The article is from A&B issue 11|23
The world is not arranged by laws or by winning elections. In the game of urban space, one and the other configure the playing field, but the outcome is not determined by either good laws or well-intentioned municipal representatives. And yet we do not always have good laws and trustworthy local politicians.
The battle for space is a constant dogfight in which details often matter. In which great defeats and victories are rare. More often, good adjustments, small changes that nevertheless affect the final shape of the city, must suffice.
Since the beginning of the Third Republic, the predominant way of rectifying various areas of social and economic life has been to improve the state of the law, especially to expand the scope of regulation, to make regulations more precise and specific, to create more anti-corruption barriers. And accompanying all this is the incantation that "changes should be systemic." A spell that is right, because we know that patching up the law leads to more problems. And it always disappoints in its effects. One of the reasons is the façade of the solutions adopted, which very quickly fit into the existing logic. Those with real power usually say, "we agree to changes, provided they don't mess up our business in any way." They adapt by putting old content into new forms.
This is what happened to some extent with the good and interesting solution of establishing Urban Planning and Architectural Commissions in local government units. But good intentions are not yet good institutions. In order to become such, they need to be well constructed, the effects of their introduction must be analyzed, and mistakes must be corrected. However, there is no indication that the institutions set up for this purpose have ever conducted a national evaluation of the operation of these institutions. The first reservations may concern the transparency of their operation. The existence of municipal and urban planning and architectural commissions makes sense primarily as a certain procedure for objectivizing decisions. When a group of people with professional backgrounds and who enjoy public trust express their opinion on changes in urban space, their opinion should be owned by the local government. That is, it should be public in nature, and not available only to the mayor and city officials. If the opinions of this body are inaccessible to councilors and residents - it can easily become a façade structure. What's more, the principle of public access to the opinions of the Urban Planning and Architectural Commissions could also result in the spread of another custom - the supplementing of the commission's opinions as such with dissenting opinions containing arguments against the majority opinion.
The matter is easy only on the surface. Transparency is not something we have no problem with. Numerous professional corporations - including my own, an academic one - are very reluctant to address their own entanglements and limitations. The same goes for the legal, medical or - by nature - architectural communities. We are reluctant to show the cuisine of our professions, the mechanisms for building prestige and influence, or issues of income differentiation. At the beginning of the transformation, it might have seemed that with the development of free market mechanisms, these corporate mores would change. If even that is happening, it is happening very slowly.
What is most difficult in the context of open debate is that many professional corporations, preferring to hide the fact that their representatives settle issues often after a long dispute, with the final outcome being the result of a small voting majority. "Architects have spoken," after all, does not always mean that everyone had the same opinion. Revealing differences is considered a risk, not to mention social or personal entanglements. Many times I've heard the argument that age and gender don't matter in discussions on this topic. Often from the mouths of people who statements made by women and people younger than themselves were quite obviously disregarded.
I would not insist on appointing political scientists to municipal advisory bodies. But there is one thing worth talking about over and over again. Public debate must take into account all possible political entanglements, not keep silent about them, pretend they don't exist. Among the exceptions are expert opinions that take into account the existence of interest groups, taking into account the methods they use.
The fact that some candidates in local elections are supported by developers is indisputable. It is also indisputable that this support is not disinterested. It fundamentally changes the logic of the decisions made. Someone will say that this is the nature of democracy? Agreed, but it is worth talking about it openly, showing these dependencies already at the campaign stage, and not only after the campaign. You can ask candidates whether they use this kind of support, look at reports from previous elections. If the residents of a city or municipality consider this type of support irrelevant or worthy of recognition, that's a very different situation from one in which they have no idea about it. Democracy is not about blocking interests, but about the fullest possible access to information on how to represent them.
In doing so, it is worth recognizing that the interests of investors or landowners who want to sell them their property are one of the elements worth taking into account. It is wrong when they are the only interest taken into account by decision-makers. Moreover, there are some needs or interests that have no natural representatives - environmental considerations, climate considerations, the interest of future generations, spatial order and the like. Their natural representatives are experts, specialists, sometimes activists. The fact that some of them will be excluded by the new law from the ranks of the MKUA can be attempted to rectify by creating meaningful mechanisms for the participation of advocates of such perspectives in the city.
