The People’s Plan? Participation and Post-Politics in Flint’s Master Planning Process

Abstract

Drawing upon an analysis of Flint’s 2012–2013 master planning process, this article explores a puzzling set of questions: Why would a city under emergency management with an abrogated democratic process explicitly encourage extensive citizen participation in one of its most important and strategic documents? How does the urge to involve the community in decision-making reflect new priorities of urban governance? The paper suggests that such a paradox can be conceived as a coherent strategy for addressing conflicting priorities. On the one hand, the exigencies of official claims to democratic engagement operate during a period in which public discourse on inequality has grown in prominence. On the other, harsh fiscal constraint compels local officials and stakeholders to create the conditions for new market-led investment as the singular remedy to urban decline. The result is a transformation of the normative boundaries of the public, lauded as democratic, yet narrowly defined as those participating in highly choreographed and non-binding civic rituals. Local stakeholders, outside consultants, and city administrators generated consensus on a set of urban planning best practices deemed conducive to novel forms of growth, suggesting a transferal of authority from elected office holders to non-elected experts. This process then established the conditions under which community participation was pursued. The intertwining of technical expertise and elite decision-making, however, predetermined community input by naturalizing technocratic logics in planning policy, while signaling the post-political bent of some participatory processes in U.S. cities.

Keywords

community elites neoliberalism new urbanism urban development

Introduction

On a chilly winter evening in early 2016, Flint’s Master Plan Steering Committee gathered in a local library to discuss the implementation of new zoning. Next to a small stand with sandwiches, the members of the committee sat around a large conference table chatting amicably prior to the meeting’s start. Comprising the official implementation of land use designations created over the course of a multi-year planning process, the meeting aimed to give technical ballast to master plan neighborhood designations such as Green Innovation, Traditional Neighborhood, or Green Neighborhood. Employed as “place types” during the planning process, these early categories were meant to designate certain neighborhoods as viable for residential uses, while others might be transitioned to the production of renewable energy, urban farms, or simply green spaces requiring little city maintenance. These designations, however, required additional committee work to codify the specifics of density, height, and use restrictions.

On this January evening, the everyday citizens serving on the committee appeared to be serious about their duties and peppered their meeting with the language of civic officialdom, “calling” the meeting to order and adjournment, and otherwise following the strict requirements of taking minutes and following an official agenda. The group, ranging in age, but with a notable skew toward residents over 50, was racially diverse. Despite their lack of official authority within the local planning apparatus, these committee members appeared empowered enough to repeatedly question one of Flint’s top planners, who attended the meeting to explain the technical rationale of the new codes.

Early on in the meeting, however, a commotion suddenly erupted. A man who appeared to be in his 50s with a long grey braid of hair and a baseball cap entered the room, asking loudly if he was at the proper meeting to contest the new neighborhood designations. As he made his way to a chair designated for the public, he began to explain his purpose and problem. He had heard the Imagine Flint Master Plan would turn some neighborhoods into green space; some residents might be denied public services because of such designations and some neighborhoods would be prioritized for development, while others would be left to fend for themselves. He addressed the group angrily, suggesting that nobody would tell him what to do with his land; it was his and he would do whatever he pleased, he said.

But soon after interrupting the proceedings, the committee members calmed him down. Faced with the possibility of chaos in a carefully planned meeting, the members sternly silenced him, arguing that this was not the place to air such grievances and that he had been given two years to voice his concerns during the dozens of public meetings that took place as part of the master planning process. Pressed with the committee members’ arguments, the man settled down and agreed to save his comments for the public comments section of the meeting agenda. Unlike the raucously participatory workshops that officials had carefully planned as part of the master plan’s development years before, this meeting was meant only for committee members and members of the public wishing to observe.

The above anecdote can be interpreted in a variety of ways. On the one hand, it demonstrates the civic ideals animating processes of shared governance in cities across the United States. It is impossible to ignore the deeply felt resonance of local participation and the community bonds that congeal in an atmosphere of high-minded civic ritual. Referring to the sacred symbols that connect everyday citizens to an imagined national community of civic virtue and democratic autonomy, Robert Bellah (1967) famously referred to these shared meanings as “American civil religion.”

On the other hand, a more critical perspective is possible. In evaluating the role of participatory governance, some scholars have called for the disaggregation of the “communicative dimensions” of participation from the “empowerment dimensions” (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2014). In other words, research on community participation has tended to focus on the communicative aspects alone – the processes, settings, and inter-group dynamics that take place in participatory contexts such as town hall style planning meetings or budgeting exercises (e.g. Forester, 1999; Umemoto, 2001). According to Baiocchi and Ganuza, past approaches have missed the empowerment dimensions of such processes, defined as the scope and importance of these forums in decision-making. The empowerment dimension includes the regulations, rules, and frameworks for incorporating citizen input into actual policy (2014: 39).

