Eight reasons why public consultations are overrated
Great public relations tools for municipal governments, but inadequate tools for city planning
It is hard to be against public consultations. But just as fast-food burgers rarely measure up to the pictures in commercials, cities exaggerate the value of public consultations. Here are eight reasons why they are overrated:
1) The vast majority of people cannot
or do not participate in such engagements. Calgary boasts that its
imagineCALGARY project, launched in 2005, involved more than 18,000
participants and represented “the largest community visioning and
consultation process of its kind anywhere in the world.” In a city of
one million people, this means not even 2 per cent of Calgarians
participated, and yet the project drives the development plans and
regulations that affect the other 98 per cent.
2) Consultation-based decision-making
favours special interest groups or activists. Whether it is bike-lane
advocates or the taxilobby, nothing beats the disorganized majority like
an organized minority. Political economist Mancur Olson uses the
analogy of a disciplined, coordinated army versus an undisciplined,
leaderless mob to make this point.
3) Few people have expertise in city
planning, but consultations are not meritocracies. Rational people do
not put more into a task than they will benefit from doing so. When all
opinions are regarded as equal, there is no extra incentive to be
educated before providing advice. Anthony Downs calls it “rational
ignorance.” Alternatively, people may believe they are informed, but
they are actually acting according to group affiliation, personal
ideology, the media or a host of other information shortcuts. As former
B.C. Liberal leader Gordon Gibson once remarked, “I would never ride in
an airplane designed by a citizens’ assembly. They are not qualified to
do that kind of thing.”
4) Knowledge aside, language is a
restriction. Consider the statement “I love you.” Anyone who replies,
“How much do you love me?” is usually teasing, because one cannot
provide a sufficient answer. In a marketplace, people may choose
products and places for reasons they cannot articulate, while
consultations can only deliver the describable.
5) Even if people can describe what
they want or how much they want it, they are not paying a direct cost
for the decisions they make during consultations, and this is the fifth
problem. Consultations typically ask hypothetical questions such as
“What would you like to have?” People will say they prefer a bigger,
higher-quality TV, but they still buy smaller, lower-quality TVs, due to
price. A person who buys a cheaper TV will have money left over to
spend on something else. Consultations lack the ability to convey
people’s desires relative to other desires or needs.
6) Consultations seek to narrow the
range of options in the marketplace by establishing the preferred city
services and urban forms, but what constitutes an improvement in the
quality of life is subjective. Some people prefer a single-family home
in the suburbs, others, an inner-city apartment. Using public
consultations to achieve consensus is futile, because there is no
consensus. There is no optimal urban form, and when consultations are
concerned with private property, participants are merely imposing their
tastes on others.
7) All consultations necessarily take
place within constraints and carry underlying assumptions. Not everyone
will see development through the same lens as the consultation
organizers. For example, consultations may be based entirely on the
principles of Smart Growth, but people argue that the Smart Growth
doctrine artificially pushes up the price of housing. Cities should not
assume everyone is an advocate of Smart Growth policies. Cities may
present citizens with different options for the implementation of a new
program, but in doing so, the consultation is biased against the option
of not starting the program at all. People who want to see government
intervention seek participation in public consultations, and those who
desire government to stay out of their neighborhood or activities,
ironically, must get involved in politics to avoid political
intervention.
8) Finally, consultations and
visioning exercises are limited to working with currently known
possibilities and do not provide an incentive for innovation. People
re-evaluate their preferences when new options become available.
Consumers were not demanding iPhones prior to their invention, but now
practically every phone on the market carries the same
then-revolutionary features.
The Saskatoon Speaks vision document declares, “The most successful cities . . . envision their future city and what will make it great. They plan ahead and then act on their plans.”
Once again, it is hard to be against planning for the future. But imagine if 100 years ago consumers planned and regulated the development of the telecommunications industry. Let us hope that 100 years from now, cities planned by consultations are not the equivalent of the rotary phone.
Public consultations are not worth the hype. They are great public relations tools for municipal governments, but inadequate tools for city planning.
Brianna Heinrichs is a research assistant at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and a research contractor at the Manning Foundation. This essay first ran on C2C Journal.
This is an interesting commentary -- up to a point. Judging by her associations, the writer is concerned mainly to defend market forces rather than the public interest.
ReplyDeleteAllowing for that, she makes a number of telling and, to residents of Nanaimo at least, pretty obvious points. We have sham consultations galore and we must pay a hefty price for them. It would make for an interesting FOI query.
Playing to the writer's own theme, however, there's a contradition involved in municipal consultations that's crucially important but which she doesn't touch upon -- and that's when one set of property interests come up against another set of property interests.
That's usually the situation when rezoning applications come up -- but it shouldn't be if zoning laws had any real meaning.
After all, we have zoning laws to protect property interests. That's the main reason why planning and zoning laws were enacted decades ago. However, many developers wish to overturn established zoning and other provisions in OCPs and are entitled to do so if they can persuade municipal councils to act on their behalf.
The various blandishments and inducements for councillors to so act re well known. It's almost a given that in a place like Nanaimo the press will not raise objections when developers push projects that require rezoning. This leaves affected property owners alone with the difficult task of mustering a defence of their own property interests. That's something they shouldn't have to do if zoning laws meant anything.
We all know the usual outcome in these situations: neighbours and neighbourhoods battle to protect their interests but the developer gets what's wanted and usually profits enormously from council's decision. Property owners in the local area, however, get the shaft.
If you doubt this just look at the silly patch work that passes for "planning" in Nanaimo: Large apartment buildings jammed into residential neighbourhoods; gas stations more or less wherever dealers want them (and semi-permanent brown fields when they abandon them); malls of various stripes built willy-nilly that foster urban sprawl; etc.
When zoning and planning laws were invented such a perverse outsome was not contemplated. What's happened over the years is that the public interest has been subverted by those with the power and money to subvert it.
We all pay handomely for the phony consultations that attend rezoning decisions and OCP revisions -- we pay not only in the form of unnecessary taxation that provides the gloss on the ad hoc subversion of established zoning laws and sound planning principles; we also pay for the high cost of sprawl; and property owners impacted by intrusive developments based on ad hoc exceptions to zoning laws and planning principles suffer real losses -- often severe -- when it comes time to sell their homes or businesses.
One day, one hopes, the provincial government will enact legislation to prevent this all too common assault on the property values of the victims of municipal mis-planning ad hocery.
Either that, or it will force municipalities to compensate for the valuation losses they create when they re-arrange the municipal map on behalf of developers. The compensation should be in the form of a tax on these same developers, because they often make windfall profits simply by bending a council to act on their behalf.
The author of the commentary should consider issues of this kind because the answer in the case of zoning and rezoning is not to eliminate public hearings and other forms of consultation -- rather, the answer is for municipal governments to respect the laws people depend upon when making important property investments and to alter those laws only with the public's consent.