This study explores the role of community organizations in the planning process, using the Seattle, Washington, brownfields program as the focus of study. Applying scholarly literature from planning, social work, and environmental studies, this research focuses specifically on the effect that community organizations have on promoting public participation, influencing project outcomes, and mediating between neighborhood residents and government at three brownfield sites in Seattle. I apply multiple qualitative research methods in this study, including case studies, semi-structured interviews, and archival research, to identify conditions if and where community organizations have been integral to public involvement and influential to project outcomes. My descriptions, questions, and analyses are based upon existing brownfield studies, participation and community organization literature, and the communicative planning debates.
This research shows a notable lack of meaningful participation by individuals in brownfields projects despite the presence of several active community organizations in each case and assumptions in the literature of organizations’ promotion of public participation. Government officials and developers in this study implemented ‘public participation’ but often produced little more than an outreach/advertising effort that lacked any real path for input, reflecting the rationalization of participation requirements by those in power. For their part, community organizations played a mediating role but the role was as much for the benefit of city officials and developers as it was for neighborhood residents. Organizations in these cases assisted government officials in gauging local concerns and added valuable support to developers seeking city approvals yet rarely provided increased access to the planning process or facilitated activism, often due to the political context of these developments. Despite the appearance of minimal opportunities for meaningful participation, however, residents appeared mostly satisfied by the planning processes and showed little concern for contamination highlighting Seattle’s neighborhood planning efforts of the previous decade and emphasizing the importance of trust, long-standing relationships, and “local” status. Calls for increased public participation in the literature and in practice may not be necessary (or at least not necessary in all phases of a project) as long as planners and politicians strengthen efforts to build relationships and trust between stakeholders.Ph.D.Urban & Regional PlanningUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/60850/1/dspiess_1.pd
