Leonie Sandercock

Out of the Closet: The Importance of Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice

This article argues that story has a special importance in planning that has neither been fully understood nor sufficiently valued. Planning is performed through story, in a myriad of ways. The aim here is to unpack the many ways we use story: in policy, in process, in pedagogy, in critique, as a foundation, and as a catalyst for change. A better understanding of the work that stories do can make us better planners in at least three ways: by expanding our practical tools, by sharpening our critical judgment and by widening the circle of democratic discourse.

A Gender Agenda: New Directions for Planning Theory

Abstract Since the 1970s increased attention has been focused on gender in relation to planning practice, but not to planning theory. Feminist theory has much to contribute to planning theory, particularly in five areas: spatial, economic, and social relationships; language and communication; epistemology and methodology; ethics; and the nature of the public domain. In turn, gender-sensitive theory could contribute to research in five areas of practice and education.

Pleasure, Politics, and the “Public Interest”: Melbourne's Riverscape Revitalization

Abstract As global forces have reshaped urban landscapes over the past 2 decades, cities have typically responded with a range of “spectacular” developments, the most common of which have been waterfront projects. In this article we describe the transformation of Melbournes urban riverscape from an industrial junkyard into a postindustrial “landscape of desire.” A primary concern is identifying winners and losers in this restructuring. To this end, we resurrect and redefine the concept of the public interest. In Melbourne, the production of signature projects geared to global place marketing coincided with a collapse of democratic public planning. Urban development became design driven, more seductive, and more secretive. Urban planning practice was restructured along with the urban landscape.

Voices from the Borderlands: A Meditation on a Metaphor

This piece takes up Beauregards (1989) challenge to view planning theory through the lens of postmodern critique. It is argued here that we need to broaden the planning theory literature to include the works of feminists and people of color who are addressing the condition of postmodernity in constructive and progressive ways, within a revised radical democratic tradition.

Commentary: indigenous planning and the burden of colonialism

In New World settlements the world over, in the era of colonialism, settlers usually occupied space at the expense of existing inhabitants, who were referred to as ‘native’ and regarded as ‘primitive’. While the details of colonial occupations vary from one country to another, the process of city-building and the clearing of regions for farming and other extractive industries required an ordering of urban and regional space by a whole range of spatial technologies of power such as the laws of private property, the practices of surveying, naming, mapping and the procedures of urban and regional planning. The effects of these various sorts of legal and/or violent arrangements and appropriations were the effective dispossession and exclusion of indigenous peoples, the original inhabitants of these lands. The desire to establish settler colonies depended upon ‘the will of erasure’ or, when that failed, the ‘systematic containment’ of the original inhabitants (Jacobs, 1996, p.105). In the USA and Canada, ‘treaties’ were struck with Indian Nations, who were then forced onto reservations. In Australia, “this erasure was inaugurated by the notion of terra nullius, land unoccupied, which became the foundational fantasy of the Australian colonies” (Jacobs, 1996, p. 105). Spatial segregation of indigenous peoples was the almost universal intent of colonizers, but that intent was only ever imperfectly realized, not least because indigenous peoples were at various times essential as guides for colonists’ explorations of ‘the interior’ and then as labour for farms, stations, mines and construction projects, in times and places of labour shortage. So segregation quickly gave way to more disorderly and permeable spatial arrangements in which individuals or groups found their way into cities and settled areas, occupying what came to be the ‘unseen’ or unincorporated parts of the city, or the fringes of urban areas or country towns (Jacobs, 1996, p.106). The dominant settler culture’s land-based interests were represented by the emerging planning practices of the colonial era, practices which asserted non-indigenous control over Aboriginal domains and concepts of space and place. Research by Jackson (1998) in

Digital Ethnography as Planning Praxis: An Experiment with Film as Social Research, Community Engagement and Policy Dialogue

