Elizabeth L. Sweet

Planning Responds to Gender Violence: Evidence from Spain, Mexico and the United States

Urban planning has been largely ineffective in addressing urban violence and particularly slow in responding to gender violence. This paper explores the public and private divide, structural inequalities, and issues of ethnicity and citizenship, in terms of their planning implications for gender violence. Drawing on evidence from Spain, Mexico and the United States, it examines how economic and social planning and gender violence intertwine. The three case studies demonstrate that the challenge is not only to break constructed structural inequalities and divisions between public and private spheres, but also to promote changes in the working models of institutions and organisations.

Bringing bodies into planning: Visceral methods, fear and gender violence

Planning has been ineffective at addressing women’s fear of violence and violence against women in part because of the false public/private divide. This divide is parallel and mutually supported by parochial and conservative understandings of male and female gender constructions and norms in spaces and social structural systems. We propose exploring the actual spaces of bodies and planning at the scale of bodies since bodies are at the nexus of public–private spaces, gender identities and gender violence. Using bodies as geographical spaces to understand and analyse visceral experiences and fear of violence may help diminish the dominance of the public–private divide and challenge the unequal rights women have to use space. Based on exploratory workshops in New York City, Mexico City and Barcelona as well as research events in Medellin, we share our experiences using visceral methods including body-map storytelling and shared sensory spatial experiences, also evaluating their usefulness. We examine the ethics of visceral methods, ways to analyse body-mapped data and the use of planners’ bodies as tools in research and practice. We conclude that bodies have the potential to become a source of dynamic and reflective information that might be effectively used by planners and communities to make places better and safer.

Identity, Culture, Land, and Language: Stories of Insurgent Planning in the Republic of Buryatia, Russia

Indigenous peoples have been struggling to maintain or regain rights to land, identity, and culture in the face of colonialism. In Russia, government policies have pushed European Russian/Soviet nationalism in an attempt to diminish or erase non-European identity. But there has been insurgency. We present the case of Buryat historical and contemporary insurgent planning. We contextualize indigenous insurgent planning using colonialism and identity as backdrops. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic study and review of historical sources, we tell the stories of how many Buryats use dynamic indigenous identities combined with appropriated Russian nomenclature to resist and negotiate postmodern imperialism.

Commentary: Diversity in Urban Planning Education and Practice

Planning needs more diversity if it is to have legitimacy. Diversity can be achieved through more diverse faculty and students who become practitioners, and by increased scholarship that addresses diversity. In this essay, we examine the trends in scholarship about diversity in planning and the barriers to increasing faculty and students of color in planning schools, and we propose ways to move forward. We conclude that planning must increase the number of faculty of color in tenured and tenure-track positions and enhance the ability of planning programs to adequately address issues of race and gender to balance the power relations within the academy.

Carceral feminism Linking the state, intersectional bodies, and the dichotomy of place

In this commentary, I use the notion of carceral feminism and the false dichotomy of the public and private sphere to reimagine how geographers interrogate the spatiality, legality, and embodiment of violence against women. By rethinking the role of the state as doling out punishment, the social work approach as service providers, along with moving beyond the bifurcation of public and private, activist scholars have the opportunity to change power relations in cities and communities. While a somewhat radical idea, it is already happening in cities like Chicago.

Response to “Letter to the Editors”: Action and Planning—Where Do We Draw the Line?

