Master Plans and Public Participation

I want to clarify my attitude towards plans and participation.

I'm for 'em!

but...

• we have to have everyday, always-on principles and visions of our natural and built environments. For instance, Sustainable Shelby's top recommendations and Jeff Speck's first six suggestions for Memphis. We can't use master plans to outsource, offload, avoid, postpone, ignore or forget these principles and visions, or their defense.


• Public participation and input happens all the time, and has always happened all the time. We now have the collaborative, visual, ubiquitous, sometimes place-based, sometimes asynchronous, usually inexpensive tools to capture the ideas, moods, uses, input of citizens. Discrete meetings in discrete places should always be one of the tools, but exclusively it deludes rulers leaders that the public is something you give 2 minutes to stand up and speak, and 5 seconds to sit down and shut up.