Collaboration: New Civic DNA?
By
Curtis Johnson
SUMMARY
While neither as noisy nor as rapid as the rushing forces of globalization, there is
a sorting out within and among communities making up American regions. This chapter
explores the prospect that a new civic approach is the underlying explanation for reports
of progress. Using selected accounts of actual experiences in different regions across the
country, a pattern emerges that is distinct from most of the past century’s experience.
Previously controlling institutions are carving out new roles as catalysts and sometimes
champions for change. Where there are stories of progress in rebuilding a sense of
community, in overcoming devastating conditions, there is a recognizable chemistry to
the explanations. Most prominent in this chemistry is the spread of collaborative
processes. Mutual listening. Deciding together. If this modest trend grows and proves
strong enough to alter the culture of more than a few communities, it may be the leading
edge America’s maturing capacity for self-governance.
INTRODUCTION
From the churning civic chemistry of America’s regions a new formula may have
been forged from the conflicting forces of the late 20th century. The core element is
collaboration. Veteran voices from major community initiatives increasingly declare it as
the organizing medium for reaching forward across boundaries of class, geography, race,
age and political philosophy. They claim that even in an era in which individualism may
have reached its apotheosis, collaboration is an enabler to recapture a sense of the
collective good.
Though no comprehensive analysis exists to provide evidence that collaboration is
forming the core of a new cultural “DNA,” stories of community collaboration – from
small neighborhoods to large metropolitan regions – are a proliferating phenomenon.
This chapter presents selected historical accounts in which the application of a
collaborative formula appears to have made impacts on the governance of communities.
Many, perhaps most of these accounts, show that major crisis is the common,
precipitating civic spur, leaving the question as to whether any successful response can
become a new norm. And whether people should reasonably be expected to organize and
pursue a complex process that affects governance decisions, unless they are driven by
crisis conditions.
Of equal interest is the pattern of what these communities do with collaboration –
the agenda that it produces, the philanthropy it attracts, and what observable changes in
the civil culture seem lasting.
The case stories also reveal a pattern of leadership, showing not so much new
sources as new combinations, as well as what appears to happen when collaborations take
on more institutionalized forms. Does the leverage provided by early philanthropy lead to
new traditions of widespread voluntary giving?
Drawing on experiences in several American regions, but especially the case of
Chattanooga, Tennessee, this account traces the record of citizens organizing and acting
to improve their society, describes how they altered the relationship to governments, and
poses the question of whether such collaborations can become lasting coalitions whose
work continues to affect decisions within the formal structure of governance.
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Connections
The first evidence of serious change in the civil society is the character of
communications between public officials and citizens. And despite the numerous
pilgrimages made in recent years to Portland, Oregon to see what many regard to be
America’s most systematic process of citizen engagement, the place to see a new culture
may be Chattanooga, Tennessee.
In the 1970s with foundries and textile factories closing, the shock of the cost of
being the Pittsburgh of the South shook the community’s confidence at the roots. Driving
around at noon with headlights on to penetrate the polluted air was common. A civic
gloom set in. Racial tensions, along with economic woes, were high. A quarter century
later, this community sparkles with livability, and radiates a level of civic confidence hard
to match anywhere. Talk to the people who lived through the transition and the notion of
a new governance culture is palpable.
Mai Bell Hurley was the first chair of Chattanooga Ventures, the name applied in
1984 to the collaborative initiative. The air was getting cleaner but not much was
happening to pick the community up. She remembers how Stroud Watson was recruited
to come down from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s architecture school and
help citizens think about how to rebuild the community. Watson, along with a growing
number of students mixed in with a core of community leadership, worked out of an old
storefront (drive by it today and see that it has become, not without irony, the “CHAOS”
clothing store). Hurley remembers how the numbers grew, citizens and students “hanging
out at the store talking about what to do (Hurley interview, February 19, 1999).” They
took a group to Indianapolis to see first hand civic progress they had read about. They
sent out some 10,000 surveys to citizens, realizing, as Hurley puts it, “we weren’t exactly
the grass roots ourselves.”
The numbers involved grew and surprisingly patient process produced
conclusions, a first agenda for action. More than 1700 people volunteered to work on
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priorities, settling eventually on more than 200, with early emphasis on civic spaces
downtown and laying out a set of plans to reclaim the community’s connection to the
river. Among the first projects was a $45 million aquarium, now widely acclaimed as the
largest freshwater aquarium in the country and every year attracting more than a million
visitors. What followed were the first stages of a river walk, destined to be more than
twenty miles long, starting with a eye-catching collection of switchbacks built around a
downtown bluff, with centers of interest artistically decorated in the spirit of the
Cherokee nation. An old iron truss bridge, scheduled to be taken down, was reengineered and designed for pedestrians and became a popular gathering spot.
Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprises was born amid a commitment to eliminate all
substandard housing, a far-reaching, maybe even unachievable goal, but producing $30
million of progress each year.
