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written from Upper Rock, Wisconsin
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[Editor's note: This is only an introductory and theoretical section of another longer and more comparatively empirical work, analyzing and evaluating the political and ecological contexts of where public participation in land use planning has struck first in the United States. The introductory section of this paper is included in Towards a Bioregional State because it has an historical section discussing the environmental and political changes that the nation-state typically inflicted on the widespread more localized frameworks of representation--taking much representation away and localist participation away in the process of nation-state consolidation of jurisdictions instead of bringing more. I am arguing that it is the nation-state's unfortunate removal of much of this subsidiary jurisdiction and localization of politics which has been very influential in explaning why abstract formal democratic frameworks are innately environmental degradative, despite a discourse around nation-states as being more representative frameworks than what came before. To bring back more jurisdictional localism through the bioregional state is the route towards sustainability. In other words, a bioregional state is less creating something entirely novel in terms of human jurisdictions, it is only adding to the nation-state what it removed and shallowed in its initial consolidation: many more examples of localist jurisdictions and localist citizenship participation which were replaced with clientelistic participation in the nation-state context. The ideas in Toward a Bioregional State if anything are a maturing and filling out of the promise of the macro-state context of nation-state representation, adding what it has systemically and ecologically left out and left divided and conquered and unvoiced: the multiple particular localisms based on bioregions and watershed based developmental externalities in human health, ecology, and economics. Addressing this politics that is there already is a reflexive manner of dealing with the unsustainable aspects of the nation-state's frameworks. A more -more analytical description of four separate points that lead to environmental degradation in all nation-state frameworks of citizenship so far is described in Bioregional Letter #25]
CONTEXTS OF SUCCESSFUL, DURABLE PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN LAND USE PLANNING: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE 50 STATES, WITH AN INTRODUCTORY HISTORY OF HOW THE NATION-STATE GOT SO ENVIRONMENTALLY DEGRADATIVE
SUMMARY INTRODUCTIONWhat are the contexts that have led to the states’ different histories in the ‘quiet revolution,’ as it has been called by Cailles,[1] this move to some form of local, democratic checks and balances on defining the uses and misuses of private property, otherwise known as land use planning? And what are the contexts that strengthen and demote the durability of land use planning? Through a comparative study of the 50 states, this paper asks what environmental, economic, and political arrangements and regularities have been associated with land use planning in the United States more exclusively than for other states without such a history of land use planning. The point is to offer ‘importable’ guidelines for strategizing in different situations how land use planning could be institutionalized. This process can be seen as both an abstract reflection of social forces and interactions, as well as an entirely contextual and state-specific relational process of how citizenship is defined.
Though there have been many different rallying cries for land use planning in the United States—from zoning, growth management, Smart Growth (and even Grow Smart), etc., this paper concentrates on analyzing the contexts of public participation in land use planning (PPLUP) specifically. Why this particular interest in citizenship involvement and legitimation of land use planning? It is proposed that without a sound institutional strategy (and the awareness of different strategies for different contexts) land use planning will likely remain politically marginalized. This is an even more important assertion, particularly as many other institutional relationships that effect citizenship--judicial and legislative actions--are at present curtailing and challenging LUP and PPLUP in the states (LUP will denote ‘land use planning’ as a phrase in this paper.).
This paper is designed to widen the sense of the planning community in general to see that they are embarking on more than a technocratic ‘economic planning’ exercise, and that they are entering into the realm of how citizenship is effected by institutional relationships. Therefore, PPLUP is both historically (1) a ‘planning’ exercise and, in a novel sense, (2) a form of governmental institutional arrangement. To have this political feedback into the planning process, both are requirements, because citizenship and public participation in general is a form of institutionalized and specified relationship with the state and is only called into being on a regular basis by protocols, practices and detailed arrangements of organizational structures. Thus, it is proposed that planning as a discipline, in its interest in citizen participation, is moving from a historical concern with ‘economic planning,’ into ‘state-formation’ issues, if you will: issues that define citizenship.
