"Where there is no vision, the people perish."

–Proverbs 29:18

What kind of city would you like to live in? What's best about Somerville that you want to preserve? How could we be better?

A
city government that reaches out to all of its citizens with questions
like those is exceedingly rare. Although Somerville faces the same
challenges as most dense cities, our manageable scale enables us to
conceive a vision for our future that has some realistic hope of being
fulfilled. And our city's administration wants to make that happen.

The
Mayor's Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development (OSPCD)
is conducting an innovative series of gatherings at which residents can
listen to their diverse neighbors and share their hopes and concerns
for Somerville's future.

The vision that emerges will help
guide the long-term comprehensive plan that OSPCD is now developing.
It's comprehensive because it includes plans for economic development,
housing, open space, city services, recreation, and transportation.

Different
residents will inevitably have different visions for our future, but
those visions will have much in common. Most of us want jobs that can
employ anyone willing to work; transportation that can efficiently take
us to those jobs and elsewhere; a population that maintains its
diversity of family incomes, ethnicity, and length of tenure in the
city; a range of good housing that its diverse population can afford;
reasonable property taxes; and the neighborliness that Old Somerville
enjoyed.

Still, there will be conflicts in where we want to go
and how to get there. So the OSPCD staff is using an interactive
visioning format with the odd name "World Café."

It is a means
for Somerville's disparate residents to interact, listen to each other,
and think aloud about our shared future. In doing so, they learn not
just how their priorities may conflict, but the lived experience that
shapes those differences.

Looking at a conflict through each
others eyes' changes your perception of it. You probably won't embrace
the other's position, but you can't go completely back to your own
less-than-fully-informed assumptions. When people commit to continuing
this through to an agreement, they produce compromises and, sometimes,
truly creative solutions.

Another means of resolving conflicts
is to root them in reality. SOPCD staff has laid the basis for this by
collecting and analyzing all available data that describe Somerville's
economic, housing, population, and transportation trends. While there
is a wide and sometimes wacky range of where we would like to go, the
range of where we can go has limits, particularly in the near term.
Continually bringing planning efforts back to the hard data focuses
discussion on where we are now, what destinations are actually
possible, and how we begin the journey.

Knowing where we want to
go can enable policy makers to avoid decisions that would create
detours away from that destination. And though we can't do everything
at once, we can make choices now that, when implemented, build capacity
for more challenging initiatives in the future.

Perhaps the most
important and immediate capacity-building choices involve expanding the
commercial property tax base. Wherever we want to go, we need the
wherewithal to pay for getting there. The advent of the Green and
Orange Line stations offer tremendous opportunity to do that, if we
plan wisely.

Keith Craig who leads the Comprehensive Plan
process explains that the World Cafés will produce an overall vision
for the city and will lay the foundation for the Comprehensive Plan's
principles, goals and action items. The Comprehensive Plan's 61-member
steering committee will synthesize what they have heard in the world
cafes and go public with a vision statement in February.

Throughout
the planning process, the steering committee will mediate between what
is desirable and what is achievable. This is the context for crafting
compromises and creative solutions. Part of the back and forth will
include bringing plan drafts to the public for review. Working through
a series of such drafts will produce goals and steps for achieving them.

World
Cafés are the kind of thing about which many in Old Somerville are
sceptical. By Old Somerville, I mean adults who were born and raised
here. I fervently hope that the planners will reach out to them, and
that they will participate.

Two weeks ago, OSPCD staff took the
World Café out for a test drive with Steering Committee members. They
kindly invited me to participate. I came in with some scepticism
myself, but was impressed with the process's efficacy. I was also
struck by how Somerville's newest residents were the most enthusiastic
and the least well informed.

These newcomers bring dynamism, new
ideas, and useful skills. But many lack an understanding of what is
required to get something done here, what was precious about Old
Somerville, and how its surviving residents and their children have
been injured by the rapid changes that their community has endured.

Getting
these two groups to learn from each other, and maybe even work
together, could produce extraordinary results. So I would urge everyone
who can, to participate in one of the following World Cafés, each of
which begins at 6:30 PM.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009: Holiday Inn, 30 Washington St.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009: TAB Building, 167 Holland St.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010: The Center for Arts at the Armory, 191 Highland Ave.