ABSTRACT
Imagine that your community goes into bankruptcy and that the state government, in a moment of surprising clarity and imagination—and perhaps also wisdom—decides not simply to ask a prestigious law firm to help to draft a new city charter to set things right, but also asks you to convene and to manage a bottom-up process in the city to rewrite that city charter. This was, indeed, the situation in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in which Susan Podziba, a recent planning department graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found herself. Maybe this task would be perfectly clear to you, but more likely you might very well wonder where and how to begin, and how then to manage and carry through a job of this scope.