This paper in many respects is a ‘white paper’ in its interest in popularizing and proposing strategies toward a more democratically informed land use process in the United States.
Land use planning is seen as one among many strategies in a move toward political, economic, and environmental sustainability. Sustainability is typically a word that has very little operationalization and a high degree of symbolic ‘mixed-use’ in public discourses. In this paper, sustainability requires some form of expansion of democratic, local purview over environmental, economic, and political activities—and institutionalizing this as a process. The interactions of these three seemingly abstract categories come into sharp, tangible and local relief whenever land use planning is offered as becoming something more than a ‘guideline document’ and when it moves into the realm of a legal standing instead of mostly symbolic standing, as the planning profession typically has been constructed by power relationships in the United States. As a consequence of PPLUP, citizenship itself, typically seen as another abstract relation of ‘individuals’ and the state, comes into sharp, tangible, and local relief—as an arrangement that has local specificity around the interrelationships of the environment, the economic organizations, and the political ‘citizenship-defining’ organizations of a locality. It is proposed that to understand this switch from a planning document that is advisory and technocratic, into a planning document that has legally enforceable claims, this requires an appreciation of how planning is moving into the realm typically reserved for politicians and campaigns: how does one generate a public consensus and maintain it, and how does one expand local democratic purview around land use planning? What are the factors that may lead to the applicability of different political strategies of land use planning, through a recognition of different state level contexts?
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE RELATIONS OF CITIZENSHIP: CITIZENSHIP’S DEFINING ROLE IN SUSTAINABILITY OR UNSUSTAINABILITY
Sustainability is seen as requiring a widening and a ‘spatialization’ (or localization) of citizenship, something that has been demoted in general with the social construction of citizenship in the nation-states of the past 200 years. What does this mean? It means that nation-state citizenship, typically defined as a relationship between an individual and the state in many cases was a demotion and a ‘thinning’ of an assortment of special responsibilities and ‘rights’ held by other forms of state/citizen relationships. As Charles Tilly, the historical sociologist, writes in a recently edited book Extending Citizenship, Reconfiguring States:
As Prak [in the same volume] also establishes, between 1750 and 1850, Europe’s consolidating states did not so much absorb these earlier forms of citizenship[,] as subordinate or even smash them in favor of relatively uniform categorization and obligation at a national scale. State consolidation thus thinned citizenship significantly for those who already participated in its rights and obligations at the smaller scale. For them, national citizenship offered a narrower range of rights and obligations than had the burghers’ militia service, participation in public ceremonies, supervision of poor relief, moral oversight, and involvement in public finance. For those who had previously lacked substantial local or regional citizenship, however, the establishment of national citizenship brought significant gains in rights at the cost of expanded obligations to national authorities. Much of the widespread Western transition from indirect to direct rule between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries consisted, precisely, of national citizenship’s establishing priority over local and regional systems of obligation. Those changes squeezed out autonomous middlemen. . . .or integrated then directly into national administrative hierarchies.[2]
It would have been convenient to us if nation-states had maintained existing localization of citizenship where it existed, or had a means of expanding simultaneously a locally specified and a nation-state ‘general’ citizenship. Actually, the only versions in the British colonies of this localized citizenship purview and lack of clientelistic relationships in the process of citizenship was in the pre-nation-state town meeting forms of governance. These places, unlike the other colonies on the British North American coast, considered the ‘unit’ of governance to be the urban or town area, instead of establishing despatialized county level governance bodies. Places with a high degree of town meeting and ‘spatialized’ governance and citizenship construction are most of the New England states, particularly the highly localized, participative, and citizenship agenda setting governances of Massachusetts (56%), Maine (46%), Connecticut (50%), New Hampshire (53%), and Vermont (35%) [Data from 1999]. Connecticut and Rhode Island for instance are without counties, as well—another sign of a lack of distanciated power drawn over wide areas and instead localized into deliberative population cores. With the expansion of the federal state in the United States, more and more despatialized senses of citizenship have been institutionalized in various ways. Plus, different areas of the Atlantic coastal colonies were settled by different groups, with different ideas of governance and different levels of political economic power that had effects on the structuring of the colony and then the later state’s particular relations of citizenship.[3] [4]
If a more spatialized sense of citizenship had been institutionalized as the historical course, it is proposed that we would have far less serious economic and political consolidation, as well as far less environmental degradation, particularly in European colonized areas of the world. Instead, the nation-state created ‘the individual,’ in many senses as a novel historical subject, and wiped away other forms of ‘wide’ citizenship on the local level, that had specific economic and political relational contexts.
