, or she, really knows the local or regional environment, the values and emotions of residents, their traditions, networks and milieus, but can keep a distance and remain independent. I cannot imagine that a California planner, unfamiliar with a community in Milan, could successfully mediate a local conflict there, even if he or she was fluent in the local tongue.

Language matters. Richardson points to the importance of language in mediation processes. I could not agree more. My concern in planning has always been that the working languages of (1) practicing planners, (2) academic planners and (3) the people outside the planning community for whom both these planners plan, diverge more and more. A language gap is growing between the first two and between the first and third as well.

Calling for public participation in planning and using academic jargon to communicate with communities in a local civil society just does not make sense. So in Europe isn't it even weirder for planning education to train its graduates to communicate in English but then fail to communicate well when applying their knowledge locally in Polish, Greek or Italian (Kunzmann, 2004)?

Time is crucial. Richardson's detailed description of the mediation steps shows clearly the significance of timing. Over time a conflict can build up for many external reasons, or it can subside because characters change or investors lose interest. To build up opinions and positions, to absorb new information, takes time. Time in the Albuquerque case was also essential in these respects. A mediation process cannot be rushed over a weekend. It requires time; it needs phases for reflection and discussion with others. Time is important so the mediator can prepare the process, like tuning a guitar or violin, and build trust. I was surprised to read how much time the negotiating parties devoted to the mediation. This may not always be possible.

Situated creativity. The place where controversies and conflicts are discussed can be significant. A hotel meeting room or a public authority setting may be poor choices. The place should have a certain meaning, the potential for cooling tempers down, a place for situated creativity. A well-chosen neutral location, best probably with cultural meaning, might inspire participants to relate their thoughts to the spirit of the place. Such spaces may spark or encourage small talk about visual impressions or the functions of the place itself and, consequently, reduce tensions. In Mediterranean Europe, such good places would have food to contribute to a more relaxed atmosphere, to further ease tension and create a spirit of listening to one other and working together on issues at hand.

Creativity in planning. As fashionable evidence-based planning is promoted, supported by excessive GIS mapping, creativity has lost a certain appeal for planners. As urban designers have shifted from design to urbanistic poetry and rhetoric, planners have retreated to the safety of incremental information-based planning. The Albuquerque case shows, though, that even mediation can be a creative process. Richardson demonstrates impressive creativity as he deals with the case and structures the mediation process. From him planners can learn to be flexible and creative when dealing with complex situations full of conflict.

Leadership. Much depends on personality, when intermediaries, perhaps planners like Richardson, mediate a conflict. Richardson makes this very obvious. In politics and corporate ventures, leadership counts when interest groups must be convinced to explore grounds for consensus. Arguments matter, but if they leave no flexible space for compromise or adjustment, they will just be neglected. We should not forget: Leadership cannot be learned – despite what business school textbooks claim. Leadership in planning, however, requires listening to people's concerns and forming strategic alliances to implement visionary projects, though only politicians (and not planners) can tame private developers/investors, who understandably wish to maximize their profits.

Costs for planning or for mediation? Local governments and planners could learn from the case, too, that had planning been done right early on, investment in time and expertise might have been less expensive. Postponing communication with citizens and investors until after a plan has been drafted will often mean relying on assumed and anticipated, but not real, challenges. When architects design a villa, they usually communicate early with the client. But when they do urban design they often remain in their studio, just surrounded by a handful of digital shots of the site. No wonder that costly conflicts lie ahead, once the plans are presented to the public. City governments' planning commissions should be aware that cheap consultancy fees for urban development projects can in the end have much more costly consequences.

Planning education requires real world labs. Students in planning schools often explain and defend their projects and plans to teachers and competing classmates. As a rule, though, the language, purposes and values within planning schools do not differ much internally. Hence, many considerations underlying proposed projects go unarticulated and unexplained. Students spend most of their time in lecture rooms. So their academic laboratories can easily become sterilized germ-free zones. This differs altogether from real world settings. There, prospective planners have to explain basics, without always being prepared to deal with the contradictions of such environments. In times when planners spend more time repairing cities than planning for fresh greenfield projects, it makes sense to teach conflict resolution by shifting more classroom teaching to real world labs, where students can observe and experience controversies as they talk to residents, shop-owners, business men and women or investors or public servants in a neighbourhood. Reading case studies may help; experiencing conflicts in a real world studio will remain in students' memories far longer.

