Expert Criticizes "Tyranny of the Majority" In Community Development

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Urban planner and researcher Robert Mark Silverman, Ph.D., of the University at Buffalo, is critical of community development projects and processes that serve vested interests while discouraging or denying input to others, including the indigent, poor and working classes who have to live with results.

"In essence," he says, "when a society routinely accepts limits on the scope of participation, it runs the risk of encouraging what Alexis de Tocqueville referred to as a 'tyranny of the majority' or 'soft despotism,' the latter a state in which people have the illusion that they are in a democracy, when, in fact, they have no influence in the government.

Silverman, a nationally recognized expert on community development planning, is associate professor and senior research associate in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Center for Urban Studies in the UB School of Architecture and Planning.

He is the editor of "Participation," a special issue of Community Development, the journal of the Community Development Society, Vol. 37, No. 4, Winter 2006. The journal is one of the top three journals available in the United States in the field of community development.

"This special issue is an attempt to focus on the challenges of empowering a broader segment of society in community-development decisions, so as to promote more equitable outcomes," Silverman says.

"Those who discourage general public involvement in the community-development planning process should recognize that public participation makes a critical difference not only in the support they give to a project, but in the quality of the project itself," he says.

Furthermore, he points out that failing or refusing to bring the public into the process "can seriously impede or require massive changes to a project long after it is assumed by its promoters to be set in stone" -- and both situations will cost a great deal of money to deal with after the fact.

He points to lawsuits and acrimonious debate in communities throughout the country over plans for casinos, waterfront development, the quality of public housing, highway locations, bridge design, crime prevention programs, challenges to eminent domain and other projects that lacked early and adequate public discussion.

"Typically, participation in community-development debates is dominated by powerful individuals and institutions -- governments, businesses and large institutions -- with a vested interest in the outcomes," Silverman says.

He notes that when they push forward schemes without deep public input, however, their likelihood of actualizing benefits at the parochial level is low.    

"It is a common practice nationwide to leave the working class and working poor out of the community-development planning process, not to mention minorities, the poor and the indigent. If they attempt to become involved, they are seldom given the technical assistance they need to participate in the debate on an equal footing," he says.

"These processes are important to the general public, as well as the academic community, because community-development decisions affect everyone," Silverman says.

He says that equity issues cannot be quelled by the frequent argument that members of the working class, working poor and others don't participate because they face so many constraints to involvement.

"It is true that they have constraints of work, family, child care and so on that limit the time they have for civic engagement," Silverman says, "but so do institutional representatives.

"The difference between the two groups is that our society offers those with vested interests greater incentives to participate," he says.

"Participation" is a topic that Silverman says can be elusive, "since a truly democratic society entails diverse forms of participation operating at the institutional, organizational and individual levels."

The field of community development, he says, fills an important role in curbing tendencies toward tyranny of the majority and soft despotism because its scholars and practitioners often set out to promote social change and greater social equity.

The new issue of Community Development is a case in point.

"In different ways," he says, "each of the articles offers suggestions for expanding the scope of participation in community-development decision making. In some cases, that involves the adoption of additional techniques for facilitating participation. In others, that involves refocusing community development practice on generating outcomes that provide more benefits to groups traditionally disenfranchised from public policy making."

Contributors to the issue include scholars of national reputation in the field from the University at Buffalo; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; the University of Wisconsin, Madison; California State University, Fresno; the Levin College of Urban Affairs and the Center for Neighborhood Development at Cleveland State University; the University of Missouri, Kansas City; New School University, Utah State University; and Pennsylvania State University.

Silverman's research focuses, in general terms, on the organization and structure of urban institutions, the role of community-based organizations in urban neighborhoods and inequality in inner-city housing markets.

He has published articles on such topics as doing business in a minority market, how community organizations represent the intersection of social capital and local context in contemporary urban society and, more recently, mortgage lending disparity and issues related to the status of the urban poor.

He has an article forthcoming in the journal Action Research, co-authored by Henry Taylor, UB professor of urban and regional planning, and Chris Crawford, senior planner for Cattaraugus County in western New York State.

Titled "The Role of Citizen Participation and Action Research Principles in Main Street Revitalization: An Analysis of a Local Planning Project," it focuses on public participation in the neighborhood planning process for an action research project conducted in Depew, N.Y. through the Center for Urban Studies at UB.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, the largest and most comprehensive campus in the State University of New York.