Can Expert Panels Change the World?

Introduction:

Diminished city government, underfunded and understaffed planning departments, the short attention spans of citizens and politicians, waning trust in government generally, and an accelerating speed of change – these are some of the trends that make public agencies increasingly less likely to be the source and originators for viable innovative plans. Instead communities, politicians, institutions and even public agencies themselves look beyond the familiar faces when it comes to solutions for intricate urban problems.  

In the fast paced world, instant planning is highly attractive, anything that gets results fast, avoids employment but still allows stakeholder involvement and public participation is welcome.  The out-of-town expert, not burdened by local allegiances and networks, gains a kind of allure that way, even beyond the fact that the prophets are never accepted in their own hometown. 

A prophet is not without honor except in his own town and in his own home (Matthew 13:57)

Ad-hoc groups, advisory services, blue ribbon panels are in high demand, anybody really, except those who who by their original job description are charged with city planning.

Can those ad-hoc panels deliver? Can they really assure proper community involvement? Are they qualified or are they simply carpet baggers? Who can provide such services? Didn't the internet make "out-of-town-big city expertise" obsolete?

This article will address those questions. 

Scene 1


It is shortly before ten o'clock on a Thursday night, the location is a small hotel ballroom in the downtown Hilton of the Texas town that describes it as a "city of cowboys and culture". The floor is littered with pizza boxes and about eight folks from San Francisco, New York, DC, Detroit, Miami and Baltimore are staring at their open laptops when the intense clicidiclac of the keyboards gets interrupted by the voice of the group chair asking to please submit your slide shows now so another run through can begin in about 10 minutes. The guy in the corner who has been cranking out hand drawn plans, vignettes and renderings all day doesn't even look up. Some look furtively at their watches, a presentation rehearsal that starts at ten would last until after 11pm. Some had started the day drafting reports and papers as early as 4:30am. Tomorrow's deadline of 8:30am for presentations was moving inexorably closer and there was no other way of getting it done. So far no proper dry-run had been done and everybody knows that at least one complete rehearsal is needed even if it means that the team won’t adjourn much earlier than midnight with a final print copy of the presentation being slipped under the hotel room doors sometime during the night. 

Working late hours is part of the panel approach
Arvada, Colorado (photo ArchPlan Inc.)

Professional Service Panels

This scenario could describe a university and one of those high pressure courses with students scrambling to finish their work. But some of the people here were in their fifties and sixties and are
developers, company owners, architects or accomplished research fellows. Their report would not be judged by professors even though it would be presented in a school auditorium and the audience wouldn't be fellow students but CEO's, department heads, community leaders and stakeholders, some of which had shelled out a considerable amount of money for it, even though the late night experts worked entirely for free.

What is described here is the last stage of the advisory panel approach to problem solving, where independent out-of-town experts who immerse themselves into a local problem for several days, present their findings and move back to their regular lives, a concept that has been around for decades, is employed in many disciplines and has remained popular especially in the field of complex multi-faceted urban problems.

What ULI panels address (source: ULI website):

1. ECONOMIC GROWTH + DEVELOPMENT
Industrial Development, Shopping Mall Redevelopment, Employment Generation, Real Estate Finance
2. DOWNTOWNS
Neighborhood Revitalization, Downtown Revitalization
3. DISASTER RELIEF
Floods, Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Earthquakes, Manmade Disasters
4. UNIVERSITIES AND INSTITUTIONS
University Development, Hospitals, Life Sciences
5. INFRASTRUCTURE AND TRANSPORTATION
Transit-Oriented Development, Transportation, Ports, Airports, Rail
6. HOUSING AND COMMUNITIES
Workforce Housing and Affordable Housing, Housing Finance
7. METROPOLITAN AND REGIONAL STRATEGIES
Regional Growth and Cooperation, Sustainable Development, Military Base Redevelopment
8. URBAN DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE
Corridor Redevelopment, Streetscape, Historic Preservation, Place Making

The late evening work scene described above is from a Technical Advisory Services panel of the US based Urban Land Institute, and the question presented was what to do with a public housing site in Forth Worth, Texas. But the scenes could play out just the same in any other state of the US or even in other countries as far as China and they have occurred already over 600 times since 1947. The out- of-town expert approach for urban problems is also used by the American Institute of Architects who have employed their Regional/Urban Design Assistance Teams RUDAT since 1967 and added in 2005 Sustainability Assessment Teams (SDAT) to their arsenal. The American Planning Association (APA) calls their version of Assistance teams CPAT for Community Planning Assistance Team. (The APA process was created in 2009; it is not limited to a week and takes several months to complete).

