BUILDING FOR SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY - Kennedy Bibliothek

Part Three
CONCLUSIONS
121. What emerges from all this can be summed up fairly succinctly.
Traditionally public services such as education, recreation, health and
so forth have been delivered by separate bureaucracies set up specifically
for the purpose.
122. Each bureaucracy has its own administration, budgets, specialist
personnel, policies and facilities. Cities and neighborhoods in every
country are dotted with public buildings which typically have only one
specialist use: schools, libraries, health centers, etc. Very often
these services have developed their own architectural styles over the
years, so that it is possible, when we visit a city for the first time, to
tell from the appearance of the buildings which ones are schools, or hospitals,
or libraries.
123. In recent years this traditional method of delivering services has
been forced to undergo change. Bureaucratic autonomy has led to wasteful
and inefficient duplications in administration, personnel, supplies and
in the use of physical space; and it has been found that when the hitherto
separate bureaucracies undergo a systematic analysis of their overlaps and
learn to co-ordinate their services, far more efficient forms of administration
emerge. Rational though the above may be, co-ordination is often
far from.simple. Time-honoured administrations are not easy to transform;
and the re-design of physical facilities from single usage to joint usage
centers takes time and capital budgets.
124. In several countries this trend toward inter-sectoral efficiency and
co-ordination is taking place in "crisis" conditions. The crisis is impelled
by a parallel phenomenon in many countries, frequently called "the
citizens' movement". Actually the phrase is not apt. The citizens'
movement is not a movement at all in any organized or political sense.
There is, however, in almost every country in the world a growing and
spontaneous concern among citizens to be directly and responsibly involved
in decisions which traditionally have been made by bureaucrats without
citizen consultation.
203