Workable solutions

How Odd Couples, Complementary Needs, and Chance Can Change Cities

October 18, 2017 By Otis White

On a Sunday morning a few weeks from now, the 47th running of the New York Marathon will begin on Staten Island as 50,000 runners and wheelchair athletes thunder over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn. They’ll loop through Bay Ridge and into Williamsburg, then cross into Queens like an invading army. They’ll begin thinning out in Long Island City before heading into Manhattan across the high-arching Queensboro Bridge (the heartbreak hill of New York marathoners).

In Manhattan they’ll turn right and head north until they reach the Willis Avenue Bridge and cross into the Bronx, where they’ll basically make a U-turn back to Manhattan. The rest of the 26.2-mile run will be, comparatively speaking, a breeze, through Harlem, into the Upper East Side, with a triumphant finish in Central Park. The world’s best runners will finish in under two and a half hours. Mere mortals will take a while longer.

It’s an amazing spectacle. And if you’re lucky enough to see it (or better yet, participate in it), you may wonder: Where did the inspired idea of running a marathon through five boroughs and all these neighborhoods come from? And what does it tell us about how things like this happen in cities?

Answer: It came from a meeting in 1975, where two people found a way of connecting their entirely different needs in a way that created not just a common solution but a sensation. The central figures were Percy Sutton, the Manhattan borough president, and Fred Lebow, head of the New York Road Runners.

The two could not have been more different. Sutton was a polished lawyer and politician. Lebow was a Romanian refugee who made money in New York’s garment district before falling in love with long-distance running. Sutton knew power; Lebow knew showmanship. In short, they were the odd couple.

Their needs, too, were completely different. During one of New York’s worst years ever, Sutton was looking to change the narrative about his city, to give it something hopeful in the Bicentennial year of 1976. (He also hoped to become New York’s first black mayor.) Lebow wanted something to distinguish New York’s marathon from the much older and better known Boston Marathon. At the time, New York’s race was run entirely inside Central Park, with runners dodging cyclists and families pushing strollers.

What brought them together was a misunderstanding. Lebow and others were talking about running the marathon in the streets (as Boston’s was). By the time the idea reached Sutton, it had somehow become a race through every one of New York’s boroughs. Sutton was intrigued by the idea; Lebow, once he heard what was on the table, was horrified. (The cost, the logistics, the likelihood that something would go wrong . . . this was a crazy idea.)

And here’s where the magic happened. Once they sat down and started talking, the two men found answers to every objection. And more: They found greatness in the idea. This wasn’t just a partial answer to New York’s image problems or a way to make the New York Marathon distinctive. This was a way of creating a spectacle that could rival 1945’s V-J celebrations in Times Square . . . and, if successful, could be held every year.

Their relationship held Sutton and Lebow together as they worked through the security, logistics, organizational, and cost issues. But the opportunity of a great civic spectacle became their driving force.

If anything, the New York Marathon has grown beyond anything Sutton and Lebow could have imagined: it’s a showcase of great runners (and tens of thousands of average ones) and great urban neighborhoods, an economic and tourism boost for the city, an irresistible draw for the news media, and a civic celebration. But it also is an illustration of how legendary civic projects come about: when odd-couple leaders find ways of connecting their needs and creating solutions that become greater than the problems they began with. You see it in the origins of Atlanta’s Beltline project and the reinvention of Denver’s Union Station.

There is no way to plan for these things. Having an open door and lots of relationships helps. So does having a creative mind that can connect needs in creating solutions. But luck plays a role. How else can you account for the fact that, had Percy Sutton not misunderstood Fred Lebow’s original idea, we would not today have one of the world’s greatest athletic events and urban celebrations?

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Peter Miller licensed under Creative Commons.

What Government Is Good At

January 12, 2017 By Otis White

Not much in life is certain, but of two things I am sure:

The secret to improving cities lies in collaboration. That is, in getting numerous independent interests working in coordinated ways on big problems.
One of the secrets of effective collaboration is knowing what each partner is good at, so each contributes from its strengths.

If I’m right about this, then we need to think deeply about what each participant can bring to a collaboration. And we should begin with government, since it will be central to almost every ambitious civic undertaking.

But first, let me urge my friends in government to give up that most human of instincts, defensiveness. If we aren’t willing to acknowledge that there are some areas where we don’t excel, then we’ll never work effectively with others.

