James A. Throgmorton

Planning as Persuasive Storytelling About the Future: Negotiating an Electric Power Rate Settlement in Illinois

This paper suggests that good planning is persuasive storytelling about the future, and that planners are future-oriented storytellers who write persuasive texts that other people read (construct and interpret) in diverse and often conflicting ways. The paper explores the merits of this view by analyzing Common wealth Edison Companys hotly-contested effort to persuade the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) to approve an innovative rate increase for three large nuclear power plants. The analysis concludes that Edison failed to persuade the ICC and others because the companys story had crucial weaknesses in plot, point of view, and character develop ment.

Sustainable transportation and land development on the periphery: a case study of Freiburg, Germany and Chula Vista, California

Abstract This paper examines two land developments in the cities of Freiburg (Germany) and Chula Vista (California) with the purpose of comparing their transportation and land use planning institutions, processes, and actions for the importance placed on achieving sustainability. Planning practitioners in both places are committed to concepts of sustainability, but their respective attempts to achieve sustainability differ dramatically. Freiburg is pursuing relatively high density land development in conjunction with transit service, while Chula Vista is pursuing relatively low-density, auto-oriented land development patterns.

Learning through Conflict at Oxford

we are not simply heading back into these futile debates and impasses, and that the current communicative-critical exchange would lead to more fruitful results than the rationalMarxist polemics to which Faludi refers. In sum, the Oxford conference crystallized and clarified the field’s various approaches, as well as its opportunities and pitfalls. The challenge in the years ahead is to construct productive and creative dialogues between the various schools of thought, although-as shown at Oxford-this is by no means simple or certain.

Inventing the Greatest: Crafting Louisville's Future Out of story and Clay

In earlier publications I have argued that planning can be thought of as a form of persuasive and constitutive storytelling about the future. In this article I tell a story about the transformation of Louisville, Kentucky, a city of approximately 700,000 people located in the middle of the United States. The story begins in the early 1950s with a youth named Cassius Marcellus Clay, moves through space and time, weaves together a series of locally grounded common urban narratives, and ends at a new Center in Louisville named after Muhammad Ali. By weaving these tales together, I seek to demonstrate how narrative might be used to generate a more capacious approach to planning, but also to indicate how the physical design of the city-region has to be changed to make space for diverse common urban narratives. I end by suggesting that such an approach might help increase the sustainability of Louisville and other city-regions.

The Bridge to Gretna: Three Faces of a Case

This paper explores diverse ways in which social scientists help to construct the meaning of particular events (or cases). It does so by focusing on an incident that occurred on the bridge to Gretna when a group of New Orleanians tried to escape their flooded city in August 2005. After scrutinizing three ways (the Scientists, the Technicians, and the Phroneticists) in which social scientists and others typically try to make sense out of particular cases, the paper suggests that the meaning of an event depends most crucially on how diverse stories and arguments about the event interact within place-based webs of relationships. Recognizing the crucial role that circulating stories play, social scientists could combine social scientific and humanities-based skills to generate “superior stories” that can transform understandings and facilitate better collective action. This would involve subjecting individual stories to a close reading, juxtaposing stories against one another, and linking the stories to key contextual features. Doing so in the case of the Gretna Bridge incident reveals five important contextual features that forced New Orleanians to undergo a “trial by space”: the contestable meaning of “racism”, the national news medias role in exacerbating fears, the emotional truth of factually suspect claims, the hyper-segregated pattern of residence in the New Orleans city-region, and the relationship between fear and the imprisonment of young black men.

Where was the wall then? Where is it now?

This article investigates the power of ‘walls’ to constrain thought and silence diverse voices of reason within planning. Using die Mauer (The Berlin Wall) as a linking metaphor, this article juxtaposes mid‐1950s planning in a spatially‐ and ideologically‐divided Berlin (Germany) against Harland Bartholomews mid‐1950s planning in a racially‐divided Louisville, Kentucky (USA). It then juxtaposes the latter against a mid‐1950s narrative about efforts to desegregate housing in Louisville. This juxtaposition reveals that some people in Louisville used the Cold War divide between East and West to reinforce the long‐standing racial divide between blacks and whites. Moreover, it reveals that, by deferring to Cold War‐related racial politics that could not be questioned, Bartholomews technical approach to planning silenced other voices of reason and thereby reflected and reproduced the race‐inflected politics of the Cold War divide. The article concludes by briefly considering what Bartholomew might have done differently in the context and by exploring what this juxtaposition of stories implies for planning in the context of the contemporary ‘war against terrorists’.

