public engagement | tmullermyrdahl

This week’s Sexual Assault, Safety and Public Transit cafe, co-sponsored by Women Transforming Cities and UBC’s AMS Sexual Assault Support Centre, generated some great media attention to the issues that many women and vulnerable populations (e.g., poor people, elderly, people with limited mobility, people for whom English is a new language) face as they try to move through the city and the Lower Mainland region.

The discussion highlights that safety means a variety of things. It means, most obviously, that transit riders deserve a commute free of groping, leering, and unwanted sexual attention. (Let’s be clear that statistically the primary group of offenders here is men and the primary group of targets here is women.) It means that lessons about transit behaviour – how to treat others with courtesy and respect – need to be taught and talked about in multiple venues, so that other dominant social messages – that women’s bodies are objects, and that some people are less deserving of respect than others – can be confronted and changed. And it also means holding perpetrators accountable for predatory action, and holding Translink and government accountable for ensuring that the transit system is safe for all users. Angela Marie MacDougall of Battered Women Support Services identified this point in an interview with Rick Cluff on CBC’s The Early Edition on January 13. She said:

See the transcript here and the podcast here.

So, what do we do? Taking seriously the stories of those who have been targets of such behaviour is a start, and the Translink Police have demonstrated that they are taking these stories seriously. While they may need to gain some public trust (incidents in which Translink Police have questioned the attire of the target rather than pursuing the perpetrator have made some in my circle cautious), their current media campaign, “See Something? Say Something!”, and their responsiveness to the Harassment on Translink blog illustrate that they are making efforts to address transit culture.

Another entry point is to extend the “thank you, driver” culture to general transit behaviour. The frequency with which I hear people say “Thank you!” as they exit the bus is one of the things that I love about Vancouver. And it’s easy to see how that norm sustains itself: people continue to do it and it becomes an unspoken expectation that this courtesy will be shared by passengers. (I would love to hear Vancouverites’ theories on why this culture might exist here, given that “bus chatting” seems less welcome.) It’s equally important to create an expectation that creating a safe transit environment is something that we can all participate in, by respecting others’ boundaries and intervening when our neighbours’ boundaries are being violated. Our willingness to ask basic questions like “Are you ok?” can help to make safety the norm on transit.

And a key entry point is to expand transit service. This means more money for safety initiatives and more bus and train service (fewer sardine-can-rides on the 99 B-line, the 135, and the Canada line!) in the city. It means thinking regionally about transit safety: traversing the Lower Mainland – moving between Richmond and Surrey, for instance, or getting from UBC to North Vancouver – can be tricky and unsafe when transit is less infrequent or simply isn’t available. For people coming into downtown to do third shift work like office cleaning, or people leaving downtown after the downtown bars close, accessing low-cost transportation is a major concern. It also means thinking regionally about transit in a way that is sensitive to both efficiency and safety. After all, the conversation about transportation and sustainable regional planning needs to get beyond growth modelling and “travel choice”, as these are insufficient methods for capturing the diverse needs of transit users.

Here is the transcript of my interview with Scott McLean for BC1:

Scott McLean: Well, last night members of the UBC community got together to talk about how to make their campus safer amid a recent string of sexual assaults and a spike in assaults on Translink. So, what now? Tiffany Muller Myrdahl teaches women & gender studies (my addition: in the Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies Department) at Simon Fraser University and spoke at last night’s forum and joins us now from our downtown Vancouver studio. Tiffany, this is a big issue, an important issue. It’s also pretty complex. Did last night’s meeting leave you with any more clarity at all about how exactly we move forward?

TMM: Thanks for having me, Scott. Women Transforming Cities, which was one of the co-sponsors of the event last night, one of our goals is to put a gender and equity lens on city services and city budgets and city planning, and bringing voices into the conversation that don’t typically get involved and aren’t necessarily heard. So, women and girls, people from marginalized communities. And that was really the goal of last night, to try to bring those voices to the table and talk about recommendations. And those recommendations will be on the www.womentransformingcities.org website, they will be put forward to municipal officials and to Translink, and they will be put into the report that’s going to the UBC president, which is I think going to be submitted at the end of January.

SL: It’s all well and good. My concern for your group and probably a lot of people’s concerns is how do you actually get these groups, whether it be the University, whether it be Translink, the cities involved here, how do you get them to actually listen and turn your great recommendations into some actual meaningful action?

TMM: It’s a great question. We’re in a moment when the transit referendum is going to come down in 2014 and budget issues are a pressing concern, but we have to be persistent and creative. The Translink police have been really responsive. They rolled out a video that they showed last night called “See Something? Say Something!” and that encourages both targets and witnesses to come forward to hold people accountable, including holding Translink and government accountable for keeping transit safe.

SL: You and I talked on the phone earlier today and you said such a big part of this is education and awareness. Why do you think that is and who are the people who need to be educated and aware, and how do you get that message to them? You mentioned that campaign there. Is it something like that or is it a different audience that we need to be reaching?

TMM: I think it’s both/and. It needs to be that kind of media campaign, it needs to be conversations like the one we had last night, it needs to be folks turning to their family and friends and boyfriends, and bring a variety of different voices into the conversation about what it means to feel unsafe on transit and not being able to say no when someone is giving you attention that you don’t want.

SL: One more question: you pointed out that last night’s event was co-sponsored by the group Women Transforming Cities. Is there a challenge now in getting those guys, some of the other community stakeholders all on the same page and speaking in one voice, or is that not necessary? Is it ok to have a bunch of different community stakeholders making the point rather than just one?

