Abstract
In the United States, an important objective of cultural planning is creating a sense of place based on the needs and visions of the people living there through public involvement. However, the processes used to involve the community need more theoretical and methodological attention. The aim of this article is to suggest strategies, based on a clear definition of participation, that local governments can use to ensure community involvement. A review of the literature about public participation highlights the importance of educating and informing all the participants to incentivize a dialogical encounter. The objective is to go beyond one-way communication, where community members merely provide their input. In this article, the author demonstrates how a geographical information system (GIS) could be used by a local government to educate and inform all the participants delivering technical and scientific knowledge. The communicative strengths of a GIS could create the foundation for a planning process based on a dialogical exchange. The author provides two suggestions for such a process using Madison, Wisconsin, as an example. Finally, she recommends the use of these suggestions as an operational model for future cultural planning processes and suggests directions for future research.
In the past 30 years, interest in cultural planning has increased around the world (Porrello 2006; Curson et al. 2007). Cultural plans link culture to other aspects of economic and social life, adopting a territorial focus with the objective of “place-making” (Ghilardi 2001; Dreeszen 1997). They are developed by local governments through a participatory planning process that engages the residents in designing future directions for their community (Dreeszen 1997; Grogan and Mercer 1995; Goldbard 2006).
A number of handbooks and tool kits have been released in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia to support community leaders and policy makers in understanding the relevance of cultural planning for local governments and to provide guidance for how to proceed in the planning process (Grogan and Mercer 1995; Russo and Butler 1991; Borrup 2006; Dreeszen 1997; Curson et al. 2007; Baeker 2010; NSW Ministry for the Arts 2004). Among the guidelines developed in these handbooks, the suggestions for how to involve the community need more theoretical and methodological attention. The following questions need to be addressed: What does it mean to invite the community to participate? Does asking for people’s input constitute an authentic form of participation? How can a local government promote authentic participation? In other words, how can top-down strategies create bottom-up involvement?
The aim of this article is not to provide an empirical analysis but rather to propose strategies that a local government could use to promote authentic participation in cultural planning, with a particular focus on the American context. I begin by giving a brief overview of cultural planning in the United States. In the second section, I identify core normative models of authentic participation, highlighting the importance of educating and informing the participants and thus promoting two-way communication in a collaborative planning process. These two functions of participation are too often not taken into consideration by local governments; they tend to privilege a request for input from participants over creating a dialogical exchange. In the third section, I explain how a geographical information system (GIS) could be a successful tool in overcoming the expert–citizen relationship, which has previously been identified as the main barrier toward a dialogical form of participation. The argument is based on the communicative strengths of a GIS in delivering technical and scientific knowledge to facilitate the understanding of complex issues related to place-making (Hampton 2009). Finally, in the fourth section I show how a GIS could be used at the beginning of the cultural planning process, crafting two suggestions for Madison, Wisconsin. Having collected technical information about the administration systems, along with data about the community and its cultural assets, I produced maps and tables displaying comparative data that demonstrate how a GIS could foster authentic participation. I conclude by recommending the use of the methodological steps illustrated in the Madison example as a model for cultural planning processes. I also address some limitations of this study and offer some directions for future research.
Cultural Planning in the United States
Cultural planning takes different forms in different countries (Curson et al. 2007) and has a variety of configurations, despite the growing exchange of ideas (Stevenson 2004; Sirayi 2008; Markusen and Gadwa 2010). Several authors describe cultural planning as a policy process for cultural development (Grodach 2010; Goldbard 2006; Rosenstein 2009; Grodach and Loukaitou-Sideris 2007; Adams and Goldbard 2001; Sonn, Neil, and Kasat 2002); others underscore that cultural planning is not the “planning of culture” but rather a cultural approach to urban planning requiring a vision of planning not limited to the physical aspect (Ghilardi and Bianchini 1997; Gray 2006; Stevenson 2004; Ghilardi 2001; Landry and Bianchini 1995; McNulty 1991; Mercer 2006); and still other authors define cultural planning as a tool for community development that consists of a plan of action that uses arts and culture to address the social and economic needs of the community (Dreeszen 1997; Borrup 2006; Evans 2001).
