Rebuilding Ground Zero with Democracy: Listening to the City and the 21st Century Town Meeting(TM)

Headnote

ABSTRACT

This article introduces readers to the principles guiding the development and planning of a 21st Century Town Meeting(TM) using Listening to the City as an example. First, the article outlines AmericaSpeaks' Taking Democracy to Scale(TM) model, on which the 21st Century Town Meeting(TM) process is based. Then, each element of the Taking Democracy to Scale(TM) model is described in detail using specific examples from Listening to the City. The article concludes with a brief analysis of the impact of Listening to the City and the potential of the 21st Century Town Meeting(TM).

KEYWORDS

AmericaSpeaks, town meeting, public hearing, feedback

INTRODUCTION

"We have a word for what they were doing. The word is democracy.""

-Pete Ham ill, New York Daily News

Even the most hardened, cynical observers marveled at the sight of approximately 4,500 citizens working together to resolve the most challenging planning process of our time - rebuilding the World Trade Center site. Listening to the City, a day-long meeting on July 20, 2002, provided ordinary New Yorkers an opportunity to have a direct voice in the rebuilding process. In response to the participants' concerns about the initial six proposed designs, the key decision makers went back to the drawing board, introducing the international competition from which Daniel liebskind's winning design emerged.

Listening to the City was the largest demonstration of AmericaSpeaks' 21st Century Town Meeting(TM) process to date. Since 1997, AmericaSpeaks, a non-profit organization, has facilitated 21st Century Town Meetings(TM) throughout the country on issues ranging from Social security reform to urban and regional planning and resource allocation.3 The process is designed to engage citizens in the public decisions that impact their lives.

AmericaSpeaks' founder and president Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer developed the 21st Century Town Meeting(TM) process in order to bridge the widening gap between decision makers and citizens. Traditional tools of democracy, such as public hearings, have largely become diluted, public relations exercises that only reach those who are already very engaged or representatives of special-interest groups. At the same time, the needs and realities of governing have changed - decisions must be made in shorter time frames and the mass media responds only to large displays of collective action. As a result, Lukensmeyer recognized a need for new democratic...