“They got out there and interviewed people. They got down to it. It wasn’t just a superficial flashover. They got involved. I think probably at this time they may know us better than we do. They put together a comprehensive blueprint of all those pieces in order to give us an opportunity to create our own destiny.” — Pat Bourque, Kingman, AZ. (AIA website)

The RUDAT process by AIA and the ULI Advisory Panel approach are similar in many ways and follow the same time-tested script of learning and listening (including tours and interviews) followed by producing and presenting.  AIA's Center for Communities by Design has a very formalized application process, asks applicants to form a Steering Committee to manage the process and even manage the funds needed for the process. The AIA RUDATS aim mostly for cities and communities as applicants whereas the ULI Services Panels could be requested by private entities or institutions as well. AIA follows up with an implementation phase whereas ULI leaves that to their clients and manages the process in close collaboration with the sponsors.

Scene 2

The posh downtown Forth Worth restaurant Perla Negra informs at the door that it is closed for an event. A long table is set up, a good portion of the local movers and shakers has already arrived and engaged in Sunday evening small talk while the expert panel group still dizzy from travel, time change, the warm temps and the unfamiliar city is trying to find the venue which really is just a stone-throw from the hotel door. Handshakes, introductions, more small talk, some drinks. An hour or so later, the age old method of joining around a table for food and drink has broken the ice and the panel members have a much better idea now who the sponsors are and what their motives are to engage ULI. 

Exchange over meals with local stakeholders is
a hallmark of ULI panels.  Forth Worth, Tx
 (photo: ArchPlan)

The drop-in fly-out process

The above scene plays out on the first night of the panelists arriving in town. The dinner setup plunges them in a pleasant way right into the middle of the key players and their issues. The second day is still a pleasant affair, with site tours and stakeholder presentations about the issue. The tough part begins with day three when up to 100 stakeholders must be confidentially interviewed between 8am and 5pm, in one hour long conversations occurring simultaneously between groups of two panelists and two or three stakeholders. At the end of day three, panelists feel like their heads will explode. Day four and five are reserved for the writing of the report (each discipline writes a section), preparing a slide show and a verbal presentation that is given on the morning of the final day in a public setting typically attended by the media, the stakeholders, the mayor and council, and other interested parties..

Ever since New Orleans was flooded first by Katrina waters and then by outside experts (AIA, ULI, APA and many others) swarming all over town providing advice and masterplans, solicited or unsolicited, the concept of fly-by expert panels has come under attack by some who see it being in contrast to planning by the people themselves (article).

In a time when bottom-up and local is good and top down and outside is bad, expert panels like those from the American Institute of Architects and the Urban Land Institute could potentially be in trouble with their multidisciplinary outside experts dropped into problem areas to devise appropriate solutions in a few days of high-intensity consulting.

Upon closer inspection, however, neither the top down versus bottom up nor the local versus out-of-town concepts have to be antithetical or mutually exclusive. In fact, experts panels, if done right, can combine these aspects in synergistic ways.

Since 1967, R/UDATs have helped more than 135 communities nationwide become more healthy, safe, livable, and sustainable [..] Many communities are immobilized by factors such as conflicting agendas, politics, personalities, or even an overabundance of opportunity. The R/UDAT process ensures that all voices are given a fair hearing and that options are weighed impartially. The lack of bias, professional stature of the team members, and pro bono nature of the work generate community respect and enthusiasm for the process. (source: AIA)

Public meeting with community. Anna Maria Island, FL
(photo ArchPlan)

The idea of the service panels' impartial experts who by coming from far away are untainted by local politics and bias and thus provide an honest straight up assessment without fear of local repercussion remains an asset which is easily paired with the local expertise which is built into the process through the interview and participation procedures.  The intensity of 3-5 extra long days of fully focused and uninterrupted concentration by highly trained people cannot replace the experience of lifelong residents, but easily match the reconnaissance potential of the initial stage of typical consulting work with its typical on and off pattern. Both AIA and ULI emphasize, though, that their services are not intended to replace consultants but provide the scoping and problem definition that is a necessary prerequisite for any consulting procurement. One can put some trust in that assertion, given that the majority of the members of these organizations make their living off consulting.

