8   Social Planning and the Dynamics of Small-City Government

Christopher Walmsley and Terry Kading

As a professional practice, social planning has existed for more than half a century, and many Canadian municipalities now incorporate social planning into the structures of local government. In British Columbia, the city of Vancouver has an extensive and well-established social planning department, but numerous smaller municipalities also employ social planners, with some allocating a part-time planner to handle social concerns within a larger department devoted to community planning. A local government may also have a social planning advisory committee that reports to city council. Yet, despite the growth of social planning as a function of local government, and the availability of social planning models, relatively little research has focused specifically on the practice of social planning in smaller cities. How does social planning operate at the local level? In a tight fiscal environment, how do practitioners justify what they do to city councils and other civic leaders? In what ways do social planners interact with community organizations? What obstacles do social planners encounter, whether within local government or in the community at large? Drawing in part on interviews with social planners, this chapter examines the practice of social planning at the level of local government in British Columbia, with the aim of enriching our understanding of how small cities respond to social issues.

In North America, the origins of social planning can be traced back to the work of the Community Chest (the forerunner of United Way America) and community welfare councils, which attempted to assess community needs and make rational decisions about how to allocate funds (Rothman and Zald 2001, 301). In the United States, interest in social planning blossomed in the wake of the Model Cities program, instituted in 1966 by the federal government in the face of growing concerns about urban poverty and violence. In contrast to earlier urban renewal projects, with their focus on slum clearance, the new program emphasized the need for a comprehensive approach to planning, one that aimed at the rehabilitation of existing neighbourhoods and involved the participation of the community itself (Gilbert and Specht 1977, 179). Although the Model Cities program ultimately foundered (it was terminated in 1974), it created a surge of interest in social planning that lasted from the late 1960s throughout the 1970s—a period that one planner we interviewed described as the “golden era of social planning.”1

A pivotal early contribution to the concept of social planning was Jack Rothman’s “Approaches to Community Intervention,” first published in 1968. Basing his analysis on a set of twelve variables, Rothman identified three distinct approaches to community intervention: “locality development,” “social action,” and “social planning/policy” (2001 [1968], 29). The first two approaches both stress grassroots action but differ in their overall orientation and in the strategies they employ. In locality development, the focus falls on community capacity building. According to Rothman, “the basic change strategy involves getting a broad cross section of people involved in studying and taking action on their problems,” with the professional practitioner becoming “a teacher of problem-solving skills” through “small task-oriented groups” (45). In this model, the practitioner functions above all to facilitate a process of consensus building among various segments of the community. The social action model is more attuned to hierarchies of power within a community, with the emphasis falling on disadvantaged or marginalized groups and on adversarial tactics that aim at achieving social justice. As Rothman put it, “The basic change strategy involves crystallizing issues and organizing people to take action against enemy targets,” and the practitioner “seeks to create and guide mass organizations and to influence political processes” (45, 39). In contrast, Rothman envisaged the social planning/policy model adopting a top-down approach to intervention, one that entails a “technical process of problem solving regarding substantive social problems” (31). “The style is technocratic,” he wrote, “and rationality is a dominant ideal. Community participation is not a core ingredient and may vary from much to little” (30). Described as “data-driven,” this approach relies on professional planners who are skilled at designing “formal plans and policy frameworks” (31), with the beneficiaries of social services primarily cast in the role of “clients” or “consumers” (41). Rothman recognized that, in practice, the three approaches overlap (35): as he noted, he was describing these models in “ideal-type form” (29).

The influence of Rothman’s typology is visible in debates about the extent to which social planning is task-focused rather than process-focused (see Gilbert and Specht 1977) or “technical” as opposed to “interactional” (see Rothman and Zald 2001, 306). Arguing that social planning is properly understood “as a specialized practice area of social work,” James Dudley (1978, 37) acknowledged “the tendency of social workers who are social planners to identify with economists, physical planners, organizational experts,” and other specialists in fields external to social work. As a professional practice, social planning appears to have some similarities to social work, while also overlapping with the field of community development—defined in a handbook prepared for Human Resources Development Canada as “the planned evolution of all aspects of community well-being (economic, social, environmental and cultural)” founded on “a process whereby community members come together to take collective action and generate solutions to common problems” (Frank and Smith 1999, 3). Indeed, one of the planners we interviewed described social planning as “good community development work—networking, collaboration, cooperation, and communication.”