Analytically, scenarios such as that described above are possible because definitions around who speaks for the community are necessarily contested. According to Baiocchi and Ganuza (2014), by legitimating “rules of the game” established from on high, insignificant issues may be resolved through deliberative practices, yet structural features of governance remain unchecked by citizen input. The incongruence between the trappings of participatory democracy on the one hand, and the lack of power to set the scope and rules of participation on the other, may lead some citizens to view participation as incapable of meaningfully resolving problems (Lee, 2014; Dagnino, 2008; Holzner, 2007). Under some circumstances, then, participation may impede rather than encourage truly democratic forms of decision-making.

In describing the way in which contentious claims making has been replaced by a veneer of consensus in a range of institutional settings, Eric Swyngedouw argues that the current period is characterized by a “post-political” (Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014), or “post-democratic” (Swyngedouw, 2011; MacLeod, 2011) form of governance. Swyngedouw is not suggesting that such a moniker is plausible in the exercise of power. Rather, the post-political refers to elite efforts to naturalize technocratic and market principles in policy, by casting decision-making as the product of expert know-how, unassailable administration norms, and the unequivocal superiority of market solutions. In its ability to assert that there is nothing “political” to be debated, post-politicization, is indeed a highly political undertaking.

These techniques of de-politicization in turn connect post-political frameworks to broader research agendas around the diffusion and mutation of neoliberal ideologies, subjectivities, and governance. In a period of intense inter-urban competition (e.g. McCann, 2004), the neoliberal city is an especially instructive site of innovation for elites and government officials, who must promote a “good business climate,” while at the same time framing urban spaces as diverse and “green,” with lifestyle amenities and a festive public sphere capable of attracting a vaunted creative class of highly educated professionals (Lederman, 2015; Peck, 2005). Post-politics suggests one of the ways in which these neoliberal logics are made compatible, producing cities that are governed through market-centric criteria, even as officials and boosters promote them as spaces of cultural diversity, social encounter, and pluralism.

If the political is conceived as a means to channel group antagonism into a particular kind of social order (Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014: 11, following Mouffe, 2005), win–win conceptions of decision-making rest on claims of consensus that reduce politics to the effective management of pre-existing administrative norms or market needs. In so doing, the post-political insulates decision-making from truly democratic debate, suggesting that concepts such as “best practices” are natural, have no political valence, and are bereft of forms of domination. Concretely, post-political rationales in urban governance imply that public spaces can only be supported through private largesse (Loughran, 2014; Newman, 2015), that concepts such as urban greening lack political content, and are beneficial to all residents (Checker, 2011; Greenberg, 2013), and that participatory processes are to be celebrated as consensual, while foreclosing on the possibility of contestation or democratic antagonism (e.g. Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Karpowitz et al., 2009; Lee, 2015: Ch. 1; Levine, 2016).

The proliferation of participatory processes in cities around the country and across the globe assumes unique importance in light of these insights. An emerging body of research suggests that a contradictory process is afoot in the implementation of participatory mechanisms in urban policymaking. While neoliberal reforms have insulated various aspects of governance from open debate – for example, by creating new quasi-public bodies immune to democratic control such as Business Improvement Districts (Ward, 2006) or Enterprise Zones (Purcell, 2008: 27) – citizens are increasingly exhorted to “join the conversation,” provide input, and be an active member of the community. A growing number of cities are adopting forms of shared governance at the same time as these processes are increasingly choreographed to the tune of powerful actors. The professionalization of participation now comprises an “industry” of public engagement (Lee, 2015), capable of producing participatory “events” (see also Blakeley, 2010; Gotham and Greenberg, 2014: Ch. 4), yet lacking the grassroots democratic appeal at the center of historical efforts to include residents in decision-making, particularly in low-income neighborhoods (Huxley, 2013; Lee et al., 2015: Ch. 1; McQuarrie, 2013).

