Andrew Zitcer

Who says? Authority, voice, and authorship in narratives of planning research

Recent developments in communicative planning theory and participatory research methods emphasize collaboration between researcher and research subject in the process of knowledge production. We ask how the ideal of collaboration that is integral to the process of data collection extends to the authorial phase of planning narratives and we identify ethical, pragmatic, and substantive justifications for collaborative authorship. The multidisciplinary literature on the city reveals a variety of approaches to authorship including empathetic evocation, selective deployment, dialogic collaboration, and uninterpreted transcription. More successful collaboration might require the avoidance of abstraction, an emphasis on contextualization and intersubjectivity, and a reimagining of social science from inquiry to conversation.

A capabilities approach to arts and culture? Theorizing community development in West Philadelphia

Abstract Arts and culture are increasingly part of the planning and development toolkit in the USA. Justifications for investment in the arts often center on economic development outcomes. In contrast, we propose the use of Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to human development, which asserts the importance of the freedom to achieve personal and group well-being through the creation of conditions that maximize opportunity. This paper advances the capabilities approach by exploring arts and culture engagement in three adjacent West Philadelphia neighborhoods. Amid conditions of material deprivation and pressure from gentrification, neighborhood residents strongly articulate their belief in arts and culture as a strategy of community empowerment. The capabilities approach offers planners an opportunity to reevaluate the way they incorporate arts and culture in their efforts. We conclude that arts-based development should employ comprehensive place-based strategies, with social and spatial justice as guides to practice and primary metrics for success.

Confronting the challenge of humanist planning/Towards a humanist planning/A humanist perspective on knowledge for planning: implications for theory, research, and practice/To learn to plan, write stories/Three practices of humanism and critical pragmatism/Humanism or beyond?

Planning theory and practice have long had an ambivalent relation to the human subject. On the one hand, planning theorists and practitioners have raised recurring concerns that the notions of progress that orient the planning enterprise have marginalized the human subject and obscured planning’s ongoing failure to adequately address a host of fundamental human needs. On the other hand, in large sections of planning and of the social sciences, the human subject has fallen out of fashion in both theory and practice. We are all post-human now: discursive, algorithmic, relational, socially constructed, structured, assembled, and networked. This Interface grapples with this tension by considering the status of humanism in the planning field.1 This introduction lays the ground for the discussion that follows, providing an overview of: (1) normative positions that underlie humanistic concerns, (2) planning debates that have helped frame the question of humanism, and (3) planning approaches that have grappled with this question in research and in practice. It also offers a series of provocations aimed at giving direction to our exploration of the possibilities that humanism might make available to the planning field. Humanism encompasses a broad array of philosophical positions based around the primacy of human nature and agency (Plummer, 2004). For present purposes, we are specifically concerned with three aspects of this philosophical inclination: (1) an epistemological humanism that privileges the human subject as a locus of knowledge, (2) a political humanism that assigns especial significance to the role of human agency, and (3) a value humanism that identifies humans – as opposed to God, the cosmos, or reason – as the ultimate source of politico-ethical decisions (Schatzki, 2002). We would like to consider whether this humanist orientation – that is, ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies organized around the human individual – allows planning research and practice to better account for human experience, feelings, and aspirations and whether it provides firmer footing for moral action. Put plainly, what, if anything, does a humanist perspective contribute to planning? Can the humanist tradition offer a greater or additional insight into questions concerning lived experience, political agency, and moral responsibility (Simonsen, 2013)? The prevalent answer in contemporary social thought has been, no. Over the past half century, that answer has emerged from theoretical trends associated with the cultural turn of the 1970s. These schools of thought place a primary emphasis on discourse, representation, and difference. More recently, “more-than-human” or “non-representational” theories have supplemented them by paying renewed attention to materiality and its co-constitutive role in the social constructions that shape social

Unsettling Planning Theory

Recent political developments in many parts of the world seem likely to exacerbate rather than ameliorate the planetary-scale challenges of social polarization, inequality and environmental change societies face. In this unconventional multi-authored essay, we therefore seek to explore some of the ways in which planning theory might respond to the deeply unsettling times we live in. Taking the multiple, suggestive possibilities of the theme of unsettlement as a starting point, we aim to create space for reflection and debate about the state of the discipline and practice of planning theory, questioning what it means to produce knowledge capable of acting on the world today. Drawing on exchanges at a workshop attended by a group of emerging scholars in Portland, Oregon in late 2016, the essay begins with an introduction section exploring the contemporary resonances of ‘unsettling’ in, of and for planning theory. This is followed by four, individually authored responses which each connect the idea of unsettlement to key challenges and possible future directions. We end by calling for a reflective practice of theorizing that accepts unsettlement but seeks to act knowingly and compassionately on the uneven terrain that it creates.

Grocery Cooperatives as Governing Institutions in Neighborhood Commercial Corridors

We explore cooperatives’ potential to play governing roles in neighborhood commercial corridors (NCCs) by examining one grocery cooperative in Philadelphia that has had stores on three NCCs in the city. We distinguish between an anchor institution role, where one organization provides collective goods for the corridor, and governance, where multiple corridor stakeholders collectively provide goods. We conclude that a cooperative will more likely play a governance role if it enters an NCC at a point when there are no other potential corridor-governing organizations, and when the NCC itself is at an early stage of development or redevelopment. What this suggests more generally about NCCs is that the organizations present at their founding or at a critical juncture have a large impact on their future developmental trajectories. We argue further that a cooperative is more likely to play a governance role when it was created by neighborhood stakeholders and it thus reflects the distinct social norms of the neighborhood.

