Neighborhood Planning as Collaborative Democratic Design

Problem: Historically, neighborhood participation has lapsed into NIMBYism or has not been especially effective at long-term, inclusive, and integrative planning.

Purpose: I aim to describe and analyze an example of how local governments can function as civic enablers and capacity builders for collaborative and accountable planning among neighborhood stakeholders and city government.

Methods: This is a case study of Seattle's neighborhood planning approach in the 1990s based on semistructured interviews with 33 current and former planners, other officials, and neighborhood activists, and review of a broad selection of neighborhood plans and other planning documents and newspaper coverage of the planning process.

Results and conclusions: The city of Seattle developed a set of tools and resources to empower local citizens in the planning process while also holding them accountable for actions consistent with specified broad values and planning targets. This, together with the city's substantial investment in neighborhood planning staff, who served as relational organizers and intermediaries of trust, was critical to the success of neighborhood planning and to the emergence of a collaborative governance culture among highly diverse and often contentious community associations, business interests, city departments, and the city council.

Takeaway for practice: Diverse neighborhoods can find common ground and make positive progress on planning to address shared citywide concerns. However, they need staff assistance to do this. Neighborhood planners can play this role, but only if cities fund them to do this time-consuming work and provide institutional support and guidance.     

Neighborhoods of Affinity

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Planners have traditionally focused on how the physical characteristics of neighborhoods influence people's activity and travel -patterns, overlooking an equally important factor: the social nature of neighborhoods. We focus on one kind of neighborhood characterized by strong social ties: gay and lesbian -neighborhoods of affinity. Gay men living in a neighborhood of affinity—those with a high percentage of coupled gays and lesbians—take shorter work and non-work trips. The mix of local activity sites and social connections results in some gay men conducting a substantial share of their lives within these neighborhoods and nearby. These results are independent of the design or density of the neighborhood. We do not, however, find similar results for lesbians, perhaps because they have less residential mobility.

Takeaway for practice: Gay and lesbian neighborhoods of affinity represent the kinds of supportive communities where local travel is possible for many activities, behavior that planners seek with so many public policies. Planners must explore how the social and physical environments of neighborhoods interact with one another when they focus on the impacts of physical design and infrastructure on community outcomes.

Research support: None.     

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.     

School Siting

Problem: The United States is embarking on an unprecedented era of school construction even as debate continues over where schools should be located and how much land they should occupy.

Purpose: My three goals for this study were to trace the evolution of school siting standards, to explain the factors currently influencing school facility location decisions, and to identify what local and regional planners could contribute to school siting decisions.

Methods: I reviewed the land use planning and educational facilities literatures on school siting and conducted in-depth interviews with school facility planners from 10 counties in Maryland and northern Virginia to assess their perspectives on the school planning process.

Results and conclusions: I discovered that different groups use very different definitions of community school. Smart growth proponents advocate community schools that are small and intimately linked to neighborhoods, while school facility planners expect community schools to meet the needs of entire localities. I recommend that individual communities consider the tradeoffs associated with different school sizes and make choices that meet local preferences for locations within walking distance of students, potential for sports fields, school design, and connections to neighborhoods. State school construction and siting policies should support flexibility for localities.

Takeaway for practice: Local and regional planners should work with school facility planners to conduct exercises and charettes to help each community determine how to realize its own vision of community schools.

Research support: The School of Architecture at the University of Virginia and the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill supported this research.     

The Migrant Metropolis and American Planning

Problem: Immigration poses various problems for U.S. cities and regions, and the roles planners should play in migrant communities are not clear.

Purpose: I consider how practitioners and scholars have understood and addressed the planning challenges and opportunities presented by the major migrations of ethnic minorities to U.S. cities and regions over the past century.

Methods: I trace discussions of planning and migration at professional planning conferences over the past century and survey planning scholarship and practice related to immigration and migrant communities in three principal eras: early 20th century southern and eastern European immigration; the mid-century internal migrations of African Americans and Puerto Ricans; and immigration in the late 20th and early 21st century.

Results and conclusions: Over the past century, immigration has had physical, economic, and social effects on people and places that are legitimate concerns of urban planners. Yet, the planning profession has had an ambiguous and often ambivalent relationship with migrant communities and has struggled to define specific roles for planners within those communities while social workers and other community and economic development practitioners played larger roles. Planning scholars have not paid as much attention to migrants' adaptation and mobility in U.S. society or their impacts on receiving communities, labor markets, housing, and congestion as have other scholars and urbanists.