Participation itself can be situated within a larger transformation in the organization and political representation of cities. A shift in federal urban policy beginning in the 1980s has had a profound impact on how the practice of everyday politics intersects with the pursuit of urban governance. As Pacewicz (2015) has argued, the move toward federal transfers based upon competitive grant-making rewarded community “partners” rather than partisan activists, empowering civic actors and non-profits that eschewed explicitly political agendas. Whereas Fordist urban regimes relied principally upon federally earmarked discretionary spending, creating strong ideological and deeply sectorial antagonisms among particular constituencies vying for resources – such as business, labor, or the urban poor (Biles, 2011; Pacewicz, 2015) – the contemporary period has encouraged the language of community partnership. By forcing cities to compete for competitive grants, coupled with the need to attract mobile investment, the partisan “fighters” of the Fordist period have become today’s community “partners” (Pacewicz, 2015: 827). In order to create flexible relationships with different interest groups capable of winning grants from outside the community, local leaders avoid explicitly political language or contentious group claims making. As a result, funding for local projects increasingly rests upon the active silencing of explicit forms of adversarial politics, while elevating non-government actors who now hold the purse strings in development projects (Elwood, 2002; Marwell, 2007).

As a result, deliberative exercises may vary in their structural relationship to local decision-making, but as Levine (2017) notes, they share a claim to legitimacy based on “community talk.” In a study of redevelopment projects in low-income neighborhoods in Boston, Levine (2017) describes the ways in which non-profits and developers strategically appeal to the legitimacy of community, while at the same time circumscribing its boundaries in order to build consensus around new development. By convening the community to participate, and representing the outcome of such participation to suit particular needs, local non-profits and developers may choose which voices exemplify the collective good, shielding such processes from accusations of extra-local or “inauthentic” interference (Walker, 2014). Dissenting voices, from this perspective, can be minimized, cast as particularistic threats to the universal wishes of “the community.”

Especially in cities with few economic resources, voluntary associations may achieve increased authority (Ostrander, 2013). Struggling to carry out even the most basic urban services, resources for new development, civic life and community development are almost exclusively funded through local and extra-local NGOs and philanthropies in a city such as Flint. Such streams of community funding encourage local residents to frame their needs not through group claims to services, unmet basic needs, and zero sum contests for public investment, but rather through the language of community empowerment and partnership.

In this context, the role and importance of elected officials may be reduced. Urban development is coordinated through unelected officials and planners along with real estate developers or community development corporations (CDCs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) who build new housing or contract social services. The result is the merging of technocratic rationale in terms of city planners and administrators, private interests in terms of developers and consultants, and community input in terms of residents who choose to participate in these processes, often at the behest of grant-funded CBOs. As a result, elected officials become bit players in key urban developments.

These insights point to a number of empirical puzzles in a context framed by a staggering loss of local political autonomy. Michigan’s Emergency Manager (EM) law, Public Act 436, passed in 2012 (following a landmark referendum on a prior EM law, which citizens voted down), represented an exceptional circumscription of local autonomy (see Fasenfest and Pride 2016). Drafted in the context of the post-2008 financial crisis, and with an eye toward expanding austerity policies, the EM law went far beyond prior forms of state intervention in cities under financial duress. It allowed the EM to break union contracts, fire employees, and sell off assets. The only notable check on the EM’s authority was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a restriction on defaulting on financial obligations to bondholders. In this context, how did a master planning process that has won planning awards and outside accolades for democratic engagement balance a technocratic consensus around the need for investment in “viable” neighborhoods with an equity priority in one of the country’s lowest income communities? How did community participation advance or impede such an undertaking at a time of restricted democratic authority?

Overview of a Master Planning Process

A critical question for Flint is how to attract investment to a city with a reputation for crime, depopulation, and economic decline. Given a rising public discourse around the issue of inequality, a further challenge is to generate new growth in ways that residents perceive as socially equitable. Private investment in fiscally-strapped cities often requires strong state-led incentives (see, e.g., Pacewicz, 2012; Peck and Whiteside, 2016), including fiscal and infrastructural benefits oriented toward business, forcing local states to earmark or forgo revenue that might otherwise be oriented toward deep social needs. In a period of intense inter-urban competition, cities are faced with the necessity of producing an economic surplus capable of attracting outside investment through tax abatements, a beautified downtown, or parks and amenities necessary for luring a “creative class” (Florida, 2002) of white-collar professionals. These demands often come at the cost of declining services and public spending in peripheral areas unlikely to draw extra-local investment (e.g. Gotham and Greenberg, 2014, Ch. 4; Smith, 1982; Squires and Kubrin, 2005).

Flint’s Master Plan represents an innovative blueprint for a smaller city. Having lost half of its peak population of 200,000, Flint has been notable for the extent of its housing abandonment, a drastically shrinking tax base, and a staggering web of costly fixed infrastructure meant for a larger city (Highsmith, 2015; Hollander, 2010; Schilling and Logan, 2008). After years of ill-fated revitalization efforts, including a failed downtown theme park and events center dedicated to the city’s history of automobile production (“Autoworld”), the master plan made a compelling case for a new start, with a smaller, more sustainable urban footprint. To do so, plan officials sought to incorporate new landscapes such as urban prairies, solar fields, or farms into areas of the city historically constructed for a built environment of residential housing.

