Welcome to Good for Cities, the podcast where we look at the ideas, policies, and projects shaping urban life, and ask the big question: Are they actually making our cities better? I'm Matti Siemiatycki, Director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto School of Cities.
On today's show, we're tackling the thorny question of whether public consultation is broken and has it become a barrier to building affordable housing and critical infrastructure. Public consultation originally emerged as a response to the top-down, heavy-handed urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 60s. In the decades since, public consultation has come to be seen as a tool to improve the quality of decisions and resolve deep community tensions over the winners and losers of urban change over time. Formal rules and mandates were implemented, requiring increasingly extensive consultation, often backed by citizen rights to legal appeal. And yet today, public consultation is facing growing criticisms from all sides, for some community participation never lived up to its ideals. It was too often dominated by those with the loudest voice, the most resources to participate, and the greatest incentive to resist change. Another critique has been that, far from genuine, community consultation can be manipulated to manufacture consent. Recently, perhaps the loudest critique of public consultation is that it delays and drives up the cost of much needed housing and infrastructure. From this perspective, seemingly endless consultation and legal appeals are contributing to the sense that it's impossible to get anything done in too many cities, and so the pendulum swings. On today's episode, I talk through the current state of community engagement and consultation with Crystal Legacy, a professor of urban planning at the University of Melbourne. Crystal's work explores participation, planning, and the power dynamics that shape how decisions get made. Crystal describes what she sees as a crisis of consultation, a chronic, normalized condition where input is gathered but not always carried through, where formal processes dominate, and where trust can erode over time, so how do we distinguish between participation that informs decisions and processes that simply legitimize them? And what would it look like to reorient consultation towards a balance between speed and accountability? Hi, Crystal, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 2:16
Hi, Mattie, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 2:18
Yeah, it's great to have you. So today we're going to talk about public consultation, a topic which is getting a lot of attention recently, and where the pendulum seems to swing from very little consultation to a great focus on consultation. So it seems like we've been in a moment over the last few decades of huge emphasis on consultation. What do we get right when we think about consultation as an important part of planning and city building?
Speaker 2 2:45
What do we get right? I think what we get right is the assertion, and that it is important, and that there is an effort to build consultation into planning processes, as well as infrastructure delivery, I've seen improvement in public engagement, significant improvement, where I'd go so far as to say that in the moment of consultation, when one attends an event, the event is typically well put together, well curated, well facilitated, not always, and maybe we'll get into some of that over the course of our discussion today, but I think we're getting much better at it, but the concerns I have is, is, is how it situates in the broader decision making around planning and infrastructure investments, and what eventually materializes in the built environment thereafter.
Speaker 1 3:47
So that's a great segue, because you've written about a crisis of public participation. So what do you mean by that? When you look out into this wide world of engagement, what do you see as the crisis point?
Speaker 2 3:58
Oh, look, the crisis point. I think I'd like to talk about the crisis in a number of different ways. One is, I think there's a crisis around how we talk about participation. I think typically when we see something go wrong in planning or go wrong in infrastructure delivery, we're really quick to say we need more consultation, we need better participatory processes, more participatory governance, but then we kind of stop there. We don't go further into, well, what does that actually mean on the ground? Like, what does it, what does having better participation look like, and how does that then inform in different ways the decisions that impact lives and communities in places, so there's a crisis in terms of, like, how do we theorize it? I don't think there, I think we need to advance theory, but then also the crisis is that there's a political economy around participation, um. There are political actors and there's economic forces that are bearing down on what counts as participation, whose voices get to count, to what sort of knowledges get picked up or left behind in in any conversation we might have about the future of the city. So it's a crisis, in part because it, and it's isn't it acute crisis or is it a chronic crisis? I would probably frame it as chronic. I think the crisis is such that we have normalized it. It's almost really hard to see this crisis because we see opportunities to go out and engage in conversations about where about the design specifications of a new train station or the sighting of a new metro stop, but then we just kind of, we lose sight of what, then over time, where does that, where do those contributions go, and how do they get taken up or lost through the duration of planning, which, which I like to pick up, has a temporality to it. There's a time component that makes it really, really complicated. Infrastructure planning is complex by virtue of many actors, many governance, many tiers of government, but it's also really complex because it occurs over many time frames and time scales as well,
Speaker 1 6:23
so just to ground this conversation, can we give some, give folks an example, a few examples of consultation, like what do we mean, just so people really know exactly what we're talking about here? Do you have some examples that come to mind of either some good consultation or pro processes that you saw that you were just like that was terrible, that did not work, that was not meaningful in any sense of the word.
