A little something more to contemplate about our land use processes related to our current housing and community development issues, this from Andrew Ross’ book “Celebration Chronicles,” about the creation of the community of Celebration, Florida:

While DPZ’s (The firm of Duany Plater-Zyberk) charrettes typically involve several days of meeting with local officials, community leaders, architects, interest groups, and citizens, Duany is wary about too much citizen participation.

“After being a rigorous practitioner of the public process, I have lost some confidence in it.  When given the chance to make decisions, more often than not, citizens will make palpably wrong ones.  They are usually against mixed use.  They are always against higher density; they love five-acre zoning … Until confidence is restored by some real successes and planners are allowed to implement the difficult decisions, a mob often decides against its best interests… The citizens will close the drawbridge, oppose mixed use and economic variety in housing, so we must fight them.  I’m not the sort of planner that does what the citizens dictate.  We are not secretaries to the mob…. Our democracy is a representative form of government, there are elected officials and planning boards, and we should speak only to them.  The citizens themselves are a distorting influence because they are specialists, just like traffic engineers are specialists.  Their specialty is their own backyard, and only rarely the community as a whole.”

Don’t think I agree completely with Duane on this because if we completely ignore the citizens, the result could be “off with their heads,” electorally at least.  Then what?  Still, there’s something nuggets here to consider…