The Intersection of Planning,Urban Agriculture,and Food Justice: A Review of the Literature

Problem, research strategy, and findings: We draw on a multidisciplinary body of research to consider how planning for urban agriculture can foster food justice by benefitting socioeconomically disadvantaged residents. The potential social benefits of urban agriculture include increased access to food, positive health impacts, skill building, community development, and connections to broader social change efforts. The literature suggests, however, caution in automatically conflating urban agriculture’s social benefits with the goals of food justice. Urban agriculture may reinforce and deepen societal inequities by benefitting better resourced organizations and the propertied class and contributing to the displacement of lower-income households. The precariousness of land access for urban agriculture is another limitation, particularly for disadvantaged communities. Planners have recently begun to pay increased attention to urban agriculture but should more explicitly support the goals of food justice in their urban agriculture policies and programs.

Takeaway for practice: We suggest several key strategies for planners to more explicitly orient their urban agriculture efforts to support food justice, including prioritizing urban agriculture in long-term planning efforts, developing mutually respectful relationships with food justice organizations and urban agriculture participants from diverse backgrounds, targeting city investments in urban agriculture to benefit historically disadvantaged communities, increasing the amount of land permanently available for urban agriculture, and confronting the threats of gentrification and displacement from urban agriculture. We demonstrate how the city of Seattle (WA) used an equity lens in all of its programs to shift its urban agriculture planning to more explicitly foster food justice, providing clear examples for other cities.     

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0: Four Reasons Why AICP Needs an Open Data Ethic

Problem, research strategy, and ­findings: Computing and digital technologies have changed how data are created, analyzed, and communicated. The American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) Code of Ethics has no guidelines for planners working with emerging urban informatics. Here we make a theoretical argument based on the premise of epistemic justice: The idea that how planners collect, manage, disseminate, and use data all bear on justice in democratic decision making about cities.

Four reasons exist for planners to prioritize open data in our formal code of ethics. First, emerging Big Data from urban informatics have a steep learning curve that potentially exacerbates the gaps in power and political voice between experts and nonexperts. Second, algorithms have come to govern an increasing portion of human life and cities, and planners should ideally be enabling residents in their ability to scrutinize, understand, and challenge managerial algorithms that have become prevalent in e-government. Third, urban informatics potentially alter the economic and community development of cities and the urban experience. Fourth and finally, ubiquitous data sensing, new consumer tracking capabilities, obscure and readily skipped terms of use agreements, and rapidly changing technologies make cities into potentially coercive data collection environments.

Takeaway for practice: Substantial barriers exist to open data ethics in an information economy where exclusive access to data can drive profits. Emerging data systems can consolidate power in the hands of experts and large private firms to the exclusion of citizens and small, independent firms. Open data and code vitiates those problems to a limited degree, and AICP could benefit practitioners by adopting an open data ethic.     

Planning for Happy Neighborhoods

Problem, research strategy, and findings: There is increasing interest in planning for healthy communities, but little is known about how planners can affect mental health and wellbeing in neighborhoods, although much is known about how planners can affect physical health through neighborhood design. In this review essay, we draw lessons from a cross-disciplinary set of studies to reveal how the neighborhood built environment may affect one aspect of residents' wellbeing: happiness. Providing residents access to open, natural, and green space may directly increase their happiness. Incorporating design features that allow for social interaction and safety also may promote residents' happiness.

Takeaway for practice: Planners have the capacity to contribute to greater opportunities for happiness in neighborhoods. Strategies include integrating happiness-related indicators into health impact assessments and employing a new, participatory neighborhood planning process, the Sustainability Through Happiness Framework.     

Special Ethical Considerations for Planners in Private Practice

Problem, research strategy, and ­findings: Planners must constantly consider the ethics of their professional behavior, yet few studies have specifically investigated the ethical landscape for those planners working in private practice, assuming that all members of the profession are subject to similar ethical considerations. We investigate the particular ethical considerations faced by planners in private practice by interviewing owners of 10 planning consulting firms. Our sample size is very small and limited to three states, which limits the generalizability of the study. We find that private practice planners routinely experience ethical conflicts related to disclosure of information, balancing uneven benefits among stakeholders, interests of the client, and ethics of firm competition. Alhough planners mostly navigate everyday ethical concerns with confidence, they face ethical challenges in managing client relationships when values conflict, and in competing with other firms.