Speaker 2 6:44
Yeah, I think there are so many different examples of consultation, and I'd like to differentiate consultation from participation as well, but we may get there to this conversation. But a town hall meeting could be consultation, a planning panel's hearing could be seen as consultation, a community meeting could be consultation. We could see consultation come in the form of participation on a community liaison group or a reference panel. It could be a citizens jury or a budgeting exercise, those are formal expressions of consultation or participation, but where I see there's a crisis is in leaving out the informal ways in which communities or individuals might participate in city making that extend beyond government kind of sanctioned events that can be quite episodic, so I'd like to kind of push the boundaries of what counts as participation to include those spaces that are not well curated, that are out in the world, where we might see a citizen, we might see a protest, we might see a sit-in, we might see a, you know, we might see a community-organized neighborhood meeting, or a community-organized advocacy event of some kind, like festival. It could be a festival. I've been to so many festivals as community engagement, but they sit outside of formal prescribed structures of consultation,
Speaker 1 8:21
it seems to me that in the abstract, more consultation is always better, like, who could be against having more people involved, but is more always better, or is it quality as well as quantity? Here,
Speaker 2 8:35
this is a really good question. There is a ongoing debate in urban studies or in public policy around consultation, so process versus outcome, right. We need to get to a point where we need to make a decision, right. There's a lot at stake, there's a lot of money at stake, but there's lives and livelihoods at stake as well. We were talking about infrastructure and planning. Now, when I think about consultation and participation, my vision for it is to move away from, again, the event, you know, the town hall meeting, the citizens jury, and think about how we can integrate participation in its different forms of consultation throughout planning, so that it's not just when there's an announcement that there's a project going to come forward or there's a vision that needs to be planned, that that consultation and participation is integral to planning. It's hard to actually disconnect, and but it's really hard to imagine what that might look like, though, right? Especially in like liberal representative democracies, like the one we are in here in Canada and in Australia, where I work, but a lot of really good literature and really good models I think are coming from global south contexts, where you know there's a lot more sort of active citizenship being taken up and informing and shaping planning outcomes in different kinds of ways, so I think there's much that we can learn from these. Other contexts that are also shaping the way I think about consultation and participation. The other dimension, just to just to add to it, is just, how does this sit in relationship to this thing called democracy, which people keep telling me is under threat, and we keep seeing examples of that. So
Speaker 1 10:14
that was the thread I wanted to pull at, and I'm going to push a little bit just to try to get at some of the tension points in the debates that are happening out there around consultation, so let's start with that point around participation in democratic countries. I mean, how do you do you see public engagement as a democratic undertaking, or is it one that reinforces the views of a mobilized minority? The
Speaker 2 10:38
concern is when groups have the capacity to generate enough power where they have veto over planning outcomes, right? And we see this all the time, particularly in the conversation around housing at the moment, and we might use the term NIMBY, not in my backyard, could be used as a pejorative as a way of kind of giving identifying groups of individuals or groups of communities that are are capable of stopping projects, but I don't think they're all some are opposed to change for sure, and others are actually have really legitimate and important concerns about proposals that need to be heard, and I think where we get stuck is in thinking about participation as in the worst case form of that, which is the kinds of Nibby NIMBYs that are trying to stop development for a range of reasons, which may not always be completely genuine to the demands and the concerns in the challenges that cities face
Speaker 1 11:41
just to really drill down on that. How do we differentiate between arguments that are NIMBY focused and ones that are voicing legitimate concerns? I mean, in many debates on all spheres of planning or city building topics, you'll hear people say, "I'm not opposed to X, it's just I don't agree with it here, or I think it should be three stories smaller, or I don't mind this project. I just don't think the developers should be profiting. So, how should we understand when, when these are NIMBY, like "Not in my backyard" complaints, and when they are legitimate concerns?
Speaker 2 12:17
I think that I think to answer this question, we need to consider the structural constraints around participation at the moment. In some of my work, I've been looking with Janice Berry and Morgan Boyco and Matt Novachewski at the professionalization of participation, and what we're seeing in that space is the rise of consultants, so a consultant class, which isn't new, we've seen this in planning for some time, but what's interesting, as it relates to participation, is that consultants tend to tender for projects across many different geographies in different places, and as someone who teaches planning, and I teach participation, one of the things that we like to talk a lot about is place-based planning and planning that is situated in a context where we get to understand complex histories, we get to understand the communities that situated in those places, we get to understand the dynamics, and we get to understand the concerns, so much so that when we go into a process of formal consultation we're not taken off guard by what those concerns might be, and we're able to kind of hear, we were able to kind of discern and differentiate the NIMBY kind of like backlash no to all the things to a more nuanced conversation around, yes, but I think I'm concerned about the design quality of this particular developer. I have concerns about overshadowing, or whatever it might be, or parking - parking, of course, is always a popular one,
Speaker 1 13:54
always,
Speaker 2 13:55
always. So, there's a structural component to this problem, so I don't think I could. I think I don't think it's reasonable to ask someone to go in into a community that they don't otherwise know a whole lot about and be able to say you're a NIMBY and we're not going to listen to you, and that's just not reasonable. It's not a reasonable request, but structurally, the way our planning system is designed, at least in the one that I'm working in, in Australia. It's really hard to find community participation experts that have a long relationship with a place and its communities to understand fully the complexity and to have built up the trust to go into those communities and have hard conversations.
Speaker 1 14:40
One of the areas where I've seen the pendulum swing recently is, you know, I think that argument until recently in planning circles and city building circles that, you know, locals knew best about their neighborhoods and what they needed and community character is critically important, all of which I agree with. There's a new stream of thought that. That there have been voices that are not involved in those discussions, or the people that don't live there yet, who have been priced out, or for whom they never had access to those communities, and they were never going to participate in those consultations, or were never invited, and so actually, what's what's been happening is that's led to a lot of neighborhoods being frozen in time, and you know, people who potentially, and our housing getting more expensive because we haven't been able to build and establish neighborhoods, and our infrastructure certainly becoming more costly to build because the processes take a really long time, and so have you seen that any of that discussion come about? And how is that playing out in your, in some of your own work?
