How Planners Can Give More Voice to Immigrant Communities
If you look hard enough, you can still see remnants of the old Clarendon: a few small restaurants and Mom-and-Pop stores scattered amid the trendy night spots and prestigious retailers that serve this vibrant, youthful, and affluent section of Arlington, Va.
But there is almost nothing left of “Little Saigon,” the nickname Clarendon was given in the mid-1970s, when refugees from the Vietnam War moved to the area and began setting up shops and restaurants. Little Saigon “served as a home away from home for Vietnamese refugees in an otherwise unfamiliar city,” Sooin Jessica Choi, a recent graduate of the Master’s in Urban & Regional Planning program at Georgetown University, writes in her Capstone. Yet, within 15 years, this “bustling commercial hub” began to disappear as rents climbed 400 percent and businesses were priced out of the area.
During the 1980s, a group of Vietnamese investors bought a shopping center about five miles west of Clarendon, near Seven Corners in Falls Church. Over the years, Eden Center grew and prospered, and it is now the largest Vietnamese commercial center on the East Coast.
Renovation Plan Meets Skepticism
Choi’s Capstone focuses on Falls Church’s long-term plan to renovate the shopping center and its efforts to involve the public in that process. The city’s East End Small Area Plan envisions a transformed Eden Center—one with enhanced green space, greater walkability, better transit options, and increased business development—that would serve as a gateway to the eastern entrance of the city. But while the city says it wants to preserve the center’s ethnic character, many residents fear that what happened to Little Saigon near the end of the 20th century could be repeated at Eden Center in the 21st.
Today’s planners are well aware of the importance of involving the public when communities face change. But, as Choi explains, the rather amorphous phrase “community engagement” leaves some big questions unanswered. How, for example, does one define “community”? And what does it mean to engage with it?
On a more basic level, Choi urges planners to reflect deeply on their position of authority and how that may be perceived in diverse communities like Eden Center. The goal, she says, is to shift from “viewing community engagement as a bureaucratic checkbox to seeing it as a deliberate effort to build social capital through sustained relationship-building.”
Who Speaks for the Community?
Choi also takes a skeptical look at public hearings in general, saying they make community engagement a reactive process.
“In other words, planners inform, and the public responds,” writes Choi, manager of special projects for the Southwest Business Improvement District in Washington, D.C. “Unless community organizations have enough political or financial resources to engage with the plan during its making process, public participation intrinsically maintains the hierarchy of planners as the decision makers and communities as receivers (at most, consultants) of their decisions.”
Another question is who, exactly, speaks for the community. “Community is more heterogeneous than meets the eye,” Choi writes. One way this is manifested at Eden Center is in the differing goals of older business owners, who may not speak English, and their children, who grew up in America and have more career options than their parents.
Among her recommendations for Falls Church and other cities interested in improving public engagement, Choi includes: acknowledging the internal dynamics of a community; establishing trust through an ally and/or open communications; and developing a long-term relationship with the community.
“Urban planning is no longer a purely technocratic profession,” Choi concludes. “As urban and suburban neighborhoods become more diverse, community engagement cannot just be about going through the motions of bureaucratic procedures. This study encourages urban planners to think creatively—and radically—about what planning with people can look like.”
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