Stories and storytelling are part of a post-positivist paradigm of inquiry influenced by phenomenology, ethnography and narrative analysis, along with the evolution of visual methods in social research. New information and communication technologies today provide the opportunity to explore storytelling through multimedia, including video/filmmaking, in what we describe as digital ethnography. While there has been a tradition in the planning field of using film for advocacy purposes since the 1920s, we argue for a new direction informed by collaborative planning theory and situational ethics. This paper reports on a three-year, three-stage research project in which we experimented with the use of film as a mode of inquiry, a form of meaning making, a way of knowing, and a means of provoking public dialogue around planning and policy issues (in this case, community development and the social integration of immigrants). We explored the expressive as well as analytical possibilities of film in conducting social research and provoking community engagement and dialogue, taking advantage of the aesthetic and involving dimensions of film as narrative. The research question was a socio-political one: how do immigrants become integrated into a specific social fabric, and how do they acquire a sense of belonging? The site of the research was a culturally diverse neighbourhood in the city of Vancouver, and the specific focus was a place-based local institution, the Collingwood Neighbourhood House. The paper concludes with critical reflections on the use of film in this research project, focusing on ethical issues, power relationships, insider/outsider dilemmas, and reciprocity.

Planning in the Ethno-culturally Diverse City: A Comment

The 21st century is indisputably the century of multicultural cities. It will also be the century of struggle for multiculturalism and against fundamentalism, for tolerance and pluralization and against ‘the absolutism of the Pure’ (Rushdie, 1992, p. 394). This collection of papers addresses some of the practical challenges of living with diversity in cities of migrants. Drawing on examples from Australia, Canada, and the USA, all long-standing countries of immigration, the espoused purpose is to derive practical lessons, learning from the ‘best practices’ of municipal administrative structures. Each of the local stories told here adds something to our understanding of the challenges of planning in the ethno-culturally diverse city, and collectively they enable us to indulge in some broader questions. The starting point for each paper is some variant of the question, what kind of challenge does diversity pose to planning practices? The answers, as I will discuss, vary according to local and national circumstances, that is, according to context. A second question is, what policies, processes, and institutions exist or might need to be invented to deal with the problem of intercultural co-existence in shared space? A third question, touched on by some of the authors, is how to manage difference in ways that are transformative rather than repressive? A fourth question asks about the role of planners in all this, vis-à-vis politicians and locally active citizens’ groups. In the first part of this comment, I reflect on the illumination provided to some of the above questions. I then suggest another set of questions, relating to theory, practice, and the education of planners, which seem to need further attention. What is immediately striking about these papers, when read as a group, is that although each draws on a case study at municipal level, each author feels compelled to fill in important details regarding provincial and national legal and/or institutional frameworks. While the focus of the symposium is an intentional shift away from the national level in attempting to better understand the real, on the ground, dilemmas of integrating immigrants at the spatial scale of the city and neighbourhood, it proves impossible to keep the analysis at this level, because of the profound influence of other levels of government and existing institutional and legal frameworks. Thus, although each case study is drawn from what is regarded as a similar ‘set’, that is cities within countries that have historically been built on immigration, what we learn is that local, provincial, and national differences are of the essence in understanding why outcomes are different in each case. For example, the USA has always had an assimilationist attitude to its integration of immigrants. They are expected to adapt to the host culture as quickly as possible, to melt into the proverbial melting pot and become ‘American’. American political culture has not encouraged or been particularly receptive to the new

The Democratization of Planning: Elusive or Illusory?