Speaker 2 15:40
I haven't looked at this directly, but you know, looking at housing as a really good example of this, we've got whole neighborhoods, no doubt, here in Toronto, but certainly in Melbourne and Sydney, where I spend a lot of time, that have been locked, development has been locked out, and there's been quite a lot of attempts across strategic plans and across political, different political suasions to try to like gain access into these communities to China, you know, to kind of rebuild, build a narrative around density, around housing choice, or housing supply. The the angle that I find really interesting is around intergenerational change and how to have those conversations across those that are property owners in the moment, those that are future renters or current renters, and those that are might be transiting through the community for a variety of reasons, maybe they're students or otherwise, and being able to understand the bespoke needs of those different kind of groups, and how to have those conferences, how to bring people together. If we are in a period of democratic demise or decline, part of that is being expressed through social polarization, and we've got groups, and the Yim Bs and NIMBYs, two groups that we can kind of play with to help make the point. We polarize debates, we other we other individuals and somehow we have not lost our capacity, perhaps we lost the capacity, but certainly lost our our way of understanding how to bring groups together to have hard conversations, and I don't know if we have the appropriate participatory tools to do that. Well, I know deliberative democracy, deliberative panels, as in the form of citizens juries, are trying to do that, doing, you know, randomly selecting individuals to bring them together to have a conversation about x or y, but I'm not quite sure how they're taking on issues where there are diametrically opposed views, and how we are figuring out how to build a common understanding and build commonality towards a common way of living in shared space. This is an area that I think the participation literature and literature in public administration are trying to grapple with, especially as it relates to trust, because we know that mistrust, and then, of course, mis and disinformation is making this area of community engagement quite complex, very and very dynamic at the moment.
Speaker 1 18:12
I think if anything, there's been a pushback against consultation, and the most prominent one of late has been the abundance crowd, the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book, and then the acolytes and folks who have come and followed that, who've essentially said that consultation has slowed decision making to a halt, it's made it impossible to build, we can't get to even a progressive future if at the pace that we're going, and a lot of it is because of citizen voice and people blocking progress, and you see that in a lot of Toronto neighborhoods, including in projects in my own neighborhood, where folks came out and said we don't want relatively modest sized buildings along a major avenue, because of issues around over shadows, because of issues around garbage access and waste removal, because of parking, so those are, you know, we have seen that, and I do wonder if actually it's becoming more polarized, and in the absence of trying to fix consultation, instead what you're seeing is folks from both the left and the abundance crowd, and then the more populous side of this saying, you know, we just want to go at pace, because it's results that matter, not just, not just a process
Speaker 2 19:24
thinking about abundance. I think what that book and that movement is inviting us to consider is the relationship between process and outcome, right? I think communities, in some places, this is not a universal claim, but in some places might be backlashing because infrastructural offerings in the past or planning outcomes in the past have not, have not delivered high amenity, have maybe delivered outcomes where there's been lots of trade-offs to a point where the things that were promised early on the conversation were things that were then left. Out towards the end of delivery, and so again, that builds that mistrust, right? So I think the critical component to the abundance conversation is, as I've heard Ezra Klein discuss, you know, what's the political vision to building this abundance agenda? Likewise, in building a political agenda, what's the participatory uptake, right? Political agendas always need a constituency, so I don't think we can just abandon participation. I think participation is always part and parcel with planning, but I do think we need to evolve it and think about it in a, in the context in which we find ourselves, where social polarization, mistrust, and mis and disinformation are now realities that require a different kind of participatory process, and certainly newfound ways of being discerning in discussions about our future.
Speaker 1 20:51
I think that's the key, is how you balance speed, meaningful input, and public trust. I think going slow in this day and age is not going to work. I think people are seeing the impacts of that, they're seeing costs skyrocket to build anything, they're seeing their infrastructure deteriorating before their eyes, and they're seeing housing getting more affordable as it can't be added. Do you think that consultation works? Like, is it still a premise that's functional in a society, as you mentioned, that's that polarized, that that, and also I guess to speak directly to the abundance discussion, that there are real trade-offs. Like, I think we sometimes think that you can talk these things out and we'll come to some type of consensus, but there are real winners and losers, and I do wonder if at some point, you know, the consultation, as much input you can do, as much input as you want, and you're not going to get to a resolution that's going to make everyone happy.
Speaker 2 21:46
Absolutely. Look, I don't expect your readership to read any of my articles, but you know, I am pretty critical of consensus-based consultation. I do find that that is quite problematic, one and also unrealistic. I think if we do consensus-based consultation, we tend to miss really important components where there are trade-offs, and there will be winners and losers, and to have a really mature, sophisticated conversation around that is essential.