Takeaway for practice: Planners have engaged with migrants in a variety of ways. Understanding this history provides context for contemporary debates about immigration and helps frame challenges and opportunities in migrant and receiving communities as planning problems.

Research support: None.     

NEIGHBORHOOD HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

Neighborhood and homeowners associations represent two forms of neighborhood governance in the United States, and these residential community associations (RCAs) aid in neighborhood development. In this article, I make the case that RCAs address a hierarchy of needs in the development of the neighborhood. I use a mixed methods approach with surveys and elite interviews of neighborhood and homeowners association presidents in Tallahassee, Florida, to understand what issues and activities are important for their neighborhoods and organizations. With this information, I create a neighborhood hierarchy of needs of issues and organizational needs neighborhoods address in their existence and development. Lower order needs of neighborhoods and neighborhood organizations include addressing crime, engaging in community‐building activities, improving aesthetics, and becoming more formally organized. Higher order needs include providing public goods and commons goods, working with local government on planning projects, hiring a professional staff, and enforcing neighborhood rules and regulations. Pursuing these needs leads to the highest order need in the hierarchy—improving property values. I find that homeowners associations operate at higher levels in the hierarchy of needs due to their legally defined structures and responsibilities established at their inception.     

Neighborhood Air Quality,Respiratory Health,and Vulnerable Populations in Compact and Sprawled Regions

Problem: Recently, public health researchers have argued that infill development and sprawl reduction may improve respiratory outcomes for urban residents, largely by reducing vehicle travel and its attendant mobile-source emissions. But infill can also increase the number of residents exposed to poor air quality within central cities. Aside from emissions studies, planners have little information on the connections between urban form, ambient pollutant levels, and human exposures or how infill changes these.

Purpose: We examined neighborhood exposures in 80 metropolitan areas in the United States to address whether neighborhood-level air quality outcomes are better in compact regions than in sprawled regions.

Methods: We used multilevel regression models to find the empirical relationship between a measure of regional urban form and neighborhood air quality outcomes.

Results and conclusions: Ozone concentrations are significantly lower in compact regions, but ozone exposures in neighborhoods are higher in compact regions. Fine particulate concentrations do not correlate significantly with regional compactness, but fine particulate exposures in neighborhoods are also higher in compact regions. Exposures to both ozone and fine particulates are also higher in neighborhoods with high proportions of African Americans, Asian ethnic minorities, and poor households.

Takeaway for practice: Compact development and infill do not solve air quality problems in all regions or for all residents of a given region. Planners should take differences in neighborhood air quality and human exposure into account when planning for new compact developments rather than just focusing on emissions reductions.

Research support: This project was supported by a grant from the ShenAir Institute at James Madison University and by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.     

Towards democratic planning? Negotiating change in St Kilda,Melbourne

Are planners ‘dealmakers’ caught up in selling urban areas to the highest bidder, or are they negotiators concerned to maintain democratic planning and social diversity in areas that are subject to gentrification? This paper explores this question through the example of two sites in St Kilda, Melbourne. The sites highlight planning strategies used at the local government level by planners who are attempting to negotiate change and to maintain the social and cultural diversity of the area. The first example illustrates the processes of ‘democratic planning’ where planners question what is ‘legitimate’ and draw on discourses of local need. The second example illustrates the problems of co‐opting local culture within a process of democratic planning that is based on community consultation. Together, the examples illustrate the need for tighter local government policies, including stricter policies about the use of developer contributions, and a closer and more critical focus on the term ‘community consultation’, if democratic planning is to be achieved.     

NEIGHBORHOOD ATTACHMENT,SOCIAL CAPITAL BUILDING,AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION: A CASE STUDY OF LOW‐ AND MODERATE‐INCOME RESIDENTS OF WATERLOO,IOWA

ABSTRACT: This case study examines the importance of neighborhood identity and engagement in place‐based social networks within the neighborhood in fostering and stimulating neighborhood‐based participation in the urban political process. Scholars concerned with civic engagement have argued that there is a strong link between the informal ties known as “social capital” and citizen engagement in the larger community. If this linkage can be shown to exist in the neighborhood setting, then it can provide guidance to both scholars and practitioners in utilizing informal, place‐based networks to empower disadvantaged neighborhoods. Evidence presented in this essay, based on interviews with a representative sample of neighborhood residents in the small industrial city of Waterloo, Iowa, suggests that strong informal networks of social capital exist within neighborhoods, but that persons who are more strongly engaged in these networks are not necessarily more involved in the efforts of formal neighborhood associations. However, individuals who are involved in these formal associations are much more likely to be connected to the local and national political systems through voting and other forms of participation.     