This can be difficult in public life because governments face a chorus of critics ready to pounce on any shortcoming. What can I say? It takes courage to be a leader. But it also takes faith that, as you build successful collaborations, your list of critics will grow shorter as your list of admirers grows longer. So have the courage to say where you need help.

What would those areas be for governments? Most likely they would include coming up with new ideas, which tends to occur early in the collaboration process.

Why aren’t governments good at creative new ideas? Because they tend to be like old-fashion department stores. They offer many things, most of them as commodity services. This rewards a wide view and clearly thought-out routines, but not innovation.

Some of the interests governments collaborate with, by contrast, will be more like niche retailers: They sell one or two things but do so at amazing depth and variety and are constantly looking for new ways of doing things. So why not use these groups’ knowledge, passion, and focus to bring new ideas to civic undertakings?

Having trouble picturing this? Think of a collaboration aimed at attracting more young people to a city. The city government will surely be one of the partners, but others might include the chamber of commerce, the local university, entertainment venues, apartment developers, and, one hopes, some actual young people. Which participants in this collaboration would you expect to offer the most promising ideas?

Collaborations are about more than ideas, of course. They’re about creating workable solutions and seeing these solutions put in place. So as a collaboration moves toward decision making and implementation, the strengths of government become critical. The three most important strengths that a government offers are fairness, scale, and steadfastness.

Fairness is a value that you’ll have to help your partners understand and appreciate. They’ll see it, at first, as delay. But government processes are designed to ensure that everyone gets a voice—and, in doing so, they can reveal the flaws in our plans and show us their unintended consequences. So while government officials should accept others’ leadership in generating new ideas and approaches, their partners have to realize that public decision making depends on . . . well, the public being involved.

The other two, scale and steadfastness, are obvious but rarely appreciated strengths of government. The best example of scale at work is water conservation. By making changes in their building codes (mandating that new construction and renovations use more efficient plumbing), cities have dramatically reduced the amount of water each household uses over time.

New York, for instance, was consuming 1.5 billion gallons of water a day on average in 1979. By 2009, it had reduced its daily consumption by a third to just over 1 billion gallons even as its population grew by nearly 12 percent . . . with almost no one noticing the changes. Now, that is scale!

It’s also a lesson in steadfastness. Unlike businesses and even nonprofits, governments tend to stick with what they do. The reason New York reduced its water consumption so dramatically is the government never wavered in its commitment.

So as you begin collaborations, government leaders should ask for help with ideas. But they should outline what their partners can expect in return: The government will listen widely and decide carefully. But, once committed, it can offer real, measurable change. And by and large, it will keep its promises.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by torbakhopper licensed under Creative Commons.

Leadership as “a Kind of Genius”

May 14, 2015 By Otis White

Twenty-five years ago, as I was growing interested in how cities produce leaders and leaders shape cities, I heard a state business association president define leadership. A leader, he said, “is someone who helps people get where they want to go.”

He was speaking to a community leadership class, and I could sense the audience deflate. That’s it? Help people go somewhere? Like a bus driver? What about organizing constituencies, offering a vision, and persuading the public? What about standing up for people—or standing up to the powerful? What about holding office?

And, yet, I had to admit he was on to something. Organization and persuasion are skills. Visions can be supplied by others. Standing up to the powerful and holding office are roles. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that helping people get where they want to go (and, one hopes, need to go) isn’t a bad definition of what leaders do. It’s just . . . incomplete.

So allow me to complete the definition. A leader is someone who helps people get where they want to go . . . by seeing the opportunity for getting there.

Seeing the opportunity—the narrow, sometimes temporary passage through which change can happen—is the genius of leadership. And herding people through that passage is the practice of leadership. What the genius and the practice require is a sense of how things fit together, a tactical vision, a willingness to learn from experience, and a saintly patience with people—but a patience that’s bounded by the resolve to do something meaningful.

If this sounds abstract, trust me; there are examples all around you. Here in Atlanta, I’ve seen these traits in people who nurtured projects great and small, from the creation of the Beltline, a circle of parks and trails that’s transforming entire neighborhoods, to the building of a roundabout that fixed an impossible intersection at the gates of Emory University and breathed life into a small retail district.

In both cases, the leader was someone who recognized the value of these projects, sized up the difficulties, figured out the path forward, and patiently guided others along it.

But how exactly did they do it? What are the steps in seeing and seizing opportunities? And how can you become one of these everyday geniuses?

You can find some of the answers in a book called “A Kind of Genius” by Sam Roberts, a New York Times reporter. It’s about a man who took on some of New York’s toughest problems in the 1960s and 1970s, figured out practical, even elegant solutions, and got them implemented. His name was Herb Sturz.