In a study of the Social Planning Network of Ontario, a coalition of voluntary-sector social planning organizations in Ontario, Susan Arai and Donald Reid (2003, 68) note that, in keeping with the goals of such organizations more generally, network members aimed at achieving “citizen participation in social policy development, improvement of service delivery, and decentralization in the decision-making process through strategies . . . best described as community development, social action or social reform.” In other words, the work of voluntary-sector social planning organizations (or social planning councils, as they are often called) has traditionally been oriented more in the direction of Rothman’s locality development and social action models. Beginning in the late 1990s, however, the staff of several organizations within the Ontario coalition began to notice the growth of a “business mindset” within local social planning organizations, reporting that they were experiencing increased pressure to concentrate on service provision and to soften their approach to advocacy, a trend that had seriously diminished their ability to engage both in policy analysis and in public education and outreach (78, 79).2 This shift in emphasis is, of course, perfectly consistent with the neoliberal embrace of the principles of the “new public management.” The fact remains, however, that the rise of neoliberalism has undermined the freedom of voluntary-sector social planning organizations to choose their own priorities and the values to which they subscribe (see, for example, Evans, Richmond, and Shields 2005).

One might predict that, in a neoliberal era, “technocratic” approaches to social planning, with their emphasis on data-driven, task-focused approaches to problem solving, would be in the ascendant among social planners employed by local governments, which need to be able to demonstrate concrete, measureable results to funding partners. Most social planners would probably agree that social planning aims to be guided by rationality and evidence-based approaches to decision making—and yet they would also recognize social planning as a sociopolitical process that seeks some level of participation on the part of citizens. As Marie Weil (2005, 239) suggests, moreover, while social planners have always needed research and analytic skills, they must also possess the mediation and communication skills required to engage community members successfully in recursive processes of action and reflection.

Social Planning and Local Government in Canada

Historically, local governments in English Canada have operated poorhouses and provided various forms of relief, while also sharing with the provinces the costs of keeping children in orphanages (Adamoski 2005, 32, 34; Finkel 2006, 48–50). In Québec, poverty relief and the provision of other social services was the responsibility of individual Catholic parishes until the 1960s, with the province and municipalities providing financial subsidies to the parishes (Vaillancourt 1988, 205–252). The situation in English Canada began to change during the Depression when municipalities struggled to provide assistance to growing numbers of unemployed, prompting the federal government to involve itself in poverty relief. The intervention of the federal government in relief culminated several decades later in the emergence of the welfare state and its elaborate federal-provincial cost sharing arrangements.

One aspect of the early twentieth century charitable sector, the community welfare councils, have survived until today. In fact, many major Canadian cities (including Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, Winnipeg, and Edmonton) continue to rely heavily on voluntary-sector social planning councils.3 As Susan McGrath and Peter Clutterbuck (1998, 3) point out, the work of such councils has traditionally been driven by three central principles: “a commitment to a collective response to social need; a belief in citizen participation in public planning processes; and a reliance on research and knowledge creation to guide the processes.” Today, these councils, most of which are registered as charities, conduct research, provide public education and outreach, and advise city government on matters related to social issues and social planning. In British Columbia, the Social Planning and Research Council of BC, a charitable organization founded in 1966, serves the entire province, while the Community Social Planning Council operates in the greater Victoria area (where the city government also has a Community Planning Division). In addition, several other municipalities and regional districts likewise have their own nonprofit local social planning councils (although Vancouver does not).

Largely relieved of their responsibilities in the area of social services, local governments have chiefly focused on the regulation of local land use through zoning bylaws and on the provision of core services such as roads, sewage, water, garbage, street lighting, fire and police protection, snow removal, parks, recreation, and cultural activities. Given this relatively narrow service role, and given that municipalities operate under provincial legislation and are financially accountable to the province, they have considerably less autonomy than other levels of government in Canada. At the same time, despite these limitations on their scope of operation, municipal governments have the most immediate and concrete presence in the lives of local residents. As one social planner commented, “It’s the level of government they have the greatest access to, and so people see that as their first place of default, I guess, when they want to talk to government.” As a consequence, when problems emerge, residents turn to their local government to express their concerns, regardless of the level of jurisdiction that is formally responsible for resolving the problem.