The rationale for “right-sizing” (Hummel, 2015) was clear. In Flint’s poorest neighborhoods with the highest levels of vacancy, tax arrears and foreclosures were common. Municipal officials conceived of these areas as a net loss for city ledgers, with costly infrastructure hardly balanced by meager fiscal revenue. To remove this costly burden, the master plan represented an opportunity to move these areas to fiscally productive uses by converting neighborhoods with high levels of vacancy into either residential areas with more green space and fewer services (Green Residential) or commercial spaces for so-called green industry (Green Innovation).

The areas targeted, however, were not exactly vacant. In line with scholarship on land and property regimes, typically associated with rural studies and “land grabs” in the global South (see Sassen, 2014: Ch. 2), right sizing signaled a new technique of dispossession for close to a third of the city’s residents. Areas in which city disinvestment in services and infrastructure hastened further residential abandonment could be sold to investors with the hopes of spurring new rounds of growth, breathing fiscal life onto city balance sheets. For residents living in Green Innovation neighborhoods, this represented a significant setback for prior home improvements or mortgage equity, as residential uses were curtailed for the future and municipal disinvestment decreased traditional services. Representing a redistribution of value from impoverished residents to potential green businesses of the future, such austerity urbanism (Peck, 2012) appeared at odds with the equity priorities outlined by the Master Plan and touted by city officials.

Equity, Governance, and Participation

The inauguration of Imagine Flint came at a strange time in the city’s history. In late 2011, as the master planning process was kicking off, Michigan’s Republican Governor, Rick Snyder, placed the city under local government financial emergency, naming an emergency manager to run the city’s finances and government. Simultaneously the Imagine Flint plan was emerging to be an exhaustively participatory process aimed at galvanizing citizen buy-in for the creation of a smaller, denser city, representing the first holistic planning process in close to 50 years.

From the start, Imagine Flint had to overcome a number of hurdles. Sixty miles away, Detroit’s attempt to envision a smaller city had hit a number of roadblocks the year before. Detroit residents outside of the greater downtown area voiced hostility toward the mayor’s pronouncement that he would “shrink” the city. Early attempts to catalyze community buy-in had been met with rowdy town hall style meetings in which residents denounced a lack of everyday services and safety, shunning a high-minded discussion of a 50-year blueprint for a more sustainable Detroit (Oosting, 2010).

Flint’s process, on the other hand, sought to encourage resident support and input from the start. Lacking an elected local government with the power to implement policy or financial decisions, Imagine Flint rested its claims to legitimacy squarely on the shoulders of community engagement. As the plan itself reads:

Above all, the process was designed and executed to ensure transparency and to build upon the thoughts, ideas, concerns, and aspirations of the people of Flint. Imagine Flint is the community’s plan and the process has ensured a sense of community involvement and authorship, and perhaps most importantly, a stewardship for the new Master Plan. (City of Flint, 2013: 5, bold in original)

From the start, Imagine Flint relied upon a particular mix of technical expertise and community participation. The Chicago-based planning consultants Houseal Lavigne crafted the analysis and plan specifics. At the same time, a Steering Committee (SC) was responsible for convening participation and ensuring the clarion voice of “the community” in the consultant-led plan. Yet one problematic premise of community engagement was the selection process for the plan’s Steering Committee (SC). The city’s appointed Planning Commission (PC) was charged with choosing the 21-person committee with input from the mayor and a city councilperson. A Memorandum of Understanding created for the master plan states that the SC did not have decision-making authority, nor was it a public body, but rather “its role will be to help channel community resources towards the master planning effort and ensure the broadest feasible community ownership of the master planning process” (City of Flint, 2011).

To this end the memorandum states that the SC should represent the social makeup of the city of Flint by race, gender, age, and geography in order to generate broad community support. Yet in a city with 40% of the population below the poverty line, the 21-person committee largely reflected the selection of local elites. From leaders of the city’s art museum, to local businesses, to members of local law enforcement, the committee was mostly bereft of low-income residents. Of the 21 members, roughly three were “ordinary” residents, while the others were leaders or representatives of major city institutions; government, religious, academic, and not-for-profits. In line with scholarship on neoliberal transformations in governing structures (Peck and Tickell, 2002; Ward, 2006), the SC was a quasi-public, non-elected body, immune from democratic control and largely composed of powerful city institutions, despite a genuine sense of high-minded civic duty that members felt and conveyed in participatory exercises. Unencumbered by electoral control, the goals of civic engagement were to be shaped by the expert knowledge and technical specifications produced by planning consultants and officials and largely shared by important stakeholders represented on the SC. Rather than a democratic check on strictly technocratic logics, the SC was largely an appointed body of local institutions, and reflected a consensus view that the city would have to concentrate efforts on viable neighborhoods near downtown, precisely where many of these institutions were located.

