Fun Palace at Brockwell Lido in London, 2016. Photo by Helen Murray.

Community members pose at a Fun Palace at Bromley by Bow Centre in London, 2019. Photo by Roswitha Chesher.

Avanttika Sivakumar and Laasya Cherukuri perform a classical Indian dance at a Fun Palace at Manor Park Library in Newham, 2022. Photo by Dominic Saulter.

A science lesson at a Fun Palace in Taupaki, New Zealand. Courtesy of Taupaki Fun Palace.

Kayaks in the swimming pool at a Fun Palace at Brockwell Lido in London, 2016. Photo by Helen Murray.

This piece publishes alongside the Zócalo/Los Angeles Times program “Would Parliamentary America Have More Fun?,” tomorrow, Friday, February 23, at 7 PM PST. Register here to attend in person or online.

For one weekend in 2014, my local community and I came together and took over Brockwell Lido, an outdoor swimming pool in South London. We put on an entirely free weekend of arts, culture, and science events for our community. There were kayaks in the swimming pool, shadow puppetry, cheerleading, scientists talking about the effects of cold water on the body, mermaids, paddle boards, a local choir, guided nature walks in the park nearby, and a magician. People came in the hundreds—the visitor count exceeded 1,000—including those who lived nearby but had never visited the lido and came through its gates for the first time.

It was our first Fun Palace, a huge and vital celebration of the brilliance of our community.

Now Fun Palaces take place annually, inspiring civic joy and democratizing ideas, resources, and culture. Over one weekend, this series of grassroots actions spring up across the U.K., uniting the nation in a drive for hyper-local culture, democracy, and radical social change.

In the 1960s, theater director Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price first envisioned a Fun Palace as a “laboratory of fun” and a “university of the streets” located in a physical building they would construct on the River Thames in East London. They dreamed that you would be able to access the building by “train, bus, monorail, hovercraft, car, tube or foot at any time.” They had a vision that you would come together with others there to learn and play. It was to be a temporary building, which after 10 years they would knock down and start over.

But it never got funded.

Instead, the idea of the Fun Palace lay dormant for five decades until Littlewood’s centenary neared. While many places were planning to stage productions of Littlewood’s most well-known play, Oh What a Lovely War, theater-maker, author, and activist Stella Duffy started thinking about what it would take to bring Littlewood and Price’s abandoned vision to life. She asked theater producer Sarah-Jane Rawlings to join her, and they both worked for months, from their kitchen tables, unpaid, to get the campaign off the ground. They traveled the country and were openly political about their mission for Fun Palaces, never underplaying the radical nature of the concept.

There was a huge response from the theater world, from those who knew and loved Littlewood and her work, but the call also attracted others seeking connection and radical social change; a different way of doing things. Ten years of Tory austerity in Britain had seen huge cuts to arts, culture, and public services, paired with increasing division around the borders and barriers to art and creativity. Fun Palaces represented a cultural shift of sorts, filling a void where government was not for its people. In total, 138 venues, organizations, and community groups said “yes” to the open invitation, and Fun Palaces popped up in theaters, libraries, parks, and community centers across the length and breadth of the U.K. on the weekend of October 4, 2014.

Now, 10 years later, Fun Palaces are still going strong, and I’m part of the organization behind them, which campaigns year-round to advocate for cultural democracy, an approach to arts and culture that aims to include everyone’s voice.

The Fun Palaces model broadens what gets counted as culture. We include gardening, crochet, orange peel sculpting, junk modeling, battle rap, and coding (to name but a few) to show people that culture is not limited to opera or expensive theater in big, shiny buildings, or contemporary art pieces in costly-to-visit galleries. By empowering them to have a say in reimagining culture as for them, it also encourages them to see that they have a say in what the world can look like. When communities come together to democratize culture and take over decision-making in this arena, I believe it gives them the power to take over decision-making in other arenas, too.

Last year we called together a group of Makers (people who make Fun Palaces) to find out what Fun Palaces mean to them. We got a range of responses, which made it clear that the political and radical nature of Fun Palaces are a huge pull. “I’ve always seen a Fun Palace as a permission to be a bit more radical and experimental,” one Maker said. “It’s about systems change. And showing that there are alternative ways of re-building society that is currently around us.” To further explore the connection between cultural participation and civic activism, we’re conducting some research with sociologist Katy Pilcher, funded by the Centre for Cultural Value.

We know that the ideas behind Fun Palaces speak to people. Since 2014 there have been more than 2,650 Fun Palaces, made by more than 45,000 people and attended by over 800,000 people. Fun Palaces take place in libraries, theaters, gardens, pubs, cafes, museums, community centers, school halls, allotments, shopping malls, and many other places. We support the communities making Fun Palaces in all kinds of ways, whether it’s talking through ideas, helping them find insurance or funding, or linking them to local buildings that might be a potential venue for their Fun Palace. When the big buildings (theaters, museums, etc.) make them, we encourage them to “hand over” the reins to their local community for the weekend.

Ultimately Fun Palaces place communities at the heart of the decision-making around arts, sciences, and culture. We’ve always used Littlewood’s quote, “Everyone an artist, everyone a scientist” to assert this. But I believe it’s more than that: Everyone a digital creator, everyone a storyteller, everyone a historian, everyone a cultural leader, and everyone an activist, too.

When we come together in our communities and learn from one another, we strengthen what we’re capable of. If we can sing together, knit together, and have fun together, then we are also in a better position to stand up as communities and ask to have our other needs met, too.

The post What Is a Fun Palace? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Los Angeles is a city of more than four million people. And in its next budget, it might—I repeat, might—launch an Office of Civic Engagement to help all residents better participate in their city government.

