ABSTRACT
Interest in participatory approaches to neighborhood planning has skyrocketed among city residents, professional planners, elected officials, and urban scholars during the past two decades. This renewed interest in resident-led planning is the result of a number of powerful economic, social, and political trends affecting our nation’s major metropolitan regions. The increasingly uneven pattern of development characterizing many of our metropolitan areas has led to a disturbing expansion in the number of economically distressed neighborhoods where the quality of life is often shockingly low. The failure of Urban Renewal and other centrally conceived revitalization strategies to address the critical economic
and social problems confronting these neighborhoods has undermined public confidence in and support for top-down urban regeneration efforts. Federal cuts in intergovernmental assistance to local governments have increased the burden local, county, and state government must shoulder for economic and community development. These budget cuts have forced increasing numbers of cash-strapped villages, towns, and cities, hurt by our most recent recession, to transfer responsibility for these programs to local nonprofit agencies and community-based organizations. The total quality management movement, which stresses the importance of continuous improvement in the quality of service delivery to an increasingly diverse citizenry, has encouraged municipal planning directors and city managers to emphasize
more participatory approaches to governance. Community development and planning professionals have also been encouraged to adopt more collaborative forms of practice due to increasing pressure from cultural identity groups, including African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, seeking a greater voice in public policy decisions affecting their communities. Finally, public and private funders of urban revitalization are increasingly mandating active participation of local stakeholders at every stage of the planning, design, and development process, further reinforcing the movement toward participatory neighborhood planning and development (Peterman 2000).
