Introduction

Neighbourhood planning in the US can be traced to the settlement house movement at the turn of the 20th century. Over the course of subsequent decades, the aims of and mechanisms to further neighbourhood planning have shifted substantially. Indeed, in the last quarter-century, new forms of local political and civic action have seemed to supplant neighbourhood planning as a principal means of linking citizens and local government officials.

However, in one key respect, the evolution of neighbourhood planning in the US parallels the experience of the UK, as well as the other countries profiled in this volume. The fundamental purpose of neighbourhood planning and its variations can be construed, alternatively, in minimalist or more expansive terms. In the minimalist sense, neighbourhood planning serves cities and other localities by bringing professional planners and local residents together to craft physical plans or organise social action in a way that is responsive to local particularities. Planning that is responsive to local needs and wishes is presumably able to regulate land uses, site public facilities and deliver social services in a manner that best serves the well-being of local communities. The expansive vision of neighbourhood planning presumes that more is at stake than carefully sited public facilities or the equitable geographic distribution of hazardous land uses. In this view, neighbourhood planning is a tool for activating citizens, inducing them to study complicated issues and enabling them to engage in what political scientist Archon Fung (Fung, 2004; Fagotto and Fung, 2006) calls ‘empowered participation’.

In the pages to follow, I first discuss the evolution of neighbourhood planning techniques in the US. This portion of the chapter emphasises the importance of the USA's federal system of government in generating a multitude of structural approaches to neighbourhood planning. In the early post-Second World War era, national initiatives such as Urban Renewal and the Community Action Program mandated neighbourhood consultation in the shaping and implementation of policy. Although the effectiveness of these consultative measures was the subject of much debate, they did seed many subsequent efforts to link planning and citizen participation. The latter part of this 20th-century policy tour touches on initiatives that have been mounted either by municipal governments or through the efforts of locally based activist movements.