Solutions that strengthen the professional factor, guaranteeing the participation of knowledgeable people is the first condition for success. The next is to create conditions for these people to work diligently, to give them the opportunity to express their opinions, to create a broader field of discussion of spatial policy issues. It is worth thinking about the details, payment for participation in the meeting and for the preparation of a draft opinion, regularity of the commission's work and inviting people from outside the center to participate (not necessarily permanently) as well. Finally, about ensuring that the commission does not just stop at preparing formal positions, but that its members are prepared to present them at the city council or at local debates on public space issues. After all, in the end, the idea is to make the whole process understandable to as wide a range of residents as possible, to move away from a situation in which every construction project that begins raises concerns and suspicions.
For in the end, all these calculations can be reduced to a question of trust. In theory, one could consider that the city government by its very nature represents the public interest. However, the numerous cases of violation of this interest, in which local authorities cared more about the success of investments than about spatial order, environmental protection, keeping an eye on the interests of residents, suggest that within the authority itself it is difficult to balance the various needs of the community, that the predominance of the investment factor (all things municipal or private) is the rule rather than the exception. The imbalance breeds distrust and lasting tensions.
At the same time, it is worth remembering that trust itself is gradable. From an individual decision of the president, I prefer one that has the support of three or five architects and urban planners independent of him and each other. From the implicit opinion of these people, I prefer the one expressed in writing and justified. From knowing the opinion of the majority - a situation in which I can also know the objections of the minority. Such work is a bit more difficult, but we must be aware that the opinion processes of the MKUA are often irreversible and have effects beyond the horizon of one generation.
Of course, we must also keep in mind that some participants in the process will withdraw from it when they feel that transparency carries too much risk. Already today, some officials and local government officials are talking about such risks involving responsibility for their decisions. It can therefore be expected that it is also more comfortable for MKUA and GKUA members to avoid excessive visibility. In the long run, however, such concerns expand the freedom to exert informal pressure and undermine confidence in decisions made by the local government as a whole. It is therefore worthwhile, to the extent possible under current conditions, to create mechanisms that increase the sense of comfort, if only through effective interest in the commission's work on the part of city councils or even a kind of umbrella spread by councils over the process of giving opinions on amendments to local plans and other MKUA activities.
The last thing is the question of scale. Only in the largest centers do we have a regular debate about the changes taking place in the city. Of course, the most difficult situation is for residents of medium-sized centers. Those in which there are no significant local media, concentrated in metropolitan and other provincial cities. And at the same time, ones about which we can't say that "everyone knows each other." It's worth not losing sight of these centers, because a little interest in their fate on the part of circles in large academic and metropolitan cities is a huge support for groups interested in protecting spatial governance at this level.
In the strategy of increasing the transparency and substantive nature of the decision-making process, success has already seen visible and beneficial adjustments. More ambitious plans require changes in statutory regulations, a balance in access to resources between the private sector and municipal governments. The latter is very difficult to imagine in a situation where local government finances are unstable, the central government and most of the major parties are eager to seek funds for the implementation of election promises precisely in municipal budgets. Therefore, it is worthwhile, without distracting the frail forces of supporters of good, coherent urban space, to focus on goals that are relatively simple to achieve.
The game for urban space is never a zero-sum game. The point is to take into account different perspectives in the dispute over it, to value the factor of professional competence, to ensure that it has the right to a publicly audible voice. Decisions will be made by legitimate public authorities anyway. If they care about broader approval - they will arrange it in a transparent and as socialized as possible manner. Local government does not act ex machina by virtue of statutory provisions, collective decision-making is a derivative of the goodwill of the actors, procedures respected by all, and good solutions tailored to the scale of the entity. There is much to ask about in the upcoming local government campaign.
The report is available on the Center for Public Policy website.
The report, "Strengthening the Social and Substantive Factors in the Formation of Urban Space."
© Center for Public Policy