In Prak’s article on Dutch urban politics in the consolidating nation-state:
"By gradually limiting the scope of urban autonomy, the central government of the Dutch state and its provincial agencies indirectly subverted urban citizenship, which was withering away while national citizenship gained in significance." [5]
Tilly writes of citizenship:
"Citizenship resembles the run of contracts in drawing visible lines between insiders and outsiders yet engaging third parties to respect and even enforce its provisions. It differs from most other contracts in (a) binding whole categories of persons rather than single individuals to each other, (b) involving differentiation among levels of degrees of members, and (c) directly engaging a government’s coercive power. To the extent that governments control substantial resources, including coercive means [that can be used by anyone], these three differentials single out citizenship as a potent form of contract liable to fierce contestation. Military service, eligibility for public office, voting rights, payment of taxes, public education, access to public services, and protection of rent-producing advantages—all frequent items in contracts of citizenship. . .have engaged serious struggle for centuries."[6]
Historically in the past 20 years, there has been a form of ‘dual globalization: (1) a widening move from many areas towards attempts at political and economic localization, (2) unlike (though contemporaneous with) the transnational corporation (TNC) pressuring towards an organizational centralization combined with distanciated political economic power. The former side of this ‘dual globalization’ is the ‘other’ globalization that is an expansion of a localized pressure for more political inclusion within varied states, and a changing of the frameworks of existing hierarchies of inclusion to maintain a locative expression of political economy (see Whitaker[7]; see Eduardo[8]; see Spretnak[9]). One example is the commencing of the decentralization of the British state to allow for more Irish, Welsh and Scottish localist democratic procedures. The Scottish parliament, disbanded in 1707 by British political and military victories, is ‘once more’ in operation. “Once more” is ironic because the context and the participants are of course sui genris expressions of the present and they are novel organizational structures created out of the present, though they are attaching themselves to social discourses that propose some form of “continuity regained.” However, a separate Scottish parliament (and state[10]) and a separate British parliament pre-1700 is different than the context of a British hierarchy granting local expansion of citizenship within the state hierarchy that is maintained.
Other structural novelties that define a more locally based ‘wider’ citizenship are more politically and economically based. For example, several areas in Brazil are working on a “participatory governmental budgeting” process that would define citizenship in terms of a representative series of meetings that democratize urban government agenda settings in terms of what to finance. These meetings (which are legally mandated as part of the governmental process) are held to deliberate exactly where to place finances in the urban area---exactly who gets infrastructural priorities, in what capacities, and how soon. Its most well known example is in Porto Alegre, in the state of Rio Grande de Sul, Brazil. However, it occurred in many areas after Brazil’s 1985 International Monetary Fund-mandated constitutional change, that required as a criterion for lending, widespread demotion of social services and state other distributionary activities from the federal level. Much was ‘devolved’ to the local state level in that federation, much as ‘unfunded mandates’ for prisons and infrastructure were legalized on the level of the federal Congress in the United States, while requiring the states to expand taxation to cover declining or removed financing schemes from the federal state level. Other examples are PPLUP whether on the state or on the exclusively urban level (like Portland and partially, the Twin Cities, in Minnesota), and forms of city/county consolidation.