Planning as Persuaded Storytelling: The Role of Genre in Planners’ Narratives

Abstract Genre is one of narrative’s key structuring tools, bounding and delimiting texts. When planners write within a given genre, they tacitly endorse specific conventions. By conforming to these conventions, planners reproduce the historical and linguistic arrangements that led to the ratification and codification of certain types of narratives. This paper explores how two of the author’s prior publications fit uncomfortably within the ambit of specific genres. It suggests ways to push back against the limits of genre, to produce texts more responsive to a project of mutual learning between authors and readers. Through recognition, interrogation, and transformation of genre, authors can advance the project of planning for the common good.

Positioning for the Future: Curriculum Revision in a Legacy Arts Administration Program

ABSTRACT This article describes the evolution of arts administration education through the lens of Drexel Universitys graduate arts administration program, one of the first arts administration programs in the United States, as a means to demonstrate how arts administration programs must strategically evolve to remain relevant to the field and within their academic institutions. By engaging a wide range of stakeholders in a holistic review of the program, faculty discovered multiple benefits of a curriculum revision process. Ultimately, these benefits redound to the graduates the program sends out into the field, as the resulting curriculum more closely mirrors contemporary practice.

Book Review: City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America

includes material that is often found in research design classes in planning and public administration programs. Chapter 5, “Evaluation Criteria,” very efficiently covers some extremely important ground on the challenges to and importance of establishing criteria when undertaking policy analysis. Following the research design and methods-based chapters are a set of case studies through which students are expected to apply what they have learned. One of the strengths of the book is the rather diverse set of cases. Included in this mix are two downtown redevelopment initiatives, an assessment of a university parking policy, a recommendation for a municipal solid waste strategy, developing an allocation formula for home heating fuel, and an analysis of a proposed state tax on plastic shopping bags. Most of these cases were present in the 1993 version of the book and reflect real-world events of the 1970s and 1980s, although a few have been updated for this edition. While the cases are generally interesting, they are quite uneven in their detail and the background stories used to inform a given case. The biggest issue I have with the cases is that they read as dated, despite attempts by the authors to update them. Considering the real estate boom and bust of the first decade of the 2000s, an underlying political climate of reduced taxation and regulation, and the clear impacts of climate change on communities, I would have loved to see more contemporary case studies. All of the chapters are well written by scholars who know their material, but the presentation is very much in the form of an old-school textbook with very dense text on most pages and a remarkable lack of pictures throughout. Most notably, the case studies lack maps, pictures, and other visual material that might make them come alive. Despite an enticing cover image of Seoul’s unearthed downtown river, this is not a showpiece textbook, one that grabs the imagination of the reader with its graphical style. This lack of visual flair is striking, especially given the book’s

Food Co‐ops and the Paradox of Exclusivity

100 price tag. On the positive side, this version does include a number of new charts that illustrate the flow of certain analytical methods and reinforce the connections between evidence, analysis, and recommendation. In my own experience as a planning methods instructor for almost twenty years, academics tasked with teaching this material have a real challenge in finding the right book(s) for their classes. A good generalist’s planning textbook, Basic Methods of Policy Analysis and Planning’s major strength is its breadth, not its depth. For teachers and students looking for a textbook that covers very important ground on research design and fundamental planning methods, one will be well served by this book. As I noted earlier, I especially appreciate the authors’ commitment to underscoring the importance of politics in the realm of policy analysis. However, other books provide much greater detail on specific methods, such as Klosterman’s beloved, but dated, Community Analysis and Planning Techniques (Rowman and Littlefield, 1990), which provides an excellent overview of different forecasting and economic base analysis techniques. Similarly, Wang and vom Hofe’s very expensive Research Methods in Urban and Regional Planning (Springer 2007) offers a detailed look at demographic, economic, land use, and transportation methods. Perhaps the most apt comparison text is another book coauthored by Patton, with Bill Page at the University of Buffalo, Quick Answers to Quantitative Problems: A Pocket Primer (Academic Press, 1991), which offers brief, but useful, summaries of a number of core analytical methods. These books offer much more detail on specific methods than Basic Methods of Policy Analysis and Planning, but at the expense of material on research design, evaluation criteria, ethical challenges, and the politics of policy analysis. For more than two decades, Basic Methods of Policy Analysis and Planning has stood as a classic planning and policy analysis text, one used to educate thousands of students in planning, public administration, and other policy fields. The book’s reputation as a useful, if dry, textbook on the topic of policy analysis is well earned. The book sits in an easily accessible spot on my bookshelf, and it would represent a wise investment for any young policy analyst’s library. My hope is that the fourth edition gets published sooner than the twenty years between the second and third editions and that the next update brings visual flair, greater connections to current planning issues, updated and more compelling cases, and even more politics into the discussion. If these things occur, then Basic Methods of Policy Analysis and Planning might be just the policy analysis textbook we’ve all been looking for.