Speaker 1 22:14
I think that's where I feel the most comfortable is that we do need to talk to people. I think a world in which there's zero consultation and no opportunity for individual input into decision and community input into into decisions that affect them. I think that's a recipe for bad outcomes, and we've seen those bad outcomes in our cities. I mean, we saw cities getting parts of cities getting bulldozed, and we saw a siting of noxious facilities into low-income and racialized communities, so we've seen what that looks like, but I also think having endless consultations and appeal processes that can tie projects up for decades is also problematic, and that's where I come back to this question about the democratic element of it, like, is it democratic if you can have relatively small groups of informed and engaged citizens that can tie up projects for years and decades, like, how does that fit into a system where the party in power was elected by a majority of the population and they were empowered then to go make decisions on their behalf, and they're accountable at the ballot box, whenever that next election
Speaker 2 23:20
is. Yeah, look, I think I need to refer back to my experience in Victoria, so Melbourne, Victoria in particular, where we have had the largest injection of public fine public dollars into infrastructure that we've, that we've seen in a generation. We do not have an integrated transport plan, so we're building a lot of transport infrastructure, but we don't have an integrated plan around what that infrastructure, how that infrastructure will come together. In 2018 on the eva of our state election, we had our premier announce that his government, if re-elected, was going to build the largest rail line that would circle metropolitan Melbourne, hitting all the, you know, middle suburbs, 90 kilometers, $90 billion an extraordinary amount of money, not connected to a strategic plan that they had just also delivered, and not, and not a priority within Infrastructure Victoria, which is a statutory agency that that government put in place to ensure that we're getting better infrastructure outcomes, so there's a lot of cynicism where I'm writing around government's capacity to deliver projects that are reflecting their strategic vision that they themselves have also set out, so we talk a lot about the gap between strategic planning and infrastructure delivery, and our strategic plans are often really bold, you know, they're glossy documents, they're political documents, as we, as we know, and they say things like we need to invest in. Public transport, we need to improve service quality out in the suburbs. We need to make sure that our growing outer suburbs, particularly in the West, in metropolitan Melbourne, are being prioritized, and that's not what we're getting in the delivery. So, community consultation, there is a high level of cynicism where I'm writing, and I think the cynicism is warranted. Where I am finding hope is in following community groups that have found ways to organize and build networks with other like-minded community groups. So I'm really interested in this idea of solidarity, and I'm interested in community-based planning. I know in North America there's a stronger tradition around community-based planning, not so much in Australia. We talk about social planning, which is usually about delivering social services and housing, but it is - there's no community-led conceptualization of planning. What I'm seeing now is community groups that are very concerned about the politics of the day by all state governments of all suasions going in and doing consultation to a high standard and delivering something that is not what the conversation is even about, and in that context, we can't. I can't help, as someone who is studying the politics of infrastructure planning and the politics of public participation, to be asking the question, what is going on? And so I'm.. this is where I come into this other body of work that I'm doing, Chris Gibson and Dallas Rogers, around structural gaslighting.
Speaker 1 26:41
I wanted to ask you about that. So, yeah, let's, let's get into, let's get into this idea of structural gaslighting, because you've introduced it, and I think it does, it fits within the context of what we're talking about, about how consultations can then be used and misused in order to push through projects that may not actually have the community support, so do you want to talk about what you mean by that idea of structural gaslighting and infrastructure planning? It is
Speaker 2 27:07
really important to be clear about what we mean when we talk about gaslighting, and it is a term that helps us to see different forms of manipulation and the affect the cost of gaslighting on individuals that are the target of gaslighting, which typically might be a felt sense that their experience of the lived world is not a true reflection of what that lived world is, so they might defer their knowing of what's happening to themselves to someone else, right. So they're being gaslit, and the affect of that is an limiting or a reduction in their deliberative capacities, their capacity to to give a testimony to their lived experience. So that's gaslighting. There's a body of literature that has been arguing and showing that whole communities can be gaslit as well, and there we see examples through cultural gaslighting and racial gaslighting as examples. Now, in gaslighting, what typically is happening is an epistemic silencing, so a silencing of different ways of knowing, so again, that could be an expression of lived experience. So, once we start thinking about the possibility that whole communities can be gaslit, we start to ask the question, are there structural considerations there that are making that, so making that possible, and we start, we may start to look at structures of social subjugation, different ways in which power gets expressed in the city, and ensures that some groups remain winners and other groups remain kind of losers in the, in the, you know, the social and spatial dynamics of a city, now bringing that into infrastructure planning, and again going back to what I just laid out in terms of my experience of being a critical social researcher in an Australian context, and being quite frustrated with what I've been seeing over the last 15 years of doing this quasi ethnographic participatory action style research was, I wasn't quite sure what was going on, I couldn't, I couldn't quite put my finger on what the problem was. So I wrote an article in 2017 and called it the crisis of participation. And then I kind of stopped there, I wasn't quite sure where else to go with that, I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what it was until I started working with Chris Gibson and Dallas Rogers, who are two incredible critical urban geographers who are also thinking about the political economy of infrastructure delivery as well. I started thinking about sort of deal making and how deals get free. Formed within the context of maybe public private partnerships, so which links to the work that you, of course, Maddie, and then the thing that becomes really interesting is, well, if structural gaslighting is something that could happen to whole communities, well, then how does it happen? So going back to gaslighting, which can be an interpersonal phenomenon, there are tactics and tools that are available to someone who might be gaslighting in an interpersonal relationship. It could be love, it could be trust, it could be empathy. So these are things that are really important to human relationships, right? They're virtues, they're wonderful, beautiful things. And in planning, something that we hold up as a virtue, as something that's inherently good to planning, is participation right? So, on both sides, big infrastructure proponent, government, maybe through a PPP or an otherwise planning process, needs participation to build a social license, right, to build a social license to get the community on site to hopefully de-risk the project over time, right, to ensure that it doesn't get stuck in, stuck through appeals or or other kinds of protests that might lead to an actual cancelation of a project, which, of course, we saw in Melbourne, in the East-West link in 2014 So big infrastructure, big government needs participation. Likewise, communities need participation too, because that's their opportunity to have a seat at the table. So, if they're going to inform a process, they do that through formal participatory channels.
