Youth Participation in Community Planning (Community Advisory Service Report Number 486)
Mullahey, Ramona and Susskind, Yve and Checkoway, Barry (1999).
Chicago: American Planning Association; 70 pages. $32.00. ISBN 1884829325.
Interest in and support for “child and youth participation” has increased significantly in recent years. But more often than not, attention has focused on young people’s participation in the arenas traditionally ascribed to them: schools, youth centers, youth employment programs, etc. Rarely are young people seen as citizens who should be engaged in decisions that affect the community as a whole. Land use planning and related policy-making- which have significant impacts on the lives of children and youth- have largely remained the exclusive domain of adults.
Youth Participation in Community Planning provides a valuable overview of communities in the U.S. and Canada that are attempting to broaden the range of issues in which young people are engaged, communities committed to providing meaningful opportunities for youth participation in community change. Developed as a Planning Advisory Service Report for the American Planning Association (APA), the report speaks specifically to practicing planners and community decision makers in North America- those at the local level who are most critical to opening doors for increased youth participation in community development. However, the report will be useful to planners and community decision makers elsewhere too, as well as others who are interested in examples of youth participation in community development. Educators in particular may find the land-use planning case studies to be of interest, as nearly all of them involved some form of school curriculum or class-based activities (from third grade up). Youth organizers will be particularly interested in the two detailed case studies of youth-initiated, youth-directed programs in Seattle (see below).
The goal for the report, as stated by the authors, is “to develop an informative guide that provides planners with practical tools for their citizen participation tool box.” To achieve this end, the authors draw upon their extensive experience- Mullahey as a “Community Builder Fellow” with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and as the APA’s national advocate for involving young people in planning; Susskind as a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan engaged in research on social change organizations where teenagers are in leadership roles; and Checkoway, Professor of Social Work and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and founder and director of the University’s Center for Community Service and Learning, well-known for his prior work and publications in the fields of urban planning, youth, and community change.
The case studies represent the bulk of the report’s content, and its most significant contribution to the literature on youth participation. Eleven case studies are presented, two in considerable detail and the other nine in summary form with varying degrees of substantive information regarding the specific methods and activities, helping to keep the report to a manageable 70 pages. Contact details are provided for each case study to obtain additional information.
Organized according to three “forms” of youth participation in community planning (youth in community land-use planning, youth-based initiatives for social change, and youth in policy making), the case studies are drawn from a variety of cities, all of them in the U.S. with the exception of Toronto. These range from small communities such as Lemon Grove, California, to larger cities such as San Francisco, Seattle and Toronto. The geographic slant towards western U.S. cities is likely due to the authors’ locations (Mullahey in Honolulu and Susskind in Seattle) than to any other factors. However, without exception the case study examples are, not surprisingly, from communities with a strong culture of citizen participation. Youth participation in nearly all of the land-use planning examples took place as part of larger citywide, long-range planning programs with significant community outreach and participation.
The most extensive case studies describe two “youth-based initiatives for youth empowerment” in Seattle: the Seattle Young People’s Project (SYPP) and Youth-N-Action (YNA). Drawing on Susskind’s doctoral research, these cases provide considerable detail regarding the organizational structure and operations of both programs. Using young people’s observations and reflections, each case study illustrates how young people developed their own initiatives to address issues of importance to them, and developed democratic structures to facilitate their group decision making processes. Both cases provide a very real portrait of the challenges and frustrations of participatory processes, as well as the power and promise they hold for achieving meaningful youth empowerment and community change. They are all-too-rare examples of the top two rungs of the Ladder of Children’s Participation- “child-initiated and directed” participation, and “child-initiated, shared decisions with adults.” (Roger Hart’s “Ladder of Children’s Participation” is the basis for the typology of youth participation presented in the report. See Hart’s Children’s Participation: The Theory and Practice of Involving Young Citizens in Community Development and Environmental Care, 1997.)
While it is not clear that all of the highlighted projects and programs achieved the ideal levels of participation outlined by the authors in their introduction, they each bear testimony to the real potential for young people to make positive contributions to community change. Indeed, the APA’s decision to focus a PAS Report on the subject confirms that young people’s participation in community planning has growing visibility and support within the planning profession and among local governments. We can only hope that the trend will continue, providing rich material for future case study publications.
Reviewer Information
Cornell University
David Driskell is a community planner with degrees from Stanford University and MIT. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell and co-principal of the firm Baird+Driskell Community Planning. For the past several years he has been active in the Growing Up in Cities project, a global effort to promote young people’s participation in community evaluation and improvement. He co-managed the project’s site in Bangalore, India, and authored the project’s manual: Creating Better Cities with Children and Youth (London and Paris: Earthscan and UNESCO Publishing, 2002).