These quotes and examples are meant to be illustrative of how the political organizations of society (as much as the biased economic determinism discourses of liberalism or Marxism of the past 150 years) are important in structuring human relationships, and how citizenship is an expression of formal organizational practice, procedures, laws, and judicial activities—all of which define citizenship expression. In terms of PPLUP, it requires that we understand the important role that state organizations have on the definition and practice of citizenship. Whether citizenship is expanded or widened by state organizational power—or, whether it is effectively curtailed and maintained in a ‘thin’ arrangement which accords little organizational mobilization or democratic feedback on the local level and instead channels its in a despatialized way toward capital cities or distanciated political parties—depends on how governmental structures influence the political feedback process through the organization of legal and judicial proceedings. Case law and legislative laws become the context of the selected messages of political representation, and they can be seen as changing the context and practices of citizenship on the local level.
Inclusive in this would be PPLUP. To understand the novelties of PPLUP, it requires that we understand it as a novel and ‘widening’ form of citizenship that is being generated. Particularly for the United States, as novel forms of citizenships are being generated (and of course being opposed), they are calling forth novel frameworks of politics and novel bases of politics. It is important to understand PPLUP as against previously existing forms of ‘thin’ citizenship that tend to maintain processes of environmental degradation. These versions of ‘thin’ citizenship are little more than a form of political consumerism or economic consumerism of established organizational forms that abet environmental degradation typically, whereas PPLUP depends upon political agenda formation, legislative strategies, and legal offense/defense strategies within the judiciary.
To get more specific than simply saying that the structures of the state effect the expression of citizenship formation, citizenship as it related to PPLUP is a two pronged expression of legislative and judicial activity and how they support each other or detract from each other. This interlinking or destabilizing of legislative/judicial relationships will be discussed later as a recognizable feature (and likely, a requirement, as will be discussed) for PPLUP.
So, it is proposed that with PPLUP, we are entering into an era of expanding locality (spatialized) based citizenship arrangements, which are based on changed organizational forms of state political definitions of citizenship. Since the legal standing of citizenship is based on a relation between state structures and ‘individual bodies,’ in the Foucauldian sense[11] (the externally coercive power relationships and socially legitimating discourse use involved in maintaining power relationships), it is proposed that sustainability requires this expansion of the political claims-making abilities of people on the local level (discourses) as well as changes in the way citizenship is institutionalized (organizational changes), with an aim to widen citizenship’s appraisal and breadth over environmental and economic issues, as an institutionalized process. PPLUP, like sustainability it is posed, is a form of citizenship/state relationship. I am talking less about religio-mystical witch hunting claims on people, and strictly talking about widening democratic feedback and purview over environmental and economic social relationships.
Historically, the demotion of these more spatialized citizenships has been associated both with the expansion of the nation-state as well as massive environmental degradation. Both tend to underwrite each other in the sense of demoting citizenship to only be defined as a relation to abstract, interchangeable, distanciated, despatialized individuals and the state, instead of relationships between particular groups and individuals on the local level where environmental degradation actually occurs. PPLUP is generating novel and expanded forms and ‘rights claims’ of citizenship on the local level.
It is important to realize this because LUP in general does indeed challenge existing frameworks of politically sponsored environmental degradation in the attempt to provide this more localized political feedback upon specific institututionalizations of degradative practices. Sustainability requires a localist citizenship expansion. PPLUP requires a widening of the democratic ‘rights claims’ and the state/citizen organizational structures that have purview over economics and environmental integrity on the local level, as a consequence. The question becomes, how to organize structural relationships to widen this sense of public participation and in such a way that it maintains its legitimacy, in the face of challenges of discourses, laws, and judicial activities that would make citizenship based on shallow individualism, and a citizenship based on underwriting environmental degradation?
