Politics of Urban Runoff: Building Relations through Active Citizenship - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 183

comes with responsibility. Local experts are obliged to look outside their
deep-seated beliefs about nature, politics, and community to engage in
reasoned debate with uncertain and sometimes undesirable outcomes. It
calls for faith in democratic processes to resolve human/nonhuman and
human/nonhuman confl icts amicably. This is a tall order, to be sure, and
calls for a political program that involves collaboration, compromise,
and a shared goal of problem solving. Clearly, there is an idealistic ten-
dency in discussions of deliberative democracy to treat politics as merely
a process of negotiation. 110
A fi nal critique of civic politics is that, like populist politics, it cannot
address problems that transcend local jurisdictions. Dryzek writes, “The
larger the scale at which an issue arises, the harder it is to introduce discur-
sive designs to resolve the issue.” 111 It is arguably at these larger regional,
national, and international scales that representative forms of politics have
typically had the most success. However, deliberative democracy does not
require that every actor be involved in every deliberation. 112 Rather, there
is the possibility for representation through public enquiries, citizen juries,
consensus conferences, and other forms of deliberation that are hybrids
of representative and deliberative political structures. 113 Political scientist
Richard Sclove writes, “What matters democratically is not the number of
people but their interrelations and activity.” 114 In other words, delibera-
tive democratic politics can be scaled up to address larger problems by
instituting different modes of representation and participation. In Austin,
the Envision Central Texas project is aimed at developing a comprehensive
regional strategy to accommodate population growth while improving
economic, environmental, and social conditions. 115 In Seattle, the Open
Space Seattle 2100 project was initiated by faculty members in the Univer-
sity of Washington's Landscape Architecture program. The project used
the centennial of the original park system as an opportunity to update the
open space plan of Seattle for the next century. 116
Despite these challenges, civic politics offers a promising agenda for
enacting a relational perspective of urban nature by fundamentally chang-
ing the structure of urban political activity. Civic politics blurs processes
of deliberation and action as well as the boundaries between expert and
nonexpert, public and private, citizen and government. The examples of
the Longfellow Creek Legacy Trail and the Growing Vine Street project
offer two examples of how urban nature can be reworked locally, actively,
and collaboratively. These approaches are not based on a dogmatic insis-
tence on the proper roles and responsibilities of government or an adher-
ence to a particular environmental ethic but to the recognition that urban