Church Planters as Urban Planners
In Jane Jacob’s groundbreaking book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she tells the story of a group of residents from a housing project in East Harlem. She uncovered that when social workers would interact with the tenants, they found that the tenants were indifferent about their apartments and cared not for their neighbors. The building was in disrepair and crime was rampant. In fact, the tenants hated the project housing. Why?
Tenants complained the urban planners and architectural designers had built the projects without actually considering the community. The non-native “experts” did not understand how the community functioned and essentially created an environment of isolation—segregating the residents from the social fabric of their neighborhood.
The professional planners gave the residents what they thought was best. Jacobs writes, “There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretend order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.” Jacobs understood that in order to achieve a sense of thriving in a community, leaders must move beyond the superficialities of intention and must work hard to understand the complexity of cities and their environments.
I fear there are many Christian community leaders who may be vulnerable to the “meaner quality” as they seek to “love the city”.
It simply isn’t enough to commit to theoretical flourishing in the city, nor is it enough to generally call people to action. True love of the city requires a virtue which David Brooks calls “epistemological modesty”—the ability to humbly remain open to the input and influence of others to insure the best possible result in a given plan of action.
Today, thanks to Jacobs, urban planning has improved. Many neighborhoods enjoy improved urban and suburban spaces that reflect the way life really works. Without the influence of Jacobs and others, we might be living communities that theoretically make sense but are practically untenable.
I see an opportunity for neighborhood Christian leaders to live incarnationally just as Jacobs did in NYC. Pastors and especially planters should consider learning the approach of new urban planners and community developers when engaging in their local communities.
Urban planners learn about how a community works before prescribing change. They spend time learning how a community functions and develop plans that how cities actually work. They study connect how planning, density, and the built environment are connected with sociological trends and patterns.
In the same way, pastors and planters can easily spend time learning about how a community works before prescribing certain strategies.
Conduct an ethnographic and demographic study. If you want to learn how to conduct an ethnographic study, check out Roger S. Greenway’s book, Discipling the City: a Comprehensive Approach to Urban Mission. It’ll teach you how to systematically learn about your community.
Conduct an Asset Based Community Development project (ABCD). ABCD offers an alternative option to traditional community development by mapping assets and resources already in a community and then creating the network to support self-sustaining neighborhood thriving. To learn how to do this, Kretzmann and McKnight’s book, Building Communities from the Inside Out: a Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets.
Read an urban planning book or two. Read The Death and Life and Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs and learn how an everyday woman took on the destructive urban planning practices of her generation and saved Greenwich Village from being plowed down to put up a highway. You may want to try reading The Space Between by Eric O Jacobsen. He takes the principles of Jacob’s and others and builds a case for seeing the Kingdom of God in the built environment.