On today's show, we're tackling the thorny question of whether public consultation is broken and has it become a barrier to building affordable housing and critical infrastructure. Public consultation originally emerged as a response to the top-down, heavy-handed urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 60s. In the decades since, public consultation has come to be seen as a tool to improve the quality of decisions and resolve deep community tensions over the winners and losers of urban change over time. Formal rules and mandates were implemented, requiring increasingly extensive consultation, often backed by citizen rights to legal appeal. And yet today, public consultation is facing growing criticisms from all sides, for some community participation never lived up to its ideals. It was too often dominated by those with the loudest voice, the most resources to participate, and the greatest incentive to resist change. Another critique has been that, far from genuine, community consultation can be manipulated to manufacture consent. Recently, perhaps the loudest critique of public consultation is that it delays and drives up the cost of much needed housing and infrastructure. From this perspective, seemingly endless consultation and legal appeals are contributing to the sense that it's impossible to get anything done in too many cities, and so the pendulum swings. On today's episode, I talk through the current state of community engagement and consultation with Crystal Legacy, a professor of urban planning at the University of Melbourne. Crystal's work explores participation, planning, and the power dynamics that shape how decisions get made. Crystal describes what she sees as a crisis of consultation, a chronic, normalized condition where input is gathered but not always carried through, where formal processes dominate, and where trust can erode over time, so how do we distinguish between participation that informs decisions and processes that simply legitimize them? And what would it look like to reorient consultation towards a balance between speed and accountability? Hi, Crystal, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 2:16
Hi, Mattie, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 2:18
Yeah, it's great to have you. So today we're going to talk about public consultation, a topic which is getting a lot of attention recently, and where the pendulum seems to swing from very little consultation to a great focus on consultation. So it seems like we've been in a moment over the last few decades of huge emphasis on consultation. What do we get right when we think about consultation as an important part of planning and city building?
Speaker 2 2:45
What do we get right? I think what we get right is the assertion, and that it is important, and that there is an effort to build consultation into planning processes, as well as infrastructure delivery, I've seen improvement in public engagement, significant improvement, where I'd go so far as to say that in the moment of consultation, when one attends an event, the event is typically well put together, well curated, well facilitated, not always, and maybe we'll get into some of that over the course of our discussion today, but I think we're getting much better at it, but the concerns I have is, is, is how it situates in the broader decision making around planning and infrastructure investments, and what eventually materializes in the built environment thereafter.
Speaker 1 3:47
So that's a great segue, because you've written about a crisis of public participation. So what do you mean by that? When you look out into this wide world of engagement, what do you see as the crisis point?
Speaker 2 3:58
Oh, look, the crisis point. I think I'd like to talk about the crisis in a number of different ways. One is, I think there's a crisis around how we talk about participation. I think typically when we see something go wrong in planning or go wrong in infrastructure delivery, we're really quick to say we need more consultation, we need better participatory processes, more participatory governance, but then we kind of stop there. We don't go further into, well, what does that actually mean on the ground? Like, what does it, what does having better participation look like, and how does that then inform in different ways the decisions that impact lives and communities in places, so there's a crisis in terms of, like, how do we theorize it? I don't think there, I think we need to advance theory, but then also the crisis is that there's a political economy around participation, um. There are political actors and there's economic forces that are bearing down on what counts as participation, whose voices get to count, to what sort of knowledges get picked up or left behind in in any conversation we might have about the future of the city. So it's a crisis, in part because it, and it's isn't it acute crisis or is it a chronic crisis? I would probably frame it as chronic. I think the crisis is such that we have normalized it. It's almost really hard to see this crisis because we see opportunities to go out and engage in conversations about where about the design specifications of a new train station or the sighting of a new metro stop, but then we just kind of, we lose sight of what, then over time, where does that, where do those contributions go, and how do they get taken up or lost through the duration of planning, which, which I like to pick up, has a temporality to it. There's a time component that makes it really, really complicated. Infrastructure planning is complex by virtue of many actors, many governance, many tiers of government, but it's also really complex because it occurs over many time frames and time scales as well,
Speaker 1 6:23
so just to ground this conversation, can we give some, give folks an example, a few examples of consultation, like what do we mean, just so people really know exactly what we're talking about here? Do you have some examples that come to mind of either some good consultation or pro processes that you saw that you were just like that was terrible, that did not work, that was not meaningful in any sense of the word.