Takeaway for practice: We find that challenging ethical situations arise for private sector planners on a routine basis. The planners we interview feel that they are able to identify ethical pitfalls and choose the correct course of action, but more research is needed to understand the scope and nature of private practice ethical challenges, and to determine whether more education or enforcement would be effective solutions to between-firm conflicts.     

Metropolitan Transportation Planning: Lessons From the Past,Institutions for the Future

Problem, research strategy, and findings: There are more than 400 U.S. metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) overseeing multiple transportation projects totaling billions of dollars, yet these crucial organizations and their history and current role are generally unknown or confusing to many planning practitioners and scholars. MPOs face major challenges in developing meaningful long-range regional transportation plans, challenges rooted in their history that planners should understand as they grapple with metropolitan planning efforts. MPOs may approve projects and their funding, but disparate agencies and often competitive local governments control budgets and actually build projects. MPOs, moreover, do not fully represent all regional interests and have no control over the local land use decisions that would support less autocentric communities and human-powered modes. I provide a metareview of the history of regional transportation planning and the MPOs responsible for it, describing U.S. metropolitan transportation planning from the early 20th century. Federal legislation in the 1960s first suggested a regional forum for conversations about metropolitan transportation. Federal legislation in subsequent decades made incremental if incomplete progress toward creating a meaningful regional forum, adapting institutions and practices to increase stakeholder involvement as well as the scope of transport planning, yet MPOs have multiple limitations that planners can address.

Takeaway for practice: History suggests that MPOs can be a force for regional change. Planners and policymakers could anchor future reforms to MPOs’ existing legal and administrative frameworks. Planners should revisit the membership and voting structures of MPO boards to ensure better stakeholder representation and permit some MPOs to generate and direct transportation funds at the local level.     

Regulatory Practices of Urban Agriculture: A Connection to Planning and Policy

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Municipalities across the United States are gradually recognizing urban agriculture as an integral part of planning, land use, and zoning ordinances. We review the literature on the regulation of urban agriculture at a moment when policy and regulatory vacuums exist and the acceptance and integration of urban agriculture is uneven. We review the current regulatory practices of 40 metropolitan and 40 micropolitan municipalities in the 4 U.S. Census regions. We find that municipalities are filling policy vacuums by adopting enabling ordinances (zoning ordinances, land use designations, resolutions), regulations on urban agriculture production (backyard animals, built structures, practitioner responsibility), and fiscal policy instruments (restrictions on sales of agricultural products, tax abatement, urban agriculture fees). Our findings support local planning practitioners in filling regulatory gaps, practitioners of urban agriculture in seeking how it’s done elsewhere, and researchers in discerning new applied and basic research projects. We identify 3 principal knowledge gaps: Planners need a complete typology of regulatory possibilities; a better understanding of how local, state, and federal legislations constrain or enable urban agriculture; and empirical evidence of the economic, social, and environmental impacts of urban agriculture.

Takeaway for practice: Planners should assess existing urban agricultural practices and consider which regulatory frameworks best support multiple local goals, incorporating a concern with urban agriculture into ongoing activities, deploying existing or innovative land use tools, facilitating institutional cooperation, and promoting inclusive decision making and community engagement.     

Navigating Statistical Uncertainty: How Urban and Regional Planners Understand and Work With American Community Survey (ACS) Data for Guiding Policy

Problem, research strategy, and findings: The American Community Survey (ACS) is a crucial source of socio­demographic data for planners. Since ACS data are estimates rather than actual counts, they contain a degree of statistical uncertainty—referred to as margin of error (MOE)—that planners must navigate when using these data. The statistical uncertainty is magnified when one is working with data for small areas or subgroups of the population or cross-tabulating demographic characteristics. We interviewed (n = 7) and surveyed (n = 200) planners and find that many do not understand the statistical uncertainty in ACS data, find it difficult to communicate statistical uncertainty to stakeholders, and avoid reporting MOEs altogether. These practices may conflict with planners’ ethical obligations under the AICP Code of Ethics to disclose information in a clear and direct way.