Institutional Change and Electric Power in the City of Chicago

depended on a privately owned utility for electricity. The utility, Commonwealth Edison (Edison), operates under a franchise from the city that grants it the right to provide power to Chicago. This particular institutional arrangement for the provision of electric power is, of course, common throughout the United States. But in recent years, Chicago and a number of other cities have begun to explore alternative arrangements as their franchises with the private utilities expire [Rudolph and Ridley 1986; Romo 1989]. These alternative institutional arrangements under consideration have included municipalization of the local distribution system with city purchase of electric power from several utilities on the wholesale market, municipalization of all the utilitys operations in the city and acquisition of sufficient generating capacity to serve the citys needs, introduction of competition in electric supply by permitting more than one utility to place its facilities on public property or rights of way within the city, opening up the franchise to competitive bidding instead of simply negotiating with the existing supplier, or simply extraction of concessions from the utility as a condition for franchise renewal.

Planning for Floods at the University of Iowa: A Challenge for Resilience and Sustainability

Why does a large institution build in a flood-prone area and how does it respond when flooding causes great damage? This is a case study of a major flood event—the 2008 Iowa–Cedar River flood—and the University of Iowa, whose recovery is expected to cost about US

Book Review: Collaborative Resilience: Moving through Crisis to Opportunity

750 million. The case explores the factors that led a major institution to invest so much of its infrastructure into a flood-prone river shed and then describes and evaluates the decision-making process the University has undertaken with the goal of becoming a more sustainable and resilient campus.

Book review: Walter Schönwandt Planning in Crisis? Theoretical Orientations for Architecture and Planning Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 167 pp. £55.00 (hbk). ISBN 9780754672760

governments and EU presidencies. In these cases, the text would have benefited from a closer intertwining of empirical descriptions and theoretical considerations. It would also be helpful to have some kind of chart or table listing the main events and documents in chronological order. However, the author succeeds in capturing the attention of his readers by focusing on biographies and personal relations, by tracing the emergence of main ideas and storylines, and by stressing the influences of national traditions and cultures. Faludi strives at terminological precision and clarity. A constant theme throughout the book is how to define and to understand terms such as cohesion and coherence, space, and planning within the European context. While the author offers definitions of his own, he states that “the meaning of concepts depends on who invokes them, when and why” (p. 143). In particular, he helps the readers grasp the meaning(s) of “territorial coherence”—an expression that is usually difficult to understand for those who are not familiar with French policy discourses. The author highlights the importance of historical events, different planning traditions, and language issues. He also raises sensitivity for what transnational planning can be at all, namely “soft planning for soft spaces.” In his view, it is about creating discourses and not about regulatory land use planning. One caveat, however, concerns Faludi’s enthusiasm for soft planning and soft spaces: What is the merit of a small number of planners agreeing on well-intentioned, though contradicting, principles such as competitiveness, equal access to infrastructure, and protection of natural resources, when hard decisions have to be made on whether to construct a transboundary motorway through an area of outstanding ecological value or on whether to spread infrastructure funds over the entire territory of a country or to concentrate them on the centers of innovation and economic growth? Hard planning for hard spaces is probably no solution to such issues either, but maybe some kind of robust coordination mechanism including legal and financial provisions. The book offers little new insight for readers who are familiar with Faludi’s previous books and numerous articles. However, the volume represents a comprehensive synthesis of the author’s earlier writings and situates the empirical findings in a theoretical framework that reflects contemporary theorizing about space and planning. Thus, it ties together many strings of Faludi’s work on both European spatial planning and planning theory. It is a telling depiction of how spaces are constructed socially and how they can be addressed in policy and planning. The book is particularly apt for an academic audience looking for a concise, accessible, and comprehensive account of European spatial planning and cohesion policy. Furthermore the book can be enlightening for practitioners who are engaging in any kind of transnational or transboundary cooperation effort, especially in Europe. Reference