Speaker 2 6:44
Yeah, I think there are so many different examples of consultation, and I'd like to differentiate consultation from participation as well, but we may get there to this conversation. But a town hall meeting could be consultation, a planning panel's hearing could be seen as consultation, a community meeting could be consultation. We could see consultation come in the form of participation on a community liaison group or a reference panel. It could be a citizens jury or a budgeting exercise, those are formal expressions of consultation or participation, but where I see there's a crisis is in leaving out the informal ways in which communities or individuals might participate in city making that extend beyond government kind of sanctioned events that can be quite episodic, so I'd like to kind of push the boundaries of what counts as participation to include those spaces that are not well curated, that are out in the world, where we might see a citizen, we might see a protest, we might see a sit-in, we might see a, you know, we might see a community-organized neighborhood meeting, or a community-organized advocacy event of some kind, like festival. It could be a festival. I've been to so many festivals as community engagement, but they sit outside of formal prescribed structures of consultation,
Speaker 1 8:21
it seems to me that in the abstract, more consultation is always better, like, who could be against having more people involved, but is more always better, or is it quality as well as quantity? Here,
Speaker 2 8:35
this is a really good question. There is a ongoing debate in urban studies or in public policy around consultation, so process versus outcome, right. We need to get to a point where we need to make a decision, right. There's a lot at stake, there's a lot of money at stake, but there's lives and livelihoods at stake as well. We were talking about infrastructure and planning. Now, when I think about consultation and participation, my vision for it is to move away from, again, the event, you know, the town hall meeting, the citizens jury, and think about how we can integrate participation in its different forms of consultation throughout planning, so that it's not just when there's an announcement that there's a project going to come forward or there's a vision that needs to be planned, that that consultation and participation is integral to planning. It's hard to actually disconnect, and but it's really hard to imagine what that might look like, though, right? Especially in like liberal representative democracies, like the one we are in here in Canada and in Australia, where I work, but a lot of really good literature and really good models I think are coming from global south contexts, where you know there's a lot more sort of active citizenship being taken up and informing and shaping planning outcomes in different kinds of ways, so I think there's much that we can learn from these. Other contexts that are also shaping the way I think about consultation and participation. The other dimension, just to just to add to it, is just, how does this sit in relationship to this thing called democracy, which people keep telling me is under threat, and we keep seeing examples of that. So
Speaker 1 10:14
that was the thread I wanted to pull at, and I'm going to push a little bit just to try to get at some of the tension points in the debates that are happening out there around consultation, so let's start with that point around participation in democratic countries. I mean, how do you do you see public engagement as a democratic undertaking, or is it one that reinforces the views of a mobilized minority? The
Speaker 2 10:38
concern is when groups have the capacity to generate enough power where they have veto over planning outcomes, right? And we see this all the time, particularly in the conversation around housing at the moment, and we might use the term NIMBY, not in my backyard, could be used as a pejorative as a way of kind of giving identifying groups of individuals or groups of communities that are are capable of stopping projects, but I don't think they're all some are opposed to change for sure, and others are actually have really legitimate and important concerns about proposals that need to be heard, and I think where we get stuck is in thinking about participation as in the worst case form of that, which is the kinds of Nibby NIMBYs that are trying to stop development for a range of reasons, which may not always be completely genuine to the demands and the concerns in the challenges that cities face
Speaker 1 11:41
just to really drill down on that. How do we differentiate between arguments that are NIMBY focused and ones that are voicing legitimate concerns? I mean, in many debates on all spheres of planning or city building topics, you'll hear people say, "I'm not opposed to X, it's just I don't agree with it here, or I think it should be three stories smaller, or I don't mind this project. I just don't think the developers should be profiting. So, how should we understand when, when these are NIMBY, like "Not in my backyard" complaints, and when they are legitimate concerns?
Speaker 2 12:17
I think that I think to answer this question, we need to consider the structural constraints around participation at the moment. In some of my work, I've been looking with Janice Berry and Morgan Boyco and Matt Novachewski at the professionalization of participation, and what we're seeing in that space is the rise of consultants, so a consultant class, which isn't new, we've seen this in planning for some time, but what's interesting, as it relates to participation, is that consultants tend to tender for projects across many different geographies in different places, and as someone who teaches planning, and I teach participation, one of the things that we like to talk a lot about is place-based planning and planning that is situated in a context where we get to understand complex histories, we get to understand the communities that situated in those places, we get to understand the dynamics, and we get to understand the concerns, so much so that when we go into a process of formal consultation we're not taken off guard by what those concerns might be, and we're able to kind of hear, we were able to kind of discern and differentiate the NIMBY kind of like backlash no to all the things to a more nuanced conversation around, yes, but I think I'm concerned about the design quality of this particular developer. I have concerns about overshadowing, or whatever it might be, or parking - parking, of course, is always a popular one,
Speaker 1 13:54
always,
Speaker 2 13:55
always. So, there's a structural component to this problem, so I don't think I could. I think I don't think it's reasonable to ask someone to go in into a community that they don't otherwise know a whole lot about and be able to say you're a NIMBY and we're not going to listen to you, and that's just not reasonable. It's not a reasonable request, but structurally, the way our planning system is designed, at least in the one that I'm working in, in Australia. It's really hard to find community participation experts that have a long relationship with a place and its communities to understand fully the complexity and to have built up the trust to go into those communities and have hard conversations.
Speaker 1 14:40
One of the areas where I've seen the pendulum swing recently is, you know, I think that argument until recently in planning circles and city building circles that, you know, locals knew best about their neighborhoods and what they needed and community character is critically important, all of which I agree with. There's a new stream of thought that. That there have been voices that are not involved in those discussions, or the people that don't live there yet, who have been priced out, or for whom they never had access to those communities, and they were never going to participate in those consultations, or were never invited, and so actually, what's what's been happening is that's led to a lot of neighborhoods being frozen in time, and you know, people who potentially, and our housing getting more expensive because we haven't been able to build and establish neighborhoods, and our infrastructure certainly becoming more costly to build because the processes take a really long time, and so have you seen that any of that discussion come about? And how is that playing out in your, in some of your own work?