Establishing even this tiny office (it could have as many as eight people and a budget of $700,000) would be a major achievement for a California city. This state is governed by processes as complicated as a Google algorithm and as slow-moving as 405 traffic—and offers little assistance to Californians who want to understand and engage with them.

Despite this, California’s leaders would have you believe that they represent a democratic resistance to the powers that be. And while they claim to be addressing profound disparities and failures in public decision-making, the people who run for office, vote, and participate in other ways (from contacting public officials, to attending public meetings, to protesting) are whiter, richer, and better educated than the state population as a whole.

State leaders have been unwilling to take the crucial first step to reversing those disparities: providing an infrastructure of support that works directly with people to boost their civic knowledge and create more opportunities for people to participate in public decision-making. Such a framework would consist of offices, staff, volunteers, and electronic tools to let the public know about any decision that might affect them and to help them learn how to make their voices heard. The natural place for such infrastructure is at the local level, closest to citizens.

An office like this, however, is almost impossible to find in California localities. Santa Rosa has a small engagement office, with an advisory board and a violence prevention program. And San Francisco has the state’s most sophisticated such office, which combines civic engagement with immigrant services.

Few other cities bother, and with reason. Local budgets are dominated by police and fire departments—and the retirement costs of their personnel—leaving little for public engagement. And many city officials will tell you that, given all the constraints on their power and the difficulty of dealing with NIMBYism, more robust public participation is the last thing they need.

This is a shame. I have traveled the world as co-president of an international forum on direct and participatory democracy, and I’ve been struck by how much more support there is for participation in the cities of Europe, Latin America, and East Asia than here at home. Even smaller cities—like San Sebastian, with 186,000 people in the Basque Country of Spain—has an office of participation bigger than the one being proposed for Los Angeles; it occupies a building once used as a prison by the dictator Francisco Franco.

Bigger world cities, from Madrid to Montevideo, Uruguay, devote millions of dollars and hundreds of people to providing not just support for engagement, but also actual power to make a host of decisions on everything from budgets to plans. Park Won-Soon, mayor of Seoul, South Korea, renamed City Hall to Citizens’ Hall and turned over the first two floors to citizens and engagement efforts.

Many national governments also have plans to integrate their citizens into decision-making. On a recent trip to Mexico, I visited the Instituto Nacional Electoral (the National Election Institute), which has more than 16,000 employees and a long-term strategy for developing civic culture (a project that the United States has outsourced to Twitter).

Rome’s new city government has devoted enormous resources to supporting participation both in person and online. Last fall, at a conference there, I helped draft, at the city council’s invitation, “Magna Charta for an International League of Democracy Cities” (Roman politicians are like Hollywood executives in ramping up expectations), which cities could sign to show their commitment to ever-increasing participation and local democracy. “A democracy city is a place where citizens—be they the city’s elected officials, staff, or volunteers—are always available to assist people when they seek to participate,” reads the document. Since then, I’ve watched in wonder as cities from Taiwan and Czech Republic have signed on. Meanwhile, not a single city in the United States has come on board.

This isn’t a surprise. Americans consider public engagement something that should be done privately, rather than as part of the suite of government services. The only American city with a world-class public participation operation is Minneapolis, where the city’s Neighborhood and Community Relations Department is focused on eliminating disparities in participation and driving up the rate of citizens who participate in local government to at least 80 percent.

I’d argue that within California, the best city when it comes to infrastructure for participation is Los Angeles, despite its hard-won reputation for apathy and low voter turnouts.

L.A.’s leadership is largely based on a decision it made 20 years ago, during a charter revision, to create elected Neighborhood Councils. There are now 99 of these advisory bodies, which advocate for their communities on issues from development to transportation to emergency preparedness, using small budgets funded with taxpayer dollars. There are neighborhood councils in every corner of the city with the notable exceptions of Pacific Palisades and Brentwood, where, not coincidentally, many of the city’s richest and most powerful people live.

While the councils can claim successes ranging from establishing health clinics in Pico-Union, to making downtown greener, conventional wisdom is that the councils are not powerful enough. So, EmpowerLA, the city department that provides operational support for the councils, has sought to establish an Office of Civic Engagement with a staff that would work even more broadly to improve participation.

The question now is whether, and to what extent, the new city budget might fund this project. Backers of the idea—Advancement Project California and leading nonprofits including Community Coalition and InnerCity Struggle—produced a report with several recommendations for what an office might do.

The document is convincing. Such an office could work to boost representation of low-income people, non-whites, and undocumented immigrants in public decision-making processes. And it could offer training sessions to citizens about how local government works, so citizens can learn how to better participate and also help their neighbors with engagement.

And the office would work with elected officials and other city departments to identify the right moments and best opportunities for the public to weigh in on policy and projects. The goal would be to establish “accessibility standards” that city officials would have to follow in public participation. Such standards might include making sure locations and times are convenient for meetings or events at which the public can participate, and that language translation, childcare, and food and drink are available.

“The city should be applauded on the start it has made” on civic engagement, says John Dobard, director of political voice at Advancement Project California, “but there is more the city could do to live up to what it says it values.”

The same could be said for other California communities. There is no better time than now for building an infrastructure for engagement. California desperately needs to rebuild its housing stock and change the way it uses energy—major transformations that will require strong public support. And the next two years will bring a new census and redistricting, both public processes that require participation.

But it won’t be easy, especially when it’s such a struggle for California’s biggest city to open a little office.