Moreover, several studies critically analyze the practice of cultural planning. The main critique in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada is that although cultural planning should carry a wide anthropological definition of culture, the majority of plans are art driven, simply propagating a traditional arts policy with another name (Kovacs 2011; Stevenson 2005). In the United States, the main critical arguments are slightly different, based on observations of the shortcomings of these policies in addressing social issues and in the hegemonic views they perpetuate (Zukin 1989; Zukin, Merrifield, and Swyngedouw 1997).
In the United States, local government efforts on issues about culture started with the creation of local agencies. “Commonly called local arts agencies, these organizations are tackling the challenge of developing more livable communities by supporting the growth and more responsive use of artistic and cultural resources” (Yuen 1990, 1). It was shortly after World War II that the first local arts agencies were created and strategic plans written to direct their missions. Cultural planning emerged only in the 1980s, and by the beginning of the new millennium 22% of local arts agencies had a cultural plan (Americans for the Arts 2005).
Cultural planning differs from strategic planning within an organization, mainly because it aims to affect the broader community and not just an isolated organization. Therefore, it involves a public process that engages people living in a specific place or community (Dreeszen 1997). In a study that analyzed cultural plans in 31 states, Jones (1993) observed that widespread public participation was one of the most common threads. In particular, several different steps were taken to involve the public: appointing a broad-based steering committee, doing surveys, convening focus groups, holding public meetings, and making special efforts to reach less-involved constituencies.
The attention given to the public involvement of the residents in a community shows how an important objective of cultural planning is creating a plan based on the needs and visions of the people who live there. It is interesting that despite the different configurations of cultural planning, public involvement has a central role in all the tool kits released worldwide (Stevens 1987a, 1987b; Borrup 2006; Dreeszen 1997; Grogan and Mercer 1995; Russo and Butler 1991; Curson et al. 2007; Baeker 2010; NSW Ministry for the Arts 2004). However, little attention has been given to clearly understanding its value. Local governments should investigate the following questions: What is the value of asking people for their reactions and opinions? Is this type of involvement a way to create opportunities for authentic participation? In the next section, I review the literature about public participation with regard to core normative models.
Defining Authentic Participation
Concepts and practices of public participation grew ever more popular throughout the 1970s and 1980s and became the operational focus of many local, national, and international agencies (Taylor and Mayo 2008). By the 1990s, practitioners, academics, and activists had begun revisiting participation under a critical eye, with divided views. On the one hand, participation has been called the “new tyranny” since it risks serving the interests of dominant institutions (Cooke and Kothari 2001). On the other hand, it has been seen as the failure of public institutions to fulfill citizens’ expectations of the obligations that government has toward them. In this case, participation is described as “empowerment,” but it boils down to “do-it-yourself” (White 1996; Cornwall 2008). In this article, I frame public participation within the American context of municipal government, considering in particular efforts to involve the community in the policy-planning process, using the collaborative planning perspective. To be able to suggest top-down strategies for bottom-up involvement, in this section I review the literature that discusses purposes for participation, ways of delineating the participants, mechanisms of involvement, and barriers to authentic participation. Finally, based on the claim of the postpositivist literature that two-way communication is fundamental for authentic participation, I assert the need for finding strategies with which the administration can inform and educate the participants.
Participation has been studied looking at the purposes that it tries to achieve (Sanoff 1999). Arnstein’s (1969) foundational work on citizen participation describes participation in terms of “citizen power,” which includes citizen control, delegated power and partnership, and “tokenism,” in which she includes consultation, informing, and placation. She uses the metaphor of a ladder to illustrate how the power progresses from power holders to citizens: The base of the ladder represents power holders having power over citizens, who have zero opportunity to participate, and higher rungs represent citizens having the power to achieve their own priorities and gaining increased levels of participation. Jackson (2001) moves away from the attention to power and builds on the ladder model by spelling out the motivations of those who adopt and practice participatory approaches. She lists these motivations in a hierarchy that shows the different purposes of getting the public involved: informing, public education, testing reaction, seeking ideas, and sharing decision making (see Figure 1). Both Arnstein’s and Jackson’s descriptions suggest a normative progression toward more genuine forms of participation that shift from authority control to citizen control. However, each stage of Jackson’s hierarchy needs to include the previous ones to keep the value of the newly achieved stage. For instance, sustaining the informing stage should be considered indispensable at all stages, rather than being considered just a lesser form of participation (Cornwall 2008).
