Planning and Communities of Ownership and Interest

Communities of people have many items in which they share a sense of ownership - for example places, streets, roads, schools, neighbourhoods, a health service, even a landscape. Those with such an interest form the Community of Ownership and Interest – its COI – for those items.

All too often a COI's shared ownership and interest is down played and may even be belittled or denied, particularly when contentious or complex issues are involved. Community planning typically bumps up against competing interests in a placescape and/or landscape. However, recognising the layerings of ownerships and interests, and the social cum cultural dynamics involved, can offer a way forward in dispute resolution – ideally local governments' planning processes need to engage with Communities of Ownership and Interest.

If we listed items that had a COI we would include items and locations that were owned by the public – public places and spaces – such as a park; a street and/or a neighbourhood; a river, a monument and/or memorial; an institution and/or a heritage building; a museum; a water supply and/or a forest; a festival and/or a ritual; clearly the list is as endless as the kinds of attachments – economic, social & cultural – people have for places, things and events.

Indeed, individuals within a place’s/event's/space's COI will almost certainly have multiple layers of ownership and interest in it. The ‘truth’ in the ownership and interest here is ‘cognitive,’ a matter of ‘lore’ rather than ‘law’ – that which is taught; hence to do with wisdom; concerning cultural knowledge, traditions and beliefs. It pertains to cognition, the process of knowing, being aware, the acts of thinking, learning and judging. If we take a placescape as an exemplar, placescapes are to do with cognition – musing; the contemplative; the meditative. Albeit imperfect 'lore is determined subjectively.

If we look at courts, then they are to do with power over conduct; enforcement and authority; control and regulation, guilt and innocence – none of which have much relevance to do with musing places, nor much to do with musing per se. Courts look for guilt or innocence corroborated by evidence. Albeit imperfectly, 'law' is determined objectively.

Furthermore, members of the COI should be understood as having both rites and obligations commensurate with their claimed ownership, expressed interest and their relationship to say an institution and its overall enterprise; a placescape and those who share it; a landscape and those with whom they share a role in shaping and managing it; etc.

A member of the COI may also be referred to as a “stakeholder” but stakeholdership in its current usage has generally come to mean a person, group, business or organisation that has some kind vested or pecuniary interest in something or a place. All too often stakeholderships are contentious and in some scenarios they may even be blighted by conflicts of interest given the ways the 'convention' has been used more recently.

Typically, 'stakeholders' assert their rights when there is a contentious decision to be made. However, 'stakeholders' are rarely called upon to meet or acknowledge an obligation. Conversely, members of a COI will have innate or unexpressed understandings of the obligations that are expected of them and the rights they expect to enjoy – indeed, there is very likely to be stakeholders in the COI mix.

It is just the case that for a placescape say, the COI mix, when assessed from outside and within, is intentionally, functionally and socially more inclusive. That is more inclusive than say a list of stakeholders drawn up in respect to a development project that governments – Local, State & Federal – typically make decisions about.

Stakeholder groups and Communities of Ownership and Interest are concepts with kindred sensibilities – law and lore, the former reinforcing the latter. Nonetheless, they engage with different community sensibilities and dynamics; with different expectations and different relationships – even if sometimes many of the same people have a ‘stake’ in something as well as other relationships as a member of a COI.

Planning processes that do not pay due attention to Communities of Ownership and Interest are arguably inadequate – flawed and dysfunctional even.

Analogous to a family, if like in a family the interests and aspirations of individuals, all of them together and at once, are not adequately taken into account the family may remain as an entity albeit as a dysfunctional one – and one of a kind that is unplanned.