This week’s readings were placed perfectly with the ending of this course. This entire semester, we have been speaking about the causes and effects of gentrification, and what the solutions to those causes and effects could be. In these readings, we find a perfect mix of local advocacy and transparency from government officials within community planning. “Progressive community planning is defined here as planning that seeks to achieve local and global equality, social inclusion, and environmental justice (Angotti, 8).” Thus, the solution proposed in the readings is the idea of the people of a community standing up against proposed plans which could severely alter their communities. However, the key is not just advocacy and resistance, but remaining persistent in the advocacy. The persistence is what led to the success of many community planning projects. However, as much as a the people want to be involved with projects, often time politicians distract the people and fool them into thinking that they are being helpful in the exact manner they wish to be. For example, with the destruction of the Twin Towers, there was huge public uproar over the plans of building more offices in that area instead of rebuilding the towers. However, officials had given the public menial tasks to do and continued to carry out their agenda anyways, which made the people’s help rather futile. Thus, we can see that the advocacy is not as effective if people do not consistently hold politicians liable. As we see in this article about
community planning, it can be effective.
This article discusses how Circulate San Diego, a group which provides plans for modern urban housing and transportation solutions, has been taking jabs at community planners in San Diego. They believe that “the reality is that the [community planning group] process can act as a barrier to achieving some of the City of San Diego’s housing and transportation goals. The [community planning group] process must be reformed to help [the groups] become part of the solution to advancing citywide goals, instead of being frequent opponents to progress and change.” As a result of this, Circulate requested for an audit of the internal working of the community planners, to assess if they were effective and if they were democratic enough for them to function properly. To the surprise of Circulate, both the audit and the judge’s review found that they found “little evidence to support the assertion that [community planning groups] frequently make requests or demands for changes that are frivolous or unrelated to the project under review.” Thus, it is evident that the community planning groups are effective, especially in a highly rented area such as San Diego. What I see from this article is that officials are trying to erode the power and influence of these community planning groups, and the only solution to that would be active and persistent resistance by the community groups.