Allow me an additional comment about the transferability of the Albuquerque lessons to Europe. From my German perspective Richardson's Albuquerque case sounds a little bizarre. I could not imagine that a local government would need, or hire and pay, an external mediator to help resolve a controversial design process. Though we can find controversial cases all over the country, only a few might require external mediation. As a rule, local governments in Germany have well-trained planning staff who, like lawyers, after five years of university education, have undergone a two-year public sector training programme ending with a state examination. Resolving planning conflicts is widely taught in planning schools and post-graduate state training programmes.

Citizen participation is legally mandated in zoning plans all over the country. External mediation of participatory processes is quite normal, particularly if local governments lack experienced staff or prefer to have these processes organized by external experts to demonstrate openness and flexibility. Such processes, however, are typically initiated for new development projects mainly as visioning workshops or design charrettes, brainstorming with citizens to develop urban living spaces or to explore pathways to consensual urban developments – when infrastructure projects threaten negative impacts on businesses or on the liveability of nearby neighbourhoods. Experienced consultants are hired by local governments to manage such participatory processes, particularly when projects are politically sensitive.

Berlin, for example, was confronted with two projects echoing Richardson's case. One plan involved extending an inner city motorway, a project that from a city-region perspective seemed necessary to end years of traffic congestion in the East of Berlin. The project, however, was totally opposed by local citizens concerned with the noise of the motorway and the demolition of allotment gardens in its path. A tunnel solution appears unfeasible and too expensive, and allotment gardens in Berlin are holy cows, better untouched by any urban development. Despite political controversy, though, the city has never involved a mediator to help find a resolution.

Another Berlin project is more controversial. The city government zoned an attractive inner urban stretch of land along the river Spree to attract international cultural industries. Interested developers faced resistance from local citizens and “creative class” members opposing speculative development and privatization of the site. Again, the city made no effort to ask mediators to work with local stakeholders to seek possible solutions. Local action groups have so far stopped the development, although the highly publicized project was and is still favoured by the mayor and his majority social-democratic party (Colomb, 2012; Tagesspiegel, 2012).

Richardson's Albuquerque case shows that creative mediation can help to find practical consensus to address urban planning conflicts. Such achievement, however, depends on the personality, wisdom, and capability of the mediator to listen patiently to the arguments of the parties involved. Listening to individuals concerned that their life spaces are threatened by material constraints, thoughtless decisions or vested interests is indispensable in planning processes. If carefully done it can even make external mediation processes unnecessary.

One last remark: The case of Albuquerque warrants another observation. Practitioners in planning know more about planning than many academics writing extensively about planning theories, processes or methodologies. In contrast to their academic colleagues, though, practitioners typically have no time to write up and communicate their experience. Richardson's Albuquerque narrative, his “practice story,” confirms this observation.

From mediation to charrette

This case reminds me of a study we ¹ undertook 20 years ago to explore whether design can mediate contentious development disputes. We chose six cases in California (see Cuff, Banerjee, Beck, & Stein, 1994; Cuff & Banerjee, 1995) because community opposition had stalled them all initially, but they subsequently went ahead after one or more cycles of design with increasingly engaged stakeholders and contentious parties.

  Those case studies documented specific processes ex post facto following interviews with key stakeholders, architects, planners, politicians, city officials, and community group representatives. Unlike Ric Richardson's focal role in the Albuquerque case, we outsiders retrospectively documented design processes from circumstantial evidence and interviews. Nevertheless, because our insights resonate here, I begin with those and conclude with comments exploring the North Fourth Street project.

Our premise suggested that design could be a tool of mediation. Completing our study, we realized it was not just a tool, but the very stuff of mediation. This, I believe, happened in Albuquerque too. His modesty notwithstanding, Richardson's skills and ability to facilitate the dialogue among contesting groups clearly influenced the progress of the process. One of Richardson's major contributions – although he came initially with no specific agenda or script – was to transform the process, if unwittingly, from a discourse of contention, accusation and suspicion to one of a focused design charrette.2

For when the conversation moved to defining “area boundaries” through Google Streetview fly-overs and discussions of form-based zoning and street cross-sections, pedestrian improvements and bikeways, the process had already become a design exercise with contentious parties undertaking collaborative explorations.