Takeaway for practice: We argue that the planning academy should change its curriculum requirements and that the profession should improve professional development training to ensure planners understand data uncertainty and convey it to users. We suggest planners follow 5 guidelines when using ACS data: Report MOEs, indicate when they are not reporting MOEs, provide context for the level of statistical reliability, consider alternatives for reducing statistical uncertainty, and always conduct statistical tests when comparing ACS estimates.     

Do Practicing Planners Value Plan Quality? Insights From a Survey of Planning Professionals in Ontario,Canada

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Researchers have developed conceptualconsensus on core plan characteristics that contribute to plan quality, but rarely assess how practitioners view plan quality. I explore how Canadian planners view the characteristics thought to create quality plans. I asked planners in 290 municipalities across southern Ontario (Canada) their view of the importance of plan quality and asked that they identify additional plan quality characteristics, rate the infl uence of various plan characteristics, and explain why they omitted certain characteristics in their offi cial plans. I find that practitioners valued quality plans because they facilitate implementation and help inspire the community while adding credibility and legitimacy to planning processes and the planning profession. Planners did not value all plan elements equally; they felt that clear and enforceable polices were crucial, but that it was less important to report participation in plan preparation or discuss monitoring or interorganizational cooperation in the offi cial plan. Planners did not always include important plan quality elements in their offi cial plans because they lacked suffi cient resources to prepare comprehensive plans and rarely signifi – cantly updated older plans. These case study findings may not be generalizable to other jurisdictions in Canada or internationally, but still offer useful insights.

Takeaway for practice: Scholars should ensure that planning practitioners have a key role in shaping understanding of plan quality. Academics and practitioners should work together to create refl ective practitioners who use plan quality characteristics to guide them as they create or update plans. The profession needs to better train current and future planners on how to prepare and evaluate quality plans through improvements in planning curricula and professional development courses offered by the American Planning Association and the Canadian Institute of Planners.     

How to Bid Better for the Olympics: A Participatory Mega-Event Planning Strategy for Local Legacies

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Several cities have canceled their Olympic bids in recent years because of local protests and referenda. Bidding cities now face a new political reality as they debate whether a bid is in the best interests of local stakeholders. We present a case study of Boston's (MA) ultimately unsuccessful bid to be the U.S. city selected to host the 2024 Olympic Games. Boston 2024, a nonprofit organization, prepared 2 sequential bids. We ask whether, how, and why Boston 2024 changed its planning approach from the 1st to the 2nd bid to respond to significant protests over its failure to meaningfully involve stakeholders, identify specific legacies, and provide accurate cost details. Our findings are limited by our focus on a single case, the small number of interviewees, and the constraints of ethnographic work. Boston 2024 shifted from an elite-driven process to a more inclusive one, from making generic claims about the impact of hosting the Games to describing local legacies, and from opaque budgets to transparent ones. Boston 2024 did not involve city planners in meaningful ways or engage fully with opponents. These changes were thus not sufficient to overcome substantial local distrust and opposition.

Takeaway for practice: Cities considering mega-event bids should encourage a fully participatory planning process that provides genuine local legacies and is transparent about costs and who will bear overruns. City planners would contribute significantly to bid planning that meets these objectives. Cities should also pressure Olympic organizations to make supportive changes in their selection requirements.     

Community Plan Making in the Face of Ethnic Conflict in Israel: Lessons for Collaborative Planning Processes

Problem, research strategy, and findings: I focus on community plan making in Israel in the face of ethnic conflict, examining ways in which community-level planning processes are embedded into larger decision systems and how attention to multiscale, institutional linkages and parallel processes can determine the success of collaborative planning efforts. I present a community development case about a dispute over a local Bedouin land claim in a Jewish community in northern Israel, mediated over more than a decade. My research is based on a longitudinal 12-year case study of this planning dispute. There were three phases to the plan making: facilitated strategic plan development, facilitated collaborative decision making, and direct negotiations. Community planning is inevitably a lengthy endeavor, embedded in concentric decision contexts. The first 10 years of the dispute were devoted to achieving shared agreements among community members at the table, ignoring the interfacing and partnerships with state, national, or other nonlocal stakeholders. Only in the last two years did the community finally forge these relationships and reach an understanding of the impacts that parallel processes (occurring outside of the community) would have on the local dispute, leading to a community plan and resolution.

