I’m in this city, which is diagonally across the USA from my home, for a total of 23 hours–from landing to takeoff. I’m here to join a presidential session at the American Education Research Association’s convention; my topic is what we can learn from the 2008 election. In August, I’ll fly to California for another presidential panel on basically the same topic, but that one will be at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting.

Meanwhile, I’ve had a brief chance to experience America’s 17th largest metro area by walking from the Gaslight District to Balboa Park, seeing some fine European paintings, and then taking a bus back to my hotel. I’m used to this kind of brief visit; I’ve also recently walked through Austin, Seattle, and Albuquerque. I tend to use analogies when I try to take in new cities. That’s no doubt misleading, but it gets you started. San Diego, to this very superficial visitor, is reminiscent of Miami (Spanish revival buildings, palm trees, strips of ocean water), Denver (long avenues lined with foursquare modern buildings and hints of mountains), and LA (freeways, canyons, and a similar ethnic mix). It’s a pretty far cry from Boston.

(In San Diego for the American Education Research Association) In 2005, CIRCLE was funded by the Cricket Island Foundation to make grants to youth-led teams of community researchers. We argued that research was a powerful form of civic and political action, especially when youth gave the results away to their communities. Doing research was not only good for kids; they could also produce excellent results if they used qualitative methods and local knowledge.

Applicants came from all over the country. One successful group was Cabrini Connections, a grassroots organization in Chicago’s most famous public housing project. As the youth show in this video–an outgrowth of our grant–Carbrini is famous for violence but is also a three-dimensional community and a lifelong home. It is now threatened by gentrification.

For several years, I also helped to select applicants for micro-level “citizen journalism” grants through the New Voices project. Applicants proposed to build websites or create broadcast shows about local issues. And I helped to judge the Case Foundation’s Make it Your Own Awards, which supported citizen-centered local work. In all these competitions–for grassroots or youth-led research, deliberation, or media production–a frequent theme was gentrification, and a rich source of strong applicants was Chicago.

I suppose the gentry will retreat again, now that housing prices are falling. But when the story is told of urban America from 1995-2005, an important theme will be the ways that shrinking poor neighborhoods organized to express their views, preserve their memories, and study their issues. Chicago will loom especially large in that history.

Complementary to the “Champions of Participation” report that I mentioned yesterday is a project to identify the principles of public engagement. The authors are leaders in the “dialogue and deliberation community,” organized by the NCDD. Their main audience is the Obama Administration and others who want to help implement the president’s requirements for “transparency, participation, and collaboration.” They begin: “We believe that public engagement involves convening diverse yet representative groups of people to wrestle with information from a variety of viewpoints, in conversations that are well-facilitated, providing direction for their own community activities or public judgments that will be seriously considered by policy-makers and/or their fellow citizens.”

NCDD is open to comments on the draft, but I’m happy to endorse this as is.

This is a meeting of senior federal managers who have been identified as “Champions of Participation.” They were convened by AmericaSpeaks, Demos, Everyday Democracy, and Harvard University’s Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. They met to discuss the president’s executive order requiring “transparency, participation, and collaboration,” which he signed on his first day in office. (For disclosure, I am on the boards of both AmericaSpeaks and Everyday Democracy.)

So far, the administration has focused on transparency and the use of technology to share information with citizens and collect their opinions. This group broadened the topic to include face-to-face participation and collaboration by federal agencies. The full report contains very concrete and challenging recommendations. But I was especially interested in some of the philosophical positions these managers took. According to my transcriptions from the video, they said:

Leaders engaging in public participation initiatives [should] value not knowing the solution before they begin and be willing to engage in collaborative learning and collaborative problem-solving to create the solution. And we believe that this approach, or this value, would represent a humility that is not often seen when government leaders engage the public.

Public citizen stewardship and local knowledge. … We thought it was important to make civic engagement part of every agency’s mission and citizen-centered delivery of the mission part of that.

Visiting the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul–popularly known as the Blue Mosque–Barack Obama reportedly said, “I am very impressed spiritually. This is one of the most important instances in my life.” He probably didn’t have much time there, but I know the feeling. I’ve visited several times, during two three-week family visits to Turkey. On both visits, we stayed within blocks of the Blue Mosque, which is one of the masterpieces of Ottoman Architecture. It stands opposite the great Byzantine Basilica, Hagia Sofia, which was the largest and most influential Christian church in the world for a millenium. With its vast dome, the Blue Mosque competes with Hagia Sofia but also complements it. It is serenely classical: transparent, regular, symmetrical, and calm. It’s not by the preeminent genius of Ottoman architecture, Mimar Sinan, but by a somewhat later architect named Sedefkar Mehmet Aga. I suppose it is less original and bold than a Sinan mosque, but it represents a confident stage in the development of this serene style, which combines Roman engineering, Byzantine design (massive domes over square interiors), and Islamic abstraction and decoration.

I might actually choose the Blue Mosque as my single favorite building. My experiences there were probably more aesthetic than spiritual, but the distinction is elusive. (When my little kid was 7, she and I built a little version of an Ottoman mosque in cardboard.)