Bruce Stiftel

Faculty Quality at U.S. Graduate Planning Schools A National Research Council-Style Study

Faculty quality assessment methods of the National Research Council study of research doctorate programs are applied to U.S. urban and regional planning graduate programs. Findings suggest that about one-half of planning faculty actively publish and that there is considerable concentration of both publication and citation activity among a relatively small group of scholars and schools. Accredited and nonaccredited schools show substantial differences, as do doctoral degree-granting schools compared with master’s-only schools. The strengths and weaknesses of faculty quality measures used are discussed, leading to a call for other studies using different measures.

Mediating environmental enforcement disputes: How well does it work?

Abstract Much has been written about benefits of using mediation to resolve environmental disputes, however little empirical research exists to substantiate these claims. Using 19 mediated environmental enforcement cases involving Floridas primary environmental regulatory agency, we examine settlement rates, settlement quality, and participant satisfaction with the mediation process and the mediator. The results show that mediation is an effective method for settling environmental enforcement disputes — more than 70% of the cases were resolved; participants indicated that they were very satisfied with the mediation process, the final agreement, and the mediator; and that they saved money by using mediation rather than litigation to resolve their disputes.

Teaching Planning Theory

Orthodoxy in planning theory has long been defined by self-described innovators who wish to contrast themselves with the mainstream. Perhaps this has given a self-critical cast to the field. It certainly has led to confusion about what is and what is not planning theory, and to a plethora of views on planning theory. This diversity of perspective is reflected in the wide range of readings serving as the bases for courses in the subject (Klosterman 1992). Nevertheless, planning theory is imagined by many schools to be the subject which anchors their curriculum in the core of the profession. And, as graduates of planning doctoral programs grow in representation on planning faculties (Innes 1992), planning theory strengthens its position as the leading basis for faculty discourse.

A Planner's Guide to the Digital Bibliographic Revolution

Abstract Recent changes in the availability of online literature and the speed with which it can be located could greatly alter planners’ use of prior research. We intend this guide to lead planners and planning researchers to more effectively use online bibliographic tools and content. We outline the recent changes, including online electronic abstracting and indexing services that facilitate quick, comprehensive searches for relevant works, and aggregators that permit electronic access to the full text of journal articles. We examine recent developments from the perspectives of planning researchers, planning practitioners, planning employers, and planning journal editors, and recommend how they can act to enhance planners’ access to and benefit from published research.

A Reply to Graduate Planning School Study Responses

Published responses to the study of faculty quality at U.S. urban and regional planning graduate programs (Stiftel, Rukmana, and Alam 2004) raise issues that deserve clarification and further comment. We begin by correcting misunderstandings about our work, acknowledge where we think the commentators have identified genuine weaknesses, report an error, and then move on to discuss suggestions made for more effective school performance measurement. Several commentators do not accurately describe what we did to compile the publications and citations data reported. Forsyth (2004) suggests that we tabulated book reviews and other minor journal publications, as well as more traditional articles. We did not. Our protocol was to count “ISI-listed articles” only (Stiftel, Rukmana, and Alam 2004, 8). The Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) database distinguishes thirty-three categories of publications in journals, many of them specific to certain artistic endeavors. We counted only those entries categorized as “articles,” excluding book reviews, bibliographies, corrections, editorials, letters, and the remainder of the thirty-three categories. This may omit certain significant scholarly contributions, but it is a more tractable, and we believe more useful, measure than one that mixes the various categories. Fainstein (2004 [this issue]) believes that the thirty-one journals listed in footnote 4 (p. 21) were the only journals searched for publications and citations. This is not the case. We searched the full ISI database of more than 8,700 journals to prepare the counts of publications and citations reported. These include approximately 5,900 journals indexed by the Science Citation Index, 1,700 journals indexed by the Social Science Citation Index, and 1,100 journals indexed by the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. All bibliometric results reported in our study are based on this full database. Rather than listing all journals searched, footnote 4 was an attempt to assess the completeness of the ISI database with respect to coverage of urban planning journals. In the footnote, we constructed a small sample of journals that we believed to be core planning journals and then reported whether these journals are included in the ISI database. The three journals stated by Professor Fainstein as excluded from our searches, the Journal of

Balance of representation in water planning: an assessment of experience from North Carolina

Overrepresentation of private interests and underrepresentation of public interests has been endemic in citizen participation in water planning in the USA for many years. Attempts to correct imbalance in interest representation have not been successful. Such failure is explained by showing that traditional perceptions may not be valid. Empirical evidence from the North Carolina nonpoint pollution control planning program is used. Categories of public and private participants are developed. Agency staff interpretations of representation are reported—staff believed private participants were heavily overrepresented. The participant categories are tested. Staff interpretations are tested against participant attitudes. Surprisingly, participant attitudes do not support the staff interpretations. Possible explanations are considered. Conclusions identify limitations in traditional categorizations of interests and suggest that participants respond to a wide array of incentives and disincentives, not just material rewards.

Submissions and Reviews in the Journal of Planning Education and Research: 1991-1992

Author characteristics, manuscript characteristics, review processes, and manuscript review outcomes were examined for submissions to the Journal of Planning Education and Research (JPER) over a two-year period. Findings suggest that JPER is, to a high degree, an outlet for research for faculty of urban and regional planning programs only and that, within this catchment, authors represent a wide range of faculty and submissions concern a wide range of topics. Confidence is found in the merit-based nature of manuscript review processes. Problems are identified concerning limited methodological sophistication of submissions, insularity of the planning academy, and limited systematic growth of our discipline.