Takeaway for practice: Community planning agendas must consider the interests of all relevant stakeholders, paying attention to multiscale, nonlocal players. Planners need to maintain and understand the links to and knowledge of other ongoing planning processes to understand how they might affect the community plan-making process at hand. Ethnic conflict cannot be ignored. Continuing with the business of community planning in the face of ethnic conflict in some ways helps minimize the importance of the ethnic dispute.     

Online Participatory Technologies: Opportunities and Challenges for Enriching Participatory Planning

Problem, research strategy, and ­findings: Planning organizations are increasingly using online technologies for public engagement, but there is dispute about their value in enriching public engagement. We explore an interdisciplinary literature on the capability of online participatory tools (OPTs) to respond to the goals of participatory planning. Proponents argue that OPTs can help attract more citizens, engage a more diverse population, disseminate information more broadly, gather local knowledge, and facilitate consensus building. Skeptics argue that OPTs can intensify social injustice and an unequal distribution of power as well as create or exacerbate privacy, security, and data management issues. We critically examine the pros and cons of OPTs, assess their potential role in facilitating public engagement, and provide guidelines for their implementation. These results are time sensitive because of the rapidly changing environment of digital technologies.

Takeaway for practice: There are still many unresolved questions about the benefits of OPTs. Research suggests that they can at times be effective in addressing goals of public participation, such as inclusive planning, consensus building, learning from local knowledge, and mobilizing social action. Their effectiveness depends significantly on implementation, however. Integrating online participation strategies with the overall participation process and other digital infrastructures within the organization may foster their effectiveness. Planners collaborating with formal or informal learning networks or related professionals can facilitate the effective use of OPTs within their own organizations. Additional information is needed on which OPTs are most appropriate in which planning environments, how well OPTs meet a range of major participatory objectives, how to make trade-offs between OPTs and face-to-face methods, and the best managerial structures for ensuring their effective use.     

Planning Experience and Planners’ Ethics

Problem, research strategy, and ­findings: Ethical considerations are integral to most aspects of planning, but the bases of planners’ ethical decisions are not well understood. In fact, there has been no follow-up to Elizabeth Howe and Jerome Kaufman’s original 1979 survey of the ethics of American planners in this journal (45(3), 243–255). Our research evaluates the differences in planning roles and planners’ ethical perspectives since then. In their study, Howe and Kaufman use hypothetical scenarios to determine which of three roles planners play: technician, politician, or a hybrid. They also evaluate how the role that planners assume affects their ethical views. Our research uses similar scenarios to evaluate these relationships in contemporary planning practice while simultaneously evaluating the influence of professional experience on the ethical bases of those choices. We confirm many of Howe and Kaufman’s findings, but first we find that today’s planners assume different roles than they did in the mid-1970s, conforming more often to a technical role and less to a political or hybrid role. Second, today’s planners tend to make virtue-based choices when concerned with ideological and legal issues, but revert to rule-based or utilitarian choices when faced with the dissemination and quality of information and segments of the population receiving special advantages. Finally, we find that planners, at all stages in their careers, maintain a mixture of virtue- and rule-based ethical choices while affirming the profession’s core values (as represented in the 2009 AICP Code).

Takeaway for practice: The vast majority of practicing planners in our sample (80%) use the AICP Code of Ethics in response to our hypothetical scenarios. At the same time, self-interested responses were rarely made. These findings reaffirm the code’s value to the profession.     

Using Photography to Assess Housing Damage and Rebuilding Progress for Disaster Recovery Planning

Problem, research strategy, and findings: U.S. communities rarely plan for recovery after a disaster, but planners have the skills to help communities redevelop, particularly in rebuilding housing, a key to community recovery. Planners, however, need appropriate and timely data on initial damage and rebuilding over time to apply for available funding, determine needs for temporary housing, address equity issues, develop appropriate policy interventions, track progress, and communicate transparently with all stakeholders. There is no accepted cost-effective and systematic method of providing those data. We developed a scalable method in which we photograph and assess the extent of home damage and rebuilding by reorienting existing damage assessment methods to provide data that can be linked to GIS and other local data to meet planning needs. We test the utility of our approach in West (TX), the site of a catastrophic fertilizer facility explosion in 2013. We compare our damage assessments to county property tax reappraisals after the disaster, finding that our approach is more accurate, generally identifying less damage and greater rebuilding than the county assumed. We conclude that our method improves on windshield surveys and other suggested methods of collecting damage and rebuilding data; it can provide efficient assessments of damage and rebuilding in technological disasters.

