Allendale had already lost much of its population after one freeway cut through the neighborhood, and another highway project threatened to deepen the damage. Planner and architect Kim Mitchell first came into the fight thinking his professional role was to bring answers, but listening to residents changed how he understood the work. In 2012, he helped form a “learning and doing” group that still meets more than a decade later, building trust and civic capacity through repeated action. More than a decade later, Mitchell sees the trust and civic capacity built through that process as inseparable from the neighborhood’s continued ability to organize.
Hello and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts, a Strong Towns podcast where we interview people who are connected in the Strong Towns movement and are also working really hard to bring more people in to help improve our communities and make a difference where we live.
Joining me today is Kim Mitchell. Kim is a planner and an architect, and, as he describes, a planner advocate in his community in Allendale, which is outside of Shreveport, Louisiana. He is a core member of many different groups within the community, including the Institute for Community Renewal in Shreveport and various other efforts in Allendale.
Kim has written a great article for the Strong Towns site on Shreveport's highway emperor's new clothes, being very discerning about the role that highway funding and projects in our communities have played, but also asking, what can we do about this now? Kim, welcome to Bottom Up Shorts.
Well, thank you, Norm. It's a pleasure to be here with you. I admire you and your enthusiasm and ability to bring the best out in people. I see that.
Well, it's easy to be enthusiastic when I get to connect to so many awesome folks. Can you share the story of your efforts to really advocate within not just the planning community, but then more broadly in the community itself, to say, hey, we need to take seriously our obligation to leave a great, lasting legacy for people that is going to go on for many generations to come?
I'm at a point in life where a lot of reflection goes on in terms of trying to make sense of the path that God has had me on for many years. I've realized that I have always been drawn to community, and that as I engaged professionally in the world, I had a deep belief in citizen creativity to shape their future. As a result, I experimented with ways to bring community together. At one point, I even felt I was a process designer, which I enjoyed.
Making sense of it has brought me to a place in life where I have a couple of assumptions in what I'm doing now. One of them comes from a quote from an author friend: relationships are our most valuable and value-creating resource. If you contemplate that a minute, you have to ask the question, well, why haven't we shaped our world around that reality?
In embracing that reality, I also look at community and society as a whole system of relationships. In doing that, you begin to see, well, if that's true, there's a predominant nature that really is foundational to all the outcomes or directions a community is going. If you dig into it the way that I have, I found E. F. Schumacher, who wrote about this and said our current predominant nature is greed and envy. That takes us toward focusing on ourselves, in a deficit mindset and consumer culture, or we can move in another direction, which is toward a predominant nature of loving and caring.
I've come to see those polarities as something that communities can begin to harmonize. We're both of those characteristics, but the world is really feeding our greed and envy, and that's taking us to a lot of the bad outcomes that we see, including the way that we invest, design and build our communities. The outcome of that is relational disconnection. When we're relationally disconnected, we're so focused on ourselves that we can't connect with people who are different from us, who have the other pieces of reality and pieces of solutions that we need desperately.
The move to intentionally move toward loving and caring prepares us to be more creative, to have relationships across boundaries, and to really meaningfully solve solutions. You'll have to catch me, Norm, if I start going too long. I may be old, but I have great enthusiasm for these thoughts and the experiments that I've been fortunate to seed or participate in that kind of validate that.
I've been a preacher for many years, so I love being able to be in the pew and just listen and appreciate it. To me, what stands out in your work and your writing and the efforts with Allendale Strong and things like this is that, as a planner and an architect, it's possible to have a professional view of things where there's a really high bar and it's really hard for people to enter into that space, and they often feel intimidated by it.
I certainly know that in our audience, many people feel intimidated by the high bar of some of the standards that are there and the language that's used. You've really, I think, in many ways led many efforts in your community to say we need to lower that bar, not in terms of quality, but in terms of entry, and give people the tools they need in order to help shape their community.
Instead of saying, 'Oh, if you put a note on a Post-it, we're just going to toss that out in the garbage because we have real planning to do,' your insight is that real planning happens with real people. Do you want to share how that approach to learning and doing has really shaped your work?