Jackson’s 2001 public participation purposes
Besides understanding the purposes, in practices of public participation it is vital to pay attention to who is participating (Moote, McClaran, and Chickering 1997; Schlossberg and Shuford 2005; Craig and Elwood 1998; Moote and McClaran 1997; Carver 2003; Kyem 2001). Schlossberg and Shuford (2005) consider possible groups to include informers, affected groups, decision makers, implementers, and the general public. This categorization helps to articulate the different players involved in a participatory project. Without doubt, involving the public in policy making is a complicated endeavor for several reasons: the composition of relevant participants can change over time; participants can be identified using several criteria such as geographic, professional, economic, and social or political information; each agency, depending on its goal, can define relevant groups of participants in different ways; and typologies of participants can be determined by power, legitimacy, and urgency. Nevertheless, the question of who participates is a crucial one in constructing practices of participation.
Finally, to understand participation it is necessary to analyze the mechanisms used to involve the general public. In American local policy making, traditional mechanisms of public participation in the process of governance have included face-to-face discussion in a multistakeholder forum, public meetings, referenda, opinion surveys, focus groups, deliberative polls, citizens’ panels, and citizens’ juries (Sanoff 1999; Carver 2003). Lately, thanks to the growth of information and communication technologies, new forms of participation have been developed. These started with services delivered online, such as payment of taxes, and evolved into the use of online discussions, web surveys, and online decision support systems (Finney 2000). Despite the variety of means for public participation, all these mechanisms require a merely reactive involvement of the public. For example, Innes and Booher (2004) recognize that hearings and procedures for review are not dialogical but based on one-way communication from members of the public to elected officials. Spaces for communication through invitation are indeed necessary, but they are by no means sufficient to ensure authentic participation (Cornwall 2008).
Specifically, the postpositivist literature, based on the claim that society has an interpretive nature, characterizes most of the mechanisms of public participation as mechanical and reactive and calls for a more dialogical form of participation. It suggests overcoming the main barrier to two-way communication, which is the typical expert–citizen relationship, where the expert is both the administrator (King, Feltey, and Susel 1998) and the social scientist (Fisher 1993; Hampton 2009). King, Feltey, and Susel (1998) claim that to achieve authentic public participation, it is necessary to move away from a model of participation in which the administrator plays the role of the expert manager of the administrative systems and citizens are merely reactive. Administrators need to become cooperative participants. Another facet of the expert–citizen relationship that needs to be overcome is the one where the social scientist is the expert. “Given the interpretive nature of both the social construction of society and the practices of the social sciences designed to investigate society, postpositivism requires the expert to establish a participatory relationship with the client” (Fisher 1993, p. 167). This means that the way social scientists should resolve social issues and conflict is not merely through empirical measurement, but rather through discussion (Lejano 2006).
To overcome the expert–citizen relationship, two elements are crucial: first, education about the technicalities of policy making (Irvin and Stansbury 2004; Innes 1998; Jackson 2001) and, second, information about empirical data (Innes and Booher 2004; Sawicki and Craig 1996). Traditional mechanisms of citizen participation stress primarily the latter stages of Jackson’s hierarchy of participation purposes, testing reaction and seeking ideas. In so doing, they overlook the first two stages, informing and public education, which are essential to achieve the final stage of authentic participation—sharing decision making. Without information and education, people cannot really take part in the conversation (Young and Benhabib 1996). If citizens are heard only through one-way communication, they will never be part of the power discourse. Administrators should involve citizens in dialogical exchange and engage them in discussion, rather than simply asking for their input (Fox and Miller 1995; Fisher 1993).
The idea of participation utilized in this article goes beyond the claim that in policy making all the affected parties should be heard and voice should be given to the disadvantaged (deLeon 1992). Besides delineating the participants in the widest manner possible, educating and informing them is important to avoid a paternalistic conception of participation (Hampton 2009). More specifically, the aim is to think about participation in a way that overcomes the dualistic conception that represents the government as an authoritarian entity dominating, rather than working together with the residents. Applying this concept of participation in the context of cultural planning, where the local government aims to involve the community in the planning for place-making, what strategies can be used to inform and educate participants so a dialogue among them can start?
A GIS as a Tool for Participation
The postpositivist literature about public participation asserts the importance of developing the conditions for two-way communication between the administration and the public (Innes and Booher 2004; Cornwall 2008). This means educating participants about the technicalities of policy making and informing them about the empirical facts gathered by social scientists. In the context of cultural planning, where place-making is the main objective (Ghilardi 2001; Dreeszen 1997), educating and informing need to be linked to a spatial understanding of the issues at stake. The administration engaged in cultural planning needs to facilitate an understanding of the place by providing a spatial explanation of governance, population, and cultural assets. In this article, I suggest the use of a GIS as a tool toward this goal.
