Citizenship and Governance in a Changing City: Somerville, MA

3. Major Redevelopment, Community Involvement, and Shared Governance

3 major redevelopment, Community involvement, and Shared Governance in Somerville, people like to be involved. . . . in a lot of other places, you go to zoning hearings and nobody shows up. Here they’re packed. . . . People live very close together in Somerville . . . [and] there’s been this push for more transparency and more public hearings and more involvement. (Scott mead, fifteen-year resident and local business leader) Ted Nolan, who once ran for political office, spoke similarly: “There is a lot of activism [in the city] around public transportation, affordable housing, open space, building a stronger tax base. [And] there is increasing activism on the part of some of the [newer] ethnic communities about being more involved in the community.” This chapter explores how collective civic engagement most often takes place in Somerville through the vehicle of key voluntary associations. This engagement occurs within a larger framework of two kinds of struggles. one is about what i call social citizenship, that is, about which city residents are fully accepted into the public life of this urban community and which are not. The other is about the extent to which city officials and civic actors participate in the making of public decisions in terms of what i call shared governance . i explain both of these concepts in Chapter 1. This chapter examines key arenas, sites, and issues around which active engagement was occurring during the period of my research. The volun- major redevelopment, Community involvement, and Shared Governance 37 tary associations1 i discuss in this chapter are directly involved in the politics of power and conflict. Their actions relate to the debate i outlined at the beginning of this book about whether voluntary associations should become involved in the contentious realm of politics or focus instead on more consensus -oriented forms of engagement. The associations i dealt with in my research see influencing and interacting with local government as essential to improving the quality of life for residents. in the language of scholars who have developed typologies of ways that associations engage politically, these associations “create avenues for direct participation . . . in public governance or political resistance” (Fung 2003a: 516, 517). They interact with formal state structures as a way to constitute governance (mark e. Warren 2001). This is in vivid contrast to a view of voluntary associations as largely apolitical social spaces that remain outside the rough-and-tumble environment of politics, separating themselves from conflict and the struggle for and exercise of power (Theiss-morse and Hibbing 2005; Walker 2008). Somerville’s voluntary associations are especially active around perhaps the most important issue in urban politics: expanding the economic base of the city through urban development (Berry 2003: 115). As longtime active Somerville resident Dave Strong told me in a typical statement, “Almost all the big issues [in this city] are around development.” The term development in the context of U.S. urban settings refers mainly to the creation of housing, business and commercial property, and jobs for local residents (Frisch and Servon 2006; markusen and Glasmeier 2008; melendez and Servon 2007). The creation of affordable housing is often, as it is in Somerville, a main activity of community development organizations. These organizations may also mobilize local residents to become actively involved in development issues, thrusting them into the role of agents of civic participation (Silverman 2005).2 one way Somerville’s community development agency, the Somerville Community Corporation (SCC), does this is by sponsoring and providing staffing and other resources for two of the grassroots voluntary associations considered here: the Affordable Housing organizing Committee (AHoC) and east Somerville Neighbors for Change (eSNC). This chapter explains how key voluntary associations have been actively involved in public decisions around major redevelopment sites and projects in Somerville: the mystic view Task Force (mvTF) and eSNC, focused on Assembly Square; the Somerville Transportation equity Partnership (STeP), the AHoC, and Union Square Neighbors (USN), all focused on Union Square; and a coalition of four associations and organizations calling themselves the Community Corridor Planning (CCP) coalition, focused on the new subway Green line. 38 Chapter 3 my focus here is on collective action by voluntary associations. i aim to understand when they are able to influence city government and public decision making—sometimes becoming part of that decision making—and to what effect. my telling of how these voluntary associations became at times involved in actual public decision making shows that (1) civic actors...