2025 Edmonton Election Thoughts on Community Empowerment

We hear Jane Jacobs’ name invoked frequently in discussion about city planning, zoning, walkability, and community engagement.  The planning profession itself has taken to many of the principles Jacobs articulated so well, such as mixed use development and the importance of encouraging density to urban environments.  Edmonton’s city council of the past four years has taken bold, meaningful, and concrete steps to enable the realization of urbanist goals and visions in the city of Edmonton through their work on abolishing parking minimums, zoning bylaw renewal, and the district planning.  

In this blog post, I am going to highlight an overlooked chapter in Jane Jacobs’ classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” a chapter titled “Governing and Planning Districts.”  The thrust of the argument in this chapter is that administrative structures that were sufficient to manage cities of relatively small size (say 100,00-500,000) are not adequate to manage the needs of cities of 1,000,000 plus, as the complexities involved grow in geometric proportion to population growth.  Failure to account for this has resulted in the administration of large cities becoming fragmented and confused.  Settlements of small enough size can function with departments delivering different services being organized vertically and serving the city as a whole, because the number of departments and officials needed is small enough that administrators can communicate with everyone who needs to be involved in a particular plan, project, or decision.  The “administrative coherence” as she calls it, of such a city breaks down as the settlement grows to become what she calls a “great city.”  In such contexts, horizontal as well as vertical coordination is needed, in other words, departments that are responsible for service delivery in a particular district, and in coordinating between all the different services that need to work together in that locality.  Administrative structures that are organized vertically both make vertical, fragmented coordination easy and obstruct locality coordination, which is what is actually needed most in great cities.  The point is that cities reach a point in their development where modification of the existing administrative structures isn’t adequate to meet the complexities of managing the city’s needs, but rather, an actual invention is needed.

This chapter was written nearly three quarters of a century ago now, but it is urgently relevant to Edmonton now.  Why?  Because of where we are in our development.  Up until recently, we’ve been a small city, and perhaps we’ve retained the administrative coherence of a little city.  Now, however, we are growing beyond a population of 1,000,000, and growing rapidly, projected to reach a population of 2,000,000 in a decade or two.  We are crossing the threshold between a little city and a great city, the threshhold where vertically organized administrative structures break down, and locality coordination becomes much more urgently needed, the threshhold where modification of the existing administrative structure can no longer handle growing complexities, but rather a new invention is needed.  I wonder how many cities crossed this threshhold long ago without noticing it or accounting for it, or successfully addressing it if they did notice.  In Edmonton, now, we have the opportunity to take proactive action to restructure our administration before the problems of administrative incoherence become too dire.  We have the opportunity to proactively support locality coordination, and empower local knowledge.  Our fifteen districts that we defined for planning purposed may possibly serve as administrative districts too (though I would caution that a citizen’s council or the like should be empowered to define these districts, as the New York Citizen’s Union did in 1947, as referred to on page 410 of Death and Life).

This is important now, and it may be more important than any hot election issue that happens to be on everyone’s lips right now, because administration is the body through which council’s direction is enacted, and if this body becomes increasingly unresponsive to local needs, increasingly incoherent and inadequate to respond to the growing complexities of a growing city, then no matter who is in the councilors’ seats, very little that those politicians promised in their election campaigns will actually get done, through no fault of their own, or of administration’s, or of anyone’s.

I don’t think it would be out of reach to make the necessary changes.  It’s not like this is without precedent - In the 1980s and 1990s, Seattle established a Department of Neighbourhoods that empowered community groups, district councils, and implemented a neighbourhood matching fund that supported hundreds of community led projects to improve their communities.  Our own City of Edmonton Administration appears to have taken some important steps in the right direction in more recent years as well.  From 2010-2017 we had an Office of Great Neighbourhoods, which employed 4 district coordinators that liaised with Community Resource Coordinators (now Neighbourhood Resource Coordinators) on issues that require coordination across departments in a local area.  Unfortunately the project was cut after those seven years.  Why, I wonder?  What lessons could we learn from what worked, what failed, and why it was canceled?  What steps could we take now to move in a similar direction, knowing how greatly such coordination is needed at this stage of our development as a city?

Jane Jacobs believed that what would be needed to make the necessary changes to administrative structure would be “a strong mayor with a convinced belief in popular government.” (p. 422).  So my questions for this term’s mayor and council are:

How will you act to defend the principle of subsidiarity, both with respect to the threat of higher levels of government encroaching on decision making that logically belongs with the municipality by the principle of subsidiarity, and with respect to empowering organizations with local knowledge and encouraging locality coordination (this will take courage, as it involves relinquishing some power currently held centrally by the city to allow decisions that can reasonable be considered to impact those within a district or neighbourhood to be made there).  What thought or consideration have you given to how our city’s administration may need to be restructured in order to competently manage the needs of our city for our future as we outgrow the structures that have served us imperfectly but mostly adequately over the first century of our development? How could the empowerment of district councils relieve rather than intensify budgetary pressures?

Anyway, these are some of the thoughts I've been pondering in the lead up to the 2025 election and in the weeks following.