Well, one of the things to see about the way we plan and design cities is that the expertise is not really taking us where we need to go. In fact, when you, as you said, lower the bar, I don't really think it's lowering the bar. What it's doing is changing from dependence on experts to dependence on learning with people who are different from you and who process information differently. That learning can help us meaningfully deal with complexity and chaos, which the current system doesn't do.
It kind of works when things are predictable and simple. We have formulas to do it, like zoning. That kind of formula doesn't necessarily produce the right outcomes, but we're trying to use something predictable to deal with something unpredictable, which is the complexity of community.
I like to think of it this way: the obligation we have to raise the relational capacities of the community, we do that together because you can't grow to your potential alone. You can only do that through relationships. Seek out those diverse relationships and differences of opinion, argue to agreement, but learn into this complexity. You do that not just by study, but by learning and doing, and then that cycle of getting better.
The experiments that I've had, like Allendale Strong, have just reinforced in me: how can we do this? Think of it this way: for each challenge that a community cares about, a learning-doing group forms. They're led by a core group of committed people who are interested in inviting everyone to the table, so you're operating in what we call an open-network environment where you can't tell anyone what to do. Forget the hierarchy and the structure. This is all about persuasion and relationships and what we learn together.
My vision of success for a community would be that there's a swarm of these learning-doing groups of citizens self-organizing with a simple discipline of how we collaborate to get things done and take on really big challenges. I refer to that as learning-doing communities.
There are really four principal areas that I try to keep my focus on, or to cultivate. The first is embrace and tend the whole: the whole of problems, the whole of opportunities, and frameworks to see community holistically. Our society has us thinking narrowly and not broadly. I've enjoyed Strong Towns so much because I see in Chuck and the team this ability to look at problems, see the system holistically, and then convert the problem into an opportunity direction, which is perfect. That gives us a new image of what could be, tests our imagination, and then we work to lovingly bring into existence what we imagine together.
That's a quote from Donella Meadows, this great systems thinker. For anybody who's interested, there's an essay she wrote, 'Dancing with Systems,' and it gives you about 14 or 15 dance steps that are all things you'll relate to and how we can get unstuck from where we currently are.
The second principal area for creating a culture of learning and doing is lead with questions. We live in a world our questions create, and if you take the world that we're living in, you'd have to say, 'Well, we're not asking good enough questions.' Asking questions is important.
What I've learned in my 10 years as the director of the Institute for Community Renewal is there's a power in caring together, so the third principle is access that power of caring. The fourth principle is learning and doing together. There's a discipline that my path includes that goes back to 1994, called strategic doing. It relates very well to Strong Towns: go out and observe, see what needs to be done, do it, and then repeat.
The questions are: What could we do together? What should we do together?
What will we do? Then what's our 30/30, or when are we going to get back together to learn things in the short term, where we can sit down together and say, well, what did we do in the last 30 days? What did we learn? How do we need to adapt our path? When will we get back together again? That simple discipline has really fueled my imagery of what a swarm of learning-and-doing groups in a community could look like.
I love that. I actually need to get a tattoo emblazoned on my arm that just says, 'When are we back?' Within the next 30 days, when are we going to do it? Because I know with our group, when we meet regularly, we sometimes almost forget, 'Hey, this was great. When are we doing this again?'
It's that opportunity for that next check-in, that next opportunity to build on it and to have that predictable pattern where, in the course of time, we might reflect on what we experienced together. We might have a new insight, and that might really help us.
You've especially had to use these tools in the effort to stop inner-city highways from simply being expanded and further deepening the wound within the community. If we need to think about the questions that we ask, what were some of the core questions that were not being asked in the context of highway expansion and what you've seen in your community?
Well, one that we took on is: what are the alternatives to a freeway? When we pursued that line of questioning, I was invited to go talk to a group of brand-new homeowners in Allendale. Allendale is an inner-city core neighborhood adjacent to downtown. Due in part to the I-20 freeway being put in in the '60s, Allendale's population went from 34,000 to under 5,000 today. Part of that was the freeway. Part of it was the ongoing threat of this I-49 connector.