Herb who? Roberts’ point exactly. Sturz was an “unsung hero, shrewd social engineer and social entrepreneur” who had an impressive but largely unnoticed impact on New York, first by reforming New York’s bail bond system (and inspiring similar reforms around the country), then pioneering ways of dealing with substance abuse. His final challenge was the one most apparent to residents and visitors today, the cleanup of Times Square.

You’ll be impressed by these stories. But the real reason for reading Roberts’ book is to learn how Sturz worked: by listening carefully, studying systems, proposing small-scale experiments, quantifying the results, answering objections, and winning over even the most skeptical officeholders. You won’t be surprised to learn that, as a child, Sturz spent a long illness learning to play chess and could see six moves ahead in his mind.

Here’s how Roberts explains the Sturz approach: “He spotted things other people hadn’t seen, even things that had been staring them in the face every day. He would pose questions that they hadn’t asked, even when those questions seemed mundane. And by peppering participants at every level with even more questions, by meticulously dissecting the responses, by crafting hypothetical fixes and subjecting them to challenging testing and experimentation, he tried his hand at transforming illusions into practical answers.”

Herb Sturz was a remarkable leader, but I’ve seen similar traits in others who’ve accomplished big things in public life. They ask good questions. They listen intently. They experiment, observe, and quantify. They see how systems respond. They answer objections. They’re patient. But when an opportunity presents itself and the way forward opens, they are decisive and relentless.

At the end of the day, these leaders get people where they want to go, but often by a road no one else could have imagined. And that’s what makes them a kind of genius.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Steven Fettig licensed under Creative Commons.

Connecting the Phases: The Guiding Coalition

December 6, 2011 By Otis White

In a series of postings, we’re exploring how conscious change happens in communities. If you haven’t read the first posting in this series, please take a moment to do so.

As we walk through the community change process, let’s pause and see if we can connect more closely the first two parts, the discussion phase and planning phase. Briefly, the discussion phase awakens the community to a need and pulls together a group of people to search through a number of possible answers for a workable solution. The planning phase takes the workable solution and turns it into a set of specific plans that speak to the public, decision makers, and funders. It may also involve organizational work and fundraising.

What connects these phases? Aside from you, as the primary leader, it’s the guiding coalition. This is the group that helps you, in the discussion phase, sift through possible solutions and come up with the one to take forward. In the planning phase, you still need a group—if anything, the tasks multiply and grow harder, so you need others to help carry the load. And the obvious people to begin with are those who were with you in the discussion phase. After all, by this point, it’s their project, too.

But who else is needed? As I mentioned in an earlier posting, a good way of thinking about guiding coalitions is to consider people with expertise, power, credibility, and the ability to get things done. How does this change in the planning phase? It doesn’t. It’s just that, as you work into the details, the problems and opportunities grow narrower and deeper, so you’ll need people who can help you not just with the broad outlines of community change but the crevasses as well.

To make this clearer, let’s return to the example I used in my planning phase posting, the building of New York’s High Line Park. Remember that this project began in 1999 when two neighborhood residents, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, learned that an abandoned elevated freight line running through their West Side neighborhood was to be torn down. They both had the idea that something, some kind of public space, could be made of this industrial relic and provide a much needed amenity. Thus began one of the most astonishing urban improvement projects of the past half-century, culminating in 2009 with the opening of a park in the sky, one of the country’s most innovative public spaces.

Who joined David and Hammond’s guiding coalition, and when did they join? As they write in their book, “High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky,” David and Hammond started out with little knowledge of parks, planning, politics, or charitable fundraising. So they began with what they had: friends who knew people. And, here, they were lucky. Hammond had gone to college with a man who had become a well-connected New York lawyer. He introduced David and Hammond to the first member of their guiding coalition, a developer and former political insider named Phil Aarons. Aarons had three of the four qualities a guiding coalition needs: expertise, credibility, and the ability to get things done. He was immediately won over by the idea of the High Line and invested untold hours in making introductions, attending meetings, and advising David and Hammond about politics and public opinion.

Hammond had another college friend, Gifford Miller, who was by then a city council member (he would later be president of the council). Skeptical at first—Hammond says Miller called it a “stupid idea” when he first heard it—Miller changed his mind when Hammond took him atop the High Line and he saw its potential. Miller brought credibility and expertise to the group (he knew city government and especially the city council) and, of course, power.