What makes this place, as City Council President Dave Crockett likes to say, “a
living laboratory,” is their commitment to constant renewal of the process, setting more
goals, continuing the engagement (Crockett interviews 1999). By the early 1990s, they
had completed most of the priorities, and it was time to start over, which they did in 1993
with a “Re-Vision” process, attracting another cadre of volunteers and setting more
priorities. Hurley says that Chattanooga Ventures (now, by the way, in mothballs) was a
means to capture what they had found “in the air,” and that the engagement of citizens
around complex problems “is the one thing that has stuck….We have our
arguments…and consensus isn’t always golden, but the thing to notice is the way we
make decisions. There is something in the culture here, and it’s just as important not to
understate it as it is not to overstate it.”
For a community of still modest scale, all these projects have formidable price
tags. But raising money seems to happen once the civic process has yielded the
commitments. As Jack Murrah, now the head of the Lyndhurst Foundation that staked
Ventures to its first serious resources, describes the money-raising dynamic, “Money will
go where people believe that success is likely. Otherwise it hides. If we’re afraid there’s
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not enough to go around, we will hide what we have.” (Murrah interview, February 19,
1999)
Stroud Watson never went back to Knoxville. He’s still downtown, though the
quarters are nicer. In fact, his office is the community’s urban design center. It’s a
birthing and nesting place for development and redevelopment ideas. Those ideas then
take the form of renderings, of computer simulations, and they’re on the walls for anyone
to look at. Watson is confident that “seeing what something might look like” has
become one of the most powerful techniques for community redevelopment. But as he
looks back on the past two decades, he professes pure amazement that people actually
still show up. “All this inwardness these days, shopping on the net, watching so many
hours of television….do we still think we can knit together what the community is like?
Or do we search for community because of all these things? I don’t know.” (Watson
interview 1999).
The pot-bellied stove that warmed the room in the old storefront is just a memory.
But the new way of doing things, Watson says, is now the culture. What started as
student exhibits on creating a better downtown and the beginnings of the River Park has
become an expectation. You could call it “transparency,” he said, but it’s really just the
confidence to let people in on building a high quality place to live.
Hurley and Crockett both suggest how rooted participation is now in the culture of
decisions by pointing to the Eastgate Mall story. On a busy boulevard in east
Chattanooga, amid the commercial “generica” one sees anywhere, sat this mall, a typical,
tasteless strip of retail stores like thousands of others draped indecorously on the
shoulders of thoroughfares, nearly always destined to age badly. They’re routinely
abandoned when the retail action shifts farther out. Too often, these old malls serve as
the canary in the mine for the whole community. The empty tarmacs, with weeds
growing through the cracks and the shuttered stores are a reminder of the fickle and
fleeting nature of modern American retail centers.
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Here is where the Chattanooga culture takes over. Through a charrette process,
the community concluded the mall should become a town center, including apartments
and townhouses, retail and offices, with trees and wide pedestrian walkways. (Crockett
interviews, 1999) A company was formed in 1997 to do just that, and has since found
serious tenants to fill office space, even a church that wants to be on the new town
commons. Gerry Chauvin, vice president of Eastgate LLC now thinks of himself as in
the community building business and says “it’s probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever
done.” (Homsy 1999: 21).
Covenants
Collaboration might be little more than the warm stirrings of community activism,
a brush with consensus that feels good compared with confusion and conflict.
Collaboration may seem to succeed and still be somewhat irrelevant unless the results
show up in governance. How important is it to be connected to what government actually
does, if collaboration is to be regarded as having serious impact?
Making this connection is no small matter. So much has the contempt for
government risen, fed by cynical campaigning for office as well as the steady pounding of
pseudo-libertarian talk radio, that it is now common in many circles to dismiss the
relevance of the public sector in making community progress. Polls often show
smoldering anger toward government; indeed a sort of presumption of bad intent has
become the starting place for the press and many citizens.
This sentiment may have taken its severest toll on police forces, especially where
crime has become more serious and crackdowns have been the response mode. In
Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, neighborhood leaders were so alienated from
police by the early 1990s, that in the most crime-infested places, they say they simply
stopped calling them. What good could it do, complained one activist, if there were
already people dead, or the drug dealers had control of the whole block? A new chief,
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Dennis Nowicki, who cut his community relations teeth policing the neighborhoods of
Chicago, set out to create a new understanding about the relationship between the
community and the police. His challenge: “You be our eyes and ears. Call us before the
bad stuff goes down,” he said. “We’ll get there quickly and quietly,” (compared with
squad cars roaring in after the shooting is done, sirens at full volume). In interviews with
a roomful of neighborhood leaders, the stories flowed about learning to stand up for the
neighborhood. Freezing the dealers out. Several women in particular reached in their
purses and pulled out the pager numbers of the cops on their beat; they knew them by
their first names. This perhaps does not rank as elegant civic theory, but in the street it
seems to have the force of a new covenant, a new understanding about accountability and
mutual responsibility. (Charlotte interviews 1996).
One night in early fall 1994 Mary Nelson and about 50 neighbors in the Bethel
New Life part of Chicago gathered in a church basement across from a $40,000-a-day
crack house. Drug dealers, mixing menacing glares with loud laughter, loitered just fifty
feet away. Nelson’s little group was almost too afraid to come out of the church. But out
they came, with a table, candles, campaign flyers, and a microphone to broadcast their
promise to take back the streets of their crime-ridden neighborhood.