Speaker 2 15:40
I haven't looked at this directly, but you know, looking at housing as a really good example of this, we've got whole neighborhoods, no doubt, here in Toronto, but certainly in Melbourne and Sydney, where I spend a lot of time, that have been locked, development has been locked out, and there's been quite a lot of attempts across strategic plans and across political, different political suasions to try to like gain access into these communities to China, you know, to kind of rebuild, build a narrative around density, around housing choice, or housing supply. The the angle that I find really interesting is around intergenerational change and how to have those conversations across those that are property owners in the moment, those that are future renters or current renters, and those that are might be transiting through the community for a variety of reasons, maybe they're students or otherwise, and being able to understand the bespoke needs of those different kind of groups, and how to have those conferences, how to bring people together. If we are in a period of democratic demise or decline, part of that is being expressed through social polarization, and we've got groups, and the Yim Bs and NIMBYs, two groups that we can kind of play with to help make the point. We polarize debates, we other we other individuals and somehow we have not lost our capacity, perhaps we lost the capacity, but certainly lost our our way of understanding how to bring groups together to have hard conversations, and I don't know if we have the appropriate participatory tools to do that. Well, I know deliberative democracy, deliberative panels, as in the form of citizens juries, are trying to do that, doing, you know, randomly selecting individuals to bring them together to have a conversation about x or y, but I'm not quite sure how they're taking on issues where there are diametrically opposed views, and how we are figuring out how to build a common understanding and build commonality towards a common way of living in shared space. This is an area that I think the participation literature and literature in public administration are trying to grapple with, especially as it relates to trust, because we know that mistrust, and then, of course, mis and disinformation is making this area of community engagement quite complex, very and very dynamic at the moment.
Speaker 1 18:12
I think if anything, there's been a pushback against consultation, and the most prominent one of late has been the abundance crowd, the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book, and then the acolytes and folks who have come and followed that, who've essentially said that consultation has slowed decision making to a halt, it's made it impossible to build, we can't get to even a progressive future if at the pace that we're going, and a lot of it is because of citizen voice and people blocking progress, and you see that in a lot of Toronto neighborhoods, including in projects in my own neighborhood, where folks came out and said we don't want relatively modest sized buildings along a major avenue, because of issues around over shadows, because of issues around garbage access and waste removal, because of parking, so those are, you know, we have seen that, and I do wonder if actually it's becoming more polarized, and in the absence of trying to fix consultation, instead what you're seeing is folks from both the left and the abundance crowd, and then the more populous side of this saying, you know, we just want to go at pace, because it's results that matter, not just, not just a process
Speaker 2 19:24
thinking about abundance. I think what that book and that movement is inviting us to consider is the relationship between process and outcome, right? I think communities, in some places, this is not a universal claim, but in some places might be backlashing because infrastructural offerings in the past or planning outcomes in the past have not, have not delivered high amenity, have maybe delivered outcomes where there's been lots of trade-offs to a point where the things that were promised early on the conversation were things that were then left. Out towards the end of delivery, and so again, that builds that mistrust, right? So I think the critical component to the abundance conversation is, as I've heard Ezra Klein discuss, you know, what's the political vision to building this abundance agenda? Likewise, in building a political agenda, what's the participatory uptake, right? Political agendas always need a constituency, so I don't think we can just abandon participation. I think participation is always part and parcel with planning, but I do think we need to evolve it and think about it in a, in the context in which we find ourselves, where social polarization, mistrust, and mis and disinformation are now realities that require a different kind of participatory process, and certainly newfound ways of being discerning in discussions about our future.
Speaker 1 20:51
I think that's the key, is how you balance speed, meaningful input, and public trust. I think going slow in this day and age is not going to work. I think people are seeing the impacts of that, they're seeing costs skyrocket to build anything, they're seeing their infrastructure deteriorating before their eyes, and they're seeing housing getting more affordable as it can't be added. Do you think that consultation works? Like, is it still a premise that's functional in a society, as you mentioned, that's that polarized, that that, and also I guess to speak directly to the abundance discussion, that there are real trade-offs. Like, I think we sometimes think that you can talk these things out and we'll come to some type of consensus, but there are real winners and losers, and I do wonder if at some point, you know, the consultation, as much input you can do, as much input as you want, and you're not going to get to a resolution that's going to make everyone happy.
Speaker 2 21:46
Absolutely. Look, I don't expect your readership to read any of my articles, but you know, I am pretty critical of consensus-based consultation. I do find that that is quite problematic, one and also unrealistic. I think if we do consensus-based consultation, we tend to miss really important components where there are trade-offs, and there will be winners and losers, and to have a really mature, sophisticated conversation around that is essential.