The post Why Does California Hate Public Participation? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The incident itself was ugly enough, but the subsequent debate proved just as bad. Many Ventura residents expressed disgust with the city’s inability to deal with people they regarded as vagrants, while many others expressed disgust that their friends and neighbors could dehumanize homeless people as part of the debate.

In the middle of this nasty fight sat seven people doing their best to make Ventura a better place to live: the members of the Ventura City Council. Sitting on the dais in the council chambers in the city’s historic 105-year-old city hall was not a comfortable place to be. Governing at the local level in California is always fraught with peril because people often have contradictory moral visions about what their city government should do—a fact that is obvious in most city council chambers every week. “We’re mad as hell. We’re not going to take anymore,” one resident told the councilmembers in a room packed full of angry folks.

The Ventura homelessness debate may yet work out—there’s a growing consensus to move forward with a new shelter—but the sense of being under fire will continue for local elected officials. It is inescapable: You’re elected by the small minority of residents who bother to vote in local elections. You devote yourself to a 24/7 job that pays a few thousand dollars a year. You try to do the right thing. But whatever you do, lots of your longtime friends and neighbors will be angry with you—and will express that anger to you in deeply personal terms in the supermarket, at parks and schools and churches, and even in parking lots.

I used to be a member of the Ventura City Council, and four of my former colleagues still serve there. They had to weather the recent controversy over the homeless. In my view, there’s no question that serving as a local elected official in California has gotten a lot harder over the past decade or two.

Just like our national conversation, our local debates have gotten harsher and uglier. Increasingly, we have seen deep divisions not only over local issues but also over national issues that manifest themselves locally, such as the recent debate about providing sanctuary for undocumented immigrants.

And, mirroring what’s happening at the national level, the ability to get things done locally has gotten much more difficult. Local politics is getting more ideological and the divisions in every city are getting starker. I called my recent book—an account of my time on the Ventura City Council—Talk City because sometimes it seemed to me like that’s all we ever did. And over time I felt we drifted away from productive talk that moved us toward action and instead spent more time talking past each other without taking any action.

Partly, this inability to get things done is the result of the growing disconnect between the expectations of our voters and their willingness to pay for those expectations. In California, that is a disconnect that goes back 40 years to the passage of Proposition 13.

On the one hand, people expect our city to do everything. Ventura is an old-fashioned “full service” city, which must provide police, fire, parks, water, sewer and more. Very often the city is the only local institution with the scale and revenue to initiate any large-scale undertaking.

On the other hand, most people don’t vote in local elections; turnout in off-year local elections typically runs between 25 percent and 35 percent. The voters are deeply skeptical of the city government’s competence; and during my terms they regularly voted down tax increases and tied the city’s hands on policy decisions via other ballot initiatives.

At a May 7, 2018 meeting at Ventura City Hall, supporters of more programs for homeless citizens held blue placards while those asking for more police enforcement held orange ones. Photo courtesy of Tim Nafziger.

Sometimes we couldn’t even agree on what to call our city. The official name is “San Buenaventura,” named for our mission, which was in turn named for St. Bonaventure, the 13th-century Catholic saint. (St. Bonaventure was a Franciscan, as was St. Junipero Serra, father of the California mission system.) That name had been shortened to “Ventura” in the 19th century, supposedly because the full name was too long to fit on the railroad schedules. Yet we never quite decided what to call ourselves—even our wayfinding signs said Ventura in some locations and San Buenaventura in others. In the middle of a heated debate on this topic one night, one of our longtime city councilmembers said, “We should use San Buenaventura on all of our signs so everybody knows they’re in Ventura.”

Luck of the draw made me mayor of Ventura during the depths of the last recession. I was the guy who closed a library and a fire station. We couldn’t meet expectations, and that, frankly, is when local politics got uglier than it had been before.

During the recession, I had conversations with constituents almost every day who told me that we shouldn’t cut their library service/fire station/park/senior citizen program. When I would ask them what we should cut instead, their typical reaction was: “I don’t know. That’s your job.”

In my experience, I am sorry to say, I now see the beginnings of the coarse, cynical, and occasionally cruel way that even ordinary people approach politics today.

One early manifestation of this was the Tea Party, which emerged in 2009 just when I began my stint as mayor. As the city contemplated a ban on single-use plastic bags, I was inundated by emails from members of the then-new Tea Party—some longtime friends, some out-of-towners I did not know—claiming that we were going to strip our residents of a precious freedom. A disagreement on policy is one thing, but one correspondent declared—in the subject line of his email—“Give me plastic bags or give me death!”

Not long afterward, the Tea Party and some other similarly minded folks came out in force to oppose our decision to install paid parking in some parts of downtown Ventura. I viewed this move as a market-oriented solution to a serious problem: Too many people parked on Main Street, while not enough people parked in the parking lots a half-block away. But the Tea Party folks viewed it as an unconstitutional exercise in double taxation. John and Ken—conservative shock-jock radio hosts in Southern California—spent an hour excoriating “the stupid city of Ventura and their dumbass mayor Bill Fulton.”

The budget situation is better now and my former colleagues have been able to do some good things as a result. But the tinge of meanness has remained, just as it has at the national level. John and Ken were back in Ventura broadcasting from the Promenade after the recent homeless/murder incident.

Those are the kinds of experiences that make you wonder why anybody would run for office. Indeed, whenever anybody asks me whether I think they should run for their local city council, the first thing I always ask is, “Are you crazy enough to do it?”

It’s not surprising under these circumstances that not many good people want to run for office in California these days—and I’m not sure there are many systemic changes that could improve the situation. A recent state law that will switch many local elections from odd to even years will at least increase turnout—which may help people feel more invested in their elected officials. Better pay might help, so that people don’t have to retire or go bankrupt to serve. But maybe the most important thing is simply to help people see political and civic life in their town as a shared effort that includes not just the elected officials but everybody else as well.