Over roughly the past four decades, local concerns have grown, partly as a result of the dismantling of the Canadian welfare state that has accompanied the rise of neoliberalism. At the same time, both the federal government and provincial administrations have backed away from their previous role in the provision of social services. (On the “downloading” pattern, see chapter 1 in this volume.) In consequence, local governments have found themselves once again responsible for responding to social issues, a task for which some are better prepared than others. Moreover, many of them have undergone a rapid and sometimes turbulent period of growth, evolving in only a few decades from small towns into regional centres for air transport, advanced education, health care, recreational and cultural activities, and government and retail services. Their populations have not only expanded but diversified, and both economic pressures and income disparities have increased. Local governments have thus become responsible for planning a broad set of services, a shift that has frequently involved a steep learning curve. With respect to social planning, small cities are often still finding their way, in contrast to the province’s largest city, which has been coping with large scale poverty and other social issues for many decades.

The Benefit of Experience: Vancouver

Vancouver is most assuredly not a small city. According to the most recent census, the Vancouver metropolitan area is home to more than 2.46 million people—more than half of the province’s total population of roughly 4.65 million.4 Governed by the Vancouver Charter ([SBC 1953], c. 55), the city has long had a racially diverse population marked by significant disparities in income. It also has a long history of responding to social needs within its borders. Vancouver has operated social services directly since 1915, funding a day nursery for working mothers and an old age home, in addition to providing relief payments, mothers’ allowances, and old age assistance, and has been awarding significant annual grants to social agencies in the city since 1946 (Vancouver 1998, 3).5 Its Social Planning Department, established in 1966, began operation in 1968, with the arrival of its first director.

Writing about a decade after its creation, Christiane McNiven (1979, 209) found that Vancouver’s Social Planning Department had “no serious problems of basic survival.” Budget reviews had not reduced the size of the department, and its community grants budget had also been maintained, suggesting not only that the department was well entrenched in the civic structure but also that its activities were recognized as valuable (209). Its legitimacy was reflected in the mission statement adopted by the City of Vancouver in 1994: “To create a great city of communities, which cares about its people, its environment, and the opportunities to live, work and prosper.” As the statement went on to specify, one of the city’s central objectives was “to enhance community and individual well-being—social, economic and physical” (Vancouver 1994, 1). Today, the functions once performed by the Social Planning Department are spread across several divisions of the Community Services Group, including Social Policy and Projects, Housing Policy and Projects, and Cultural Services. As one social planner we interviewed pointed out, however, the influence of the city’s early involvement in social planning can be felt in many departments, from engineering and police to libraries and recreation. It is visible in the encouragement given to city departments to consider the human aspect of their policies and services, to develop mechanisms for citizen consultation and participation in decision making, and, in particular, to facilitate the inclusion of marginalized members of the community.

Vancouver’s extensive community grants program supports the core operations of broad-based social agencies such as the Association of Neighbourhood Houses BC and Family Services of Greater Vancouver, but it also funds organizations that focus on specific needs, such as those of seniors. As one planner explained, in addition to supporting agencies that offer outreach to seniors as a whole, “we provide more than twenty grants to organizations providing services to seniors, but they are targeted at isolated seniors or seniors who belong to a particular ethnic background that require additional support, like Spanish seniors or Vietnamese seniors.” In addition, the city is sometimes called upon to respond to newly emerging communities, such as inland refugees. “No one was looking into their issues, and there were thousands and thousands of them,” one social planner told us. “Because of federal legislation, they were not recognized as immigrants, but they needed services.” Another problem is racism, the planner added, explaining that the city was presently engaged in a multi-year “youth-led anti-racism dialogue and youth engagement strategy to address some of the racism and discrimination issues that face youth.”