The charrette phase enabled merchants and neighborhood groups to collaborate. The turning point came as parties realized that redeveloping the corridor did not have to be a zero-sum game. As more technical embellishments and design details were proposed, empathic responses emerged – from neighborhood groups to retain existing buildings of significance, and from merchants to accept street improvements and pedestrian amenities. Design of the corridor became the very stuff of mediation.

Increasing experience and a growing literature informs design charrettes. Our experience of teaching international collaborative planning and design suggests that typical charrettes involve group dynamics of three types, “brain-storming,” “barn-raising,” and “bricolage” (see Banerjee & Kunzmann, 2003).

The Albuquerque case clearly involved brain-storming, especially among contestants, that required participants to think “outside the box.” Barn-raising involves purposeful social actions that can lead to convivial bonding experiences, strengthening social ties. Did the Fourth Street corridor charrette accomplish such social bonding? Richardson does not actually tell us if barnstorming happened across the contestant groups; it may remain a romantic possibility that one might wish had emerged. We see a “bricolage”3 effect where this case involved “reasoning and collective creativity fundamentally different from the more familiar types, argumentation and trade-offs” (Innes & Booher, 1999, p. 12).

Finally, if design itself is a form of mediation, do normative questions of good design become irrelevant? Surely “getting to yes”, or mere agreement, implies a degree of successful outcome, but not necessarily respecting either normative good city form or a city that is distributively just. This rejection of mere agreement arises emphatically in Fainstein's (2010) recent critique of communicative action theory. That critique notwithstanding, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to define (or of course to come to agreement upon) the normative outlines of such good city form or “the” just city. Which expertise should we depend upon to settle these normative questions?

A nagging concern in planning and urban design involves our limited abilities to formally evaluate planning or urban design episodes – in part because planning or design outcomes cannot be neatly framed in time or space. Policy outcomes or built projects take time to come to fruition, and by the time they happen, original circumstances and even stakeholders may have changed, new ideas or inputs may have altered the original outcome, and so on. I have argued that urban developments should be seen as an on-going dialectic (see Cuff, Banerjee, Beck, & Stein, 1994) between problem contexts and design responses. So, not only do we lack “post-occupancy evaluations” that architects sometimes conduct, we also lack formal performance criteria or measures for conducting such evaluations.

Consequently, process becomes all too important. As in jurisprudence where justice is served by “due process”, a communicative process that allows a dialogue, informed negotiation and ultimately resolution becomes an important, if not the sole, measure of success. While “things” must be the focus of good planning (and design), as Beauregard (2012) recently argued, process always hogs the agenda because of the difficulties in measuring the “things” planned, produced, or designed.

We could ask, following norms of welfare economics often defining rational decision-making in liberal democracies, if a final outcome promises to be Pareto superior? In the Fourth Street case, it seems intuitively obvious that the contending parties felt they'd achieved greater welfare after the process, relative to that promised by the rejected consultant's plan. The Pareto superiority of their mediated outcome seems clear at least for the corridor neighborhood. While this conclusion may not satisfy questions (is this good city form? is the outcome just?) that detractors of communicative action raise, it certainly confirms my original premise of design as mediation.

Finally, this process, completely unscripted and guided by Richardson's intuitions, shows clearly that design charrettes can be effective tools for creatively harnessing participatory, communicative action on urban design issues in contested political settings.

Physical clarity and necessary interruption

This interesting case study of urban planning in disarray illuminates classic dangers and failed methods that planning practice has confronted for decades. My comments are not a critique of Richardson, obviously a skilled practitioner, who should be commended for rescuing a situation headed for disaster. But Richardson's commentary vindicates important messages about planning that urban designers in my sisterhood (i.e. new urbanists, or anyone cherishing ideals of compact, diverse, walkable urbanism in the tradition of Jane Jacobs) have long espoused. These stress three imperatives: physical explicitness at all stages, transparency in the accounting of costs, and an increasing democratic approach.