As mayor I used to attend a different church service every Sunday, and at one social hour after a service I was approached by a man in his 30s wearing all black with several tattoos. He was accompanied by his wife and daughter, both of whom were dressed in all black with heavy dark makeup.

“Mayor Fulton,” he said, “I just wanted to say we love what you’re doing. We are so excited about where Ventura is going.”

I thanked him in a perfunctory way, and he added: “We were wondering—how can the Goth community get more involved?”

I’m not sure we ever got the Goth community deeply involved in Ventura’s political life. But that’s where the hope lies: When ordinary people from various backgrounds are inspired to step out of their own world and into the wider world of civic involvement.

The post The National Partisan Nastiness Is Now Poisoning Local Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The distance L.A. has traveled between then and now marks a journey that has landed this city in a place very much of its own making. There have been strides and setbacks, and not everyone will agree about what constitutes progress or why some big problems remain unresolved. But, if this is a different city—we would say a better city—than the one that burned in 1992, the explanation lies in decisions Angelenos made about how they govern themselves.

First though, the L.A. story of the past quarter century has to begin with hitting bottom after 1992. In 1994, the Northridge earthquake struck, killing 57 people, injuring thousands more, and costing billions of dollars in property damage. That same year, California voters, including a majority in Los Angeles County, backed the Prop 187 ballot initiative, which prohibited unauthorized individuals from using state-run public services. The isolation, anger, and racial tensions of the 1990s continued with police scandals that eroded trust.

But those scandals also produced reform efforts that, haltingly, created a new model of community-centered law enforcement. And then, in the early 2000s Los Angeles began moving toward a shared destiny, as the region’s economics and demographics shifted.

In 1992, the non-Hispanic white population accounted for 41 percent of Los Angeles County, according to census data; that population now composes only 28 percent of Los Angeles County residents. That happened because whites left, and the non-white population grew not with immigrants but with their children. The flow of new immigrants to Los Angeles peaked in the 1990s as other destinations offered lower living expenses and better job opportunities. The big numbers already here largely stayed in place and made families. Children of immigrants now account for more than one in five residents, the highest share of any major metro.

The remains of a commercial building smolder, as another building burns out of control, in Los Angeles, early on the morning of April 30, 1992, after riots broke out in response to the verdict in the Rodney King beating trial. Photo by Douglas C. Pizac/Associated Press.

Now coming of age, this huge generation of young people has grown up navigating cultural and racial differences. According to a 2013 study by the Pew Research Center, second-generation Latinos and Asian Americans are much more likely than members of their parents’ generation to have diverse friends, feel comfortable with interracial marriage, and get along with people of other groups. By necessity, that has become the default attitude in L.A.’s school corridors and playgrounds.

Of course, a whole lot of young people, members of minority groups and growing up without many advantages, could have spelled trouble in the streets. But, as this second generation came of age, crime dropped—a lot. The violent crime rate was more than six times higher at the time of the unrest than it is today. As crime declined and this new homegrown population of cosmopolitans matured, Angelenos began making investments in their collective future.

Over the past decade and a half, voters repeatedly have endorsed tax increases to expand affordable housing, homeless services, school construction, and transit development in the region. These investments benefit everyone in the region, not just specific neighborhoods or populations. The success of these recent ballot measures, which often required support from supermajorities of voters, exemplifies Angelenos’ willingness to take responsibility for the common good.

Los Angeles also has repeatedly chosen to invest significant funds in the city’s arts and cultural resources over the past 25 years, enabling us to examine our history, heal past trauma and racial divides, and build a shared and inclusive cultural identity. Annual income for Los Angeles County arts-related nonprofits is estimated at $2.2 billion, and the arts and creative industries account for nearly 1 out of 6 jobs in Los Angeles County—a significant part of our economy.

These investments allow organizations like the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to defy national trends by increasing audiences and revenue, and to provide a wide range of diverse communities with performances and educational programs. Meanwhile, small theaters, studio spaces, and storefront galleries have become focal points of neighborhood regeneration. Simply put, the arts increase social capital and provide a rich cultural landscape in which civic vitality can thrive.

Among the most encouraging developments are moments of civil dialogue that have brought diverse populations together around shared objectives, and there is a valuable example near the burn zone of 1992.

Consider the Central Los Angeles Promise Zone, one of the first three designated zones (the others were in Philadelphia and San Antonio) under President Obama’s signature anti-poverty initiative that provides preferential status and technical assistance on federal grant applications. The Central Los Angeles Promise Zone encompasses Hollywood, East Los Angeles, Pico Union, Westlake, and, perhaps most significantly, Koreatown. These neighborhoods are collectively home to 165,000 people, 35 percent of whom live in poverty.

Like many urban neighborhoods on the edge of a central business district, this area just west of Downtown Los Angeles had seen slow deterioration of its housing stock, a loss of jobs, weak transportation infrastructure, and growing homelessness in the years leading up to the civil unrest. After much of Koreatown was destroyed in the civil unrest, representatives of many economic interests and a variety of ethnic communities found common cause in the process of drafting redevelopment plans based on public-private partnerships, such as the Wilshire Center/Koreatown Redevelopment Project Area.

Now, more than two decades later, the Central Los Angeles Promise Zone is bringing the community together again to identify shared goals and desired outcomes around good jobs, safe streets, and improved educational opportunities for young people in the community. This process alone has not directly solved problems, but proposed solutions have a much better chance of becoming real when they are based on a deliberative process of community engagement and collective goal setting.