As was also clear from the interviews we conducted, the city had been active in the area of child care services, using its regulatory power to offer density bonuses to land developers in exchange for the construction of new facilities. Ten child care centres had been built by developers in connection with new projects in the downtown core, with the ongoing operational expenses of the centres financed through developers’ contributions to a child care endowment fund. In addition, the city had contributed to the creation of three thousand new spaces in licensed group child care centres all across the city, whether by providing land or existing buildings or by working with community partners to finance the construction of new facilities. In these ways, the city is able to draw on its social planning experts to support the development of new social infrastructure, often without direct civic expenditures. Vancouver has, in short, accumulated both experience and expertise in social planning, which has given it the confidence and flexibility needed to respond effectively to existing and emergent social issues.

Relative Newcomers: Small Cities

In British Columbia, a 1994 amendment to the Municipal Act specified that city councils “may provide for social planning to be undertaken, including research, analysis and coordination relating to social needs, social well-being and social development in the municipality.”6 In the wake of this legislation, a number of smaller cities developed local social planning frameworks. A social plan—described by the City of Prince George (2002, 6) as “a long-range visioning document intended for the community to use to plan ahead”—provides the conceptual framework within which concrete actions can be initiated in support of local social development goals. In 1996, Kelowna became the first small city to create a municipal social plan (see Kelowna 1996), and others followed suit. These included three other cities in which we conducted research: Prince George, Nanaimo, and Kamloops (see, respectively, Prince George 2002; John Talbot and Associates 2004; and SPARC BC 2009). These social plans varied in length (from 44 to 196 pages) and in details of methodology, as well as in the specific outcomes that the city hoped to achieve. Prior to their approval by city council, however, each entailed a process of public consultation, the collection of qualitative and quantitative data, the identification and prioritization of key themes and concerns, and the articulation of specific strategies. Each of the plans identifies anywhere from six to ten priority areas, and all include housing, health, and safety among them. Most also list education and employment as areas of concern. Emphasis is sometimes placed on specific issues—downtown revitalization (Prince George), human rights (Kelowna), the Indigenous community (Kamloops), child care (Kelowna), youth (Kamloops), substance use (Prince George, Kamloops)—but attention also falls on broader concerns such as “community life” (Nanaimo), “accessibility”—meaning “physical access to amenities and services” (Kelowna 1996, 27)—, and “safe spaces, alternative transportation and environmental health” (Kamloops).

In addition, small cities began hiring social planners, and this century has witnessed considerable growth in social planning as a function of local government. Not all local governments use the term “social planning”: some prefer “social development” or “community development” or even “community planning” (although this term is also used to describe all planning activities at the municipal level). Similarly, because local governments differ in their organizational structure, the person responsible for activities related to social planning may work in a variety of settings—although, as our discussions with social planners revealed, in some cases the position had originally been created in response to a particular social issue, such as homelessness or juvenile prostitution, which had in turn influenced the placement of the position within the administrative structure. Nanaimo currently employs two social planners, who work in the Social Planning Division of the Department of Community Planning, while Prince George has a Social Development Division located in the Department of City Services. Kelowna has a Community Planning and Strategic Investments Division (of the office of the City Manager) that comprises several subdivisions, including Policy and Planning and Community Planning. Kamloops locates social planning in the Social and Community Development Division of the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Culture. While the location of the position and its title may vary, the emphasis of the work will fall more (or less) towards social issues depending on changing municipal priorities, issues, and concerns.

Several of the social planners we interviewed worked outside a departmental structure, reporting directly to the city manager. These planners seemed to enjoy considerable autonomy, as well as the freedom to interpret their role in accordance with social priorities and community needs. Clearly, however, regardless of their title or their structural position, social planners in small cities are fundamentally generalists. A high-priority issue may provide the current focus of their work, but they may also manage the civic grants program, provide input into plans for the development of housing or other civic facilities, coordinate social service planning, advocate for zoning changes, sit on civic advisory committees concerning social issues, and so on. As one social planner noted, “Any one day, I might be dealing with four different social planning topics.” Whatever else they may be doing, however, social planners are expected to work with city councils and other civic officials to develop municipal social policy and to devise and implement strategies for addressing specific social issues.

