Abstract
Community engagement is a craft that is easy to do, and hard to do well. At a basic level, it is about talking with people and getting their feedback. But the best practitioners do more than inform. They inspire and empower, leading participants to surface their imagination and grow their confidence to create and nurture effective strategies for their communities.
The Heart of Community Engagement: Practitioner Stories From Across the Globe, authored by Patricia Wilson, illustrates how successful practitioners around the world addressed some of the biggest challenges in helping stakeholders become cocreators of their shared futures: encrusted hegemony that causes many to stay silent while a few dominate the conversations, grinding poverty that saps the confidence of its victims, and the straitjacket of the practitioner’s own bounded rationality.
The book is written as a four-section path for readers to grow their self-awareness. It begins with “Introducing Ensemble Awareness,” which establishes the framework for culturally competent community engagement. “The Journey Begins” introduces readers to model practitioners, and the stories of how they successfully engaged people in conflict- and poverty-damaged areas. In “Going Deeper,” readers learned about practitioners who went from merely engaging residents to helping build stronger civil societies. “Moving Forward” is a set of reflections designed to help the reader create—or re-create—their own practice. The Heart of Community Engagement resembles the syllabus and readings for a graduate course in culturally competent placemaking.
The Heart of Community Engagement bridges the disciplines of community development and leadership development. These are two foundations for the growing field of placemaking (and its intellectual cousin, creative placemaking). The work builds on the work of Christopher Argyris (1991), Donald Schön (1983), and Peter Senge (1994, 2006) and adapts it for community development, urban planning, and placemaking. It helps students and planners become more collaborative leaders, rather than second-rate Prometheans.
Through compelling stories, Wilson goes deeper into the art and craft of community engagement than many others and guides the reader to key principles for culturally competent and effective practice. In short, this is a great book for students and scholars of community development or placemaking, and practicing planners who want to do more than mere facilitation or “community outreach.” Students and practitioners will likely find the book easy to read and inspiring. (Wilson is a good storyteller with good stories to tell.) Teachers should appreciate the discussion questions Wilson puts in each chapter. Also, there is plenty of academic depth for scholars.
I recommend the entire book for a course on community engagement or a studio course in which students are expected to engage members of the public. I recommend Chapter 9, “Generative Patterns of Practice” for other courses on community development, planning theory, and introductions to planning. The chapter makes a nice complement to the works of Davidoff, Healy, Innes, Forester, Krumholz, and other thinkers in communicative planning, advocacy planning, and equity planning. It also would pair well with Schön’s work on reflective practice and Rittel and Webber’s discussion of wicked problems in planning theory courses. The Heart of Community Engagement’s subtitle—Practitioner Stories from Across the Globe—undersells the full value of the book. This is a guide on the inner workings of community engagement practice—which are illuminated by the stories. Readers begin their journey with visits to battle-scarred El Salvador and the struggling colonias along the Texas–Mexico border. There they learn about the challenges of doing collaborative planning while facing the headwinds of hierarchical planning and internalized dependency. Wilson then takes readers into processes for building the foundations for cocreation—peace and trust and mutual support—through trips to Colombia’s Cauca Valley, South Africa’s shantytowns, rural India, and the outskirts of Mexico City. Along the way, Wilson introduces readers to well-meaning and knowledgeable people who structure their practice to elevate the voices of marginalized people—then struggle and ad lib as their best laid plans . . . well, you know the rest.
However, the practitioners reflect and create new ways of engagement that work better. Wilson also shares her own struggles and pathways. Traditional academics tied to the illusion of an objective observer may initially be put off by Wilson inserting herself into the narratives. But because community engagement is inherently value-laden, readers benefit by Wilson’s presence in the stories.
Good community engagement is more art than science. Although stakeholders around the world may have some similarities, every experience is unique. A practitioner can have different experiences with the same people on different days. Subtle changes in the environment—such as how the stakeholders feel about one another or the practitioner—can have a butterfly effect on future gatherings and planning sessions. Nobody ever gets it all right all the time.