Others joined the coalition soon after. There was a lawyer who understood transportation law and federal regulation, and helped guide them through the federal maze. Miller brought in the city council’s zoning and land use attorney. Aarons introduced David and Hammond to Amanda Burden, who was then a member of the city planning commission. In time, Burden would become the project’s most important champion and strategist. (In a stroke of luck, when Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor, he appointed Burden the city’s planning commission chair, which is a powerful position.)

Even more joined in time. One was a city government lobbyist who knew the nooks and crannies of city hall even better than Miller and Aarons. Another city council member, Christine Quinn, came aboard. An economic development expert, John Alschuler, was hired to study the project’s impact on property values and was so taken with the High Line, he stayed on as a volunteer and became part of the inner circle. There were others: One was a man who knew so much about the neighborhoods that the project crossed that he was known as the “mayor” of the lower West Side. He helped convince building owners and neighborhood groups to support the High Line. Finally, as the project moved into major fundraising, a partner at Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street firm, joined the group to help them connect with the wealthiest families and corporate interests.

These people came as needed. Alschuler was brought into the inner circle after the workable solution had been identified and when more detailed plans were needed. The lobbyist and neighborhood “mayor” joined as the approval process, at city hall and in the neighborhood planning boards, approached. The Goldman Sachs partner arrived after the project had won its most critical approvals and its heaviest fundraising began.

Others were influential, but more as allies than members of the guiding coalition. One was Dan Doctoroff, the deputy mayor for economic development. Acting on Mayor Bloomberg’s behalf, he had major development plans for the northern end of the High Line, an area called the Far West Side. Doctroff’s support was crucial for the High Line but his own plans were controversial. So David, Hammond and the rest of the guiding coalition walked a fine line. They had to stay in Doctoroff’s good graces while not being too supportive—otherwise the neighborhoods would have turned against the High Line. Somehow they managed this well enough that when Doctoroff’s Far West Side plans fell apart, the High Line sailed ahead . . . with Doctoroff’s support.

There were other important supporters, including celebrities, business leaders, politicians, and society mavens, and they were frequently consulted. But they weren’t in the guiding coalition. Yes, they might be in the ribbon-cutting photographs or featured in videos and printed materials (that was a way of compensating them for helping out), but they didn’t map strategy or search for answers and allies. That was the work of the guiding coalition.

At a point, the High Line needed more than a loose coalition; it needed the structure of a full-blown nonprofit, which came to be called Friends of the High Line. Many of those who were in the informal guiding coalition became board members. Aarons was the first chair of the Friends of the High Line. The next was Alschuler, the economic development expert who started as a consultant and became an advocate.

The interesting dynamic about guiding coalitions is how members’ involvement waxes and wanes. That is, at a point, one person might be the key member because she has the critical expertise or credibility, but at a later point, she may not be as central to things. As long as it’s an informal coalition, these things are almost self-regulating. That is, as people feel they are needed, they step up. When they’re no longer needed as much, they drift away.

When a coalition becomes a nonprofit board, though, it takes greater management. Someone has to choose who stays on boards and who leaves. This is known as “board development,”and it is one of the most important strategic duties a nonprofit director and board chair make. And how do you choose good nonprofit board members? Well, expertise, power, credibility, and the ability to get things done are good places to start. But add one more: the ability—and willingness—to raise money.

Planning Phase: The Slog of Civic Projects, and Why It’s Critical

November 18, 2011 By Otis White

In a series of postings, we’re exploring how conscious change happens in communities. If you haven’t read the first posting in this series, please take a moment to do so.

In a time when many wonderful parks have been built, New York’s High Line may be the most wonderful of all. It’s a park that runs above the street and through buildings on Manhattan’s west side. If you climb the stairs and walk the portions that are completed (it will eventually be a mile and a half long), you’ll see something at once modest and spectacular. The modest part is the park itself, a narrow trail edged with plants and trees with resting areas along the way. The spectacular part is the setting: a park in the sky, wending its way through post-industrial New York. The reviews, as you can see in this video, have ranged from glowing to awestruck.

But my interest is not in the park itself. It’s in the project—the road the High Line traveled from a pair of neighbors looking up and seeing potential in an old elevated track until its opening in June 2009—and what that journey tells us about the second phase of our map of community change, the planning phase.

Background: In 1999 two men, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, attended a neighborhood planning meeting on the future of the abandoned rail line known as the High Line. Some landowners wanted it torn down to make way for new developments. David and Hammond, who did not know one another, came with another idea, that you could turn this elevated freight line into . . . something else, some kind of community asset.