A GIS is defined in several ways, but essentially it is a spatial analytical device that combines computerized cartography and database management (Pickles 1995). These components provide the following functions: the representation of a place in a coordinate geography, the collection of information about spatial objects, and the elaboration or manipulation of this information. This means that a GIS combines the power of information technology with cartography (Goss 1995). For instance, it creates maps that display the political boundaries of a place in conjunction with the information included in that place, such as demographics, housing, and so on, and manipulates it to produce specific kinds of data. In this way, a GIS allows the exploitation of geographical ties between different kinds of data sets—a task that previously could be performed only by skilled technicians using sophisticated machinery.
In the public sector, practitioners have been using GIS for a vast array of issues: transportation (Yamada and Thill 2003), infrastructure (Genzer and Luhan 2009), environmental protection (Morain 1999), election assessment (Johnson 2005), and so on. Several public agencies at the local, state, and national levels have adopted GIS. Local governments increasingly use GIS in different departments to study neighborhoods and improve public-sector management and services provision. Nedovic-Budic and Godschalk (1996) pointed out increased use of GIS by local governments in public policy implementation for matters such as transportation, tax mapping, community assistance, and comprehensive planning.
In addition to its practical uses, the academic literature has increasingly supported the use of a GIS to address public issues (Brown and Brudney 1998). In fact, an emerging body of literature has begun encouraging the use of a GIS in facilitating public participation in policy decision making (Greene 2000; Humenik-Sappington and Thomas 2009; O’Looney 2000; Desai, Greenbaum, and Kim 2009; Martin et al. 2004; Fleming and O’Neill 2005). For example, a case study about community-based planning and design pointed out the strength of a GIS as a way to conciliate the individual perceptions of the people participating in the process. “GIS provided a way to bridge the plethora of different mental maps and perceptions that each participant brought to the process” (Al-Kodmany 2001a, 121).
In the late 1990s, the connection between GIS and public participation led to the rise of public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) (Sieber 2006). The aim of using PPGIS is to integrate GIS data from diverse sources such as social narratives of marginalized communities, nongovernmental organizations, and grassroots groups (Laituri 2002; Obermeyer 1998; Jarvis and MacLean Sperman 1995), implying the inclusion of qualitative data representing people’s needs and judgments (Ceccato and Snickars 2000). Moreover, a PPGIS enables the development of increased access to a GIS through projects that allow the community to include their local knowledge in the information system (Ghose 2001; Elwood 2002, 2006; Elwood and Leitner 2003) and through the dissemination of data using web-based information technologies (Simao 2009; Carver 2003; Nuojua 2010; Sidlar 2009; Shiffer 1995; Haque 2001).
This article brings GIS into the participation discussion with a different focus from the PPGIS approach. Although I agree that advocating for a wider source of data and increased opportunity of access in the practice of a GIS is important to develop a greater level of social inclusion, the purpose of this article is to underscore the communicative strengths of a GIS and its ability to handle spatial information (Al-Kodmany 2001a; Krygier 2002), rather than calling for a wider source of data. Its powerful mapping and display capabilities and its capacity for integrating many different layers of data make a GIS an ideal tool to encourage lay participation (Harris and Weiner 1998; Myers, Martin, and Ghose 1995). Although the majority of GIS applications are concerned with mapping, a GIS can be used for a great diversity of computer-based applications that capture and display geographic information and associated services (Wegener 1998; Ceccato and Snickars 2000). In this way, a GIS can offer a community profile in a snapshot—providing a sense of where the residents are and who they are compared to surrounding communities (Haque 2001)—as well as constitute a “territory interface” where the map and its derivatives are central to participants’ interaction and dialogue (Carver 2003). For instance, a study carried out during participatory planning in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood showed how the use of a GIS presenting several types of data facilitated the dialogue between planners and residents (Al-Kodmany 2001b).
