The city we make together City council meeting's primer for participation

Mallory Catlett, 1969-

Book - 2022

"In the middle of unprecedented, ongoing national political polarization, local governments carry on their work of deliberating, administrating, and running the official structures of cities. City council meetings are often where seemingly mundane issues take on epic proportions, and where democracy moves forward in its clunky, wildly imperfect way. How much is a local government meeting an exercise in democracy, and how much is it an exercise in impression management? In 2009, theater artist Aaron Landsman was dragged by a friend to a city council meeting in Portland, Oregon. At first he was bored, but when a citizen dumped trash in front of the council in order to show how the city needed cleaning up, he was rapt. He saw for the firs...t time how our civic bodies often result in a performance of democracy as much as the real thing. He began attending local government meetings across the country, interviewing council members, staffers, activists and other citizens, using an ethnographic method. Out of this initial investigation, Landsman and director Mallory Catlett developed a participatory theater piece called City Council Meeting in five US cities-from New York City to Houston, Keene New Hampshire to San Francisco. They worked with local partners to create endings in each city about issues on the ground and trained local staffers to take audiences through the experience. Along the way they got some things right, made mistakes and learned ways to approach community engagement across geographic, racial and class lines. Five years later Catlett and Landsman returned to local partners in each city to reflect together on what the impact of the project was, how it could have been better, and what they got right. No One is Qualified looks at how we make art with communities, how we perform power and who gets to play which roles, and how we might use creativity and rigorous inquiry to look at our structures of democracy anew. This book is ideal for interdisciplinary humanities courses, socially-engaged theater-making programs, and cross-disciplinary programs in sociology/ethnography, philosophy, politics and live performing arts"-- more