As we will see, interactions between social planners and local city councils involve a complex mix of advocacy, education, and negotiation. City councils in small cities are composed of individuals elected not on the basis of party affiliation but on the strength of their own values and their positions on topics of local concern. As a result, depending on the composition of the electorate, city council members may represent quite a broad spectrum of ideological orientations, and social planners in small cities must learn to navigate their way through what may be a complex tangle of political sympathies and priorities. Their task is further complicated by the fact that city council members may still be struggling to define the boundaries and cost implications of the municipal role in social programs. In addition, changes in the composition of the local council as the result of city elections can have significant implications for particular social initiatives, impeding progress until newer councillors are convinced of the value of these efforts by the local social planner. To the extent that the entire concept of social planning remains somewhat novel, social planners may find themselves constantly having to prove their worth to city councils, by resolving citizen complaints, successfully prying funding loose from higher levels of government, and engaging with community groups to arrive at solutions to pressing issues.

The Practice of Social Planning in a Small-City Environment

The nine social planners whom we interviewed offered a wide array of descriptions of social planning. One said that social planning deals with “all the human aspects of someone’s life,” while, according to another, it aims at “building a quality of life that’s attractive.” Others referred to planning more broadly, suggesting that social planning concerns “the social issues related to the planning field” or that it seeks to “expand the basket of what planning is.” Yet another felt that social planning was about creating “sustainable growth for cities,” a goal that “includes four pillars—social, environmental, economic, and cultural.” All the planners, however, placed at least some emphasis on the planner’s role in ensuring the efficient coordination of community services at the local level, so as to prevent ad hoc responses, eliminate duplication, identify service gaps, and maximize the impact of available resources. The theme of efficiency was supplemented by the recognition that effective local coordination, the creation of community consensus and support, and a well-thought-out plan can attract investment from senior levels of government. Local social planners recognize that a key component of their job is to develop strategies that will induce the province or the federal government to make major investments in social infrastructure. As one social planner noted, “Pretty much all of the work we do is done on the assumption that we are part of leveraging other resources and other partners.” Moreover, if a local government can demonstrate that, with a relatively small investment of staff time and tax dollars, it has multiplied external investment fifty times and created tangible community benefits, it makes a persuasive argument for its responsible stewardship of local tax dollars.

From 1968, when Vancouver’s Social Planning Department began operations, through to 1996, when it became part of the city’s Community Services Group, all three of its directors had a background in social work, and a similar pattern was evident among social planners in Victoria. In contrast, the social planners to whom we spoke variously had backgrounds in urban planning, content expertise in a particular area (such as homelessness, child care, or immigrant populations), or community expertise—that is, an in-depth knowledge of the local community’s social services gained through active participation in its committees, projects, and actions. Regardless of their original training, those we interviewed described a wide range of facilitation skills that are essential to their position, sometimes identifying this aspect of their work as “community development.” Through a variety of public consultation strategies, social planners reach out to community members to solicit their views, help to coordinate the activities of various community organizations, mediate between competing interests, and develop planning processes that aid in building consensus. Whether at the municipal or the provincial level, they also act as community advocates, pressing for needed change. Some social planners gave less emphasis to “technocratic” planning and policy skills, focusing instead on developing specific social programs or on helping to foster cooperative and constructive responses to local social needs.

Others, however, stressed the importance of creating social policy at the local level to provide an ongoing framework for action beyond the four-year life cycle of an elected council. As the four social plans reviewed earlier illustrate, affordable housing, homelessness, child care, and the sexual exploitation of youth are among the key areas in which local social policy has been developed. Some communities (such as Prince George) underscore the need for coordinated community action with local government and community partners on housing, health, and safety issues. This work is clearly based, in part, on the results of empirical research, including demographic data that allow for the identification of social trends, which can in turn provide the rationale for proceeding in a particular direction. Empirical data may also be employed in consultations with city council, municipal employees, and/or local community groups, often in connection with processes of knowledge building. As one social planner described it, “You’re helping decision makers make informed decisions, so there is an education component because you’re undertaking research, you’re consolidating it, and you’re communicating it in such a manner that it’s going to help them move forward.” One planner employed recent census information to inform communities about possible neighbourhood amenities:

There are no families at your end of town—it’s all singles and couples. So why get a Costco? Couples don’t buy at Costco, singles don’t buy at Costco because the lines are too big. But you will get a Starbucks, because families don’t go to Starbucks. With coffee at nine bucks, who can feed a family at Starbucks?