Takeaway for practice: We created a simple and cost-effective method of assessing initial damage to homes after a disaster and of measuring the extent of rebuilding. This method provides photos and easy-to-understand data that planners can use to meet multiple reporting requirements, to reassess redevelopment strategies, and to report progress to stakeholders.     

Visioning diversity: Planning Vancouver's multicultural communities

The roles and responsibilities of planners in managing culturally diverse cities are beginning to be recognized. “Visioning”, as planners have used it in recent years, has the potential to help realize “multicultural planning” insofar as it involves broad public parti-cipation and represents diverse interests. How the City of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada has involved ethno-cultural groups through a visioning process is examined. Information for this study was gathered through a critical review of planning documents related to Vancouver's “Community Visions Program” and key informant interviews with staff and community participants, including those of visible minority background. Results indicate that visioning, as it has been used in Vancouver, is a useful technique in carrying out multicultural planning. However, there appears to be more general satisfaction with the inclusive visioning process than with the end results. If planners are serious about engaging in a multicultural planning process, they will need to guarantee some tangible results that can be seen in the community and that acknowledge and respect cultural diversity.

“No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.” (Mahatma Gandhi)     

When Tourists Move In: How Should Urban Planners Respond to Airbnb?

Problem, research strategy, and findings: The online accommodation platform Airbnb has expanded globally, raising substantial planning and regulatory concerns. We ask whether Airbnb rentals generate significant neighborhood impacts like noise, congestion, and competition for parking; reduce the permanent rental housing supply and increase rental prices; or provide income opportunities that help “hosts” afford their own housing. We focus on Sydney, the largest region in Australia with 4.4 million people in 28 individual municipalities, which has experienced both rapidly rising housing costs and exponential growth in Airbnb listings since 2011. Airbnb’s growth has raised concerns serious enough to result in a formal Parliamentary Inquiry by the state of New South Wales. We analyze stakeholder submissions to this inquiry and review local planning regulations, Airbnb listings data, and housing market and census statistics. We find that online homesharing platforms for visitor accommodations blur traditional boundaries between residential and tourist areas so Airbnb listings may fall outside of existing land use regulations or evade detection until neighbors complain. Our findings are constrained by the difficulties of monitoring online operations and the rapid changes in the industry.

Takeaway for practice: Planners and policymakers in cities with increasing numbers of Airbnb rentals need to review how well local planning controls manage the neighborhood nuisances, traffic, and parking problems that may be associated with them while acting to protect the permanent rental housing supply. Local planners need to ensure that zoning and residential development controls distinguish between different forms of short-term Airbnb accommodation listings and their potential impacts on neighborhoods and housing markets.     

Motivations and Strategies for Bicycle Planning in Rural,Suburban, and Low-Density Communities: The Need for New Best Practices

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Many planners view bicycles as a critical component of sustainable urban transportation, but assumptions about cycling derived from urban places may not translate to the social, political, and built environment contexts outside of cities. Our study focuses on the motivations and strategies that rural, small, and low-density (RSLD) communities have for investing in bicycle systems; our goal was to learn what kind of technical assistance such communities might need to realize their cycling goals. We conducted in-depth interviews in 10 communities that received grants from a Kaiser Permanente program in Colorado to increase cycling.

Takeaway for practice: These 10 cases present a conflict between a recreational or quality-of-life approach to increasing cycling in RSLD communities and a transportation approach more common in urban areas, which stresses the use of cycling to supplement or replace auto travel for purposive trips. Most RSLD cities did not have the political or cultural support to plan for and begin constructing major cycling infrastructure for either recreational or transportation cycling. Most need best practices to educate local stakeholders on the value of cycling to support economic development, increase tourism, and improve property values without significantly reducing auto access. Planners in RSLD places also need special guidance for addressing the needs of riders with diverse environmental values and those from disadvantaged communities.     