It was the beginning of 40 days and nights of continuous activity – of
demonstrations, church functions, concerts, a door-to-door leaflet campaign. “We’d do
something every day,” recalls Nelson. “One day we had a job fair right in the middle of
the street.”
This campaign was a working partnership, with the feel of a contractual
relationship, between the neighbors, area business owners, and local government, which
in this case was the city of Chicago and Cook County. The county agreed to assign
inmates serving time to help clean up the neighborhood, mow those vacant lots, get the
trash out of the alleys. The city agreed to put in new lighting in places that were too dark,
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to fast-track the demolition of vacant buildings not worth saving. Streets and sidewalks
were to be repaired. Drug dealers would be sentenced to do community service.
Mary Nelson and her courageous neighbors could have carried out their campaign,
but if the local governments hadn’t followed through, progress would have been shortlived. (Johnson 1995: 52)
It may be fashionable these days to regard government as the gardener with the
five-hundred dollar hoe and only weeds to show for a crop, but nearly every story of
enduring change in communities finds government as a partner and something resembling
a new relationship with people who live there.
Even where government is well positioned to be a partner in community
improvement and comes in sincerity to citizen groups, a wall of skepticism is often there
to be overcome. In San Diego back in 1998, staff from the San Diego Association of
Governments (SANDAG), tell how they went into south San Diego to talk to citizens
about blighted blocks and what could be done, particularly in an environment crying out
for more affordable housing. They encountered fierce resistance. People remembered the
shabby six-plexes and high-rises dropped on to lots in their community in the past. Mike
McLaughlin directs the planning unit for SANDAG and he is quick now to say that you
can’t get anything done in a neighborhood without making a new deal. In this case,
McLaughlin started with straightforward questions about what changes people wanted in
their community. They used computer simulations to show citizens what projects might
look like – before they were approved and built (San Diego interviews 1999).
John Nalbandian, an experienced city manager, now a University of Kansas
professor, believes these new arts of engaging the community are the indispensable
practices of public management. He says this facilitative work is “not designed to make
people feel better. It is designed to help promote a problem-solving orientation and to
develop consensus among diverse interests.” (Nalbandian 1999: 195).
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Catalysts and Champions
In the late 1980s, Professor Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University
raised what seemed like a lonely voice calling for a return to “communitarian” values in
society and has since created a network of like-minded citizens. In the early 90s, the
National Civic League, founded a century ago as a civil society reaction to corrupt
government, organized a coalition called American National Renewal. Other champions
for some version of civic renewal showed up in the mid- to late-1990s, from the high
symbolism of the Million Man March of African Americans in Washington, D.C. to the
hundreds of thousands of men showing up in city after city for Promise Keepers
meetings. Former senator Sam Nunn joined former education secretary William Bennett
to launch the National Commission on Civic Renewal.
Opportunities can be created or dashed, and movements seem to wax or wane by
the push or pull of catalytic organizations that bring influence or resources. Foundations,
for example, essentially managing society’s loose change, often achieve powerful
leveraging effects. The Topsfield Foundation has been promoting study circles since
1990 as a means of mobilizing the minds of citizens on troubling issues in society. The
National Issues Forums have been around for nearly 20 years, making the Kettering
Foundation one of the philanthropic veterans in the quest for more civil society. Its
president, David Mathews often lifts a phrase from Ernesto Cortes about “reweaving the
social fabric…to invigorate public life at a time when many Americans are seeking
security in private sanctuaries” and suggests that maybe “a democratic society takes
centuries to develop, building layer upon layer, like a coral reef.” (Mathews, Independent
Sector conference 1996).
Chattanooga arguably would have accomplished little without the special funding
that come from the Lyndhurst Foundation. The foundation left by heirs to the Coca-Cola
put money on the table to see whether others in the community would match it. In fact,
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many others did. Today, there’s a Community Impact Fund underwritten by major
donors around the community’s top priorities.
The PEW Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia, one of the nation’s foremost
foundations, committed nearly $20 million in recent years toward the renewal of civil
society. And a new foundation called the Institute for Civil Society has sprung to life in
Boston from a $35 million anonymous donation. The National Civic League has built an
entire catalog of organizations, most of them newly founded, aimed at improving civil
society.
The media – particularly major newspapers – are another catalytic force. That
media constitute a powerful force is beyond doubt. But the inexorable drift of media
organizations toward entertainment values may have deepened the polarities of civil
society and made a sense of shared destiny every more elusive. Chris Gates, the president
of the National Civic League, recalls moderating a very large gathering of elected
officials and citizens, bringing strong views over growth policies into collision in Clark
County (Nevada) in the mid-1990s. Behind the big crowd was a line-up of newspaper
reporters, and at least one television crew, all smelling a fight. Gates remembers laying
out the ground rules early in his remarks: (1) Discussion will focus on the facts; (2) We
won’t be deciding anything by voting; (3) We are committed to have civil exchange of
even strong opinions; and (4) This is a search for common ground. The reporters all
walked out (Gates interview, 1997). Perhaps the meeting was better for it, but it
exemplifies today’s media appetite for theatrical civic conflict. Even the use of the term
“civil” is a signal that there’s no story to cover. This is peculiar of course, in that the
classic definition of what is news is when the unusual occurs. Gates remembers this
meeting as producing plenty of conflict. “It was no teasipping event with watercress
sandwiches.” But there was also an underlying interest in working it out, finding some
basis of agreement.