Lastly, Los Angeles has chosen policies that treat the undocumented population as part of the civic family. And they are, literally, a big part. One of every 10 adults in Los Angeles County, and the parents of one of every six kids in the public schools, are undocumented immigrants: one million people, the largest concentration in the country. The region’s commitment to including the undocumented in plans for the future goes way beyond “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies in law enforcement. Angelenos, often in concert with the state government, have helped ensure that unauthorized immigrants have access to health care, public education, drivers’ licenses, and community policing that unambiguously aims at protecting them and their neighbors.

They are part of us. That realization developed slowly, and it applies not just to the undocumented. Los Angeles was a city of contested spaces and tribal rivalries 25 years ago. It’s not that now.

The post From the Wreckage of the ’92 Riots, a Better Los Angeles Rises appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Are you finally growing up, Sacramento?

I pose that question not to our state government but to the real Sacramento, by which I mean the Sacramento Capital Region. It’s a query that should be aimed at all of the Central Valley’s big urban areas. Are you ready for civic adulthood, Fresno, Bakersfield, Stockton, and Modesto?

The maturity of these cities is more than a regional question. The Valley persistently lags California as a whole in employment, access to health care, and educational attainment. If California is going to make big gains in the decades ahead and reduce inequality, Valley cities will have to lead the way.

The importance of Valley cities should be conventional wisdom by now, but unfortunately, the narrative feels unfamiliar and counterintuitive. That’s because the Valley is stuck in a state of agriculture-based denial. That’s understandable, given the region’s rural history and the outsized influence that agriculture retains over land use and politics. But that influence obscures the 21st-century reality—most people in the Central Valley live in cities. And so the true economic engines of the region are not the groves and fields but an archipelago of urban islands connected by State Route 99.

Far too often these cities are underestimated by everyone, including their own inhabitants. The cities of the Valley are “small” only compared with the global mega-regions on the coast. More people live in the cities of Fresno and Sacramento than in the cities of Atlanta or Miami. Bakersfield is bigger than the cities of Tampa or St. Louis, and Stockton has as many people as Pittsburgh or Cincinnati.

But the Valley cities all face different versions of the same problem: They have grown into places far larger and more complicated than the governments and infrastructure that once sustained them. One of the great underappreciated dramas in California is the race of these cities to catch up to their urban needs, by adding cultural venues, revamping downtowns, and developing new infrastructure.

Cities are in different stages of this process. Stockton, which is emerging from bankruptcy, and Bakersfield, which is suffering from a decline in oil prices, are the laggards.

The struggle in Fresno has been particularly dramatic, with the city making big if uneven progress. There is new life and housing in its downtown; by summer, Fulton Mall should be transformed into Fulton Street, a main avenue. The new Midtown Trail for bicyclists and pedestrians will connect Fresno and the Clovis Old Town Trail, creating a 17-mile link between the two cities, and including space for future transit. A bus rapid transit system is being launched, a water upgrade should make Fresno less dependent on groundwater, and planning is underway to establish mixed-used zoning districts on thoroughfares and to develop the neediest neighborhoods.

But the most promising—and often most puzzling—case is greater Sacramento.

The Capital Region has long had advantages that give it a more diverse economy than other Valley cities—from the presence of the state government to its proximity to the Bay Area. Sacramento was never that small a town—it instantly became a city during the Gold Rush, and prospered as the terminus of the transcontinental railroad. But for much of its history it coasted—“Stockton with a governor” was one insult—happily lagging the fast-growing coast and developing a slow reputation, enshrined in Mark Twain’s letter from the city: “You needn’t rush down here right away by express. You can come as slow freight and arrive in time to get a good seat.”

Today, it’s a bigger, more ambitious place. Sacramento County has a population nearly the size of Manhattan’s, and the nine counties around the region have 2.8 million residents, on par with the city of Chicago. And there are signs of urban progress, particularly in the center of the city of Sacramento, where the past decade has brought more than $1 billion in public and private investment. A sports arena opened last year, a hospital is planned for the railyards, housing is coming to K Street, and midtown Sacramento’s neighborhoods of restaurants, galleries, and loft apartments are livelier than ever.

But beyond those gains, the picture is as muddy as Sacramento’s rivers. A leadership class heavy in real estate and state government types can seem less interested in improving poorer neighborhoods than peddling empty slogans (Earth to Sacramento: “Farm to Fork” is how the whole world eats). What’s worse, this crew appears to be gripped by a rampant inferiority complex, seeking validation—and outside visitors and tourists—with showy projects of dubious value.

The city of Sacramento is now ludicrously considering building an aquarium—though Monterey’s world-class aquarium, and the ocean, are not so far away. The city is also contemplating expansion of an already struggling convention center. Building of such showy destinations is part of what brought Stockton to bankruptcy (an arena and marina), and nearly sunk Fresno (the Granite Park sports complex, the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art). The basketball arena may expose Sacramento to similar peril; the city gave the NBA Kings a $272.9 million public subsidy, via a risky parking bond.

Beyond the city, getting the disparate parts of the Capital Region to work together remains difficult. While there are recent examples of regional progress on transportation, water, and workforce development, the Capital Region is not cohesive. There’s not even consensus on which of the area’s counties are part of the region. The Sacramento Bee says there are four; government documents often refer to six counties (Sacramento, Sutter, El Dorado, Placer, Yolo, and Yuba), while a few academics list nine.