The capacity to combine information technology and cartography makes a GIS a powerful tool for a municipal government interested in engaging the community with a project about place-making (O’Looney 2000). Moreover, its increased extensive use in local governments makes it a tool already available to the administration, avoiding additional costs for the planning process (Ventura 1995; Hissong and Couret 1999; Masser 1998). Through a geographical lens, a GIS can educate participants about the technicalities of administrative systems and inform them about empirical facts of the place in which they live, two steps necessary to spark a dialogue for authentic participation. In the following section, I explain how these objectives can be achieved, providing two suggestions for the municipality of Madison, Wisconsin.
Toward Authentic Participation: Two Suggestions for Madison, Wisconsin
Madison is the capital of Wisconsin. According to 2008 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, it has a population of 231,916 in an area of 84 square miles. It is located in south-central Wisconsin, in the middle of Dane County, and is home to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, one of the largest public universities in the United States. A characteristic of the city’s geography is that its downtown area is located on an isthmus bordered by two lakes. In 1996 Money magazine ranked it as the best place to live in America, in 1997 American Health Magazine rated it as the healthiest city in the nation for women, and in 2004 Forbes magazine ranked it the top city in the nation for business and careers. 1 Furthermore, Madison’s vibrancy is bolstered by a high level of education, low unemployment, and job growth. These characteristics make Madison one of the most energetic small-sized cities in the United States.
In 1974 the city of Madison created the Madison Arts Commission (MAC), which is currently a unit of the Department of Planning and Community and Economic Development and is led by a commission of residents that advises the mayor on issues related to the arts. In 2008 the MAC solicited a proposal for a cultural plan, following a need that emerged during the ArtGrowth Summit in 2003 to better nurture existing resources for cultural activity and to foster the growth of future resources. After that, Mayor David Cieslewicz expressed his intention to launch a cultural plan as one of the recommendations laid out in the document The Healthy City: Model for a Forward Economy (City of Madison 2004). In the summer of 2009, a selection committee composed of citizens and city staffers selected Mary Berryman Agard & Associates, a local consulting firm specializing in civic dialogue, to lead the cultural planning process.
The goal of the cultural plan was presented as a community decision- making process to better utilize creative work. The homepage of the web site, created to communicate with citizens (City of Madison 2010), explains that “cultural plans explore resident’s [sic] preferences, the adequacy of public and private structures that support creativity and innovation, and identify specific action steps that can make the community’s creative portfolio stronger, more accessible, more sustainable and more diverse.” This participatory objective of the cultural plan is carried out in several ways. The MAC organizes and encourages group meetings to give citizens the opportunity to be heard and offer their input. A tool kit to instruct citizens about how to organize group meetings is made available on the web site. In addition, the MAC supplies a series of questions for citizens, creating a questionnaire process to collect their ideas. Despite the genuine effort to involve the citizens, these strategies represent an example of the flawed mechanism of participation illustrated by Innes and Booher (2004), as they are based on one-way communication from citizens to elected officials instead of encouraging two-way communication, where there is an exchange between citizens and government.
As explained earlier, the main barrier to two-way communication in current mechanisms of public involvement is the expert–citizen relationship. On one hand, the expert is the administrator who is the only one knowledgeable about the policy-making system and its technicalities, while the citizen is merely reactive (King, Feltey, and Susel 1998). On the other hand, the expert is the social scientist who carries out policy analysis with a scientific approach to problems (Fisher 1993). To overcome the expert–citizen relationship, I assert that administrations pursuing public involvement should (1) educate about the technicalities of administrative systems (Irvin and Stansbury 2004; Innes 1998; Jackson 2001) and (2) inform all the participants involved about empirical data related to the place (Innes and Booher 2004; Sawicki and Craig 1996). Considering that cultural planning is a process concerned with place-making, a geographical approach to educate and inform could be particularly helpful by framing the discussion within spatial dimensions. A GIS can produce outputs that communicate the spatial dimensions of issues involved in place-making—such as maps that show the boundaries of an administrative infrastructure and tables that organize a complex set of data about the different aspects of the place defined by administrative boundaries—and compare them, helping to show the place’s strengths and weaknesses.
The expected outcomes of using such outputs for educating and informing are the genuine empowerment of participants and the creation of shared knowledge. Empowerment is thought of as capacity building (Elwood 2002): When residents are educated about the technicalities of their administration, they will gain the skills to be part of the policy-making process and actively assert their needs. Shared knowledge refers to the discussion about the quantitative data collected by social scientists. When the data are presented to all the participants in the easily understandable format offered by GIS, a collective interpretation will guide the planning goals (Innes 1998). The remainder of this section applies the framework I developed, providing two suggestions for Madison. Table 1 summarizes the elements of the framework and the two suggestions developed applying it.