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The notion that the media should consider how to help the community improve
has actually found a few followers (and no shortage of critics). For example, in the early
1990s, under the new leadership of editor Jennie Buckner and publisher Rolfe Neill, the
Charlotte Observer made a decision that seemed radical for a contemporary media
organization. Not only did they decide that their crime coverage distorted reality in urban
neighborhoods, covering only the bad, rarely anything on the efforts to improve; they
concluded that they should hire someone to go into the neighborhoods, and organize
meetings and see what happens (Charlotte interviews 1996).
In the ensuing couple of years their organizer produced a startling series of
neighborhood meetings, where people told their stories of trouble and shared their ideas
for how to make the community a better place. Meantime, one neighborhood at a time,
the newspaper covered those meetings, showering inches of ink on the people and their
ideas.
Massive feature articles with bold headlines played under the banner of “Taking
Back Our Neighborhoods.” One of the television channels joined in the effort to create
blitz-coverage when the stories broke. Almost overnight, neighborhood activists, long
laboring in nearly total obscurity, attained some celebrity for their leadership. Donations
from all over the region came in to fund projects such as new community centers. And,
as discussed earlier, the relationships with the police changed. At the same time, the city
began to take neighborhoods more seriously in the planning process.
In the late 1990s, even the prestigious Philadelphia Inquirer, albeit only through
the editorial pages, sponsored a bold effort to put citizens at the center of the drama of
campaigns. Its Citizen Voices program did massive listening, facilitated issues
discussions, and gave enormous publicity to issues citizens care about in three recent
election campaigns.
Churches, though with studied reluctance, have also begun to take an active role
in catalyzing civic action. Once a force for change in some parts of the U.S. through the
Industrial Areas Foundation and the followers of Saul Alinksy, the faith community is
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seeing a resurgence of activism in growing number of regions. Perhaps best known of
these is Cleveland, where the archbishop himself, Anthony Pilla, has become an
outspoken leader on the controversial issue of sprawl. Pilla has become the most
outspoken critic of the set of public policies that encourage capital flight from the city and
older suburbs to newer, fresher places, while abandoning the problems left behind.
In Boston in the early 1990s, inner-city neighborhoods were ravaged by drug
dealers and youth killings. The police there certainly seem to deserve the credit they got
for cracking down. But as John DiIulio of Princeton University points out, the most
powerful change came from a band a black ministers who started a campaign to mobilize
the 40 most blighted neighborhoods to reclaim their youth. And as one Boston police
officer said, “With the churches, we can turn our neighborhoods around. Without them,
without cooperation, we can’t” (Who Cares January/February 1998). The role religions
play in many other cultures, dominating political thought, seems totally foreign to the
American civic culture, though the political incursions of the religious fundamentalists in
the 1990s have rendered the previously unthinkable a matter to ponder.
No institution in America would seem to have more potential for affecting the
quality of civil society than the universities and colleges that are now spread across nearly
every major region. The universities in particular are the repositories of the nation’s
brainpower. Perhaps as a response to the perception that many of them seem aloof from
the communities in which they exist, nearly a hundred universities are now involved in a
movement to focus intellectual assets on community challenges.
In some respects, this is a long tradition, rendering assistance to nearby
neighborhoods. But paternalism – and often, experimentation for research purposes – has
been the tradition’s habit. The emerging model seems qualitatively different, more like a
collaboration with the people in the community who see the university as a potential
partner in confronting the community’s challenges. The largest formal structure active so
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far is one created by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s
(HUD) Office of University Partnerships.
A key participating institution from the beginning was the University of
Pennsylvania. There, Professor Ira Harkavy, whose job it is to find those connections
with the community, tells a extraordinarily revealing story from his early days in
persuading university faculty to consider the laboratories right outside the university’s
door. In a gathering of distinguished university leaders assembled by then Secretary of
Housing and Urban Development secretary Henry Cisneros, Harkavy recalls approaching
a renowned anthropologist in the university faculty club. Harkavy had done his
homework. He knew this professor did in-depth studies of nutritional deficiencies, and
that he periodically traveled to villages in Central America to collect more data for his
research. He managed an encounter, introduced himself, and cautiously steered the
professor to a west window. As Harkavy told it, he said, “Professor, I need you in my
village, right down there.” To his astonishment, the professor agreed. And as Harkavy
cheerfully regales anyone who will listen, in the next few semesters, the professor and his
graduate students descended on West Philadelphia schools with surveys; they did the
same research he had previously left the country to do. But, when the results were in,
more than another set of juried articles was produced. Harkavy describes how the
graduate students collaborated with children then to spread better practices to whole
families. (Harkavy interviews, 1993) Meanwhile, the University of Pennsylvania is
building a new elementary school, in addition to working on improvements in others;
and, it has committed $130 million to create hotel and retail space which has been a void
in West Philadelphia for years. (Gurwitt 1999: 33).