  The Albuquerque conflict resembled a classic case of nimbyism versus money – or, in non-pejorative terms, neighbors wanting neighborhood-serving, place-based and pedestrian-oriented urbanism versus land owners wanting to protect their investments and economic opportunities. The tragedy, of course, is that often these objectives need not be in opposition. The key to negotiating a resolution, urban designers will assert, is design: the tangible, visual, explicit, physical representation of everything discussed. This means much more than static, end-state blueprints. As Richardson shows, design can be generative, assessing and crafting alternatives.

This lesson came out loud and clear. As negotiations progressed, once material specificity entered the discussion, and tools such as Google Earth and other means of design representation were used, the whole process turned around. This reveals the non-trivial nature of the physical in planning. Exploring this significant problem from the perspective of planning theory, Beauregard (Beauregard, 2012, p. 182) recently argued that theorists often render the material world “epiphenomenal and thus causally irrelevant.” In Albuquerque, organizers of the initial process seemed not to realize that a “neighborhood store” is a 7–11 chainstore to some and a mom-and-pop gem to others. Adding a traffic lane, even for bikes, can be positive or negative, depending on design. Even a “better pedestrian environment” means different things to different people. The devil is in the design details.

In American planning, this explicitness is often not treated seriously – “visioning workshops” are cerebral affairs full of platitudes and abstractions. So I found the beginning of the commentary strangely detached from the substantive debates over corridor design and redevelopment. The term “land-use facilitation program” signaled how abstracted the endeavor had become. Damage can result whenever questions like, “What do you think about the future of this place?”, “What kind of character should it have?” or “What function should the roadway play?” are asked as conceptual matters, without context. Such over-abstraction can lead to profound inefficiency, sapping what precious little energy many “regular folk” have for planning matters.

Design-focused planning approaches require huge educational efforts that must precede the discussion. How much time and expense could have been avoided by initially creating a common vocabulary, a problem Ric Richardson overcame rather late in the process? We read, “people didn't understand what form-based codes were” even after months of discussion in the Wednesday “education sessions.” Later revelations regarding the necessity to “bring someone who will help us see the corridor and the visuals to begin to set boundaries” seemed an obvious approach, interjected after significant damage and distrust had already occurred.

What if the “values” discussion had been equally explicit in terms of physical design? Values like diversity (of people and land uses), connectedness, pedestrian orientation, economic growth and vitality are rarely rejected in the abstract, but if they remain abstract they can unravel – people form visual impressions of how these values might translate “on the ground.” Seemingly innocuous but very ambiguous terms such as “redevelopment” are easily left vague without concrete articulation. In Richardson's case, this physical specification was necessary both to ensure a common vocabulary and to build collective identity – without it, the sense of collective ownership was impossible. Each faction “owned” and prized a different part, and there was no hope of integrating that ownership without legibility and physical clarity.

Physical explication requires being intelligent about social psychology. Physical form provides a “third element” to deflect discussion from interpersonal matters. We know the power of third party “props” – a child, a pet, a garden. A space of interaction alone, like a front porch, often fails to stimulate positive social interaction. So physical explicitness can direct attention to elements of shared interest rather than to conflictual feelings between individuals. When interviewers are only armed with a “flipchart” and “a set of questions and something to write on” discussions can turn sour. I doubt the wisdom of “allow[ing] people to be themselves” without thinking through how the structure of such expression can best be handled. Expecting people to reach a “deeper level” expressing “relationships” and “feelings” may lead to a focus on personality traits rather than concrete ideas.

Another deficiency the case study exposed involves transparency. People should be kept informed of the trade-offs involved in any proposals – how specific proposals have consequences for others, including business owners. With a proposal, for example, to downzone a neighborhood to disallow multi-family units or to restrict accessory units, people need to know how this might not only reduce diversity, but the retention of essential services they might deem important, their ability to sustain a walkable environment, the increase of traffic arterials through the neighborhood, or the cost of housing.