On balance, the SC consisted of comparatively privileged individuals and groups. But beyond socio-economic indicators per se, elite representation may take place within marginalized neighborhoods or communities as well. As has been documented in a number of contexts, institutions such as churches or community associations in low-income neighborhoods may nonetheless reflect the interests of a comparatively privileged segment of residents (see Hyra, 2006). Absent electoral politics, these seemingly mundane observations take on increased importance. Local institutions representing low-income residents may be organizationally conditioned to adopt the language of partnership as they attempt to gain access to competitive resources. With elected officials having little input into master planning priorities, many local organizations may have correctly perceived that the quasi-public bodies overseeing the master plan were the only game in town. In short, the elevation of community participation over electoral politics helped to advance the technocratic consensus of planners and consultants over the redistributive effects of these plans. The carefully choreographed organization of the body overseeing participation ensured that community input would dovetail with the aspirations of administrators and local stakeholders.

That urban governance often involves the empowerment of voluntary associations to positions of consultative authority is, of course, nothing new (Elwood, 2002; Garcia, 2006; Rosol, 2010; Woolford and Curran, 2013). The SC, however, represented an innovation on this form of governance insofar as it operated during a period of abrogated electoral politics, with a purported mission to democratize urban planning, and was infused with the symbolism of local community, rather than specific group claims. The SC’s role as a participatory catalyst, working in tandem with the technocratic mission of the city’s planners, Planning Commission and an outside consultant, shaped the relationship between community input and technocratic decision-making. The SC was meant to be the voice of the community. And yet its empowerment by the PC and the urban planners presiding over the PC’s work suggested a gap between a truly generative versus largely consultative community role. Rather than acting as a voice of “the community,” it would be confined to responding to the technocratic rationale imbued in the master planning process by planning officials and consultants. From this perspective, it represented a means of channeling community input into the categories of administrative control produced by planners and consultants aimed at shrinking the city’s footprint in ways that tended to benefit low-income residents the least.

Greenlining the Periphery

Though the master plan contained a number of areas of governmental action, including transport, education, and culture, its central role was the alteration of the city’s zoning, to transform residential areas with high levels of vacancy or blight into Green or Green Innovation neighborhoods. According to block-level data from the 2010 census at which time Imagine Flint kicked off, these areas contained 30,210 residents, close to one third of the city’s 102,000 residents. By definition these were distressed neighborhoods, with high levels of abandonment and concentrated poverty.

As Figure 1 shows, Green Innovation districts tended to be in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, representing a form of “greenlining” (Fischer 2016), not dissimilar to the process of financial redlining characterizing the lack of lending in urban minority neighborhoods in Flint beginning in the 1930s (Highsmith, 2015). Flint’s poorest neighborhoods, then, were rezoned in ways that discouraged residents from investing, or new residents from buying, in neighborhoods fated for residential decline.

Figure 1.

Land use category by income. Source: University of Michigan–Flint, GIS Center.

City planning officials and consultants producing the plan were careful to suggest in public statements that no residents would be forced to leave. According to this perspective, Green Neighborhoods would simply be different than Traditional Neighborhoods. Lot sizes would be larger if residents chose to purchase adjacent parcels that had been abandoned. Urban farming and forestry might coexist with residential uses. On the other hand, such plans appeared to siphon state investment out of these neighborhoods to those prioritized as stable. As the plan itself reads:

If future investment and development should occur within a Green Neighborhood, it is possible for these areas to transition to a Traditional Neighborhood, with new homes on vacated lots repairing the neighborhood fabric. However, if a Green Neighborhood cannot be stabilized, and decline and abandonment continues, these areas will transition in the other direction and become Community Open Space or Green Innovation. (City of Flint, 2013: 46)

Though this statement suggests that Green Neighborhoods might remain residential, it also gestures toward the priority of funding those neighborhoods deemed viable in market terms. According to the plan, Green Neighborhoods are “complemented by parks and natural open space areas that are maintained by local residents, community groups, and invested stakeholders” (City of Flint, 2013: 46). In other words, residents and community stakeholders are responsible for proving the viability of their neighborhoods in the shadow of state financial retrenchment. In spaces characterized by increased park and green space, the local government will no longer provide traditional maintenance services.