In Hartford (Connecticut), Trinity College president Evan Dobelle has persuaded
his board of trustees to invest $6-8 million of the college’s endowment investing in the
surrounding neighborhood, after spending upfront money to tear down six crack houses.
HUD in 1999 gave $8 million to 18 universities for community development purposes.
(Gurwitt 1999: 34).
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Some of these universities are discovering the powerful potential in assembling
faculty teams to take on tough community challenges. One such team from the
University of Illinois at Champaign, draws from the law school, landscape architecture,
political science and an assortment of other academic areas; once a week they’re in a van
headed toward East St. Louis. Driving through East St. Louis, you wouldn’t think the
place had any future. The evidence of its drop in population over the last generation from
100,000 to 30,000 is everywhere. Driving down streets reveals block after block blighted
with houses burned out or boarded up. Vacant buildings stand where thriving businesses
once operated. In the 1990s both the city and the school board were forced into
receivership.
But the picture changes if you are guided to a nondescript building just off
Collinswood Avenue. Inside a rear entrance there is a committed band of activists,
people who live in East St. Louis, who have been getting training and tools from the
University of Illinois group. They also have a base of Geographic Information Systems
(GIS) on a bank of computers. They have been tracing ownership of abandoned
properties and it would seem they know more about these places and the legal steps for
reclaiming them than the city officials themselves. They talk of hope among the weeds
and rubble. They saw vacant lots and planned for pocket parks where kids could play.
They invited neighborhood kids to draw designs for the park, so they could discover what
characteristics and equipment mattered most. They saw an idle downtown corner and
developed a farmers’ market. Would any of these developments been likely without the
catalyzing force of university brains tackling community problems? Likely not. (St.
Louis interviews 1997)
The East St. Louis case represents an important break with the top-down models
of the past. Nearly every interview contained some mention of how the university team
worked with, not on the community, while being champions of the cause.
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In one of the most studied community-building efforts ever, The Atlanta Project
(TAP), the effort nearly sank under the heavy load of elites who organized it. Started in
1991 by former President Carter, TAP’s mission was to connect the neediest
neighborhoods in Atlanta with resources and leadership that would help citizens grapple
with the most severe problems associated with urban poverty. The early years saw
extensive loaned leadership from the corporate ranks and more than $30 million
committed as a budget. Offices were spread out over 20 neighborhoods. The vision was
comprehensive, and expectations ran high.
When Professor Michael Giles of Emory University conducted an evaluation four
years later, he found a very mixed record. The project had some accomplishments, but it
had made little systemic impact, and had vastly underestimated the gaps between
downtown leadership and the neighborhoods, between black Atlanta and white Atlanta,
even between affluent black Atlanta and poor black Atlanta. The more Giles thought
about it, he came to conclude that “Where TAP succeeded, it came down to individuals –
which is anathema to a social scientist,” he admitted. The best field success happened at
the project’s center at Therrell High School, where a United Parcel Service executive had
become so intensely involved, he became a full-time staffer (Giles 1995).
Crossing Boundaries
Most people, even the most civic-minded, tend to show up for meetings mostly
with people with whom they already agree on most matters. Collaboration is the art of
designed talk for a situation in which there is diversity of views and disagreement over
direction, held together by the potential for a resolution most participants can support.
Only when collaboration bridges boundaries that usually divide should it seem to
be anything special for civil society. Robert Bellah reminds us in the introduction to the
updated edition of Habits of the Heart that the biblical answer to the question, “Who is
my neighbor?” took the form of a parable about the Good Samaritan. Samaritans were a
despised group in Israel (Bellah 1996).
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The notion of traversable boundaries brings into play matters of fundamental
differences among people – including where they live and what access they have to power
and opportunity.
First, nothing new is afoot in civic activities that prove to be merely a rush of
enthusiasm among elites. Chattanooga’s Dave Crockett suggests, folksy as it sounds, a
“shoe” test: “You have to look under the table, where you should see wing tips mixed
with platform loafers, flats and heels, boots and sneakers, and maybe even
Birkenstocks….You can’t deal with the issues on top of the table if you’re not reflecting
the community under it.” (Crockett interview 1998)
The experience with diversity in discussion breeds a common language. It is
possible to attend some civic affairs in Chattanooga and find yourself in a mixture of
business executives, environmental activists, government officials, neighborhood leaders,
and academics. You might need name tags to tell who is who. By the mid-1990s, the
chamber people sounded like environmentalists. The neighborhood leaders were savvy
about the realities of development. They have all been talking together for a while now.
Occasionally, an issue arises in Chattanooga where it is possible to test the
penetration of the collaborative option on the civic culture. In 1998, the new chancellor
of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga faced an urgent facilities problem (Tracy
interview, Chattanooga 1999). Several new buildings were needed, the first of which was
a new building for the engineering school. Having exhausted the campus space, the
apparent option for expansion was to spill across a major city street into a low-income
neighborhood. The neighborhood has a high ratio of African Americans, whose parents,
by the way, would not have been eligible to attend the university in their day. But the
neighborhood also had a culture now, born of the experience with Chattanooga Ventures
and Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprises, that assumed, perhaps even expected
involvement. Chancellor Bill Tracy says, “Coming here, I was pleasantly stunned to see
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how decisions get made in the community. So, I thought, why don’t we march down off
this lofty hill and ask our neighborhoods where we could put new buildings.” As Tracy
tells it, the faculty committee on facilities was respectful but nervous. “What if they want
to put it in the wrong place?” went the warning.
