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promoting communal interactions or obtaining communal consensus. As Jacobs understood, <br />there is not necessarily a pre-existing body of persons who make up the community. Instead, <br />there are often interest groups and these interest groups may serve as proxies for the community <br />as a whole even while actively excluding some elements of the community.96 Such groups may <br />wield power in ways that corrupt or deform processes of group decision-making. Moreover, the <br />decision to vest individuals in a community with a significant amount of neighborhood design <br />autonomy may be politically inspired. It is for these reasons that the role of the charrette in <br />implementing design-based code should be the subject of some concern. <br />A. The Multiple Strands of "Community" and the Charrette as a Tool of an Entrenched Elite <br />As some experts on form-based code have observed about traditional planning tools, <br />there are assumptions, sometimes unstated, made about a wide set of communal and societal <br />relations such as gender, racial, economic, and familial interactions.97 These assumptions <br />become embedded as norms in the framework of such planning processes and systems, and shift <br />the balance of power resulting in the domination and marginalization of some groups. A shift to <br />form-based code's charrette process comprised of "rational" face-to-face meetings has the risk of <br />replicating existing power dynamics, since the dominant are often better equipped to manage and <br />96 Community Practice: Theories and Skills for Social Workers, David A Hardcastle, Patrice R. <br />Powers and Stanley Wencour 112 (1997). As another observer wrote in 1953, it would be <br />"naive" to assume that club or community groupings will "open their membership to many <br />elements in the community, including Negro citizens, labor, women and others." Floyd Hunter, <br />Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers 259 (1969 University of North <br />Carolina Press)(1953). These observations often prove as true now as they did in the middle of <br />the last century. <br />�' Sandercock, supra note 70. <br />27 <br />