One Sacramento disadvantage as a region is its political diversity; unlike the Democrat-dominated Bay Area and L.A., Sacramento is a swing region, from the left-wing NIMBYs of Davis to the Republican NIMBYS of the foothills. Another challenge to developing urban strategy is all the people who live in the so-called UnCity—unincorporated Sacramento County.

“Though Sacramento often sees itself as the byproduct of forces outside of its immediate control, or as a step-child of the Bay Area,” said a report used at this decade’s beginning by the UC Davis Center for Regional Change, “It both deserves and needs to view itself with a greater degree of identity and autonomy.”

That lack of identity has made it harder for greater Sacramento to address its most stubborn regional problems. Housing affordability has reached crisis level here, as in other parts of the state. Transit is a regional sore spot; Sacramento County voters defeated a transportation sales tax hike in November that, while lacking in imagination, would have restored previous service cuts. And the lack of economic and job growth in the region deserves greater attention. The Brookings Institution ranks Sacramento 95th among the nation’s largest 100 metro regions in economic output per capita, with a 9.5 percent decrease over the past 10 years.

Sacramento’s optimists argue that efforts to address such regional problems, and political and public awareness of them, are deepening. In that vein, the city of Sacramento is now the stage for what may be the state’s most intriguing local political story: new mayor Darrell Steinberg.

Steinberg is a former state Senate leader with broad perspective and deep contacts among the overlapping governments of the region. To the good, he has made decreasing homelessness a priority, and is addressing it regionally, in a way that should force Sacramento County to offer more mental health services. (To the bad, he’s been talking up the aquarium idea.)

Californians are understandably wary when big plans emerge from the Capitol. But we should be rooting hard for the Capital Region. Our state will be much better off if Sacramento can fully launch itself.

The post Grow up, Sacramento! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s a question that I have pondered for more than 15 years, visiting and reading about places broken after long slow declines—from vacant lots in New York and Bangalore to the Los Angeles River—as well as places broken by sudden disasters like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and Japan after the 2011 earthquake.

I first became inspired by efforts to fix broken places in 1998, when I visited what had been a bus parking lot contaminated by diesel oil on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Local activists had converted the parking lot into a community garden. On one side of the garden was a school. The children had built a greenhouse in the garden, heated by compost generated from orange pulp, banana peels, and other waste they collected from a nearby juice bar. On the other side of the garden was a mosque, whose Bangladeshi worshippers in kurtas tended to beds of amaranth, pigeon peas, marigold, and coriander.

This garden on the Lower East Side showed me how it’s done. To reclaim a broken place, people from disparate walks of life need to work together. They also need to recognize the multiple benefits that a broken place can hold.

The Los Angeles River has become the center of a revival movement as Angelenos have come to see it as more than a means to control floods or a place to dump trash. Rather, in the words of poet and river champion Lewis MacAdams, the banks of the L.A. River today host a “vibrant community of artists, musicians, grandchildren, and grandparents, with cheap date nights, beanbag throws, and bicycle repairs.”

Revivals inspired by grassroots activism often grow into something bigger than the original organizers imagined. I love strolling the High Line park in New York—a place that started as a campaign by two West Side residents to restore a dilapidated elevated rail line in the Meatpacking District, and has become one of the world’s most heavily designed, endowed, and visited public spaces.

Sometimes an effort to revive a broken place involves a charismatic leader like MacAdams, or even an establishment figure like the architect Frank Gehry. Gehry’s entry into the L.A. River project has provoked controversy—it doesn’t help that he referred to the long-term activists as complainers or “worker bees” who should simply toe the line and follow his lead. Others have described people like MacAdams who reclaim broken places as nimble, fast-moving “innovator bees” who commit their creativity and time to the community where they live, work, play, and volunteer. (My take: Conflict with establishment figures is part of most efforts to revive a broken place—at least those efforts that grow into something big.)

But sometimes broken places are reclaimed without the involvement of well-known figures like MacAdams or Gehry.

Take India. A group called The Ugly Indian was launched in Bangalore, India, in 2010, when everyday citizens decided they could no longer tolerate desecration of their city’s public spaces by trash and human defecation. The group organized volunteers for what became known as a “spotfix”—an effort to pick up garbage and install pathways, planters, trash bins, and no-smell urinals in what had been a smelly, ugly space along a city street in Bangalore. These volunteers remained anonymous so that no one person would grab the credit for transforming rubbish and stench into a public space people could enjoy.

The Ugly Indian at work. This is the same street corner pictured at the top of this article.

 
The Ugly Indian started with one cleanup in Bangalore, and spread to hundreds of spotfixes across India and now Pakistan. How? The Ugly Indian cleverly exploits traditional and modern Indian culture. The organizers invite housemaids—the very ones who take out the trash and dump it in public spaces—to create traditional rice flour drawings on the spotfix sites for people to enjoy. And since housemaids are part of the community (in India, housekeeping help is common in most households), having them participate creates more respect among neighbors in keeping the public spaces clean over the long-term.

All spotfixes—some of which are strategically located near the homes of film and cricket stars—post “before” and “after” photos on Facebook, thus taking advantage of India’s fascination with social media, Bollywood, and British sports. And putting their own spin on a popular saying attributed to India’s most famous activist—Gandhi’s “Be the Change You Want to See”—The Ugly Indian’s motto is “See the Change You Want to Be.”

Behind the volunteers who take part in spotfixes is a group of anonymous designers and tech-savvy millennials who contribute their expertise to The Ugly Indian. They have designed no-odor urinals and trash bins suitable for public spaces. They figured out that painting walls a maroon color would cover the statins of betel nut spit without provoking tensions among India’s different ethnic groups, which consider maroon a neutral color. The anonymous professionals and volunteers behind The Ugly Indian are structural and social architects—not of Gehry’s stature and not public figures like MacAdams—but architects nevertheless.

