Description

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Modern cities are increasingly involving citizens in decisions that affect them. This trend is a part of a movement toward a new standard of city management and planning-falling under the names public involvement, public engagement, collaborative governance, civic renewal, participatory democracy, and citizen-centered change. City administrators have long focused on attaining excellence in their technical domains; they are now expected to achieve an equal standard of excellence in public involvement. Toward this end, Citizen-Centered Cities provides a body of experience about public involvement that would take years for municipal administrators to accumulate on the job. The twelve city studies in the present volume were written to provide city administrators with a comparative perspective about how U.S. and Canadian cities carry out their public involvement activities. The opening chapter summarizes general themes and salient differences in approaches to public involvement across twelve cities. The close government-academic cooperation required to carry out this project builds on an innovative partnership between the City of Edmonton and the University of Alberta called the Center for Public Involvement.

About the Author

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Paul R. Messinger worked on this project as a senior faculty fellow of the Center for Public Involvement. He has served as founding director of the University of Alberta School of Retailing, principal investigator of the research alliance "Harnessing the Web-Interaction Cycle for Canadian Competitiveness," vice president of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), on the editorial boards of the journals Service Science and Marketing Science, on the INFORMS Analytics Certification Board, and on the committee that drafted the INFORMS Code of Ethics. He is associate professor of marketing at the University of Alberta School of Business and has numerous publications in leading journals in marketing, retailing, services management, information systems, and operations research.