>excerpt from a paper by Albert Bartlett published in Population
>& Environment, Vol. 20, No. 1, September 1998, Pgs. 77 - 81.
>
>REGIONWIDE PLANNING WILL MAKE THE PROBLEMS WORSE
>________________________________________________
>
>
>REGIONAL PLANNING DILUTES AND ULTIMATELY DEFEATS DEMOCRACY
>
> What does regional planning do to democracy? In 1950 the
>population of
>the City of Boulder was 20,000. So when speaking to a member of the City
>Council in 1950, a citizen of Boulder was one voice in 20,000. In 1998 the
>population of Boulder is approximately five times larger, so one citizen of
>Boulder in 1997 is one voice in 100,000. Population growth in Boulder
>since 1950 has diluted democracy in Boulder by a factor of five! This is
>bad enough. But look what will happen if we turn to regional planning as
>we seek democratic ``solutions'' to the problems. If there are 300,000
>people in the ``region,'' then, as seen by the individual citizen, regional
>planning will further dilute democracy by another factor of three. If the
>``region'' includes the metropolitan Denver counties with perhaps 2.5
>million
>population, one citizen of Boulder will be reduced to being only one voice
>in 2.5 million! Then, to make things even worse, if regional planning is
>``successful'', it will hasten the population growth in the region to 3, 4,
>or even 5 million, with the corresponding further destruction of democracy.
>
> For the individual, democracy is inversely proportional to the size
>of the
>participating population.
I'm not sure that it always works quite that way. When I spent a month in a
Sao Paulo slum a year ago, I saw something rather interesting. Sao Paulo,
as you know, has a population of aprx. 20 million, meaning, by Bartlett's
reckoning, that each citizen would stand a one in 20 million chance of being
heard. This did not seem to bother the people around me in the least
because, while many of them worked in downtown Sao Paulo, the city as a
whole was not in any sense their community. Their community consisted of
the people around them, with whom they interacted via a great variety of
networks. The boundaries of this community were rather amorphous, and
seemed to vary depending on what was at issue. While it seemed informal, it
was probably quite tightly organized around things that really mattered -
for example, drug dealers' territories or daycare for young children. And
on those things, it was not always democratic.
Much of the world's population is now urban, and large cities are continuing
to grow at the expense of smaller urban centres and the countryside.
Perhaps what will emerge from this is something like I observed in Sao
Paulo. In their day to day lives, people can only interact at a certain
scale -- maybe no more than a few thousand people. What they may try to do,
then, is break a very large city down into communities which make sense to
them. These may be partly democratic, partly authoritarian, but they would
function to provide people with a sense of protection, place and order.
Ed Weick