It doesn’t take a star to convert trashed-out places to community spaces. But it does take people with all kinds of talents who can figure out how to work together to reclaim broken places.

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It would have been helpful to learn this information earlier—at least before I tried to vote election day morning. No location was listed on my sample ballot (which I did receive on time), but that didn’t seem like a problem. I’ve had the same polling place—in Pearblossom, a small community in the Antelope Valley—pretty much my whole adult life. On election day I decided to look it up online, just to confirm. The secretary of state’s website returned this message: “Sorry, we were unable to find your election day polling location.” The link for more information sent me back to the query page I’d just used.

Most people probably would have stopped there, but as someone who works as an advocate of public engagement, I’ve long argued that democracy is often at its best when it is not convenient, when it makes demands of citizens who are invested in the process. With my own words echoing in my head, I decided to check out the county registrar’s voting website. There, I was told I had to vote by mail. I was certainly wishing I’d checked earlier, but it never occurred to me that I’d have to.

Confused, I scavenged my paperwork for the vote-by-mail ballot I’d received and set aside. It hadn’t stuck me as unusual to receive it; I’d voted absentee in the past, but preferred to vote in person when possible. It took me a little while to find it. Hidden inside the ballot, I found a bright sheet of paper informing me that I had no choice but to vote by mail. If I couldn’t mail the ballot in time (mail ballots have to be received on election day or before), I could drop off my ballot at any L.A. County polling place on the day of the election. But there was no information about where those might be. Nor could I look polling places up online without an actual house number in another precinct. Though not insurmountable, the obstacle was frustrating and time-consuming.

I’d heard a lot about the need to “get out the vote” but it certainly didn’t feel like anyone wanted me to vote.

Today, as I read story after story about why L.A. County voter turnout was at an all-time low of just over 13 percent, I wonder: What if similarly situated voters intended to vote, but gave up? I haven’t seen this possibility proposed in any election day post-mortems, but I did come across a 2009 study suggesting that mandatory vote-by-mail systems lower the odds of individuals voting by 13.2 percent.

We shouldn’t dismiss this potential vote loss as insignificant. Pearblossom, where I live, is located in a Congressional district where the top two candidates were separated by just over 2,000 votes and in a state assembly district where the top two candidates were separated by only 1,743 votes.

So how did my community end up losing its polling place? The California elections code allows precincts with 250 persons or less—which are almost guaranteed to be rural precincts like mine—to be declared vote-by-mail at the discretion of the county. However, the code also requires elections officials to “notify each voter of the location of the two nearest polling places in the event the voter chooses to return the ballot on election day.” L.A. County failed to fulfill this requirement, and seemed to make little effort to promulgate the change to affected voters (nothing on Twitter or social media, no public service announcements, no paper fliers in the post office).

I understand that staffing polling places in rural areas is challenging. But why not consolidate these precincts rather than instituting mandatory vote-by-mail? There are many reasons people prefer to vote in person: convenience (rural areas generally don’t have home mail pickup), concerns about privacy, or simply a sense of civic pride.

Declines in voter turnout are a nationwide trend, and even in L.A. County, the lack of turnout obviously goes beyond frustrated voters in a few rural precincts. But of all the possible reasons for failing to vote, giving people access to, and knowledge of, polling places is a relatively easy factor to address. Amidst the calls for more civic engagement and fiery op-eds on polarization and disengagement, we should not forget to hold elections officials accountable for promoting engagement through the processes already in place.

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The answer is almost certainly yes. Compared to people in other states, few Californians talk to their neighbors and work together with them to solve local problems. But the most natural forums to meet with neighbors on community challenges—local meetings of the city council or school boards—aren’t designed to encourage conversation among citizens.

Walk into a council chamber or school board meeting room in your town, and you’ll likely see rows of chairs facing some sort of raised dais or stage, where the council members or board members sit. (Check out images of city council meetings around L.A. County here.) The whole point of the setup is to have you look at the politicians, not your fellow citizens. Essentially, city council chambers are laid out like church, and, as in church, you’re not supposed to talk too much. So it’s not surprising that fewer and fewer Americans bother to go to city council meetings (or, for that matter, to church).

So where do people go? They go to places where they feel comfortable, where they can eat and drink, where tables and chairs are arranged in ways that encourage conversation, In my San Gabriel Valley community, there are so many people spending time sitting and talking at the three local Starbucks that it’s often hard to get a table. Great bars and restaurants always seem full. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to find an empty seat at our local ice cream parlor, Fosselman’s in Alhambra.

Rarely have I had this problem at city council or school board meetings.

Ask yourself if the following sounds like how public meetings are conducted in your community: The big decisions are made in closed session, and when the council or board members face a difficult challenge, they spend most of the time sniping and immersed in personal rivalries. The written agendas handed out are long, but the descriptions of what’s being discussed are too brief and legalistic to be understood. Turnout among citizens is low, unless something has made the public mad, and so many angry people show up that it’s impossible to conduct a useful meeting. And those who come to speak tend to be regulars—many of whom are nutty gadflies. (They prove the municipal wisdom that that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who don’t go to council meetings, and those who go and probably shouldn’t.)

In my experience as a reporter, meaningful conversations between citizens do sometimes take place during meetings, but this talk occurs in corners, just outside the chambers in the hallway, or in common space. I’ve learned a lot from listening to the whispers back and forth in the open space at the very back of the L.A. Council chambers. When I visited the Clovis school board last year, a few parents talked about a problem teacher as they stood in the back right corner, along a wall, out of earshot of the people sitting in front. At Santa Monica’s council meetings, many people don’t go into the council chambers—but instead sit outside and watch on video feeds so they can talk with their fellow citizens.

