ABSTRACT
This study thus addresses an important gap in research and reflective practice, using a major community planning initiative to highlight cross-cultural confusion, power relations, and other problems in face-to-face meetings and, to a lesser degree, the contexts that surround them. For my purposes here, “community planning” is synonymous with “neighborhood planning”: efforts by which residents and others in a spatially defined area, often working in tandem with planning professionals, seek to develop a blueprint for their collective future-to protect what they have and secure improvements in their quality of life. In America, the roots of such planning efforts run deep, at least as far back as the reformist era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when settlement houses began to appear in crowded industrial cities (Rohe and Gates 1985). Community planning is policy development on the micro level, often with deliberation at its heart, but it is also an effort by local stakeholders to write themselves a story. Baum (1997, 295), in a detailed study of two community planning processes in Baltimore, describes such planning as the effort to help move residents’ conversations with themselves and with technical experts from “communities of memory” to future-oriented “communities of hope.” At all stages, clear, trustworthy face-to-face communication among actors is crucial to getting significant and sustainable results.
