Democracy and Community Planning
Uploaded by allupinu69 on Oct 31, 2011
This essay explores several sources that discuss various aspects of community planning and government.
I Introduction
Although it may seem trivial on one hand or self-evident on the other, the question of the relationship between the definition of a community and the structure of its government is neither. The way in which we define “community” often impacts directly on the way in which its government functions, and authors have been struggling with this question from different viewpoints for decades.
This paper considers opinions and comments about urban planning and similar issues by several different authors. Some of them are writing about the idea of democracy; others about citizen actions groups; others about urban planning. But all are concerned about the issues facing us when we try to decide exactly what we mean when we discuss the tangled relationship between citizens and government.
II Discussion of the Writings
Robert A. Dahl’s piece is a good starting point, because he takes as his subject an attempt to define the optimum size and structure for a true democracy. He begins by discussing the ancient Greek city-states, the polis. Greece is, of course, the cradle of Western civilization and the foundation of the democratic ideal. But, Dahl argues, the idea of the city-state worked well in ancient Greece (or worked, at least, how well is open to historical debate) because the population density was low. Each city-state had its own government, and could operate like this because of the low numbers of people to be governed. In addition, the mountainous terrain proved to be a physical barrier between neighbors, further encouraging the development of autonomous city-states.
Today, however, a city-state is no longer feasible, but the question of why it is not, and what entity might take its place, is not easily answered. The city-state passed into history with the rise of the nation-state. While ancient Greeks defined themselves as Spartans or Athenians rather than Greeks, today they would identify themselves by the name of their country rather than their city. Just as people living in the United States call themselves Americans, then say, “I live in New York,” people all over the globe tend to identify themselves by their allegiance to a particular nation.
Dahl is concerned with the United States, and he points out that the U.S. grew so quickly and to such an extent that...