Commentary: Of What Meaning—Journal Prominence?

Bibliometrics have risen rapidly in our views of what constitute good academic departments and universities, as well as in the crosshairs of critics of goal displacement and corporatization of higher education. Central to the recent debate have been efforts to separate journals into tiers based on quality. At stake are budgets, careers, and program survival—not just rankings. There will be both glee and consternation that Goldstein and Maier (2010) have found little correlation between the leading bibliometric yardstick of journal quality and the opinions of U.S. planning educators. These are important results that challenge us with respect to how we decide where to publish, how we evaluate our colleagues, and how we assess schools. At each of these levels, it is important that we distinguish journal quality as understood in our profession/discipline from journal quality more broadly. Planning is a small pond that, when full, shares its water with the sea of interdisciplinary scholarship. Being a big fish in a small pond is not the same as being important in the sea. Following publication of Stiftel, Rukmana, and Alam (2004), I heard comments that since Thomson ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) journals are the leading bases for citation counts, planning scholars should stop publishing in non-ISI journals. I was saddened by this conclusion; it seemed to be a symptom of the teaching-to-the-test culture that pervades our society and, if widely shared, would threaten the existence of many fine planning journals that play very important roles. Moreover, I thought about what this would mean for conversations among researchers who work on common projects. Niche journals are vital to the development of emerging ideas that frankly are unlikely to get placement in the most selective, discipline-wide journals. I want audiences who care about what I write and who will react, respond, and use my work in their own scholarship and practice—and I believe that other planning scholars share my view. Publishing in outlets that bring feedback and impact on the field is exactly what we should be aiming for as individuals seeking publication. As individuals, let us go for impact, not impact factor. The two main sets of measures of journal quality analyzed by Goldstein and Maier (2010) are both helpful to us in understanding how to go for impact. In our small pond of city planning scholarship, the survey results on reputation among planning scholars are an excellent guide to reaching our fellow U.S. planning educators. These results may or may not translate well to communities of scholars that are interdisciplinary and more or less tightly knit in the eighteen specialty areas that Goldstein and Maier code, or in the myriad of other substantive areas to which planning researchers contribute. Goldstein and Maier’s hierarchical cluster analysis (pp. 68-69) is a useful step toward such specification, but nonplanning journals are in the mix as well. An article reporting the effects of project design on local opposition to windfarm siting might most productively land in an energy policy journal, a journal focused on stakeholder participation, a landscape design journal, or even a methodological journal depending on the article’s approach and conclusions. ISI citation counts or impact factors are informative for such decisions but hardly a substitute for understanding readership, reputation, and editorial skill. When our scholarship reaches beyond the pond of city planning and beyond the other small ponds within which we usually swim, when we aim for the largest international audiences, impact factors take on more importance, as they help us to evaluate outlets with which we are less familiar. Evaluation of scholars by peers and by institutions is a different context. Here we must ask what we are trying to accomplish as departments and schools and balance that with the tenets of respect for individual research directions. We want our faculty members to accomplish something with their scholarship—and also to meaningfully affect the practice of our profession. Among other lines of analysis, it is legitimate to ask if a record of scholarship is successful in achieving publication, or if it meaningfully affects our discipline or our profession, or if it meaningfully affects a broad swath of thinking in the academy or the society. These three questions require three sets of indicators. Raw counts of articles are useful to the first. Focused counts in the journals that place highly in the evaluations of planning educators and citations in those same journals are useful to the second. Overall ISI citation counts and impact factors are useful to the third. None of the indicators just mentioned are complete on their own, but they can each contribute to a thoughtful, balanced evaluation conducted in light of institutional goals. The differences in journal rank by administrative home of the planning school identified by Goldstein and Maier

Societal Effects of Collaborative Decision-Making in Florida: The Impact of Environmental Conflict Resolution Institutions on Public Choice, Civic Culture and Environmental Management Systems

Hailed as a route to improved public decision making, civic engagement, and power sharing in an increasingly contentious world, collaborative decision making (CDM) has become an important mainstay of contemporary environmental planning and policy practice. As described by CDM theorists, collaborative decision making not only improves substantive outcomes, but also transforms participants, professional behaviors and institutional structures in ways that broadly improve the substance and process of societal decision making. Few empirical studies demonstrate these broader claims, however. The present research outlines a conceptual framework for assessing decision process, decision outcome and social/environmental system impacts of collaborative planning. The framework anticipates three scales of impact: participant/group, professional/organizational, and societal/environmental system. We go on to apply the framework to the design of a study of the systemic and cumulative effects of 20 years of extensive collaborative policy processes in Florida. This study utilizes comparative case histories, a survey of professionals, and content analysis of stakeholder newsletters to compare planning outcomes in Florida today with those in Florida twenty years ago, before the advent of extensive collaborative processes, and to compare planning outcomes in Florida with those in Georgia, a neighboring and similar state which has not implemented collaborative processes with vigor.

Florida's 20-day meeting: Resolution of the appeal of the development order for the Tampa Bay Park of commerce

Abstract Floridas Environmental Land and Water Management Act offers opportunities for negotiation and mediation as regular parts of the process through which appeals of development orders are resolved. The Tampa Bay Park of Commerce is a large multi-use development which came under the provisions of that Act. In the Commerce Park case the negotiation process resulted in a settlement which illustrates several important postulates of public policy dispute resolution. The case also reveals difficulties in establishing rules for resolution of development impact assessment conflicts, and suggests reasons for establishing procedures for mandatory mediation of environmental disputes.