While Imagine Flint casts these spaces in the image of urban homesteading, with residents assembling and maintaining multiple adjacent lots, and community groups building gardens and beautifying the natural and built environment, the key structural transformation of these neighborhoods is their lack of city investment. Therefore, some of Flint’s poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods will no longer be prioritized for state support. Rather, they will be expected to organize their own maintenance, attract new investment, and “prove” their viability if they hope to transform themselves into Traditional Neighborhoods.

Collaboration and Cooptation

Rezoning these districts was an inherently distributional exercise insofar as land use reflects a road map for future state investment, growth priorities, and private development. Yet Flint’s planners and the consultants working on Imagine Flint framed these decisions through a lens of technocratic know-how that reduced participation to fine-tuning existing decisions based upon indicators of neighborhood health largely informed by market metrics.

In a series of well-attended workshops, Flint planners and consultants took the land use plans directly to the people. Planning officials and Houseal Lavigne convened a number of community planning workshops in which photos and media coverage show a diverse group of residents pouring over tables of maps, workshop guides, and color-coded zoning plans. The central aim of these workshops was to allow residents to collaborate in producing the boundaries of new land use designations, such as Green Innovation or Green Neighborhood. Deliberating around circular tables, residents debated where to place brightly colored dots indicating the new land use designations.

But the most important aspect of this democratic exercise was the conditions constraining it. The maps themselves were overlaid with vacancy rates, with high-vacancy neighborhoods shaded in a yellow hue. Participants were instructed that their color-coded dots reflecting Green and Green Innovation neighborhoods were only to be placed in these areas. Residents were limited in the number of spaces they could make Traditional Neighborhoods, but unlimited in their ability to render districts “green.”

These rules of the game strongly influenced the outcome. While the ability for residents to maintain Traditional Neighborhoods or create new Mixed Residential (mixed use) areas was limited by the instructions, participants were required to rezone much of the city for Green Neighborhood or Green Innovation zoning (see Figure 2). The instructions for Green Innovation read: “Minimum of 3. Locate only in mostly vacant areas.” The instructions for Green Neighborhood asked for a minimum of 5 with the same criteria for vacancy. These conditions were presented as unquestionable norms, quite literally the incontrovertible background to citizen collaboration in land use designations. Here, then, a process with deeply divergent outcomes for different geographic and social collectivities was presented as apolitical, the process of consensus, stemming from the exigencies of technical know-how.

Figure 2.

Land use workshop guidelines.

This performance of participatory planning, therefore, was deeply constrained by rules set from on high. Such practices highlight Baiocchi and Ganuza’s (2014) assertion that analyses of participation must move beyond the interpersonal practices that characterize these forums to examine the rules and regulations that govern them and the ability of participants to change these rules. As Figure 3 shows, these strict parameters strongly influenced the outcome of the exercise. The city’s color-coded base map showed areas of vacancy and abandonment. Those with higher rates were dubbed “residential blocks in transition,” unsuitable to remain Traditional Neighborhoods. Neighborhoods with less vacancy appeared as a default grey area on the map. Participants could only designate grey areas on the map (those without blight) as Traditional Neighborhoods.

Figure 3.

One of many land use maps produced by everyday residents.

These instructions made residents, rather than city officials, accountable for a land use plan that signaled the retrenchment of state investment in Green and Green Innovation neighborhoods. Subsequently, this process of participation was channeled back into the technical plans created by consultants and planning officials. In so doing, the thoroughly political nature of these decisions – that is, an expression of power tied to the distribution of scarce resources, and instantiated in group claims making – was neutralized. Instead, a technical rationale was crowned supreme as the arbiter of unequal outcomes.

Taken together, this process served to naturalize the politics of local austerity by tying land use to market principles, validated through a carefully constrained process of participation. Baiocchi and Ganuza’s call to bend the arc of research on participatory governance toward the social production of the “rules of the game” is especially relevant in this case. Participation operated in a largely performative manner in which consultants and unelected city officials produced the rules, foreclosing on a generative process of resident participation, and instead orienting participation toward the naturalization of existing urban inequalities. Whereas such unequal outcomes are not unique to Flint, the lack of electoral politics within this process suggested that unhappy residents had only themselves to blame.

To achieve this outcome, urban inequalities were made invisible in renderings of Flint’s Green Innovation and Green Neighborhoods, obscuring the redistribution effects and context of rezoning. In the consultant-produced renderings, the images of these spaces showed residents in well-maintained homes caring for large open plots with neatly arranged urban gardens and greenery. Green Neighborhoods were framed as a consumer choice, with residents able to buy and maintain adjacent plots and live a more pastoral lifestyle within the city limits.