Their ideas were vague. They thought about a park of some sort, but what kind of park could you build on a narrow set of elevated railroad tracks? And David and Hammond hardly seemed the type to turn vague civic ideas into reality. David was a writer who specialized in travel articles for glossy magazines. Hammond was a consultant to business startups. Neither had run a nonprofit, managed a park, or had any serious contact with government at any level. They came to the meeting with hopes of volunteering for a nonprofit—any nonprofit—that would make the High Line into a community asset. What they learned was there was no such nonprofit. So, pretty much on the spot, David and Hammond decided to do it themselves.

If you’re following this on the map of community change, we’re at the very start of the discussion phase, with the recognition of a need. Or, in this case, two needs. The first was David and Hammond’s belief that, in the crowded lower West Side of Manhattan, there wasn’t nearly enough open space. That part of New York takes in many old industrial areas (one neighborhood is still called the Meatpacking District). In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, New York didn’t build parks in places like that.

The other need was for quick action. If somebody didn’t act soon, they believed, the city would tear down the High Line and an opportunity for public space would be lost forever. (They were right. Less than two years later, the Giuliani Administration sided with the landowners and signed a demolition order for the High Line.)

A funny thing happened, though, once David and Hammond took up this project. It turned out—to their surprise and others’—that these two were uniquely equipped for a civic project of this magnitude and complexity. While they had no experience in leading an urban change effort, they had valuable and complementary skills. One could write well and knew some in New York’s social and philanthropic circles. The other was experienced in starting things, was at ease in asking people to do things (including giving money), and had a good sense of strategy. They were both quick learners, and each had an interest in art and design, which became important as the project moved forward.

It took three years of contacts, conversations, fundraising and strategic planning for David and Hammond to accomplish two things that ended the discussion phase and began the planning phase: First, they halted the demolition order with a lawsuit; second, they arrived at a workable solution for the High Line. You can view their workable solution online. It’s a 90-page document titled “Reclaiming the High Line,” researched by a nonprofit called the Design Trust for Public Space and written by David.

It’s an interesting document for three reasons. First, it’s beautifully designed. It had to be because it was aimed at multiple audiences: the political and planning communities that had such a big say in what would happen to the High Line; the community nearby, which at that time had barely any idea of the High Line’s potential; and possible donors who needed to understand the High Line’s vision.

Second, it’s modest in spelling out that vision. While it makes a strong case that the old freight line should not be torn down, used as a transit line, or turned into a commercial development (a long, skinny retail area, perhaps?), it doesn’t say it ought to be a park, either. It simply says its best use is as open space in a part of the city where there isn’t enough. In other words, the workable solution keeps its options open.

The third thing that’s interesting is who wrote the foreword: Michael Bloomberg, who by 2002 had succeeded Rudolph Giuliani as mayor. This gets to an important element in any change effort: luck. The High Line project was lucky in who got elected during its 10-year path from concept to ribbon-cutting, starting with the person in the mayor’s office.

Well, if a workable solution is at hand and a powerful new mayor wants it to succeed, that’s that, right? What else is there to do? The answer: The real work was just beginning. And this is my central message about the planning phase. Getting agreement on a workable solution is like getting everyone to agree on the design concept for a new house. Now comes the difficult, detailed work of hammering out costs and financing, drawing blueprints and mechanical plans, obtaining building permits, and bringing together a small army of independent contractors.

As David and Hammond explain in their book, “High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky,” even with the new mayor on their side, there was still a gauntlet of approvals to be run, from community planning boards (basically, neighborhood organizations that review developments) to the owners of the High Line (CSX, the railroad company) and the federal agency that approves transfers of railroad rights of way. And they had opposition: from landowners who had expected to build where the High Line stood, but also from residents who couldn’t see how the dark, peeling, scary elevated railroad could ever be anything but an eyesore. Finally, they realized a truth about government: that, even in a strong-mayor government such as New York has, the mayor doesn’t call all the shots. As Hammond writes:

(By late 2002) the Bloomberg Administration fully supported the High Line, but if they’d only endorsed it and done nothing else, the project would have died. Everything about the High Line was complex, and it had to pass through so many different agencies and departments. City government is like the human body: the head, which is the mayor’s office, may want to do something, but the body has a number of different parts that want to go their own way.