Free Time Activities and Quality of Urban Life

The citizen participation movement of the 1960's, as embodied in the anti-poverty program, opened new opportunities for the development of working relationships between professional planners and low-income neighborhood residents. A Pittsburgh study on resident assessments of conditions in anti-poverty program neighborhoods suggests that these relationships can offer false assurances of democracy to planners who prefer to operate with popular sanction. On the basis of much supportive evidence, planners and citizen participants in Pittsburgh's anti-poverty program were highly critical of existing neighborhood conditions. However, the results of a survey of over 6,000 residents indicate that these views were not shared by the vast majority of the people living in the neighborhoods. This discrepancy between the high level of dissatisfaction expressed by a relatively small number of citizen participants and the apparent contentment of their neighbors highlights the role of activist minorities in the citizen participation movement—a phenomenon that deserves careful evaluation by planners seeking to legitimate their low-income neighborhood activities through resident involvement.     

State of the Art in Planning for College and University Campuses: Site Planning and Beyond

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Colleges and universities have been planning their campuses for centuries, yet scholars have conducted little empirical research regarding the nature of campus planning in the United States. We review recent scholarship on campus planning, discovering that it is dominated by case studies (sometimes in edited collections) and some comparative studies. In this review we organize the literature into 3 geographic scales: the campus per se (or campus park), the campus–­community interface, and the larger campus district. The literature addresses 5 topics: land use, design, sustainability, economic development, and collaboration. Most of the studies focus on research-oriented universities in metropolitan locations. The literature emphasizes how campus master planning can support student learning, how design and building guidelines can make a campus more cohesive, and how campuses are adopting sustainable development and operations. At the campus–­community interface, the research documents how some colleges and universities have expanded beyond their traditional boundaries, invested in local economic development, and worked with their communities to improve transportation and reduce environmental impacts. Studies of campus district planning emphasize community adoption of development regulations and code enforcement procedures to reduce the impact of students living in nearby neighborhoods. The literature stresses the importance of partnerships, collaboration, and enhanced communications between the university and the community.

Takeaway for practice: University planners should continue to focus on site design that reinforces student learning and environmental sustainability and on community interface planning that supports economic development and reduces environmental impacts. City planners should expand campus district planning to address a broad array of issues and opportunities. Both university and city planners should facilitate collaboration between their institutions. Scholars should study a wide range of colleges and universities, including 2-year as well as 4-year institutions and those in nonurban settings.     

Vernacular Culture and Urban Economic Development: Thinking Outside the (Big) Box

Problem: This article addresses the increasing homogeneity of urban commercial areas and the loss of local culture associated with this trend. It seeks to identify strategies that build effectively on vernacular culture as an asset in neighborhood development.

Purpose: We aim to identify tools that advance the cultural preservation approach to urban economic development and to describe instances in which planners and neighborhood groups have applied these tools successfully.

Methods: We completed a wide-ranging literature review to identify the characteristics of places that have employed cultural preservation approaches and conducted six case studies involving 43 interviews in five cities.

Results and conclusions: Our interviews and case studies showed us that there are at least three types of anchors in neighborhoods with strong vernacular culture: 1) markets; 2) ethnic areas and heritage sites; 3) and arts-and-culture venues and districts. Although the balance between preservation and development will be different in each place, we did cull some widely applicable lessons learned while conducting our fieldwork: a) involve residents; b) find assets in local needs; c) transfer lessons rather than replicating others' work; d) create opportunities for ownership; e) if it doesn't exist, invent it; and f) balance culture and commerce. Our analysis also suggests that a neighborhood wishing to pursue a neighborhood development strategy based on vernacular culture should have at least one of the anchors listed above and strong, community-based organizations.

Takeaway for practice: We argue that it is both possible and preferable to advance an urban economic development strategy based on the local cultural assets that exist in urban neighborhoods. Our research illustrates different paths that places have taken to advance this kind of strategy and provides several ways for local planners and policymakers to integrate the maintenance of vernacular culture into their larger economic development plans.

Research support: Our research was supported by the Fannie Mae Foundation.     

Greening the Rust Belt: A Green Infrastructure Model for Right Sizing America's Shrinking Cities

Problem: Existing planning and redevelopment models do not offer a holistic approach for addressing the challenges vacant and abandoned properties create in America's older industrial cities, but these shrinking cities possess opportunities to undertake citywide greening strategies that convert such vacant properties to community assets.