Prof. E. R. Alexander raises an interesting question when he asks, “What makes the activities [Sweet and Chakars (2010)] describe and analyze “insurgent planning?” and cites Wildavsky (1973) to suggest that maybe we have gone too far by framing Buryat activities as planning. To respond, I would like to use a two-pronged approach that evolves from the way we have conceptualized our article. First I raise and answer general questions about what is valid planning, and then I use examples from the literature, to point out how these activities are consistent with planning, in particular insurgent planning. While I am not aware of an exact litmus test for whether an activity qualifies as planning or not, I think there are several key attributes that help us narrow things down and avoid the false dichotomy of “everything” and “nothing.” First and foremost is place. As planners, we work and think about places. We want to make places better, more efficient, healthier, sustainable, enjoyable, safe, and functional (Hayden 1997; Davoudi and Strange 2009; Martin 2003; Massey 1995; Healey 1999). In addition, the ideas of collective action (Helling and Sawicki 1997; Friedmann 1987) and engaging the future (while not always in an absolute way) have also been central to planning (Hopkins 2007, and forthcoming). Intertwined in the debate over what is planning is the question, who is a planner? This question has been debated and will continue to be debated for a long time. However, had the subjects of our article been certified planners (e.g., by the American Institute of Certified Planners), the question of whether or not they were engaged in planning would not have been asked. One assumes that if you are a professional planner then your activities are, by definition, planning. Although plenty of planning scholars have written about and acknowledged nontraditional planners doing planning (Jojola 1998; Hayden 1997; Davidoff 1965; Grabow and Heskin 1973; Friedmann 1987, 1992; Lane 2001; Lane and Hibbard 2005; Beard 2002; Sandercock 1998, 1999; Dubrow and Corbin Sies 2002; Miraftab 2009; Al-Kodmany 1999), there is still a tension between the need to protect our notion of ourselves as professionals and of planning as something special and separate from ordinary citizens’ activities that attempt to make a place better. I would argue that this tension has created the need for insurgent planning and planners. Although insurgent planning is a fairly new concept in academic planning discourse, our article attempts to show a long history of insurgent planning in practice and helps to formulate a more nuanced understanding of it. Kipfer and Keil (2000) assert, “Since the 1960s, subordinate groups and movements have proposed alternative planning practices and challenged some of the orthodoxies of official planning” (28). Meth (2010) contends, “The concept of insurgent planning practices has offered planning theorists an exciting lens through which to explore the alternative actions of people operating outside of, or alongside, the “formal” planning frame work. Research in this area has focused on the vital contributions that citizens have made to the shaping of their cities” (241). Beard and Basolo (2009) also comment on the importance of social movements in planning. As we cite in our article, Miraftab (2009) states that insurgent planning is “counter-hegemonic, transgressive, and imaginative . . . counter hegemonic in that [it] destabilizes the normalized order of things; . . . transgress[ing] time and place by locating historical memory and transnational consciousness” (33). We also discuss Beard (2002) and Meir (2005) and their descriptions of insurgent planning activities that include a community-constructed library to raise the consciousness within the community, setting up settlements, naming them with signs, and supporting local governance within them. If we take these previously established definition and examples of insurgent planning and apply them to the Buryat case, we can see a subordinate group proposing alternative planning practices to counter the official land use and governance structures that were aimed at eliminating their cultural identity and removing them from their homeland and communities. Their alternative planning included collective action to counter hegemonic norms that forced Russian language and religion on them, also understood as imperialism. By translating books and reviving great historical figures they were, in effect, boosting the self-worth and value of the Buryat culture that is still being actively challenged by traditional land use and economic development planning in Russia. The focus on preserving land, by using unconventional methods like demonstrations at the Tasr’s office, Shaman ceremonies, silent marches, and letters to the President are all planned activities intent on engaging the future and making a place better for the residents of that place. I actually think the question regarding the difference between “action” and “planning” is less about our paper and more about a desire to understand and define the limits of planning. Where do we draw the line or do we need a line?

Engaging territorio cuerpo-tierra through body and community mapping: a methodology for making communities safer

Abstract We propose a new way of collectively creating data about gender violence through active participation and mapping women’s bodies and communities. We see this process of data creation, self-awareness and action as inherently linked to the native concept territorio cuerpo-tierra, the landscape of bodies-lands. The concept erases Western notions separating bodies and land and helps to decenter the public–private divide, which is an important obstacle to eliminating violence against women. Drawing on data from our work with Mexican women in the, U.S. and Mexico, we illuminate the continuity of women’s individual bodily experience of violence and collective spatial knowledge of community safety. We conclude that the process and outcomes of body and community mapping linking bodies and land, afford planners the prospect of engaging as partners and co-actants with community members in the goal of making places safe for women.