Since 1947, Advisory Services panels have helped communities find strategic, practical solutions for the most challenging issues facing today’s urban, suburban, and rural areas. During a concentrated one-week effort, panels address challenging real estate and land use issues and provide solutions. Source ULI)

Validation from the local perspective

I observed the validity of outside experts achieving what local stakeholders or experts cannot when ULI came to Baltimore to advise about the Westside, Baltimore's ailing former retail district. Baltimore's Mayor couldn't or wouldn't decide between the diverging voices advising about what course to take, especially about a city lead land disposition called the Superblock, which was mired in controversy and litigation and brought the revitalization of the entire district into question. It was

ULI report cover: The local perspective

Pittsburgh's former Mayor Tom Murphy who lead the advisory panel. In his direct style he and the team recommended in no uncertain terms that the city should not extend the contract with the master developer another time and instead embark on a new and smaller scale approach in which "thousand flowers bloom". Thus the Baltimore's Mayor Rawlings-Blake had a script in her hand that gave her coverage for a few bold steps that she either was unwilling or too tepid to take before.

“The bottom line is your community will get as much out of a R/UDAT as it is willing to put into it. A R/UDAT study is not a magic bullet. The real work begins the day they leave on the plane.” — Donna Stenger, City of Tacoma, WA (AIA website)

Is it undemocratic to hand local matters over to outside experts? Not if one considers that they simply advise and that the advice comes after a very intensive round of listening. In the case of ULI the panel does not only get a thick briefing book up front, it tours the area in question plus large parts of the surrounding influence zones and meets key people involved in the matter at hand. The panelists interview up to a hundred or so stakeholders and local experts in confidential one hour sessions that stretch over an entire day. Should they not like the sponsor picked participants, they can summon just about anybody they like, provided the person is willing to speak.  In my experience as the local, I could judge firsthand how much the outside panelists had actually learned about the Westside. As a resident expert with an office in the area for 20 years, I was astonished how many complicated back stories had not only been relayed to the out of town visitors but had also been properly digested and integrated into the recommendations. As a local I found that the biggest utility of the panel recommendations lay less in innovation or crazy bold ideas but in putting the whole complicated story together for all to draw conclusions. Those, then, provide ammunition to positions which matched up with the recommendations thus breaking through the stalemate.

The panelist's perspective

From my perspective as a panelist (I have participated in four national panels) unease about rendering advice after such short exposure remains, in spite of the extensive information "dump". Not that lack of information is the problem, but rather the abundance of it. The difficulty is of how to calibrate advice and recommendations sufficiently so they are not devised by preconceived notions but integrate all the information thrown at the panelists. The absolute ultimatum that a set of recommendations be complete before leaving town again forces panelists to cut through the maze, to weigh and filter along the way, all healthy step towards action which often are not taken by local stakeholders. As in the case of Baltimore's Westside, locals tend to push tough problems aside in favor of the path of least resistance. Of course, the pressure to produce carries the risk of leaving out important considerations for the sake of expediency. To some extent the risk of egregious errors can be mitigated in the written report which follows a few months after the expert panel concluded their work and is subject to rigorous fact checking and editing.

The panelist's perspective (Photo ArchPlan)

Today it is harder than ever for the dropped-in advisers to generate truly new ideas that local stakeholders and decision makers wouldn't have dreamed of before. True innovation is hard to come by in a time when every new idea travels around the globe in seconds. In the years when the advisory panel method of assistance was first employed, experienced outside professionals had a pretty good chance of knowing things locals just didn't have access to. Back then information and knowledge was more guarded and more exclusive. Today with travel common and information flow less filtered than ever before in history stakeholders and advisers are on a much more equal footing. The best practices in planning, urban design and development, typically at the core the problem statements, can be googled by anybody. Does this make panels obsolete?