METHODOLOGY OF ANALYZING P.P.L.U.P., IN THE UNITED STATES SO FAR
Methodologically, there are two major sections to this paper. One will detail and isolate certain generalizable state level contexts that seem to be associated (or unassociated) with durable land use planning so far in the United States, particularly PPLUP. In what contexts do forms of citizenship become expanded and spatialized, instead of abstract and interchangeable? In what contexts do local citizenship organizational relationships of the state expand their purview over economic and environmental issues? What is it about the places that use planning as a legally and judicially enforceable framework of citizenship participation? Taking it for granted that the ‘easiest fall first’ into this framework, we can analyze PPLUP institutionalization as a form of process that is expanding into other states. Plus, we can analyze PPLUP as a process where certain contextual factors that make it easier going are reflected in the PPLUP group so far. These can be used as hints for organizational strategies for similar areas, and they can show the way to strategize for other areas that are contextually different than the PPLUP examples so far. As a corollary to this, one can note how the demotion of these contexts would tend to undermine the political pressures for these changes in citizenship as well. This is either within the state level (the urban level), or ‘at’ the state level of organization, or both.
In other words, this section will be the political ecological analysis of the paper. Setting up for the second section of the paper (where strategies are analyzed, see below), much of this first section’s analysis will look into general contexts where PPLUP tends to exist and where it tends to falter. This section is loosely organized into three areas: an environmental analysis, an economic analysis, and a political analysis.
SECTION TWO
However, the paper wants to avoid proposing that PPLUP comes out of some nebulous framework of interactions that are outside human participation, and that it vanishes as easily (or as contentiously) as it came. The second section of the paper, will discuss how the varying contexts of the states’ organizational structures, compared in the general context of the states discussed in Section One, generate varying forms of citizenship as a political relation between individuals, groups and state actors on the local level. It is through this organizational arrangement that preferences and expands citizenship that PPLUP is maintained as a process. Since there is nothing called abstract land use planning, one should comprehend that PPLUP requires a highly specified and localized citizenship, instead of something called ‘abstract citizenship input.’ The particularities of the state relationships always mold—for ill or good—the expression of the integrative potential, or divisory potential, of certain spatially defined areas of citizenship, and typically they create very despatialized senses of citizenship exclusively in nation-states. The PPLUP calls for social relationship investments as much as it does tangible infrastructural investments. Different trajectories of these state’s histories (summarized in a comparative way along select categories) require different land use strategies of citizenship based on an appreciation of the demographics, the environment, and the organizational contexts of different states.
[1] Cailles, David L. 1994. “The Quiet Revolution Revisited: A Quarter Century of Progress,” The Urban Laywer 26(2): 197-213.
[2] Tilly, Charles. “Why Worry About Citizenship?” in Extending Citizenship, Reconfiguring States, eds. Michael Hannigan and Charles Tilly. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999) p. 253-4.
[3] Fischer, David Hackett. 1989. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press.
[4] Hallman, Howard A. 1977. Small and Large Together: Governing the Metropolis. Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications.
[5] Prak, Maarten. 1999. “Burghers into Citizens: Urban and National Citizenship in the Netherlands During the Revolutionary Era (c. 1800),” in Extending Citizenship, Reconfiguring States, eds. Michael Hannigan and Charles Tilly, p. 28.
[6] Tilly, p. 253.
[7] Whitaker, Mark. 1998. “Local, National, Global: Three Strategies for DeGlobalization,” www.sit.wisc.edu/~mrkdwhit/cdi1.htm
[8] Eduardo, Grillo Fernandez. 1998. “Development or Cultural Affirmation in the Andes?”, in The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development, ed. Frederique Appfel-Marglin, pp. 124-145.
[9] Spretnak, Charlene. 1997. The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World. P. 11-36.
[10] Note: The “British” Isles were actually seven separate states. A long process led to consolidation within England’s monarchy.
[11] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. ; Burchell, Graham; Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, eds. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality : with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1991.
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