Public Comment

With respect to the North Shattuck Plaza, a proposal which recently resurfaced in the city’s Master Pedestrian Plan, and whose “comment period” has recently ended, I write concerning both the issue and the process. To the issue of the plaza as proposed I stand opposed. The process to which I refer is that of government imposition of such plans (to which I stand opposed) without the active and informed participation in their formulation by those who will be effected by them. A “comment period” does not constitute participation. 

We who have been active against the plaza for over a year now, since the first attempt to impose such a plan, feel that the majority of people in the North Shattuck neighborhood oppose a plaza, while a few people support it. We have gathered a petition of approximately 1,000 signatures of people who oppose the plaza, which has been submitted to the appropriate city offices. There is also a petition of merchants from the two blocks along Shattuck Avenue in question, including Safeway and Andronicos, opposing the plaza. Since the issue has re-emerged, there has been extensive discussion on mailing lists and among neighbors concerning this proposal, both for and against. If all this takes the form and the aura of a protest movement and a neighborhood association, what the existence of such a movement proves is that the avenues of democratic participation are insufficient. Those speaking for both sides, for the plaza and against it, are in form calling for better than a “comment period.” We are all calling for participation, which means the establishment of regular channels of discussion, planning, and decision.  

The major empirical reasons for opposing the plaza are the following. The plaza’s construction period will mark the death knell of a number of important and desirable businesses in the area, whose margin of operation will not withstand the disruption. While the plan will move around a few parking spaces, it will neither beautify nor provide new greenery; it will replace concrete with more concrete. There is already a beautiful park, one block north. To beautify the “plaza” area would mean approaching what now exists like a canvas on which to paint, with an aesthetic in hand, and not a jackhammer. Blocking off the Shattuck service road that services the Vine-to-Rose businesses will not correct the major traffic problem in the area, which is on Rose Street itself, where west-bound traffic turns left into Long’s parking lot. In fact, it will make it worse because it will increase the traffic through that parking lot. To dig up concrete in order to lay down more concrete in a different configuration will constitute neither progress, nor beautification, nor a positive change. 

The political reasons for opposing this plaza are more important. We live in a moment when some serious and far-reaching changes are being proposed at the corporate and government administrative levels, as well as those of this city. The modus operandi of such projects has too often been to present them as accomplished fact to those people who will be effected by them on a daily level. Those levels of political administration, including those of this city, are getting more and more distant from us as citizens. I need but mention the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), and the Bay Area Council (a business association), both having the ability and the power to make decisions without consulting the people effected by those decisions. This marks the growth of an anti-democratic tendency in our forms of governance. In response, similar neighborhood associations to that of the North Shattuck area have come into existence around the city, and around similar issues. 

When neighborhood associations emerge, seeking to have a say in what happens, in the face of such administrative apparatuses, they appear as protests. This is itself an injustice. The channels for discussion, planning, and decision making by those to be effected by those decisions should already be in place. The proposed North Shattuck plaza, as an issue around which there is already an aroused citizenry, is a perfect place to start figuring out how to structure just such citizen participation. Rather than simply modify the proposal in accord with an amorphous “comment period,” the city should strike the proposal from its plans altogether, and begin a process of developing such channels in the North Shattuck neighborhood, as a pilot project for the rest of the city. 

Steve Martinot is a Berkeley resident.