Vision Seattle. The Civic Foundation. Charlie Chong. Even the monorail.

Every few years, the Seattle's civic landscape throws up a citizen movement that challenges the downtown power brokers in City Hall and at the mayor's office. Sometimes, city council members are ousted in favor of new, grass roots voices. Sometimes not. Usually, reforms are proposed; sometimes, they are enacted. And then everyone settles back down and the business of using taxpayer time and money to make money for developers proceeds apace.

Are we about to see a new neighborhoods movement?

We're overdue. And, so far, there's been a lot more motion than movement. But this month's cancellation of this summer's concert series in Gas Works Park, as a direct result of neighborhood organizing and a lawsuit the activists filed to stop the concerts, gave a massive shot in the arm to a number of other disgruntled activists around the city, mostly on issues having to do with top-down decision-making and a downtown-driven development agenda.

And slowly, but surely, they're hooking up with each other.

As I reported last issue, the Gas Works imbroglio is only one of several recent neighborhood controversies involving top-down Parks and Recreation Department decisions, many with commercial aspects. In only the last two or three weeks, many of those groups have discovered each other and started to make common cause. Meanwhile, on Queen Anne Hill, a development proposal involving the current site of the Metropolitan Market and Elfreida Apartments ("Saving the Local Grocery," Jan. 11) has turned out hundreds of residents to protest at public meetings and spawned a new opposition group, Queen Anne Neighbors for Responsible Growth. And similar developments, filling in the city's goals for increased density, have provoked residential grumblings in the U-District, Northgate, and elsewhere.

This is, historically, exactly how a cycle of a Seattle neighborhoods' political uprising begins. And as the city's long-planned visions for urban villages and neighborhood plans, with the increased densities they project, come on line, more and more people are going to become upset not only at the change being wrought, but that it seems to have been finalized before any of the locals knew what was about to happen.

City planners like to compare Seattle with nearby Vancouver, B.C. Both cities have nearly identical populations of just over a half million. And both cities leave massive amounts of their residentially zoned land for single family residences: 76% in Seattle, 78% in Vancouver. That means, in both cases, that most new residential and mixed-use development has to be squeezed into the remaining space. But Vancouver has a similar population with only a little over half of Seattle's land area 44 square miles compared to 84. Beyond Seattle's more extensive industrial acreage, this means two things: Vancouver's downtown is much more residential (70,000 residents vs. Seattle's 18,000), and Seattle has a lot of room for increased density in its remaining, multi-unit residential neighborhoods.

That's not Vancouver's more extensive residential amenities or the need to preserve increasingly rare affordable housing is the lesson city planners have drawn, and that's the future of Seattle, whether the neighborhoods like it or not. As city council member Peter Steinbrueck, an architect who is sympathetic to many of the activists' concerns, notes, "You want neighborhood districts that provide for a full array of goods and services within a walkable distance. Whether that's possible or not right now in a given location is another question."

It can be another question for business reasons, for example. The ground floor retail spaces provided for in many new mixed-use buildings are frequently floundering; they've often been located in neighborhoods with too little parking to attract automobile business, but too little pedestrian traffic to support them. (Steinbrueck and other council members are working to amend that requirement.) But as often, it can be a political question. Opposition can awaken to developments that are the consequence of planning decisions quietly made years ago. And that opposition can in turn affect decisions being made now, such as light rail extensions and the lifting of limits on downtown development, that will affect the city in decades to come.

Kent Kammerer of the Seattle Neighborhoods Coalition says that in the wake of the Gas Works victory, discussions are underway to create some sort of new, city-wide neighborhoods group. "I don't know where it's going to go," he says, "Many of the groups that were somewhat independent are starting to talk with one another."

Sally Clark's temporary city council seat is up for election this year; next year, the seats of Clark, David Della, Jean Godden, Tom Rasmussen, and Steinbrueck are all on the ballot. If awakened and if they come together, neighborhood activists can be a powerful political force in this city. Last November, Al Runte, running with virtually no money or name recognition, turned in a surprisingly strong showing against incumbent Greg Nickels, probably mostly due to resentment over Nickels' developer-driven agenda. If that unease and the current parks momentum can be tapped in city politics, watch out.