Tracy recalls how they met down in a local restaurant, and the room was packed.
Full of suspicion too. Lots of questions about what did the university really want? But in
the end, after several such meetings, and after a set of principles got written all over the
wall (Tracy marvels at how the community gets everything important up on the wall so
everybody sees it together), the group made its recommendation. As though confirming
every fear, the suggested location was not where the faculty and administrative team had
figured it should be.
The next step was to turn the project over to the architectural firm, one with stellar
international credentials. Within the first report the university got back was the firm’s
assessment that the community’s analysis of where the building should go was in fact the
best possible location.
The experience Tracy described extended power to a group that historically had
no say in civic affairs. Taking a collaborative approach was not forced on Tracy. But he
remembered a similar sort of project when he was head of the University of California at
San Marcos; the project was entangled in litigation for ten years.
Even in small, out of the way places, evidence seems to surface about the civic
potential of people learning to work together. Consider the last quarter century in Tupelo,
Mississippi. Here’s a community where civic renewal started with no obvious
advantages. No large body of water, no mountains, no nearby metropolitan center, and
until recently no major highways running anywhere near. Tupelo was the poorest town in
the poorest county in the poorest state in the United States. Now when surveyed, its
citizens seem to feel they own every civic project. Participation levels are high. The
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result is a small community that’s been increasing its economic base by over a 1,000
industrial jobs a year, and even more service jobs. Per capita income is on par with
Atlanta (Willey 1999).
Tupelo people tell a story of collaboration, one based on the belief that everybody
has something worthwhile to contribute, a notion that in this jaded age must strike many
ears as pure sentimentality. But it may be an indispensable part of making collaboration a
durable process, and it is clearly not yet common. Professor John McKnight of
Northwestern University has played the prophet’s role for 20 years, pointing to the
inherent assets of people. By labeling people with the titles of their presumed
deficiencies – the standard social model – we ignore and forego everything they might
contribute to society (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993).
Collaboration, as the potentially core tool to advance a more civil society, cannot
achieve serious scale unless it can stretch across divided geography. It would seem clear
now that the community of interest has become, for urban places, the whole metropolitan
region. Research conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank in the early 1990s (Roith,
Philadelphia Federal Reserve, 199x) and similar research done by the National League of
Cities shows that incomes of people in suburbs rise faster in regions where there is a
healthy center city. The Real Estate Center at the Wharton School at the University of
Pennsylvania in the mid-1990s, as a part of a larger research effort, showed the
relationship of downtown real estate to regional equity. Their findings showed that a 10
percent decline in the value of downtown property in the nine largest city centers would
be a financial loss larger than the savings and loan disasters of the 1980s, and that the loss
would largely fall on people who lived in suburbs. The reason: suburbanites owned a
majority of the shares of the publicly traded companies and pension funds that own most
of the real estate in major downtown centers (Wharton interviews 1994).
Manuel Pastor of the University of California at Santa Cruz sees the same synergy
in the growing regional nature of the society. Pastor, after years of studying the
18
relationship of community-based actions and the new economic realities of American
regions, says:
“Regions are now the central economic unit. They are
large enough for economies of scale and small enough for faceto-face relationships that build trust between businesses, between
business and the public sector, between business and the
community. There is a win/win in linking the concerns of
neighborhood development and regional development. Regions
do better when they pay attention to the needs of low-income
individuals. Low income individuals do better when they link up
and think up to the region” (California Regions Take Action
1998: 6).
Barnes and Lebedur wrote about a body of research commissioned by the National
League of Cities. And while their underlying interest may go to the challenges facing
local governments in the fractious politics of the late 1990s, their 1998 book also makes
the case for reframing the questions about how to accomplish more effective governance:
“There must be found a place for those collective regional
voices to be heard, for the needs of the many local economies to
be balanced with each other, and for the needs of the many local
economies to be balanced with the needs of their linkages and the
common elements among them. If such a place existed, it would
loop back to encourage the further development of effective
regional governance. We propose, therefore, a ‘forum for the U.S.
common market of local economies.’" (Lebedur 1998).
If in fact the incomes of the rich and the poor, the urban dwellers and
the suburbanites, appears to substantially depend on working together to
19
create more competitive and livable metropolitan regions, then collaboration
may have found unexpected fuel by century’s close.
Conclusion
From this potpourri of stories from Chattanooga and elsewhere, those
hoping for a more effective civil society may draw hope. No claim is made
here that collaboration has become the new civic norm, or that the linkage to
governance is predictable. The pattern in this chapter may be only a
sprinkling of small celebrations – good things but happening in too few
places. Or, the success that collaborative civics has seen may be the first
glimpse at a sea-change in a largely unorganized but major movement to
repair the American experiment.