TMM: I think that’s a great question and I guess I would say that the more we can work together, but pressing from different angles perhaps. But yes, we all need to be at the table with representatives from different women’s communities, different marginalized groups’ communities to make sure that transit is safe for everyone.

John Lorinc’s fantastic Dec 10 column, “Building a better budget at City Hall”, prompted me to reflect on several matters related to questions of transparency and public engagement. Written to coincide with the onset of the City of Toronto’s annual budget consultations, Lorinc’s column details how Toronto’s budget works “to obscure, rather than enhance, understanding” about the City’s fiscal responsibilities. Still, the presentation of data in the Toronto budget communicates a clear message: claims that the City supports public engagement in budgetary decision-making are simply lip service, as is the oft-touted commentary about transparency in government spending. Making the budget available to a public readership is insufficient if the purpose is public engagement or transparency. Instead, the City must give the data context and meaning if readers are to make sense of the information.

Lorinc’s commentary and suggestions for change are tremendously important to fashioning the future of cities. I want to make three additions to Lorinc’s discussion.

1. On expert knowledge and obtuse data. When documents are perceived to use impenetrable language and exclude a lay readership, they signal that they are in fact written for an implied audience. Writing to an implied audience is not in-and-of-itself a bad thing; I would be doomed to a stockpile of incomplete essays if I did not assume a particular kind of reader for my various writing projects. Moreover, writing with discipline-specific language is sometimes necessary. For example, an academic audience typically expects writing that denotes a depth of knowledge in the field to which the writer contributes. Problems arise, though, when there is a mismatch between the text and the audience: this is where accusations of jargon abound. Thus, as Lorinc notes, trouble emerges when budget documents that are made available for the purpose of public consultation are inaccessible to their intended audience.

There is a certain sub-text at work in the disconnect between the budget documents and their presumed public audience. That is, by representing data in formats that are inaccessible to the lay reader, the writers of the budget documents use expert knowledge to distance themselves from those who cannot decipher the text. Here is one reason that so-called participatory processes fail: their very structure is set up to exclude those who don’t have the insider knowledge, time, or patience to actually participate. This being the case, participatory processes and public engagement fora seem to exist as an end unto themselves. Participation thus appears to enable a business-as-usual approach to governance, since the information provided to constituents will not encourage a change in government practices.

2. There are participatory models that work (at least some of the time). Lorinc underestimates the existence of functional participatory budgeting processes in North America. The Participatory Budgeting Project alone is working across Canada and the US; their impact in New York City, Chicago, and Vallejo, CA demonstrate the potential for the organization and participatory budgeting process.

Last month, Vallejo, CA became the first city in the US to adopt a city-wide participatory budgeting process. In other words, it is not just discretionary funds that are being spent with direct input from civic organizations. As long as these processes are neither co-opted (see image below, taken from the FAQ of the Participatory Budgeting Project) nor romanticized, participatory budgeting has great potential as a way to engage communities to build better cities.

3. Related to Lorinc’s concerns, there are two other matters of interest: the termination of data collection and the outsourcing of policymaking. Without romanticizing “Big Data”, which some scholars rightfully critique for its capacity to surveil, there is a lot to be said for the ability to empirically demonstrate imbalance and inequality. As feminist economists like Marilyn Waring have long argued in relation to women’s unpaid labour, marginalized groups can more effectively invoke the state’s responsibilities to its populace when data is available to support their claims. Harper’s cancellation of the long-form census, for example, has massive repercussions for Canadians who want to hold the state to account for its Constitutional promises. The deafening silence of the loss of data is, in some ways, as loud as the thud of Toronto’s inscrutable budget: both stifle the public’s capacity to actively engage government practices.

The outsourcing of policymaking has a similar effect. In February 2012, the Social Policy in Ontario website reprinted an editorial from the Toronto Star discussing the spate of public contracts awarded to private consultants; these consultants were hired to find solutions to municipal, provincial, and federal budgetary imbalances. The problems with this strategy are laid out clearly in Carol Goar’s editorial (and in Rick Mercer’s weekly rant). First, the public has little recourse to challenge the findings of private consultants, and where there are mechanisms in place to hold public sector employees accountable for their analyses, the same cannot be said for publicly-funded private consultants. Second, budgets are the agenda-setting documents of governance; they should chart direction based on desires of the populace, as these are articulated through elected officials. Therefore, budgets – and particularly “cost-saving measures” (usually defined under the rubric of short-term notions of efficiency) – should not be transferred or determined outside the public sector.

So, who benefits from the decision to employ consultants to solve public sector spending? What incentives do political leaders have to hire private consultants to do this work? In short, political leaders have the same incentive in hiring consultants as they do in eliminating data collection altogether: it’s called “see no evil, hear no evil, and do nothing” policymaking. It looks like this: the Harper government eliminates data collection mechanisms like the long-form census; data on the population’s health and well-being is no longer gathered by the state; and the state, having gathered no information about the well-being of their populace, feels justified in its cuts to public spending and unwillingness to create policies that address the (now unsubstantiated) needs of the populace.

At the end of the day, data is about power. Determinations over whether data is made available, made accessible, or is collected at all are grounded in attitudes about whose voices should be represented at the decision-making table. As long as governments are (implicitly or explicitly) invested in limiting those voices, genuine civic engagement will fall short, regardless of the participatory obligations by which governments must abide.

tmullermyrdahl

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on data and public engagement