This is a response to a reader who uses the tern "urban design for all" to mean citizen, or public, participation.
A politician can dance around issues but is accountable for problems. Is it any wonder we face issues without solutions?
----- Walter Hosack, 2011 (See "Sound Bytes" below)
Public participation, or "urban design for all", has turned city planners into facilitators /administrators and architects into supplicants. Urban renewal failed because solutions were dictated based on opinion without knowledge. Citizen participation has failed for the same reason; but failure is disguised by popular participation that dilutes blame; considers experience knowledge; and mistakes issues for problems.
A problem must be defined before a solution can be found. A public grievance is a symptom, but is rarely the problem. The responsibility of leadership is to ask questions and conduct research to define problems; but admitting a problem can be political poison, so it is tempted to dance with the issues and ignore the problem.
Issues distract us from problems. This is typical because problems are abstract and issues are real, but medicine has already taught us that reacting to symptoms does not produce a cure. The urban public does not define problems. It lives with symptoms and will never produce cures, but it may ratify one when explanations justify change. If I use the phrase, "medicine for all", the contrast with "urban design for all" may help to explain where we are and where medicine has been.
SOUND BYTES
Since the world has become a battle of sound bytes, I've decided to level a blast of my own in the spirit of citizen participation:
- Freedom to deceive is not democracy.
- Financial deception in the name of freedom is a threat to the nation.
- There is no economic success without social stability
- Never has so much been taken from so many by so few in the name of freedom.
- Justice is a department of the party in power
- Blame is irrelevant when there is no fear of punishment
- Winning is not the only thing except in sport and war.
- When gridlock is stability improvement is an illusion
- A House divided cannot lead as grievances multiply and extremism grows.
- Opinion is a temporary substitute for knowledge.
- Emotion is connected to intelligence by an unstable thread of responsibility
- Intelligence is a weapon without a permit
- Complexity is the enemy of compromise.
- Taxation with excessive representation is chaos
- Balance is a function of time in an unstable universe. It is always sought but never found
- A politician can dance around issues but is accountable for problems. Is it any wonder we face issues without solutions?
In the end it has always been about protection from unfair advantage -- and we have struggled to define the concept. It hasn't gotten any easier, but remains essential to the success of democracy in the world of free enterprise.
BYTES from THE PEOPLE
- Give me liberty or give me Wall Street.
- One if by President -- two if by Congress
- The bankers are coming; the bankers are coming!!!
- By the economy's fading light
- By the dawn's early foreclosure
- I regret that I have but one home to give for my country.
- Don't fire 'til you see the greed in their eyes.
- These are the times that try men's trust.
- We find this deceit to be self-evident
- Don't give up the bonus
- Taxation with excessive representation is chaos.
- Poor Richard's last notice was not an almanac.
In honor of Samuel Adams the Maltster
BYTES WITHOUT A HOME
I dropped these as being too byte-ing to be amusing
- Taxation without equality is tyranny in disguise.
- The Boston Massacre is alive in Oakland.
- The tea party was only a beginning.
- Saving to invest has become fuel for deception.
- I regret that I have only one retirement to give for my country.
- Home ownership is a goal that is only a right in the mind of a politician.
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Walter Hosack
Author
Walter M. Hosack
Dublin OH
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