The stories do lend themselves to some conclusions, however.
Crisis usually precedes progress, but not always.
Nearly every story of civic progress flowers from the seeds of crisis.
Those who participated in the Chattanooga civic struggles of the past 20 years
would readily confirm this. Why is it then that some places seem to forge
ahead, creating new civic infrastructure, without some crisis as the
explanatory force?
When some 30 neighborhoods in Charlotte – old and new, rich and
relatively poor – signed a “Declaration of Interdependence” in the early
1990s, no headline-level crisis was around. From the way activists then
described their work, they may have seen trouble ahead, if the larger
community failed to act together, but it would stretch the definition of crisis
to have declared one then (Charlotte interviews, 1996).
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The indispensability of crisis as civic spur deserves more debate.
Examining the history of innovation in nearly any sector would suggest that
opportunity may be a more powerful source of change than crisis. To lift a
convenient contemporary example, what was the crisis that led to the
invention of the personal computer? Or the Internet? No one was demanded
e-mail as a solution to a major problem. Reaching back a half century, even
though national defense was cited for rationale, no real crisis spurred the
decision to build the national system of interstate highways. So it remains a
worthy object of inquiry as to when and whether civil society is improved
because and only when our backs are against the wall, and we have no other
choice.
Roles and relationships of civic leaders have fundamentally changed.
It is worth noting that the business community, having lost its monopoly position
over public policy, is regaining influence. But, where civic success stories are told, it is
not the old top-down, we-know-best model.
Its new role springs from seeing how globalization has transformed the role of
regions. Faster than local government officials or the public at large, major business
executives comprehend how critical it is for regions to find a formula for a stable society,
for a sustainable environment, for nurturing knowledge-based economic growth.
In places like Atlanta, local governments consistently failed to intervene in a
pattern of growth that was destroying the livability of the entire region. By late 1998 it
was the business community that called for change, and supported a new governor’s
initiative to reverse the region’s policies. Business found partners among state and local
government officials. Importantly, it found shared ground with at least some of the
leading environmental organizations, such as the Georgia Conservancy. The partnership
paid quick dividends in governance. A landmark law passed in 1999, dramatically
changing the decision rules for land development and transportation. Chamber of
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commerce representatives now work in coalitions that would have seemed improbable at
best only a few years ago.
This success came on the heels of the TAP struggle, and may in part suggest a
continuum of learning about crossing boundaries. As difficult as it may be to find a
modicum of agreement between environmentalists and builders around preserving quality
of life, it is infinitely more difficult to build bridges over centuries of racial conflict and
wide income gaps. When collaborators charge up this steep hill, they often fall back
wounded and weary.
However scarce success may seem, the seeds of change are evident.
In Charlotte, N.C., business forged a partnership with government to
revitalize some of the poorest neighborhoods in the region. The respect
shown neighborhood leaders by the newspaper gave activists the power to
raise resources from a wider community. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the
largest business organization has attracted wide media attention for its
alliance with traditional social justice groups to steer private financing to the
46 most impoverished communities. Down the coast, the Silicon Valley
Manufacturing Group is the loudest voice at public hearings for more
affordable housing; in fact, it funds and manages one of the nation’s largest
private investment pools to support more affordable housing.
When Silicon Valley high tech manufacturing took a dive in the late
1980s and early 1990s, business executives there along with their government
and non-profit counterparts got together and created Joint Venture: Silicon
Valley. “Through a top-down, bottom-up process, people from business,
government, education, and community came together to reinvent Silicon
Valley around the vision of a community collaborating to compete globally,”
says Douglas Henton of Collaborative Economics (Henton 1997: 47). The
valley’s signature is achievement, but those who have made incredible wealth
22
agreed, through a collaborative process, that their ability “to sustain a worldclass economy requires greater economic opportunity for lower-income
people” (San Jose Mercury News 1998). More recently, nearly every major
community-based organization, business council, and local government have
combined into the Bay Area Partnership.
In 1999, the Regional Commerce and Growth Association of the St.
Louis metropolitan area adopted a strategic plan that featured revitalization of
housing and distressed areas of the city of St. Louis, which was clearly
drifting toward replacing Newark and Detroit on the wrong lists (Fleming
interview, 1999).
But are not all such examples really evidence that business is merely
flexing new kinds of muscles, stretching to protect its position in a more
complex economic and social milieu? Perhaps. Business concerns about the
livability factors in regions seems on the rise everywhere where growth has
strained natural resources. The new intellectual class – young,
technologically savvy knowledge workers – are selecting places to work by
where they prefer to live, which translates to a major concern about
everything from the quality of the environment, to cultural opportunities, to
housing costs, and access to good schools.
In region after region, the model seems to be shifting to collaboration.
Even in Chicago, where conflict and machine politics are legendary, the late
1990s saw a highly diverse leadership group, something called Metropolis
2020, working on a bold plan for making the whole region more competitive
and sustainable. The business leaders involved, particularly George Ranney,
a former CEO of a major steel firm, insisted on getting neighborhood activists
to the planning table; and, critically, they sought out organized labor to
participate (Ranney interview, 1999). So, however formative it may be as a
23
new model, there appears to be substantial evidence that collaboration as a
way of proceeding in the community is taking hold.