Two Suggestions
Suggestion 1: Unpacking Political Discourse
There is no standardized structure for cities’ bureaucracies in the United States, so each city divides its territory and organizes its administration in its own way. In most countries, the national government holds most of the power over municipal affairs; however, the U.S. Constitution places cities under the jurisdiction of state governments (Sonenshein 2006). Furthermore, municipal home rule, a provision of state law, gives cities the right to make decisions on local matters and choose their own forms of government (Morgan, England, and Pelissero 2007). Compounding this lack of a standardized structure in a city’s bureaucracy, the proliferation of local government affects its form, redrawing a territory with several jurisdictional boundaries. The sudden growth of suburbs creates a division of territory where the suburban area can be within the larger limits of the city. Often residents consider a small inner suburb simply as a neighborhood of the larger city without grasping the implication that it is a separate political entity. This complexity of metropolitan governance makes the administrators and bureaucrats the technical experts of the administrative strategies chosen to manage the territory.
In 1992, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin established the Neighborhood Resource Team (NRT) as a way to better coordinate city services into 10 smaller areas. An NRT is intended to be a resource for residents because it creates cross-agency solutions to improve the delivery of services to neighborhoods. Each team includes a city staffer from one of the major city agencies operating in the area (e.g. Fire, Public Health, Building Inspection, Library, and Park). A team leader for each area can be contacted by residents to address area issues. In 2007, the boundaries of the NRT areas were restructured to better align them with the city’s police districts; there are currently five NRTs. To overcome the expert–citizen relationship, it is necessary to clarify these mechanisms and educate residents of the community about utilizing them.
The map in Figure 2 shows in solid colors the five areas into which the city territory has been divided. While displaying the boundaries of the NRT areas, a GIS represents in map form the administrative tools chosen by elected officials (Sonenshein 2006). If participants are provided with maps that show the NRT areas, they can more easily locate their own areas and contact NRT leaders to become part of community discussions. In this way, community members can understand how an administrative entity has a geographic domain and can make the connection between their own location and the administrative group to which they belong (Aberley 1993).
Madison and its suburbs
Besides displaying the territorial divisions of city management, the map also shows the areas of territory that are part of different jurisdictions and as such cannot be included in policies made by the city officials initiating the cultural plan. Cities and villages are shown in gray, towns in white. The 27 municipalities included in this map are involved in the territorial governance of the Madison area, 2 and are part of the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO): 3 Blooming Grove, Bristol, Burke, Cottage Grove Town, Cottage Grove Village, DeForest, Dunkirk, Dunn, Fitchburg, Madison Town, Maple Bluff, McFarland, Middleton City, Middleton Town, Monona, Pleasant Springs, Rutland, Shorewood Hills, Springfield, Stoughton, Sun Prairie City, Sun Prairie Town, Verona City, Verona Town, Waunakee, Westport, and Windsor. Each municipality can develop policies for its own territory; however, an overall picture of the area could suggest possible collaborations among different municipalities.
The map in Figure 2 clarifies at a glance the administrative complexity of the Madison area territory and can be easily understood by all the publics involved in the cultural plan. This intelligibility makes the map a good example of how a local administration could use a GIS to educate the community and overcome the main barrier to two-way communication, the expert– citizen relationship, where the administrator is the only one knowledgeable about the administrative systems. The expected outcome is the empowerment of the community because the map unpacks territorial discourses (Jonas 1994, 2006; Leitner and Miller 2007), showing the administrative tools chosen by public officials and disclosing mechanisms that allow citizens to interact with the administration and other groups in their city (NRTs). This understanding could allow everybody in the community to be engaged in the discourse rather than simply offering their input (Fox and Miller 1995; Fisher 1993). For instance, if the arts groups are made aware of these administrative mechanisms—the NRTs—they can choose to sit at the existing civic table without having to wait for a specific policy initiative that addresses the needs of the arts such as a cultural plan. Also, by delineating the boundaries of the other municipalities, the map makes evident the numerous political actors present in the Madison area. All of them, even if they are not involved in the cultural plan, can influence the sense of place of the area. Educating arts groups about the territorial mechanisms of urban administration and policy making, a map can empower them to be part of the collective policy process because it clearly identifies all the administrative actors. Moreover, this knowledge can imbue them with legitimacy as political players (Irvin and Stansbury 2004). If this educational stage is skipped and the arts groups are involved in policy decisions only for special projects, then they will be included only in a “one-shot deal” cultural plan rather than becoming integrated in urban administrative decision making in a participatory way (King, Feltey, and Susel 1998).