Everything hinged on three tasks that occupied much of the High Line’s planning phase: Coming up with a design for the park that would please politicians and neighbors and excite donors; dealing with the landowners’ objections; and figuring out how to pay for the construction and maintain this most unusual park in years to come.

If this doesn’t sound like exciting work, it wasn’t. This is the slog of civic projects, but it’s also why the planning phase is so important. Managing these details determines the success or failure of projects. And there were hundreds of details, from mapping the decision points and how to approach each of them to knitting together a coalition of supporters and funders. There were competing interests that had to be satisfied and intense politics. Oh, and they had to design a park unlike any in the world, and figure out how to pay for it.

What this phase requires from leaders are three things: the ability to plan (that’s why it’s called the planning phase), a mastery of detail (in an earlier posting, I called this the realm of “small-p politics”), and a willingness to ask for things. Throughout its development, David and Hammond asked people to do things for the High Line. Early on, they asked for information and advice (who owns the High Line, and how should we approach them?). Soon after, they asked for support and permission. In time, they asked for money. They started by asking for a small sums for printing costs and filing the lawsuit against the demolition. Eventually, they asked philanthropists and politicians for millions to pay for the park’s construction and maintenance. And they got it, in ways that surprised even them.

This brings us to the three elements of the planning phase that are in the map of community change: champions, narrative and strategy. I put them in the map as reminders. We’ve talked about one, strategy—that’s about mapping the decision points and making plans for each decision. This is the “inside game” of civic change, the political and bureaucrat checklist of approvals.

But there is always an “outside game” as well, and that’s where the narrative becomes critical because it speaks to citizens and potential supporters and donors. A narrative, of course, tells a story. It explains the need, why the need exists, the opportunity for addressing the need, how the solution was arrived at, and the future benefits of the change. Sometimes, the narrative has to change how people think about their community and its potential, something I call “reframing the community’s mind.”

And finally, there are the “champions.” Obviously, David and Hammond are the central figures of the High Line project. Without them, the freight line would be a memory and a remarkable asset squandered. But they aren’t the champions I have in mind; they’re the leaders and strategists. The champions are those whom David and Hammond asked for support who brought others along. Some were political champions who used their influence to win approval and gain government funding—people like Mayor Bloomberg, two successive city council presidents, New York’s senators and congressional representatives, and a host of people inside the bureaucracy.

There were also business and philanthropic champions, like media tycoon Barry Diller and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg who lent their names, made major financial gifts themselves, and hosted fundraisers for the High Line. Finally, there were celebrity champions who helped raise money and call attention to the High Line. An early celebrity endorser was actor Kevin Bacon, whose father had been an urban planner. Another actor, Edward Norton, also had a family interest (his grandfather was the pioneering urban developer James Rouse). When he read about the High Line project in a magazine article, he tracked down David and Hammond and offered to help out. As you can see from this video about the High Line, made before its opening, what Norton brought was public attention, which is what stars do.

The final box in the planning phase is “the plan,” but that’s a little too simple. In all likelihood, it’s not a single plan but a host of plans: one describing the project’s feasibility in great detail for decision makers, one speaking to the public about its benefits, one setting out the financing (for decision makers and funders), and one describing the design (if it’s a physical project). There will likely be internal documents that serve as a kind of project flow chart, laying out the approval process and decision points, and what each approval will require, so you can marshal the right supporters. Finally, your project may need interim funding, to print materials, commission studies and seek expert advice. You’ll need a plan for getting that funding along the way.

As I said earlier, this isn’t glamorous work; it’s a slog. The amount of detailed work and its complexity will test civic leaders’ commitment and attention spans. There will be victories along the way, and it’s important to broadcast them to keep your supporters’ spirits high. “One of the keys to the High Line’s success,” Hammond writes, “was in always showing progress, even if it was a really small step.” And sometimes there are big steps, like the day in late 2004 when Josh David opened an envelope and found a check for $1 million inside, from a donor he and Hammond had courted.

But make no mistake: This is the period when obstacles are met and overcome—or not. Do the planning phase right, and the next one, the decision phase, will be a triumph. Do it poorly and your chances of success are about as good as winning the lottery: theoretically possible . . . but practically impossible.

Photo of the High Line by Katy Silberger licensed under Creative Commons.

How Odd Couples, Complementary Needs, and Chance Can Change Cities

What Government Is Good At

Leadership as “a Kind of Genius”

Connecting the Phases: The Guiding Coalition

Planning Phase: The Slog of Civic Projects, and Why It’s Critical

About Otis White

The Great Project

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