Chapter 6 ‘A Slow Assassination of your Soul’: Race, Citizenship and Gender Identities in the Borderlands of New Economic Places

In 2009, Lucha, a Mexican woman who had migrated to Chicago and worked at a candy factory described her work as ‘A slow assassination of your soul’. Her experience in the United States was transformative. The power she previously had as a community activist and college student in Mexico was eroded. Luchas experience exemplifies a shift in her identity and how that changing identity fashioned the character of her economic activities. Race, ethnicity, and gender shift and change meaning through migration (Gilmartin, 2008, p. 1840) and shape ‘migrant womens multiple relations in the process of migration’ (Parrenas, 2009, p. 11). We are interested in the struggles, realities and contestations of immigrant women. We want to better understand how migrant women negotiate the dynamic intersections of race, gender and citizenship identities in new places in order to survive, prosper and exert influence in new places and economic environments. Based on indepth interviews with immigrant women in Chicago, Illinois, United States and in the Barcelona area of Spain, we demonstrate that issues of race, gender and citizenship influenced the kinds of jobs they obtained and the working conditions they experienced, as well as their ability to become accepted members of the community. In this chapter, we want to respond to the call made by Parrenas (2009) to contribute to the gender and migration literature by analysing structural gender inequalities beyond differences between men and women, and focusing on how gender inequalities are constructed as they intersect with other inequalities based on race and citizenship. The women we interviewed endured humiliation based on their intersecting identities at work; some questioned their belonging in their new countries while at the same time feeling that they did not belong in their home country, as other authors such as Parrenas (2001) have found. The challenge for planners and policymakers is to understand the intricacies of multiple identities across places and scales. Hearing their complex stories of work and perceptions of belonging in their country of origin and new country can help academics who are training future planners and professionals build more inclusive planning and policy theory and practice.

Ethnographic Understandings of Gender and Economic Transition in Siberia: Implications for Planners and Policy Makers

Economic transition has been defined by neo-liberal restructuring policies and understandings. Using ethnographic data from Omsk, Russia, I examine structural adjustment policy implementation in the context of socially constructed gender norms. These policies have complicated implications for women and mens economic survival. The ethnographic understandings gained from interviews with women provide vital information that would improve planning processes in Omsk. For example, using an economic gardening approach to support womens small business development and workforce development targeting survivors of violence would advance womens economic self-sufficiency. I suggest that if planners use ethnographic understandings they will be able to more effectively respond to planning challenges such as poverty, education and health care issues.

Modeling Intimate Partner Violence and Support Systems

This chapter documents a simulation model developed to examine the dynamics of intimate partner violence (IPV) in a Midwestern US city. IPV is the term for personal abuse among intimate heterosexual partners. It affects all races and income levels, but the individuals at highest risk are African American, immigrant, and lower-income females (Intimate partner violence in the USA, Washington, 2007; Intimate partner violence, Lanham, 2009). Furthermore, cultural and economic factors may influence a woman’s disclosure of IPV, her probability of seeking help, and her utilization of social services. The modeling IPV patterns and policy responses is intended to provide insights that affect decisions about where to locate shelters, for example, or what kinds of support and educational services may be most effective in reducing the recurrence of IPV. The IPV model is a spatially explicit agent-based model developed with NetLogo (http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/). The model was based on sociocultural and economic representations of IPV from the literature and statistics on IPV, crime, and homelessness for Chicago, IL. Simulations enable the user to assess the impacts of different policies and resource-deployment strategies on IPV rates, including the impacts on selected socioeconomic or racial groups. The authors assess the validity of the simulation results and identify areas for improving future versions of the model.