It is not always business in the organizing role. Sometimes it is the
university, getting beyond the small (though significant) efforts described
above, and moving toward a new frontier of leadership. In San Diego they
are literally pushing the frontier. In the early 1990s there, the University of
California at San Diego started the San Diego Dialogue. With a now
substantial membership on both sides of the international border, the
Dialogue has evolved into a major force. It produces forums and research,
and helps put together joint ventures of the cross-border kind – combining the
cultural and governmental institutions of Tijuana and Mexico’s state of Baja
California with those in San Diego County. UCSD Vice Chancellor Mary
Walshok, one of the founders, says how routine it is now for the head tables
at civic events to be populated by leaders from both countries. “Now we can
force issues on to the table for frank discussion. We know the new rules: we
name the problem, frame the choices, and provide the space for patient
deliberation” (Walshok interview, 1999).
Collaboration – if practiced with persistence – can alter the civic culture.
The Chattanooga experience would certainly suggest, that pursuing collaboration
as the core strategy for civic improvement – if supported by financial resources, and if
repeated over time, with results that reinforce the motivation of citizens – can change the
basic culture of a community. Over and over in the testimony of people who participated
in the experience of the past couple of decades, people said this was becoming their
culture. No place is civically perfect; any visitor to Chattanooga today could find
evidence for a contrarian thesis, along with abundant evidence of regular political
conflicts. Nonetheless, the results are visible. And people do talk about this community
as though it had discovered something very unusual.
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By definition, when collaboration is seriously embraced, it is a radical departure
from usual community problem-solving. As the Kettering Foundation puts it, the usual
way is for communities of interest to cut the problem down to more manageable size (i.e.,
it’s not an “education” issue, but a “teacher” problem); then find a plausible solution,
delegate responsibility to some existing institution, and sell the public on it (For
Communities to Work 1999). The problem gets framed in fragments, loses the
interconnections, and the result is war among competing solutions. Kettering has
plainspoken advice: Recognize that the issues confronting civil society today are what
Rittel and Webber called “wicked problems” (Rittel and Webber 1973). These are the
issues for which workable definitions are not clear, and the cause of the problem is not
certain, and any presumably effective action would have to narrow the gap between what
is and what ought to be, without agreement on what should be. This is why we do not
make great progress on reforming the education or health care delivery systems. The
antidote? Naming the problem for what it is, and showing how it connects with the
concerns citizens already have. Framing the choices realistically and providing the time
and the space for citizens to work through the options.
The Internet, with its capacity for a more interactive civil society, is the wild card in the
civic deck
Collaboration is commonly assumed to be people meeting face to face in some
definable set of venues. Clearly, though, the Internet holds the potential for infinitely
scalable collaborative efforts, without the necessity of physical proximity. It is already in
use for political campaigns. The technology for interactivity is becoming increasingly
sophisticated, with real-time capacity for voice, video, and data exchange and
compilation. Some communities already use this medium for an extended town meeting,
giving anyone on-line access to all aspects of a proposed development. Polling is fast
becoming a routine on-line practice. Eventually, security encryption questions
notwithstanding, voting on-line seems inevitable.
25
Assuming that access is assured to every interested citizen, what major civic uses
are likely? Will there be referenda for every major question, in lieu of deliberative,
representative legislation? Will software emerge geared to citizenship? Envisioning
abuses and a further weakening of civic bonds is a plausible vision. But so is the prospect
that, in contrast to the original New England town meeting (narrowly focused, limited to
property owners, meeting only at selected intervals), meetings on the web could meet any
jurisdictional or community definition, be inclusive and available at flexible times.
No one can say what the effects will be or how rapidly this medium will make its
impact on governance. What seems safer as a forecast is the likelihood that practitioners
of democracy will always need real contact. And that collaboration in communities will
stay true to the formula of meeting to talk, decide, and plan. When the National Civic
League holds its finals for the All America Cities program each year, more than a
thousand citizens show up representing the 30 communities still in the competition. The
judging is largely based on the quality of the collaboration shown across all parts of the
community in the process of getting measurable results. Finalists show up in delegations
often more than a hundred people, a real cross-section of the community. The
enthusiasm, reminiscent of political conventions, is palpable. The winners always point
to what they learned from the challenge to collaborate across the lines of familiarity and
comfort. Only ten “win” each year, but the feeling in the room is always that they all won
something profound from the experience they had.
So perhaps collaboration is a compound in which sentiment is a major element.
Enthusiasm and inspiration are not trivial. But inside the formula there is a discipline, a
deliberative process, arguably the closest thing to civic science available today. John
Gardner, who may have pondered this subject longer than any other living American,
thinks of it this way: “Behind the buzz is a discipline. And with all due respect to the
ancient arts of governing and diplomacy, the more recent art of collaboration does
represent something new -- maybe Copernican. If it contained a silicon chip, we’d all be
26
excited. As it is, it’s mostly tolerated as just another step in our social bumbling.”
(Gardner interview1996)
27
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