Planners might also employ health data to help communities identify their priorities. For example, if the local teenage pregnancy rate is significantly higher than the provincial average, this suggests the need for concerted community action.

Social planners who work in small cities often see themselves as a bridge between the city government and the community and thus make a conscious effort to facilitate communication in both directions. Noting that “a lot of work that we do is public consultation,” one planner explained that she asks city staff members to let him know when they “have something coming up, like a public forum . . . because we can send it out to a bunch of different networks that might attract a different group of people.” On the community side of the equation, social planners will advise residents about how best to pursue an issue with the civic administration:

Some want to go to council; they feel that’s the best place for their issue. I try to inform them that there’s a social planning council, there are subcommittees, and council looks to those committees for opinions—so if you go straight to council on a social issue, they’re likely going to tell you to go to the other committees to get some feedback.

Public consultation frequently entails some element of mediation, which is another prominent feature of the work of social planners in small cities. Planners may be called upon to mediate between factions within the community whose interests are in conflict, but they may also need to mediate between city hall and a specific community group whose stance on a issue differs from that of local government. In addition, mediation skills are essential to strategies aimed at promoting the inclusion of marginalized segments of the community. One social planner emphasized the importance of being “at the table” with various civic departments during internal planning processes rather than at the end of a routing slip, with no opportunity to do more than write comments on a proposal. Face-to-face interaction enables social planners to represent community concerns more effectively and to respond directly to the opinions of other city staff members, with a view to working out a mutually acceptable solution to a problem.

With regard to community conflicts, one social planner described the use of “good neighbour agreements” to quell anxieties surrounding decisions to locate facilities such as homelessness shelters or free health clinics in a particular area. If local residents and business owners are to accept such facilities, they need to have a mechanism for registering their concerns, whether these pertain to personal safety or to the possibility that the presence of homeless people and others deemed socially undesirable will drive away local business customers. As the planner explained, good neighbour agreements are founded on the principle that, while basic social services “should not be denied to anybody, ever,” service providers have a responsibility to the broader community. Providers are therefore asked to make it clear to their clients that “when they go into the public realm, there are certain expectations about how they conduct themselves.” Such agreements, he said, give “businesses a place to voice their complaints,” while also enabling the city to hold service providers accountable for the behaviour of their patrons.

In cities both large and small, efforts to provide services for those in need frequently meet with some degree of resistance on the part of relatively privileged community members, who perceive in these efforts a threat to their own interests. At the same time, the high visibility of some groups, such as sex trade workers, transient youth, and pan-handlers, in the relatively close environment of a small city, throws such resistance into high relief, and can assume the form of a crisis requiring the immediate engagement of the city’s social planner. As a number of social planners observed, such crises ironically tend to distract them from the ongoing task of developing policies and procedures that might help to prevent such crises. Given the perennial possibility of reactive community input, often of the not-in-my-backyard variety and typically both vocal and negative, social planners must work to design inclusive planning processes or otherwise devise innovative solutions to conflict. In connection with the proposed construction of multi-family affordable housing, one planner described an approach that had proved to work well: the city selected six different parcels of public land that were all potential sites for such housing and then held a single public consultation session regarding rezoning. “Then you’re doing it all at once,” the planner explained, “and one neighbourhood can’t say, ‘Well, the other neighbourhood isn’t getting it.”

Although small cities frequently employ only a single social planner, some also have a standing committee that advises the mayor and city council on matters related to social planning, with the social planner often providing staff support to that committee. Other small cities lack such a committee, but city council may strike advisory committees in connection with specific concerns, such as a lack of affordable housing or the sexual exploitation of youth. The creation of such ad hoc committees may be driven by community concern about an emerging issue, or the availability of funding from senior levels of government and the need to demonstrate a local planning process under civic leadership. Sometimes, committees are linked to high-priority issues identified in the city’s social plan, with their formation constituting an initial step in the process of developing policies aimed at resolving these issues. A city may also need to convene a committee as part of a regional strategy designed to address a pervasive social issue, such as homelessness. Regardless of the rationale for the creation of such a committee, however, social planners emphasized the importance of bringing together those who are knowledgeable about an issue with those who have an interest in creating effective solutions. This broad-based approach involves a cross-section of stakeholders that includes representatives of community-based organizations and local social service agencies, local senior public officials in health, education, social services, recreation, and policing, and local political leaders.