Such transparency, especially regarding cost accounting, seemed absent as the Albuquerque planning process was launched. This requires much up front work by planners, but it can mean the difference between months of haggling versus a focused, productive discussion. Making clear the winners and losers of various alternatives, the costs associated with different scenarios, the costs of maintaining the status quo (a full accounting of costs of NOT doing anything with the corridor) seems essential for an intelligent debate and as part of the public dialogue. And, as those familiar with scenario planning know, transparency of cost calculations, as functions of diverse weights and variables, is critical. The goal should be to address issues factually and, as best planners can, to do scientific projections based on real data, not conjecture and anecdote. Without this cost basis, it is no surprise that people were “afraid of what was going to happen.”

Finally, consider issues of representation and democratic process. For many years my urban design colleagues have believed that an entirely open-ended planning process enabling everyone to shout and pontificate is anti-democratic and produces flawed, inequitable planning decisions. Participatory methods should avoid “the tyranny of structurelessness,” (Sirianni & Friedland, 2003, p. 24) which the beginning part of this case study seemed to epitomize. In Colonial America, and now in Australia, matters of local town planning matters were entrusted to representative councils – randomly selected people perhaps, ensuring broad representation of community interests. This can provide an antidote to open-ended participatory planning allowing a few personalities to control and intimidate.

I wonder how much time would have been saved, had a charrette process been instituted, using guidelines of the National Charrette Institute (NCI), an organization devoted to reforming the planning processes inherited early on in this case.1 NCI advocates a more structured approach, not permitting loud mouths and bullies to dominate design discussions. I wonder how Richardson would respond to Andres Duany's (2012) recent statement characterizing this approach:

Don't let misinformation or falsehoods stand for even five seconds. The charrette leaders should always correct inaccuracies and misstatements immediately. Interrupt the speaker and set it straight. The murk created by misstatements can destroy a charrette. Do not be afraid to be ruthless in your corrections.

Planners may balk at this sentiment because (1) they wonder who will gauge objectivity; who will decide which statements amount to “misinformation” or “falsehood”, and (2) they don't accept shutting down someone's voice just because planners disagree with it.

To me, the legitimacy of these points rests on one's sense of urgency. Is there time – and money – for protracted debate, or do we need a bolder approach in which we accept the costs of “interrupting” voice for the benefit of more immediate action? Or, are the costs simply too high, no matter what the urgency?

Ric Richardson responds

These commentaries are insightful and informative. The authors bring different points of view to illuminate the North Fourth Street story. Their comments relate to three underlying themes. The first involves the importance of trust in mediation and public participation in urban design. The second questions the efficacy of the original plan – why did it fail? – and explores the context for effective mediation. The third suggests that charrettes might engender participation and dialogue in the urban design process.

  Sandro Balducci highlights the value of conflict assessment to explore the potential for participation and to build trust among participants. He calls attention to Galison's work with interdisciplinary teams of scientists and asserts that participants in mediated processes must develop an “exchange language” to communicate across differences and create new options. As the negotiations unfolded in Albuquerque, the participants developed a common understanding of the dispute as well as available regulatory mechanisms to control property development. Creating processes that developed a common language among the participants was essential to building trust and defining solutions that fit historic and present circumstances.

In fact, the most important part of the North Fourth Street process centered on building trust and communication. The pre-mediation assessment and the early stage of the negotiations laid the groundwork for building trust by giving participants the opportunity to talk about “facts” from their respective viewpoints, then for jointly finding the information important to creating an agreeable solution. During this phase, building trust within each negotiating team was as important as building trust and communication between the teams. For a good process, trust and communication need to be built among the negotiating parties including experts and regulators involved in the dispute.

The process will fail if participants cannot create the shared language necessary to expand the boundaries of possibilities under consideration and create innovative solutions. Good process and direct communication result in building good working relationships among the negotiators. On North Fourth Street we found those relationships, in turn, enabled negotiators to craft solutions to the conflict by innovating with the regulatory system. In addition, the process created a constituency – merchants, neighbors and the government officials – who would defend the plan during the public review process.

Both Klaus Kunzmann and Ali Madanipour ask why the original plan failed. Did the consultants make substantive mistakes? Did the dispute emanate from poor design or bad ideas? The North Fourth Street corridor plan did not fail because of poor design or faulty analysis. It failed because of poor process. The consultants missed an opportunity to test (and revise) factual information and assumptions with those who work, live and own property in the corridor. The design and planning process spawned opposition because it inadequately addressed the underlying values and concerns of both residents and merchants. A good process must embrace diversity in the community and recruit constituents who value the area for different reasons. The process should enable participants to explore their most contentious differences so they can create new opportunities and options that have not been imagined previously.

