Carmen Sirianni

Neighborhood Planning as Collaborative Democratic Design

Abstract Problem: Historically, neighborhood participation has lapsed into NIMBYism or has not been especially effective at long-term, inclusive, and integrative planning. Purpose: I aim to describe and analyze an example of how local governments can function as civic enablers and capacity builders for collaborative and accountable planning among neighborhood stakeholders and city government. Methods: This is a case study of Seattles neighborhood planning approach in the 1990s based on semistructured interviews with 33 current and former planners, other officials, and neighborhood activists, and review of a broad selection of neighborhood plans and other planning documents and newspaper coverage of the planning process. Results and conclusions: The city of Seattle developed a set of tools and resources to empower local citizens in the planning process while also holding them accountable for actions consistent with specified broad values and planning targets. This, together with the citys substantial investment in neighborhood planning staff, who served as relational organizers and intermediaries of trust, was critical to the success of neighborhood planning and to the emergence of a collaborative governance culture among highly diverse and often contentious community associations, business interests, city departments, and the city council. Takeaway for practice: Diverse neighborhoods can find common ground and make positive progress on planning to address shared citywide concerns. However, they need staff assistance to do this. Neighborhood planners can play this role, but only if cities fund them to do this time-consuming work and provide institutional support and guidance.

Working time in transition : the political economy of working hours in industrial nations

1. From Standardization to Flexibility Changes in the Political Economy of Working Time - Karl Hinrichs, William Roche, and Carmen Sirianni 2. Working Time Development in West Germany: Departure to a New Stage - Karl Hinrichs 3. Working Time Policies in France - Jean-Pierre Jallade 4. The Chimera of Changing Employee Time Preferences: Working Hours In British Industrial Relations since the Second World War - William Roche 5. Where Have All the Hours Gone? Working Time Reduction Policies in the Netherlands - Chris de Neubourg 6. The Reduction of Working Hours in Belgium: Stakes and Confrontations - Annik de Ronge and Michel Molitor 7. Trading Time for Consumption: The Failure of Working Hours Reduction in the United States - Susan Christopherson 8. The Working-Bee Syndrome in Japan: An Analysis of Working Time Practices - Christoph Deutschmann 9. On the Road to a Society of Free Choke: The Politics of Working Time in Sweden - Ulla Weigeit 10. The Self-Management of Time in Post-lndustrial Society - Carmen Sirianni About the Contributors

The Civic Mission of a Federal Agency in the Age of Networked Governance U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been engaged in a process of organizational learning to build civic capacity for nearly 4 decades, in effect discovering its civic mission. This article examines how EPA has increasingly become a more effective enabler of democratic network governance in the watershed arena and has developed ambitious cross-media initiatives to help transform the culture of the agency. Its very progress, however, highlights significant challenges that the agency must address.

Big Rights, Small Citizens

In this important book, Margaret Somers sets herself the ambitious task of developing an analytic and empirical approach to citizenship as ‘‘the right to have rights’’ and elaborates an ‘‘architectonics of citizenship’’ (p. 35) in terms of the historical, contemporary, and normative ‘‘triadic’’ institutional assemblage of state, market, and civil society (p. 30). Her main adversary is market fundamentalism in all its varieties. The book offers many profound insights into the genealogies of concept formation relevant to her task, and ranges across a wide array of what she calls ‘‘knowledge cultures’’ (p. 51). As such, it is a most worthy read for all social scientists.

Civic Innovation, Conflict, and Politics: Response for The Good Society Symposium on Civic Innovation in America

Our book examines civic innovation as a social learning process extending over the past several decades. It is here, however incompletely, that we find critical lessons for broadening and deepening civic democracy to grapple with the challenges of an increasingly complex society where ordinary citizens, as well as professionals and officials of many kinds, will be compelled to reimagine the public work they do. It is here also that we find an important source of insight about the capacity of Americans to reinvent democracy, one that is largely absent from more familiar tales of decline of aggregate levels of social capital (Putnam) and of multi-tiered civic associations (Skocpol), or in the repeatedly disappointed historical cycles of “the democratic wish” (Morone).1 We find much wisdom in all these accounts, to be sure, but they miss much about how and why civic innovation in the current period proceeds, and the institutional and policy dynamics that enable it to do so. Our account of four specific arenas of innovation and the emergence of a nascent civic renewal movement draws upon organizational and regulatory theory, policy learning, deliberative democratic and critical theory, social movement theory, and social capital theory. We delimit our study by focusing primarily upon a range of deliberative and collaborative models of public problem solving, rather than examining social capital broadly or the full array of public interest groups and social movements that arose in the wake of the 1960s; we view these resources and movements, however, as vital to contemporary American democracy and important to some of the innovations we examine. We never identify ourselves as “communitarians” or posit the “decline of community” as an abstract target, but focus on concrete public problem solving and policy design (“public policy for democracy”) in various forms. We recognize, however, that there are still areas of this analysis that require greater analytic attention and clarification. Let us briefly address a few of them.