Given that civic leaders are not necessarily convinced that local government should be held responsible for resolving social issues, social planners may find themselves having to justify the work they do. Several of the planners we interviewed recalled city council members objecting to a proposed plan on the grounds that it overstepped the bounds of what they regarded as the proper scope of municipal government. They also heard councillors complain that expecting the city to formulate a certain strategy or to provide such-and-such a service was simply another attempt on the part of the province and/or Ottawa to “download” responsibilities onto local government. Several planners noted that a major component of their job was to convince city councils that plans and recommendations did not entail large financial commitments at the local level. “I have to be clear with them that I am not dragging municipalities into places they ought not to be,” one said. “You have to be careful of that,” he added, “because they’ll go, ‘Wait a minute! We’re being downloaded on again by the province.’” Indeed, another remarked that local government tends to be seen as simply “a receptacle” for the downloading of responsibilities that properly belong to other levels of government. However, if social planners advocate that the city take responsibility for areas formerly under the purview of a more senior level of government, this may cause tension in the relationship between planners and city councils. Some city councillors may even view the very creation of a social planning position as tending to encourage such downloading and may therefore adopt a somewhat suspicious (or even hostile) attitude towards proposals put forward by the planner.

Faced with possible resistance from local city council members, social planners must look for opportunities to persuade councillors of the advantages of assuming active leadership with regard to social issues. Social planners who were hired partly on the basis of their “content expertise”—that is, their familiarity with a particular social issue (or issues)—can, for example, leverage that expertise in support of proposed strategies. Doing so may simply be a matter of education, with the planner providing the mayor and council with the evidence on which a proposal is based and an explanation of why it can be expected to achieve certain concrete goals. Typically, however, getting city council on board also requires a hard-headed recognition that, as elected officials, councillors will not necessarily be moved by the humanitarian principles traditionally embraced by social workers and voluntary-sector organizations. Social planners may thus need to devise arguments that will convince council members that a particular action is in their political self-interest. Such arguments often involve considerations of cost-effectiveness, given that city councillors are held accountable by the electorate for the outcome of budgetary decisions. A planner might also argue that a certain proposal is likely to succeed in gaining funding from government programs and/or other potential partners, including private donors and voluntary-sector organizations.

This is not to suggest that social planners limit themselves to pragmatic arguments. Sometimes a planner will argue that city council should approve a particular action—funding for a homeless shelter, for example, or a zoning change needed to permit the operation of a halfway house for abused women—simply “because it is the right thing to do,” as one planner said. Planners may also assume the role of the “voice of the excluded,” speaking at city hall on behalf of street youth, the homeless, or others excluded from decision-making processes. Planners sometimes spoke of the need for “internal advocacy,” in which they explain the perspectives of community groups to city departments and staff. Advocacy might mean negotiating with housing developers for the inclusion of certain amenities. As one planner indicated, in discussing housing proposals with developers, she asks questions such as, “Are you going to consider child care? What’s your parkade looking like? Are you going to make sure it’s safe for women and kids? Are you going to provide bike storage or a bike parking area? Are you going to include a gathering place for people?” Advocacy may also include working with the mayor, city councillors, and city staff to build a strong case for funding from the province to support the development of new social infrastructure. As several of the social planners we interviewed observed, however, one of their most fundamental tasks, as advocates, was to attempt to raise the consciousness of local government—to move it towards a place of greater social engagement and responsibility. “Every time I get in front of council,” said one, “I see that as my job.”

It would, in short, be wrong to regard the social planners who work in small cities as “technocrats,” imposing government plans in top-down fashion, as Rothman’s model conceived. While planners certainly have a role in formulating policy and designing strategies for its implementation, they are closely involved with the communities in which they live, serving as allies and advocates, mediating in disputes, and working to keep lines of communication open. In this respect, they remain closer to the grassroots traditions of community development and share many of the same values—compassion, altruism, cooperation, mutual support—that have long informed the voluntary sector.