Through the stories, Wilson shares short biographies of the artists, among them David Arizmendi, Nancy Dominguez, Varun Vidyarthi, and Joel Bolnick. She also introduces readers to Otto Scharmer (2007), who created the Theory U model of collaborative inquiry. This chapter is unfortunately the weakest chapter in the book. Wilson intends to explain how Theory U can be used for community engagement, but the chapter spends too much time lionizing Scharmer and too little on the translation of his ideas for community engagement.
Planners who want to engage communities successfully—as Wilson describes it—need to manage contradictory actions (e.g., sticking with the agenda versus letting conversations play out organically, guiding conversations versus simply facilitating them). It would have been useful to learn more from these artists in their own words. Some readers may wonder what these practitioners were thinking when they reached critical points in their work, and how they chose to adjust their courses.
In the fourth section of the book—“Moving Forward”—Wilson reflects and offers principles for effective and equitable community engagement. Refreshingly, her tone is more guide-on-the-side than sage-on-the-stage. Many case studies of community planning describe community engagement processes with the superficial language used for public minutes from a planning board meeting. (To paraphrase: “A meeting was held on the topic. There was much discussion. The meeting was then adjourned.”) Wilson’s use of narrative illuminates the challenges and nuances of community engagement practice. It is an excellent way to explore one of the key takeaways of The Heart of Community Engagement: triple-loop learning. The “looped” learning model was developed by organizational theorist Chris Argyris (1991) to explain how people master concepts and skills. In single-loop learning, a person is trained only to do a task. (Imagine a person as a light switch who knows how to go on and off, but does not know why.) In double-loop learning, the individual develops the ability to think about why they are doing the task. Triple-loop learning challenges the learner to think about how their own thoughts and behaviors are influencing the environment for community engagement.
For too long, planning educators have promoted a Promethean fantasy to their students: the planner descends from the heavens (or in today’s terms, parachutes in) and delivers wisdom and order in the form of colorful slide presentations and well-ironed land use regulations. Then, the people live happily ever after (or something like that). Practicing planners soon learn that it is not so easy.
As I have sadly learned in teaching hundreds of planning students and planning practitioners, few planning programs teach leadership theory or skills in any deliberative way. One of my favorite exercises is to ask a roomful of planners: how many of you learned leadership in planning school? I have never seen more than a few hands go up, even in rooms of a hundred or more planners. Yet professors ignore teaching leadership at their students’ peril. One of my planning school professors, Dowell Myers, would often say, “The only power that planners have is to persuade.”
Too many students are made to think that all they need is a well-reasoned argument, solid facts, and a nice presentation. Worse, they come to believe that the only reason people will disagree with them, or ignore them, is because they do not care or do not understand. Both mental models make most planners like beige wallpaper—pleasant and easy to ignore. It might have been easier in the past to simply sidestep the shared will of stakeholders. Not now—not in the wake of waves of civil rights movements—from women’s suffrage to Black Lives Matter—and a time when everyone can have a public voice as big as the Internet.
The Heart of Community Engagement can help students and planners better analyze why otherwise reasonable people do not respond as expected to rational arguments, or why smart people seem to refuse to learn. I hope it will also encourage more planning organizations and public agencies to spend more of their limited resources on collaborative planning that leads to sustainable and equitable outcomes—and less on analytical reports that no one actually reads, unless they are paid to.
I suspect that the academics who undervalue community engagement will turn their noses up at this book. (I doubt they have even read this review.) It does not use the dry, pretentious language or muck through the ponderous expository style that too many readers mistake for intellectual heft. That is a shame. The “hard skills” purveyors—academics who focus on analysis and regulatory programming—should know that anything American or Western European planners can do from their desks can be done by others anywhere else around the world— probably for a lot less money. While the scions of those academics sit in fabric-enshrouded cubicles making charts and maps, those who learn from The Heart of Community Engagement will be in the field, co-creating futures.