Speaker 1 22:14
I think that's where I feel the most comfortable is that we do need to talk to people. I think a world in which there's zero consultation and no opportunity for individual input into decision and community input into into decisions that affect them. I think that's a recipe for bad outcomes, and we've seen those bad outcomes in our cities. I mean, we saw cities getting parts of cities getting bulldozed, and we saw a siting of noxious facilities into low-income and racialized communities, so we've seen what that looks like, but I also think having endless consultations and appeal processes that can tie projects up for decades is also problematic, and that's where I come back to this question about the democratic element of it, like, is it democratic if you can have relatively small groups of informed and engaged citizens that can tie up projects for years and decades, like, how does that fit into a system where the party in power was elected by a majority of the population and they were empowered then to go make decisions on their behalf, and they're accountable at the ballot box, whenever that next election
Speaker 2 23:20
is. Yeah, look, I think I need to refer back to my experience in Victoria, so Melbourne, Victoria in particular, where we have had the largest injection of public fine public dollars into infrastructure that we've, that we've seen in a generation. We do not have an integrated transport plan, so we're building a lot of transport infrastructure, but we don't have an integrated plan around what that infrastructure, how that infrastructure will come together. In 2018 on the eva of our state election, we had our premier announce that his government, if re-elected, was going to build the largest rail line that would circle metropolitan Melbourne, hitting all the, you know, middle suburbs, 90 kilometers, $90 billion an extraordinary amount of money, not connected to a strategic plan that they had just also delivered, and not, and not a priority within Infrastructure Victoria, which is a statutory agency that that government put in place to ensure that we're getting better infrastructure outcomes, so there's a lot of cynicism where I'm writing around government's capacity to deliver projects that are reflecting their strategic vision that they themselves have also set out, so we talk a lot about the gap between strategic planning and infrastructure delivery, and our strategic plans are often really bold, you know, they're glossy documents, they're political documents, as we, as we know, and they say things like we need to invest in. Public transport, we need to improve service quality out in the suburbs. We need to make sure that our growing outer suburbs, particularly in the West, in metropolitan Melbourne, are being prioritized, and that's not what we're getting in the delivery. So, community consultation, there is a high level of cynicism where I'm writing, and I think the cynicism is warranted. Where I am finding hope is in following community groups that have found ways to organize and build networks with other like-minded community groups. So I'm really interested in this idea of solidarity, and I'm interested in community-based planning. I know in North America there's a stronger tradition around community-based planning, not so much in Australia. We talk about social planning, which is usually about delivering social services and housing, but it is - there's no community-led conceptualization of planning. What I'm seeing now is community groups that are very concerned about the politics of the day by all state governments of all suasions going in and doing consultation to a high standard and delivering something that is not what the conversation is even about, and in that context, we can't. I can't help, as someone who is studying the politics of infrastructure planning and the politics of public participation, to be asking the question, what is going on? And so I'm.. this is where I come into this other body of work that I'm doing, Chris Gibson and Dallas Rogers, around structural gaslighting.
Speaker 1 26:41
I wanted to ask you about that. So, yeah, let's, let's get into, let's get into this idea of structural gaslighting, because you've introduced it, and I think it does, it fits within the context of what we're talking about, about how consultations can then be used and misused in order to push through projects that may not actually have the community support, so do you want to talk about what you mean by that idea of structural gaslighting and infrastructure planning? It is
Speaker 2 27:07
really important to be clear about what we mean when we talk about gaslighting, and it is a term that helps us to see different forms of manipulation and the affect the cost of gaslighting on individuals that are the target of gaslighting, which typically might be a felt sense that their experience of the lived world is not a true reflection of what that lived world is, so they might defer their knowing of what's happening to themselves to someone else, right. So they're being gaslit, and the affect of that is an limiting or a reduction in their deliberative capacities, their capacity to to give a testimony to their lived experience. So that's gaslighting. There's a body of literature that has been arguing and showing that whole communities can be gaslit as well, and there we see examples through cultural gaslighting and racial gaslighting as examples. Now, in gaslighting, what typically is happening is an epistemic silencing, so a silencing of different ways of knowing, so again, that could be an expression of lived experience. So, once we start thinking about the possibility that whole communities can be gaslit, we start to ask the question, are there structural considerations there that are making that, so making that possible, and we start, we may start to look at structures of social subjugation, different ways in which power gets expressed in the city, and ensures that some groups remain winners and other groups remain kind of losers in the, in the, you know, the social and spatial dynamics of a city, now bringing that into infrastructure planning, and again going back to what I just laid out in terms of my experience of being a critical social researcher in an Australian context, and being quite frustrated with what I've been seeing over the last 15 years of doing this quasi ethnographic participatory action style research was, I wasn't quite sure what was going on, I couldn't, I couldn't quite put my finger on what the problem was. So I wrote an article in 2017 and called it the crisis of participation. And then I kind of stopped there, I wasn't quite sure where else to go with that, I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what it was until I started working with Chris Gibson and Dallas Rogers, who are two incredible critical urban geographers who are also thinking about the political economy of infrastructure delivery as well. I started thinking about sort of deal making and how deals get free. Formed within the context of maybe public private partnerships, so which links to the work that you, of course, Maddie, and then the thing that becomes really interesting is, well, if structural gaslighting is something that could happen to whole communities, well, then how does it happen? So going back to gaslighting, which can be an interpersonal phenomenon, there are tactics and tools that are available to someone who might be gaslighting in an interpersonal relationship. It could be love, it could be trust, it could be empathy. So these are things that are really important to human relationships, right? They're virtues, they're wonderful, beautiful things. And in planning, something that we hold up as a virtue, as something that's inherently good to planning, is participation right? So, on both sides, big infrastructure proponent, government, maybe through a PPP or an otherwise planning process, needs participation to build a social license, right, to build a social license to get the community on site to hopefully de-risk the project over time, right, to ensure that it doesn't get stuck in, stuck through appeals or or other kinds of protests that might lead to an actual cancelation of a project, which, of course, we saw in Melbourne, in the East-West link in 2014 So big infrastructure, big government needs participation. Likewise, communities need participation too, because that's their opportunity to have a seat at the table. So, if they're going to inform a process, they do that through formal participatory channels.