Suggestion 2: Organizing Community Data
Social scientists know how to turn data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into policy. Too often, however, members of the community do not have sufficient data to sustain their positions, most of the time because data are available only from media that require substantial skills to read (Sawicki and Craig 1996). Information produced by social scientists, who are supposedly neutral experts, does not become embedded in the policy process. To become shared knowledge, data need to be presented in a way that is understandable to all participants so there can be plenty of talk about the meaning of that information and its implications for the planning process (Innes 1998).
A GIS can transform technical and scientific information into shared knowledge because it delivers data in a way that does not need specialized training to be understood (Haque 2001). A GIS can handle spatial information, offering a “territory interface” of data about the community (Carver 2003). In addition to displaying geopolitical data in a digital map, a GIS can organize spatially related attribute data such as population, income, and so on. First, the map in Figure 2 identifies the different jurisdictional entities in the Madison area—the 27 suburbs and 5 NRTs—and their proximal relationships; second, Table 2 organizes data for each of these jurisdictional entities and allows a comparison among them.
Comparative Data
NRT = Neighborhood Resource Team.
Table 2 reports quantitative data about the people living in the Madison area and the cultural assets located in the territory. The indicators chosen to create a profile of the local residents are population, race, median age, and median household income, whereas the cultural assets are defined as the organizations involved in the production and consumption of cultural products and services. The collected data are organized using the administrative boundaries as grouping criteria to facilitate an understanding of the jurisdictional ties of each set of data. This way of organizing data also aids in understanding the complex characteristics of an area—its jurisdiction, its cultural assets, its population, and its socioeconomic attributes. But most important, GIS’s organization and presentation of data make them easily manageable for analytical purposes as well as available for interpretation to all the participants involved in the cultural planning process, allowing groups to coevolve and learn together (Innes and Booher 2004). Community members, arts groups, the consultant hired to facilitate the cultural plan, elected officials, and city staff could all look at these data and suggest their interpretation, initiating a dialogue during public meetings. The expected outcome is the development of a shared knowledge that serves as the common ground upon which to begin participatory conversations during meetings. In this way, the interpretation of data is not left solely to the expert, but it is opened to everybody, dispelling the idea that there is only one scientific solution to a social or political problem (Fisher 1993).
For instance, at least three main findings from the data ranked in Table 2 can be interpreted collectively and shape the planning goals (Innes 1998). First, the West and Central NRTs emerge as the locations with the highest numbers of cultural assets. This information can be readily observed and interpreted by the diverse groups involved in the cultural plan, and anyone may suggest how this situation could be improved. Two possible directions are either to invest in branding for these two areas using their cultural prominence or to encourage the growth of cultural offerings in different areas to promote the cultural identities of all individual neighborhoods.
Second, the wealthiest location revealed by the data is Shorewood Hills, a village located within the city boundaries. It also has the highest median age, but it is not particularly rich in cultural assets. Considering the proximity of this inner suburb to the Central and West NRTs, most likely its residents utilize the cultural assets of these two areas. This observation could suggest that the village of Shorewood Hill should be involved in the financial contribution to the city’s cultural assets.
Third, Table 2 shows that the Madison Town population has the highest percentage of African-Americans. The town is intertwined with the South NRT, which ranks third for number of cultural assets, and it is close to the other two NRTs, which are the first two in that ranking. This finding raises the need to discuss the interaction between the ethnic background of the population and the culture promoted in the area’s cultural assets. Cultural planners will have to verify if the diverse backgrounds of the residents living close to these cultural assets are represented in their programming and consider if they want to enhance the ethnic diversity of the city’s cultural offerings.
“Reporting quantitative data, along with practices of public discussion of the data and its policy implications, have produced changes in human rights policy, in school policy about discrimination, and in environmental policy” (Innes 1998, 55). Information acts as a lens, influencing not so much the opinion as the assumptions (Innes 1998). The pooling of information and its interpretation through shared discussion promote the emergence of a collective consciousness that supplants individual concerns (Joerin et al. 2009). Sharing data calls for participants’ interpretations and sets the base for a dialogue toward the development of joint objectives for the creation of new policies (Al-Kodmany 2001a).
