Unifying Pittsburgh's neighborhoods may be a bit like herding cats, but 300 people gave it a try at a recent town hall summit on the South Side.

The six-hour event last week was a call to arms by the Pittsburgh Partnership for Neighborhood Development, whose president, Dorothy Lengyel, said it is time for neighborhoods to set the tone for planning the city's future, "since neighborhoods are integral to the identity of the city."

The summit was staged in two parts last week at the Circuit Center with support from the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh. In the afternoon, neighborhood volunteers, architects, community-planning professionals and longtime activists drew up lists of priorities in break-out sessions on blight, public safety, infrastructure and land use/development. The evening crowd was made up of residents of neighborhoods throughout the city.

The result, said Ms. Lengyel, will be a white paper to present to the new mayor.

Official results were not available in time for this article, but many who participated echoed keynote speaker Kim Burnett, a proponent of weak-market cities for the Surdna Foundation: Pittsburgh's top priorities in 2006 should be public safety and control of abandoned properties.

"People don't move into places where they don't feel safe," said Ms. Burnett, "and developers don't do development if they can't assemble the land. Period."

Pittsburgh has 88 recognized neighborhoods, many of which are blighted and beleaguered by youth incivility and violence. They all have at least one nonprofit entity that toils in betterment campaigns; many have two and three. Some focus on housing, some on reducing crime. Some have querulous factions and get almost nothing done, and most feel their neighborhood gets shortchanged. Rarely have they talked among themselves on such a large scale.

Jeanne Berdick of Oakland beseeched the land-use group she was in, saying: "We tend to view ourselves as victims of existing power bases, and we become beggars: 'Please help us ... Give us ... ' That's a non-starter. We have to see ourselves as players, people who can orchestrate revitalization."

"We have to educate our neighbors on the power they have," said Ronell Guy of Perry Hilltop, a co-founder of the North Side Coalition for Fair Housing.

Marilyn Brown said she came away from the summit with a stronger sense of how much other city neighborhoods have in common with her own Beechview.

"A little pocket somewhere may not be aware that a neighborhood across town has the same problem," she said. "I have a renewed sense that we can speak with a common voice."

In the public safety session, she said, "gun violence was a big topic of discussion. We agreed that the police need more cooperation from citizens [to be] extra eyes and ears."

Rick Swartz of the Bloomfield-Garfield Corp. suggested that community activists be trained at the police academy so new police officers can start building a relationship with their new beats and residents can learn investigative skills police use to help the police.

"We are not dealing firmly with people who are ruining the quality of life in our neighborhoods," he said. "How do you move drug traffickers off the corner? How can you drive past vacant houses whose doors are wide open?"

He said the group also recommended that the next mayor form a task force to determine the most effective uses of the public safety budget.

Dana Thomas of the Highland Park Community Council, a volunteer group, said the blight session focused on the critical need to untangle the system of clearing titles to tax-delinquent and derelict properties.

"Our first priority was to streamline the system," she said. Schools and the water and sewer authority understandably want money that's owed to them, she said, "but no one gets anything from properties sitting vacant."

Allegheny County's assessment for 2004 cited 15,487 residential lots in the city that are not being used -- abandoned houses and vacant lots zoned for houses. That's 13.7 percent of the total, said Adriane Aul of the Vacant Property Working Group, a program of the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group. In many cases, these properties are sinking deeper into arrears.

Session participants identified the limbo of delinquent properties as the main perpetrator of blight. An added insult is that, to clear titles, the city is having to buy back its liens from the company it sold them to in 1998, Capital Asset Research Corp. Between city and water and sewer authority liens, the principal buy-back amount is up to $42 million.

Many neighborhood advocates and city officials say a buyback is urgent to get delinquent properties back on the tax rolls.

That need addresses a challenge in many weak-market cities whose bureaucracies, ordinances and laws are cumbersome and out-of-date, said Ms. Burnett.

This class of once-industrial powerhouses includes Baltimore, Buffalo, N.Y., Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, she said.

"Pittsburgh is more fortunate than many in that you have so much great stuff to build from already," she said, citing the riverfront, diversity of architecture, strong arts and cultural institutions, and "great, walkable, distinct neighborhoods."

And maybe a few too many neighborhood groups.

Condensing neighborhood nonprofit groups would mean more bang for the buck, she said. "The East End, for instance, could be one neighborhood and all their neighborhood groups could join together" to leverage both more services and investments.

Cities like Pittsburgh, she said, need to "come to terms with their new role ... and permit themselves to grow smaller gracefully."