“The Arlington Way” is viewed as one of the first and best examples of civic engagement at the local level. However, the drumbeat of criticism and opposition to all manner of needed investments suggest the Arlington Way as we know it is falling short.
There are many factors likely at play: complex project design, a fast-paced pipeline of project approvals, the rise of unfiltered blogs and social media, and that anxious feeling of sitting on the top of a cycle with property values and jobs.
At the county level, reliance on civic associations, commissions, and meetings seems to favor PWT (people with time) over broad engagement. County-run workshops have a “you come to us” set-up that too many Arlingtonians cannot fit into schedules. County websites are more schedule-friendly, but they are an ineffective engagement and trust-building tool. This is the situation for practically every resource-strapped city in the country. But this is Arlington, and we need to adapt the Arlington Way needs to the times.
Earlier this year, several women from around the county considered how to fix the current system’s shortcomings, along with the possibilities of how new tools and stories of innovation from other cities could work here.
We asked ourselves, “Wouldn’t it be great for a group of women who already take an active interest in Arlington to come together to ask strategic questions, educate themselves on issues, come up with ideas and then act on them?It would also be a great way for women to socialize and network with one another in a fun, informal way. Food and wine would be essential ingredients.”
Thus AWE2 was created: Arlington Women Educating and Empowering. Sure, it’s a happy hour, but we found it’s a way to get busy people into a room to catch up, learn a new thing or two and figure out what to do next. The first three meetings were experimental, and several themes have stood out:
- Connect the dots among our issues: affordable housing, schools, neighborhoods, jobs, and more
- Break down silos
- Look at the big picture
- Don’t take positions on projects or policies as a group
- Spread new information with extended networks, and
- Have fun. Lots of fun.
What does this look like? Our July meeting tackled transportation. We covered the status of individual projects, how the individual pieces came together to form a regional system, and what it means for housing, school transportation, affordability, and jobs.
Unexpectedly, the focus was not the Columbia Pike streetcar, but WMATA’s Planned Rail Network throughout the region. The fact we are moving from a hub-and-spoke to a spiderweb of networks turned out to be more powerful than facts on individual projects.
We handed out a survey on transportation and found:
- no matter where women live, walking is a key way of getting around, and
- aging in place is a top priority for the group.
So what does AWE2 have to do with the Arlington Way 2.0? It’s too early to tell the full picture, but one powerful aspect of our new group is as a “force multiplier” for outreach and education. Do-it-yourself urban planning is a natural outgrowth from trends in open data, crowdsourcing, and participatory governance. It is also a reaction to the polarized nature of public debate that plays out on television, in blog comment sections, and in public meetings. Our group no longer wants to just put dots on maps. We want to prepare ourselves to participate as equals in policy and brainstorming.
This is happening all over the country. In Austin, Texas, the city launched Community Character in a Box, tasking neighborhoods with the job of photographing and mapping assets and neighborhood constraints. In Brooklyn, the Center for Urban Pedagogy supplies a What is Zoning? toolkit (that comes in an actual toolkit) with lessons on zoning and planning.
If you are interested, please visit our website and sign up for our listserv (by contacting Kathleen McSweeney). We hold quarterly meetings, and would like to get more people, more experiences, and more ideas.