I was asked to go talk to this group, and I went as a planner who already did not believe in freeways or our future. I wanted to tell them that this was inevitable. But rather than go in like I traditionally would, saying, 'I'm here. I've got your answer,' I thought to listen that night.
There were about 18 new homeowners who had created a miracle to make this neighborhood go from the most dangerous to the safest place in the city. Here the system was saying, rather than celebrating with you and saying we need to spread this around the country, we're going to run over you. But listening to them that first night showed me that they had a real sense of the realities of it, and you could hear the despair.
One matriarch of the community, Rosie Chaffel, who died recently and who I consider the wisest person that I've met in Shreveport in my long time here, said, 'If you're from Allendale, the rest of the city doesn't think you're worth anything, so they don't care about running over us.'
That reality drove an early project, which was a storytelling project. We had some expertise with telling the stories of people in Allendale and also sending a message about the freeway. Those stories got published in a local magazine as the cover and multiple pages of an issue, so we tackled that.
That night, after listening to them, is when I made an agreement with them. I said, 'Well, it's not inevitable, but if you're willing to form a learning-and-doing group, I'll serve you as your planner advocate.' That just came out that night, but that was in 2012, and the group has grown in remarkable ways through networks.
They've won over some politicians. They've won over citizens throughout the city who actually come to participate in the learning and doing of the group. The group meets monthly, that 30/30 routine, and they've done that now since 2012.
At some point, and you're familiar with this through the conversations around the country, change doesn't happen fast enough to suit us a lot of the time. A person came to me and said, 'People are showing up, but they're getting a little frustrated that nothing's happening.' I said, 'Well, it is.' So I started documenting the events and history at that point. That's now over 30 pages of bulleted items that the group has taken on.
It's not just the freeway. They've formed to work on a food cooperative store, and they're the ones that got me thinking, well, we used to have food in this neighborhood, so it's not a food desert. It's food apartheid, is the feeling. Then there's SWEPCO Park, going from the city wanting to remove the park as a barrier to the freeway to we're now working in partnership with the city on improvements.
Just seeing the growth in civic leadership in Allendale's neighborhood, that's the win for me. That was kind of the point of it: if we're learning together, will civic leadership grow in this neighborhood? It has. It's been amazing.
I do want to highlight, if you have access to a cell phone or you want to go watch on YouTube, the video 'Why Does the U.S. Destroy Its Cities for Highways?' features this story out of Allendale, the I-49 expansion and the efforts of Allendale Strong to stand in the way of it. It's really powerful. I would definitely recommend going and checking it out.
I would love to hear from you, Kim, as we conclude. What is it that gives you hope in this ongoing work?
Well, that image of a swarm of learning-doing groups gives me hope. What fuels that hope is seeing all the good that exists in Shreveport. Shreveport is a struggling city. It's struggling for a lot of the reasons that Strong Towns helps us learn about. But there are so many good people and so many good things that are going on that really aren't as connected as they should be.
That gives me hope, fueling my belief in citizen creativity. But it also fuels my desire: can we get these groups together? Can we frame a new opportunity through a question that motivates them? Can I somehow bring this skill or this discipline of strategic doing so that they all get more done together?
All get more done together. That feels like it could be the slogan for so much of what we're trying to do here. I really appreciate the time, Kim. If folks want to get connected, Kim has shared a number of links in the show notes, and we'll pass those along to you for sure. I'm so grateful for you coming on today, Kim. Thanks for doing this.
Sure. Glad to do it, Norm. Thank you for having me.
If this wasn't a short, we would be able to have a much longer conversation together, and in due course, I'm sure that we will. With that, thanks, folks, for listening in.
Do take note: there are so many opportunities to learn and do as you go, and I feel like that really sums up the spirit of what we're aiming for. We don't have to know everything in order to begin that process, but as we do, we will begin to develop that deeper sense of confidence, a deeper sense of conviction, and a deeper opportunity to actually take action.
With that, take care and take care of your places. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.