Missing the rich reservoir of experience and expertise present in the neighborhoods and merchants' association was a profound mistake. Relying on a process not able to tap into these resources led the consultant team to propose inappropriate urban design solutions. As Kunzmann so eloquently points out, understanding the local planning culture, developing a shared language (not jargon), finding a neutral place, setting the stage for creativity during the negotiating process and nurturing facilitative leadership are crucial to resolving disputes.

Madanipour inquires about issues of representation: whose voice was not heard in the negotiations? The neighborhoods along the North Fourth Street corridor are some of the oldest and most diverse communities in Albuquerque. They are highly organized and have considerable political power. Although the merchants' association had little history of working together, the members organized quickly and effectively, building on shared economic interests, legal expertise and regulatory knowledge. The negotiating teams reflected diverse interests and skills. However, low-income people were only marginally represented. We met informally with representatives of a working-class neighborhood near downtown that had a seat at the table but chose to remain largely outside the process. Social and economic concerns are central to urban design. Designers who do not embrace diverse perspectives in design processes do so at the risk of missing the context and proposing inappropriate and unacceptable solutions. Good urban design fits design solutions into local culture and conditions.

Tridib Banerjee and Emily Talen address the value of charrettes from two different perspectives. Banerjee argues that a design charrette is a mediating force in achieving city form, and he sees charrettes as a process of inquiry into urban design and as “an effective tool in creatively harnessing participatory, communicative action on urban design issues in contested political settings.” Talen calls for transparency and accountability in urban design and asserts that the key to negotiating a resolution is in design itself. She argues that the best charrettes are carefully orchestrated events structured to control uncertainties, and she wonders how much time would have been saved had a charrette process been undertaken using the guidelines of the National Charrette Institute. She concludes by quoting Andres Duany who instructs charrette leaders to correct inaccuracies and mis-statements by interrupting speakers and setting the record straight.

Pursuing such strategies perpetuates the myth of expertise and in most cases escalates disagreements to arguments over who has the most accurate and reliable information. Mediated processes allow participants to frame problems and provide technical support for them to collaborate on ascertaining the facts. The process replaces untethered argumentation and “loud mouths” with mediated dialogue directed at discovering the truth, and consequently neither the bullies nor the experts dominate the discussion.

The North Fourth Street negotiations spanned 16 education and negotiating sessions over four months in which the participants engaged in joint fact-finding and collaborated on options before agreeing on specific recommendations. The outcome was consensus on both the future urban form and the way the design would be implemented. In mediated negotiations, the participants work together to discover what they want to learn and to guide experts in designing systems to meet their concerns, interests and needs. In mediated negotiations, the roles of planners and designers shift from leading with expertise to listening for opportunities to offer insight and guidance on local initiatives.

In sound urban design processes, informed dialogue is key, and expertise is essential to creating good places and implementing good urban design. The question is, though: who drives the need for and the use of the expertise offered by planners and urban designers? In mediated negotiations, experts are responsible for creating and guiding the process, yet they “lead from the side” and strategically move from center stage to a supporting role. They provide expertise when asked, and contextualize information into forms useful to the negotiations. Negotiators should be supported to speak clearly about their concerns and interests – and then learn to translate their ideals into shared solutions that create viable physical places. Mediated negotiations and, I would assert, good urban design combine diverse representation, careful process, an appropriate understanding of the geographic, political and economic context, and mutual trust.

Notes

1. See the wealth of materials they have amassed after decades of practice: http://www.charretteinstitute.org/

1. The team consisted of two former USC colleagues – Dana Cuff (now at UCLA) and Achva Stein (now at City College of New York) – and Ken Beck (then a MRED student, now a developer in Los Angeles).

2. The term charrette refers to an old tradition at L'Ecole de Beaux-Arts where at term's end students' projects were collected and piled onto a cart (hence “charrette”) as students ran alongside trying to finish final details as time ran out.

3. Originally discussed by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.