This is the point in the column when earnest Bay Area types jump on Twitter to tell us that they are developing cool new technologies to help citizens engage their local government online. But precious little thought has been given to how to revitalize local government meetings themselves. To unleash the untapped power of council and school board meetings—to make them about creating conversations—we must flip our priorities and redesign the spaces, so that council chambers and boardrooms are foremost places for people to gather and talk.

What does that look like? Well, it looks like Starbucks. Take out the old fixed benches and seating of your council chamber. Set up tables and chairs and nice couches. Have a bar for serving coffee and healthy snacks and maybe even beer and wine. (I’m a teetotaler, but I don’t know how an elected official could summon the courage to grapple with California cities’ outsized pension problems without a slug of Jim Beam.)

And then take the council or board members off the dais and put them in a corner of the chambers—the way you might position a piano player in a hotel lobby. They’d be miked just loud enough that anyone in the room could hear them, but not so loud as to overwhelm any conversations.

If any council or board dared to try something like this, it would be broadly popular, but would raise all kinds of hackles among people like me—civic types and journalists. Too many of us treat local government as if it were a civic religion, and civic organizations, in the name of defending public access, often fight in court to protect the current, regulated system of church-like public gatherings. So we should loosen up. California is way too interesting to have its public meetings governed by stuffy Yankee mores.

It’s time to make our public meetings as comfortable as your favorite coffee shop. Imagine grabbing a drink, putting your feet up, and tuning out the re-zoning hearing in the corner while you and your neighbor trade gossip, and maybe figure out how to turn that vacant lot into a community garden.

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Is it time to bring back doughnuts for votes? Certainly, L.A. is full of ideas in the wake of this year’s city elections, and rightfully so. Mayor Garcetti, who now wants a commission to study low voter turnout, was elected in a May runoff that produced a turnout so pitiful (23.7 percent of registered voters) that L.A. was a national laughingstock, feeding a narrative that Angelenos are only interested in voting for the next American Idol. And the March primary was even more pathetic (21 percent). NBC political director and chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd pointed out then that “fewer people voted for Eric Garcetti in the primary than attend the Rose Bowl game.” Ouch.

Unfortunately for us, that statement was accurate at the moment it was uttered a week after the primary, when Garcetti had tallied barely 90,000 votes. The totals have since been updated to 121,930, but this is still just 3 percent of 4 million Angelenos.

So what to do?

Most of the ideas being discussed around Los Angeles involve changing the election calendar. And few seem promising. Moving Election Day to a weekend is one common idea, but would that really boost turnout in Los Angeles, where weekends are sacrosanct?

Another popular calendar-related idea is to change the years in which L.A.’s elections take place. Currently, our municipal elections are reserved for odd-numbered years when there are no statewide or federal elections, and the contests for mayor and council seats can steal the show. But since local elections can seem boring, the thought is that moving them to even-numbered years to coincide with gubernatorial or presidential elections would bring out more Angelenos who aren’t concerned about the mayor but care who is president.

That might work if the goal is just boosting turnout numbers. But such a shift would diminish the contests for mayor, city controller, and city attorney—turning them into “down ballot” races that might well be forgotten by voters consumed by gubernatorial or presidential campaigns. Research shows that the number of votes cast decreases as voters make their way down to the end of the ballot, where the names of mayoral candidates might be in this scenario. Voter turnout numbers might look better, but would voter participation and interest increase? Unlikely. And don’t locally elected constitutional offices deserve to be more than an afterthought to voters in Los Angeles?

Here’s a better solution: Keep the elections in odd-numbered years, but move the first round to June, when Californians are accustomed to voting, and set the runoff for November, another familiar month for going to the polls. We don’t have to be different, and June-November is much more traditional than March-May (or the pre-1993 L.A. practice of April-June elections). What’s more, this voting schedule leaves more time for debate and drama; the two months between our current elections are shorter than some Hollywood rehab stints.

Such a change would permit other calendar shifts. The traditional date for the inauguration of newly elected officials (July 1) could be moved to Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January, which would provide a longer transition period for those taking office. A national holiday provides a perfect opportunity to reflect on history, while watching the newly installed leaders of Los Angeles attempt to chart their own.

Additionally, the staggering of city council district elections must change. Under the current set-up, the odd-numbered council districts (there are 15 seats on the L.A. city council) hold their elections at the same time as those held for the mayor, city controller, and city attorney. But the seats in even-numbered districts are contested two years before and after those votes. The turnout for council seats in elections that are untethered to citywide races is, well, staggeringly low. If civic-minded people are embarrassed when 23 percent of eligible voters show up at the polls to decide the next mayor, just wait until 2015. Even though there will be seven council seats up for grabs plus a proposition or two, voter turnout will be probably barely even reach the double digits.

Staggered council district elections also discourage continuity; the council is always changing. Democracy would be better served if voters delivered their verdicts on the entire council every four years—to thereby change the direction of the city. Of course, vested interests in and around City Hall would be vehemently against changing the council election schedule, and could probably block any efforts to fund a council election calendar change. From the point of view of such interests, an electorate that can never change its city government is the best of all possible worlds.

It’s not clear what might produce higher voter turnout in L.A. and what those measures might cost. Even doughnuts, despite their obvious advantages, might merely provide “sugar highs” for people who otherwise would not have cast a vote. Maybe local businesses would benefit … but would the city as a whole?

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