Conclusion

As is well recognized, despite a discursive emphasis on the importance of innovation, the austerity regimes associated with neoliberalism tend to breed caution and conservatism. Municipal governments—which, even in the best of circumstances, operate in a tight fiscal environment—are in no way immune to this trend. As a result, they are often reluctant to spend local tax dollars on initiatives that hold no promise of generating revenue, no matter how well justified these actions are in terms of social responsibility. As became clear in the interviews we conducted, social planners often see themselves as their local government’s social conscience, encouraging city councillors and other members of city staff to remember that “communities” consist of people and to think about the human aspects of policy and planning. While a social planner who has earned the respect of senior city officials is obviously at an advantage, persuading local government to adopt a more explicit social agenda is an ongoing challenge, in which social planners require the support of others.

Especially in the relatively intimate context of a small city, building alliances is therefore essential to the work of social planners, and, as always, it involves two reciprocal processes. Social planners need to enlist the active support of those in the community—service providers, members of organizations dedicated to helping those in need, concerned citizens—who are already sympathetic to their goals. In this regard, planners must work to ensure that such people are represented on advisory committees, as well as to foster participatory processes that reach out to the community and allow their voices to be heard. At the same time, social planners must engage in dialogue with their colleagues in city government, seeking to educate them about specific social issues and to explain why taking action to address them is ultimately in the city’s best interests. Planners can also engage in a similar process with members of local business associations and others in the private sector who may otherwise tend to regard those who are homeless, or who work in the sex trade, or who struggle with drug addictions or mental illness, simply as threats to their commercial objectives.

Although they may yet need to act on the recognition, local governments are in a position to contribute to the creation of communities that are more inclusive and more responsive to the needs of all who live in them. They can transform the local environment through the development of social plans and policies that target specific social issues, through the establishment of advisory committees and task forces, through the provision of land and community grants, and through active efforts to build consensus among the many segments of a local population. They may also do so by participating in the development of regional strategies that constitute a collective response to pressing social issues and by advocating for greater strategic investment on the part of senior levels of government in the strengthening of social infrastructure and in programs that support the provision of social services. While social planners cannot singlehandedly prompt local government to adopt a longer-term perspective and a more progressive social agenda, they are an integral force in the process.

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1 Comments made by social planners derive from semi-structured interviews conducted in 2010 and 2011. A total of nine planners were interviewed, from a mix of large and small cities in British Columbia. The cities are not named to protect the anonymity of those interviewed.

2 As Arai and Reid (2003, 87) point out, during the 1990s, funding from both the United Way and municipal governments declined, forcing six of Ontario’s social planning organizations to close and six others to merge into a single entity, while yet others closed temporarily as they cast about for the funds needed to ensure their survival.

3 As Québec shifted in the direction of the modern welfare state, the social planning dimensions of community services were built into the provincial system of Centres locaux de services communautaires, which employed community organizers. Since roughly the mid-1980s, however, the role of the voluntary sector in social service provision has expanded considerably: see, for example, Jetté (2011); Savard, Bourque, and Lachapelle (2015).

4 At the time of the census, the exact figure was 2,463,431 million, with 631,486 people residing in the City of Vancouver, while the population of British Columbia stood at 4,648,055 million. “Census Profile: Vancouver [Census Metropolitan Area],” Statistics Canada, 2016, http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/index.cfm?Lang=E (search “Vancouver”).

5 By 1946, the City of Vancouver was contributing to the Vancouver General Hospital, the Juvenile Detention Home, and the Family and Juvenile Court. It had a charitable grants budget of $373,000 and made grants to twenty-five organizations, including the Children’s Aid Society, the Salvation Army, and the Marpole Infirmary (Vancouver 1998, 4).

6 Municipal Act [RSBC 1996], c. 323, part 15, s. 530, http://www.bclaws.ca/civix/document/id/consol1/consol1/96323_00. Originally enacted in 1979, the Municipal Act has since been replaced by the Local Government Act, although the rights and duties of municipalities are laid out primarily in the BC’s Community Charter [SBC 2003], c. 26, http://www.bclaws.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/03026_00.