Crowdsourcing Bike Share Station Locations

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Planners increasingly involve stakeholders in co-producing vital planning information by crowdsourcing data using online map-based commenting platforms. Few studies, however, investigate the role and impact of such online platforms on planning outcomes. We evaluate the impact of participant input via a public participation geographic information system (PPGIS), a platform to suggest the placement of new bike share stations in New York City (NY) and Chicago (IL). We conducted 2 analyses to evaluate how close planners built new bike share stations to those suggested on PPGIS platforms. According to our proximity analysis, only a small percentage of built stations were within 100 feet (30?m) of suggested stations, but our geospatial analysis showed a substantial clustering of suggested and built stations in both cities that was not likely due to random distribution. We found that the PPGIS platforms have great promise for creating genuine co-production of planning knowledge and insights and that system planners did take account of the suggestions offered online. We did not, however, interview planners in either system, and both cities may be atypical, as is bike share planning; moreover, multiple factors influence where bike stations can be located, so not all suggested stations could be built.

Takeaway for practice: Planners can use PPGIS and similar platforms to help stakeholders learn by doing and to increase their own local knowledge to improve planning outcomes. Planners should work to develop better online participatory systems and to allow stakeholders to provide more and better data, continuing to evaluate PPGIS efforts to improve the transparency and legitimacy of online public involvement processes.     

Incentivize It and They Will Come? How Some of the Busiest U.S. Airports Are Building Air Service With Incentive Programs

Problem, research strategy, and findings: In the 1990s, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) prohibited airport sponsors (local authorities managing airports) from diverting airport revenue to general municipal budgets and allowed the busiest airports to create air service incentive programs (ASIPs) to induce airlines to launch new air service. These incentive programs have not been evaluated, although planners need information on their long-term effectiveness. Few data, however, are available on ASIP programs; I created a database to identify which airports have ASIPs, which new airline services received incentives, and the services that continued after incentives ended. I find that 26 of 44 airports with ASIPs that recruited new routes spent $171.5 million combined between 2012 and the first quarter of 2015, 40% on routes that were not retained when the incentive ended. The busiest airports in the largest cities with growing populations, relatively independent of local economic status, were most able to recruit and retain new airline services. Small and medium airports, particularly in stagnant areas, were not able to recruit and retain new air services.

Takeaway for practice: The FAA should require airport sponsors to submit comprehensive information on their ASIP programs—the routes recruited and retained, as well as detailed estimates of the costs and benefits of each route—to provide planners with needed information. The FAA also should loosen the constraints on the use of non-aeronautical airport revenues so that communities can choose between spending on incentives to increase air service and other programs to increase local economic development.     

Sustaining the Commons: The Coercive to Cooperative,Resilient, and Adaptive Nature of State Comprehensive Water Planning Legislation

Problem, research strategy, and findings: States need guidance to adopt comprehensive water planning legislation that can affect urban planning and built form. Current state legislation, however, may not yet incorporate emerging water resource paradigms that promote sustainable water management at the state and substate levels. Planners can improve existing state legislation, but need guidance on incorporating the latest thinking on resilience, adaptive capacity, and sustainable commons management. I identify the 26 states with comprehensive water planning legislation, and analyze that legislation using a new assessment tool that builds on the coercive versus cooperative metric (CvCA). I determine where each state's water planning legislation falls on a coercive versus cooperative spectrum, and the extent to which each state's legislation incorporates sustainable commons management (SCM) and social–ecological resilience (SER) mechanisms and attributes. Most of the 26 states with comprehensive water planning legislation balance coercive and cooperative approaches to achieve state and substate water plans, although research suggests that planning is most effective when legislation is more cooperative. Moreover, most have not codified SCM and SER mechanisms into state water planning legislation, suggesting that the plans that follow may lack the adaptive capacity to increase the resilience of the water system. Research limitations include the single data source and potential interpretive coding bias.

Takeaway for practice: Planners can advocate for new or improved state water legislation that incorporates integral adaptive and resiliency concepts, encouraging states to include the fundamental features of the social–ecological system that lead to better water management.