With that democratization of knowledge the benefit of the panel comes no longer from disseminating privileged information. Instead the benefit comes from the intense back and forth among the panelist in which raw information is processed like in a blender or cooked like in an oven. The prerequisite heat comes from a half dozen folks who often don't know each other being thrown together with no chance for escape. They have to deliver and they have to agree on something within the time given to them, whether they think alike or not. The psychology of this information digestion process is like the one that evolves when a jury first survives the procedures of a trial and then deliberates until a verdict is reached. Except that in the panel process, the sponsors who lay down big bucks for the panel expenses, will not accept a hung jury. Having been a juror and also a panelist I have seen sparks, emotion and argument as steps towards common ground. It is a thing of great beauty to see disagreement, fracture and elements of despair in light of the imminent deadline dissolve at the time of the final presentation when each panelist reports one element of the work and the puzzle pieces finally fall into place. Always the emerging whole comes out much less fractured than any draft ever appeared before. Once in a while, there are exceptions, no consensus emerges and a key panelist may run off in a huff. This what happened when famous Philadelphia planner Ed Bacon did not agree with a ULI panel's contention who the master developer for Washington's Union Station renovation should be. (Source). The 1981 ULI panel laid the ground-work for the conversion of the station into a mixed use public-private facility with significant amounts of retail which then were seen as what gave the historic preservation its economic foundation.

However, the biggest benefit from a week of panel work may not be what the advisers recommend at all. The biggest benefit could easily be the simple fact that a large group of locals who often don't talk with each other have paid attention to the problem at hand, met at the initial dinner or the reporting session or at least heard about other positions and views during the proceedings.  In other words, the mere presence of the panel can shake things loose and create an act of collective learning.

Experts or busybodies?

Can the many organizations that apply this advisory panel approach in one way or another really all find good experts? Who would work grueling hours, receive no enumeration whatsoever beyond direct expenses and, unlike a juror, volunteer to serve? Who would drop work and family for a week and devote all attention to a problem they didn't even know existed before they received  the briefing book? Wouldn't only losers apply, folks that have nothing better to do, busybodies that yearn for the opportunity to get away from where they are or for the chance of getting on a pulpit from which to preach?

Media reporting: Raleigh Durham Airport
panel 

From what I have seen and what is listed as participants in the hundreds of panel reports published to date, most advisers work in demanding and well-paying jobs, they are highly qualified, and they could do many other things besides being unpaid out-of-town experts. Neither AIA, ULI nor the other organizations with similar approaches would have applications for this kind of service going on for decades if the product was poor because it came from folks who were unqualified or just self-promoting. If the organizers somehow wouldn't achieve valuable outcomes, they wouldn't find people, organizations or institutions requesting those services and paying significant amounts for panels year after year.

In 2013 ULI compiled a report which uses 11 cases dating from 1948 to 2013 to showcase its best panels and their impacts. This report is certainly no independent audit and reads rather self congratulatory at times ("ULI Advisory Services: Transforming the World, One Panel at a Time") but it shows that many early recommendations were prescient and proved correct over time, even if cities and sponsors haven't always followed them right away as in the case of one of the first recommendations ever made by a panel which suggested that Indianapolis and its surrounding county form a joint government. It took two decades for Marion County and the city to consolidate as Unigov. (source)

.. this service produces much more than recommendations and a written report. It provides real, tangible, transformative results. In city after city, region after region, institution after institution, the Advisory Services panel process has changed the way local stakeholders think about land use planning and development. Many panels’ recommendations have powerfully affected the cities that hosted them and transformed them forever (ULI report about impact of services)

Why people do things for free

Why panelists volunteer for the five day mammoth undertaking remains a bit puzzling. It fits the interesting phenomenon that volunteerism is alive and well in our society, no matter how often the end of social behavior has been proclaimed. Unlike for church-based charity, the advisory panel isn't based on a fixed belief system or a set catechism that fires up the motivation of missionaries. There may be a kind of vanity at work that one can observe when somebody is asked for advice. People generally love to give advice, share insight or experience when somebody actually asks. 

Then, no doubt, there is the valuable experience of getting to know a lot of interesting people in the process, plus the learning that comes from intense work in an interdisciplinary team, much of which can be applied back to the professional practice of most, whether they work in a for-profit setting, in a non-profit setting, or in academia. 

Increasingly, we realize that people can perform very well without the direct material stimulant that was thought to be an absolute must in an all too monetized world. It turns out that motivation can come from curiosity, from a sense of being useful and from participating in the first steps of a journey towards a better future. The many people who don't mind coming together to work hard on conquering big challenges prove the notion that everything revolves only around money false, and provide a much more optimistic outlook on what makes people really tick.

The unleashing of that hidden energy is what makes these panels work and is a blessing in a time of diminished public resources. That will keep those panels going for some time to come.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

The writer is chair to AIA's national Regional and Urban Design Knowledge Community (RUDC) and is a member of ULI who has participated in four national ULI Service Panels and in one local Technical Assistance Panel (TAP).

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