Arguments for the democratization of planning began to surface in the 1960s in the UK, North America and Australia. Official reports such as the UK’s Skeffington Report of 1968 advocated more of a voice for ‘the public’ in planning processes (if not decision making); the new conventional wisdom in the USA at that time was for ‘maximum feasible participation’; and various state governments in Australia in the mid-1970s passed legislation requiring that public consultation be built into planning processes. Philosophically, these arguments came from a number of directions. For some, the main concern was the crisis of expert knowledge, the apparent failure of city-building professionals—soon to be referred to derisively as technocrats—to produce environments that gave pleasure to or even met the needs of residents. For others, the main concern was the crisis of democracy itself, in its representative version, and a belief that more direct forms of involvement could solve this perceived crisis. For communitarians, participation and civic engagement are ends in themselves. The active life, as Hannah Arendt argued, is the Good Life. Swedish experiments with workplace democracy in the 1970s drew the attention of radicals worldwide and led to calls for the democratizing of schools, universities, the family, and of course, of place-making. For engaged members of civil society, the demand for a voice in shaping the built environment was in part related to the perceived dual crises of representative democracy and of expert knowledge, but was also concerned more directly with the issues and needs of neglected minorities. Once the participation debates encountered an emergent postmodernism in the 1980s, the discourse shifted to the recognition of difference as a predominant characteristic of cities. The ‘new cultural politics of difference’, first described as such by the African American philosopher and theologian Cornell West, was also a located politics of difference and therefore began to affect the politics of planning as place-making. Group identities became significant politically, and different groups began to demand a say in the shaping of the urban environment, from women to ethnic minorities to gays and lesbians to folks with disabilities. ‘Take back the city’ was the slogan of Italian social movements in the 1970s. In Zurich in the 1980s it was ‘We want the whole city!’ And in Amsterdam in the 1990s it was ‘Save the City’. Each of these movements had common origins in the 1960s theorization of the great French urbanist, Henri Lefebvre, who had written then of the right to the city, le droit á la ville. Speaking from the working-class periphery of Paris, where he taught, Lefebvre was the champion of a working class that was not only economically marginalized but increasingly physically marginalized as well, through processes of gentrification and displacement from the central city. But the right to the city always implied more than the right of access to and use of the central city by those who could not afford to live there. It implied the right to influence the form and development of the city and the meaning of place (that is, the right to a voice) as well as the right to transgress bourgeois forms of urban life and to rebel against the rationalized and alienated patterns of everyday life Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 6, No. 4, 437–441, December 2005

Hype and hope

Melbournes Docklands, 200 hectares of land and water nudging the western edge of the central city, is a redundant industrial site typical of many that have been targeted for redevelopment since the 1980s. But the planning and design process has not been typical, and nor has the outcome thus far. This paper documents this process, drawing out certain themes: the heightened importance of design imagery in the construction of desire and legitimacy; the complex relationship between public and private roles in redevelopment; and the perplexing question of the public interest in relation to such flagship projects. This is a story of a market-driven development intended to be free of both planning interference and public investment, and a belated realization that both are necessary.

Spirituality and the Urban Professions: The Paradox at the Heart of Planning

When I was a child I was told that there were three things we never discuss in public: politics, religion, and money. As a young adult, groping for meaning in life and for meaningful work, I gravitated to the urban/city-building professions as a way of working for social justice, and found myself talking about nothing but politics and money for the next 25 years, since that’s what most urban conflicts seemed to be about. My first book, in 1975, was tellingly titled Cities for Sale, and subtitled Property, Politics and Urban Planning. Religion, on the other hand, never seemed relevant, except in so far as it motivated some individuals—myself not included—to do this social justice work. (My motivation came, and still does, from a secular humanism.) Looking back now, it’s surprising how little I knew about the faith backgrounds, or motivations, of those I’ve worked with or who’ve inspired me. It shows perhaps how well-trained we all were in keeping these matters of faith strictly in the realm of the private. And there were, or seemed to be, good reasons for this. In secular nation states, religion has been viewed as potentially divisive and thus as something that must be kept out of the realm of public policy and governance discourse. But at least in my corner of public policy—cities, urban planning, social policy—this results in an extraordinary paradox. The work of urban, social, community, environmental, and even land-use planning is fundamentally a work of hope, the work of organizing hope (Baum, 1997). And this work often takes place in the face of despair, as Adrienne Rich’s poem tells us. But where does this hope come from, if not from some kind of faith? Hence I must ask myself, and my profession: are we not missing something important by not talking about this thing at the heart of planning that marks us all as at least closet utopians? The faith at the heart of planning is very simple. It’s our faith in humanity, in ourselves as social beings, in the presence of the human spirit and the possibility of realizing/bringing into being the best of what it means to be human. (Thus when Adrienne Rich asks what would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 7, No. 1, 65–97, March 2006