These plans relied upon a class-inflected vision of rural living that departed drastically from the social conditions of Flint’s poorest neighborhoods. Casting proximity to nature not as a threatening assault on the modernist binary between the natural and social worlds, the renderings instead borrowed from contemporary sustainability landscapes tied to images of nature as a luxury amenity (e.g. Checker, 2011). Poor and working-class neighborhoods were now framed as bucolic retreats from the city, with gardens and small farms abounding.

The emphasis on lifestyle departed starkly with the social needs of residents. This contradiction became clear in contentious community meetings meant to enshrine final zoning rules. During one such meeting in August 2016, residents from Green Innovation and Green Neighborhoods berated the Planning Commission and urban planning officials. An older black resident from the North Side of the city accurately summed up this dilemma, lambasting the assembled officials, while telling harrowing stories of overgrown vegetation, an unsettling dearth of built structures, and the uncomfortable creep of urban nature. Groundhogs had been burrowing under his lawn and house, a neighbor complained of rat infestations, and a general overgrowth of non-human nature threatened the viability of his neighborhood, which the assembled officials appeared poised to enshrine into law.

At the center of these dilemmas stood the renderings themselves, which appealed to visual changes in the built and natural environment, yet disavowed the social conditions underpinning these changes. This disavowal signaled another feature of post-political forms of governance; the renderings showed a universal public of middle-class residents, who would see these changes in terms of lifestyle amenities, with gardens, farms, and well-maintained homes on generous plots of land.

These visions of the future, however, had clear social implications, visually transforming spaces of neglect into scenes of pastoral harmony and social synchronicity with nature. The plans framed these spaces as universally aspirational for all residents living there, elevating the notion of land and local food production for residents who were facing major deficits in health and educational infrastructure and high rates of violent crime. Ignoring the consequences of fiscal retrenchment in Green and Green Innovation neighborhoods, the plan celebrated a form of urban homesteading as a means to overcome the consequences of local austerity.

The Centrality of Markets

The reliance on market mechanisms in urban governance has been exhaustively documented as cities privatize services, sell government assets, or scale back social assistance (see Hackworth 2007 for an overview). Flint’s planning process, however, emphasized investment in residents, engagement with the community, and an explicit focus on equity as a central axis of the plan’s objectives. But how did new land use designations respond to the city’s fiscal constraints while addressing the need to gain resident support for redistributing city resources toward those neighborhoods deemed viable in land and real estate markets? In what ways does Imagine Flint demonstrate how equity priorities in urban governance must accord with a reliance on market logics?

The process of plan implementation and participation outlined here suggests a consensus of local elites, planners, and urban consultants on the need to scale back state investment in low-income and high-vacancy residential districts. The patterns of local investment and disinvestment suggest that market indicators largely informed this consensus. In short, urban governance in Flint, during a period of limited fiscal resources, required making such decisions not according to a ranking of resident needs, but based on the strength of land and real estate markets (see Akers 2015). With little possibility to spur development based on social priorities or state investment, Flint’s plan instantiated markets as the key metric with which to determine planning priorities and thereby social and housing policy for one of the poorest cities in the country.

The Master Plan was undergirded by two assumptions about the local real estate market. First, the plan suggested that state resources should be concentrated in those neighborhoods that could eventually spur market investment. With scant resources available, city officials clearly believed that some neighborhoods would have to be written off in terms of government action. The Green Innovation land use designation suggested that these neighborhoods were too large a drain on city resources to remain residential. From this perspective, the logic of the Master Plan suggested a “salvage what you can” strategy of redevelopment. Strong neighborhoods close to the downtown core where significant improvements in the built environment have taken place over the last 10 years could be saved if resources were channeled in their direction. This required avoiding state spending in neighborhoods far from the downtown with already high rates of vacancy. At the same time, this realist approach to the city’s gloomy fiscal situation suggested that Flint’s comparatively affluent neighborhoods would receive state support in detriment to some of its poorest.

Real estate markets, of course, are based upon a particular balance of supply and demand. By foreclosing on the building of new residential uses in Green Neighborhoods, particularly those far from the city center, and by hastening the abandonment of high-vacancy neighborhoods by zoning out future residential uses, the Master Plan implied that better positioned neighborhoods could be salvageable through the reduction of the city’s housing supply and the allocation of city funds to neighborhoods with market potential. Officials referred to neighborhoods deemed salvageable as “tipping point neighborhoods.” This particular conception of neighborhood viability showed preference for real estate markets as the guiding principle for state action. Meeting minutes of a May 7, 2013 Steering Committee meeting show that Flint’s outside consultants suggested “[T]here is a need to figure out what are the criteria for tipping point areas and viable neighborhoods, and what is too far gone” in order to “assess neighborhood stability, spreading out of resources, and consolidating resources” (Master Plan Steering Committee, 2013).