The value of sharing information is supported by the idea in planning theory that information has a transformative function that can alter perceptions and mindsets, and it affects planning systems at all stages (Hanna 2000). The data presented in Table 2 could be discussed at group meetings and during the cultural plan steering committee meetings. These data are informative for a vast array of publics overcoming the barrier to two-way communication—the expert–citizen relationship, where the expert is the social scientist. The discussion emerging from the interpretations of each group involved could lead to collaborative policy formulations that could develop inclusive visions for the city’s arts activities.
Conclusions
Using the example of Madison, Wisconsin, I have suggested in this article two ways through which a GIS can help develop authentic participation in the context of cultural planning: first, providing a spatial explanation of the administrative systems and, second, organizing and comparing the community data of the different municipalities in the area. The outputs produced by GIS—maps and tables with comparative data—could be the tools used by the local government to educate and inform all the participants of the cultural planning process. They provide access to both the administrative systems and the data about the community, developing widespread empowerment and creating shared knowledge for a better dialogue. In this way, the barrier to authentic participation is overcome and the expert, both the administrator and the social scientist, “is reconceptualized as a ‘facilitator’ of public learning and empowerment” (Fisher 1993, 171).
This study helps to explain the importance of developing two-way communication in cultural planning. It highlights how a dialogical form of participation is likely to occur when all the participants are empowered by being educated in the political discourse and have shared knowledge as a common ground for the discussion. Furthermore, it explains that planning for place-making needs to start from an understanding of the spatial dimensions of administrative systems and the knowledge of spatially organized data about the community.
The two suggestions for possible use of a GIS could serve as an operational model that can be applied to other cities in the United States. They provide an example of the use of maps and data about the community as material that a local administration could prepare and share with all the participants during their first cultural planning meetings. This material would educate and inform the participants, establishing common ground for a dialogue. The same material could be posted online to provide access to a broader spectrum of citizens.
At this point, a word of caution is necessary. The aim toward authentic participation must include the understanding that collaboration has complex dynamics and several obstacles can be found in the way to its implementation (Innes and Booher 2010). Irvin and Stansbury (2004) point out that citizen participation has economic and social costs and may not even be effective. Regardless of the inevitable obstacles, the important aspects of participation that make the efforts valuable are an open dialogue between the citizens and their administration (King, Feltey, and Susel 1998; Hampton 2009) and the increased public engagement in policy making (Michels and De Graaf 2010; Halvorsen 2003).
The suggestions illustrated in the previous section are only the first step toward possible ways through which a local government could foster authentic participation in cultural planning, and much more research needs to be done. First of all, the two examples of the type of outputs a GIS could produce for Madison were limited to extending the access to quantitative data to everybody. But in addition to broadening the access to information produced by experts, another important aspect of participation requires that the sources of the data be from local knowledge that makes reference to moral and behavioral issues that are not considered in expert analysis (Hampton 2009). Future research could integrate the quantitative data with qualitative data collected from “local contextuality, aesthetics, or emotions” (Aitken and Michel 1995, 24) and from everyday life experiences (Elwood 2006; Aditya 2010; Aitken and Michel 1995).
A further step could be to develop empirical investigations of these suggestions. During the summer of 2009, at the beginning of the cultural planning process, I presented the GIS maps and tables about Madison at different meetings with arts groups. People at the meetings were eager to learn about the quantitative data and to be able to compare them among the different places. Moreover, they were very attentive in listening to the description of the administrative mechanisms already in place, the NRTs displayed on the map, as the majority was not aware of them. Future studies could analyze these observations more thoroughly, organizing surveys and interviews with participants before and right after the meetings. Collecting the reactions to the use of the materials produced with GIS could lead to important insights about the value of the suggested tools for fostering authentic participation. Moreover, an empirical analysis could reveal ways to improve these top-down strategies for an increased bottom-up involvement.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Timothy Halkowski, Mark Tolstedt, and Tanya Buckingham for their comments on earlier versions of the article. A special thanks goes to Corinna Neeb for her work with GIS, Keith Rice for his constant support, and the Edenfred Foundation for their residential fellowship in Madison. Many thanks also to anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Part of this work was funded by a University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point internal grant.