This same real estate friendly conception of viability was clear in Green Innovation districts. The moving away from residential uses would not leave these neighborhoods vacant per se. Rather, the idea guiding Green Innovation zoning was twofold. On the one hand, the state would save resources in districts no longer requiring fixed capital investment for an overextended residential infrastructure. But the innovation of the plan was to position them for future private investment by symbolically reshaping their categorization by land markets. Fully vacant contiguous plots could once again assume viability in the market by attracting investment requiring large parcels, such as solar panels, wind turbines, or large-scale urban agriculture. Symbolically rendering these areas “blank slates” for new commercial investment, these strategies would be hampered by the existence of continued or new residential uses and the social needs that they encoded in land markets.

Taken together, these principles reflected the common sense of neoliberal governance, in which distributional choices were absent, framed as technocratic dilemmas to be resolved by the salutary presence of functioning markets. Emergency management thereby represented one feature of a longer process of depoliticization, reflected in Flint’s culture of community partnership over partisan politics, enervated local government, and reliance on the logic of fiscal austerity. The taken-for-granted status of market conditions as determinants of social investment represented a similarly post-democratic element of governance as the EM law itself, essential to understanding the local expression of neoliberal crisis.

Paradoxically, many members of the Planning and Steering Committees were critically aware of Flint’s history of uneven and racialized development and intent on not repeating it. The development of the master plan, however, produced growth strategies that appeared natural and unproblematic while building upon contemporary planning principles informed by market conditions. Consultants Houseal Lavigne and Flint’s top planners carefully directed the democratic process, channeling market principles into the language of inclusive green development and sustainable growth. Importantly, these principles appeared outside the realm of contentious claims making. Across a range of land uses, the guiding principle in assessing the viability of any use appeared strongly influenced by the existing conditions of land markets and the diminutive position of state resources. This common sense narrative, however, belied the most prominent theme of the plan, that of urban equity and the purportedly open and democratic process through which the plan emerged.

Conclusion

Rather than simply calling attention to the pervasive power of market indicators in urban decision-making, this paper aims to lend empirical depth to another set of issues. Around the country, powerful actors’ elevation of consensual notions of urban governance may diminish the power of everyday citizens to contest technocratic priorities in urban development. In the case of Imagine Flint it is not a coincidence that officials, funders, and outside consultants crafted a plan that was deeply shaped by existing market indicators. What is novel, however, is the way in which city officials and elites successfully framed these distributive decisions as the product of unassailable best practices and, importantly, representing the democratic voice of “the community.”

Signaling a reconfiguration between the practice of urban governance and the pursuit of everyday politics, local officials and civic elites strove to catalyze new rounds of investment during a period still shaped by the politics of local, state, and federal austerity. To do so, limited local funds were channeled into areas with the most market potential, while areas with little market value could be spatially reoriented toward commercial uses if they could be symbolically rendered “blank slates.” Paradoxically, new accumulation strategies tied to assembling contiguous plots for commercial investment through the curtailing of residential uses emerged along with a rhetoric of urban equity. In doing so, market and technocratic logics in urban planning competed alongside a public discourse around the issue of inequality. The proliferation of participatory language and processes appears to have diminished such equity demands by suggesting that the distributional consequences of the master plan were the result of a democratic form of community decision-making. Public participation thereby served to insulate local officials from electoral politics, while diminishing the possibility for contentious group claims making around issues of distributional equity.

Such a reliance on market logics in urban planning decisions is not new. What stands out in Imagine Flint is the complex system of social meaning that produced, in the words of the master plan itself, “the community’s plan […]” such that the community should take “authorship” over the plan (City of Flint, 5: 2013). Echoing Baiocchi and Ganuza (2014), non-elected officials and consultants narrowly framed the empowerment dimension, with participants granted little control over the scope and nature of participation. If open and democratic processes indeed took place, they were a priori shaped according to the concrete economic indicators of land markets and a preexisting technical rationale that officials and consultants produced with little input from elected office-holders or the public.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Urban Sociology workshop at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor for helpful feedback and comments. Troy Rosencrants at the University of Michigan–Flint GIS Center provided crucial support with GIS mapping and Nancy Maarraoui with helpful research assistance. I thank the many Flint residents who shared their experiences with me for their generous insights.

Funding

This research was supported by a Research and Creative Activity Grant from the University of Michigan–Flint (Grant #0051460).

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