Purpose: We define strategies shrinking cities can use to convert vacant properties to valuable green infrastructure to revitalize urban environments, empower community residents, and stabilize dysfunctional real estate markets. To do this we examine shrinking cities and their vacant property challenges; identify the benefits of urban greening; explore the policies, obstacles, and promise of a green infrastructure initiative; and discuss vacant property reclamation programs and policies that would form the nucleus of a model green infrastructure right-sizing initiative designed to stabilize the communities with the greatest level of abandonment.

Methods: We draw our conclusions based on fieldwork, practitioner interviews, and a review of the current literature.

Results and conclusions: We propose a new model to effectively right size shrinking cities by (a) instituting green infrastructure plans and programs, (b) creating land banks to manage the effort, and (c) building community consensus through collaborative neighborhood planning. Our model builds on lessons learned from successful vacant property and urban greening programs, including nonprofit leadership and empowerment of neighborhood residents, land banking, strategic neighborhood planning, targeted revitalization investments, and collaborative planning. It will require planners and policymakers to address challenges such as financing, displacement of local residents, and lack of legal authority.

Takeaway for practice: We conclude that academics, practitioners, and policymakers should collaborate to (a) explore alternative urban designs and innovative planning and zoning approaches to right sizing; (b) collect accurate data on the number and costs of vacant properties and potential savings of different right-sizing strategies; (c) craft statewide vacant property policy agendas; and (d) establish a policy network of shrinking cities to share information, collaboratively solve problems, and diffuse policy innovations.

Research support: Our field work was supported by technical assistance grants and contracts through the National Vacant Properties Campaign.     

Longer View: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans

Problem: Catastrophic disasters like Hurricane Katrina disrupt urban systems, economies, and lives, and pose huge problems for local governments and planners trying to organize and finance reconstruction as quickly and effectively as possible.

Purpose: This article aims to summarize the key planning challenges New Orleans faced following the August 29, 2005 flooding in order to identify lessons planners can apply following future disasters.

Methods: In this case study we sought to observe key decisions about the recovery as they unfolded. Collectively, we spent months in New Orleans in 2005, 2006, and 2007, and interviewed leaders of all the planning efforts to date. One of us played a lead role in the design and execution of the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP), and all observed and/or participated in neighborhood-level planning activities.

Results and conclusions: We agree with previous findings on post-disaster recovery, confirming the importance of previous plans, citizen involvement, information infrastructure, and external resources. We also observe that the recovery of New Orleans might have proceeded more effectively in spite of the inherent challenges in post-Katrina New Orleans. Many local difficulties are a result of the slow flow of federal reconstruction funding. Despite this, the city administration also could have taken a more active leadership role in planning and information management earlier; the city's Office of Recovery Management has since improved this. On the positive side, the Louisiana Recovery Authority has been a model worth emulating by other states.

Takeaway for practice: Planning can inform actions as both proceed simultaneously. Had New Orleans planners not felt so compelled to complete plans quickly, they might have been more effective at providing reasoned analysis over time to support community actions and engaging a broader public in resolving difficult questions of restoration versus betterment. A center for collecting and distributing data and news would have better informed all parties; this remains an important need.

Research support: We received support from the Mid-America Earthquake Center, the Public Entity Risk Institute, and the New Orleans Community Support Foundation.     

Home Foreclosures as Early Warning Indicator of Neighborhood Decline

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Ideally, planners would intervene in neighborhood processes before substantial forces of decline have gained momentum. Unfortunately, currently there is no guidance about which neighborhood indicators forecast future neighborhood changes. This study seeks a neighborhood early warning indicator that is readily available, frequently updated, and that predicts with substantial foresight and accuracy future changes in key aspects of neighborhood market processes and quality of life. We search over a range of neighborhood indicators for one or more that clearly lead others in a temporal sense, instead of lagging behind them. We employ Granger causality tests with indicators related to public safety, housing market, and economic activity that are based on data from Chicago neighborhoods between 1998 and 2009. Our key finding is that only one indicator analyzed, completed home foreclosures, systematically precedes other neighborhood indicators but does not systematically follow after them. All other indicators are enmeshed in complicated, often mutually causal temporal patterns, which render them inappropriate for forecasting. We conclude that completed home foreclosures is an appropriate early warning indicator of neighborhood decline in several dimensions.

Takeaway for practice: Planners interested in identifying imminently emerging problems in their constituents’ neighborhoods should regularly acquire and map data on home foreclosures as soon as they become available, and then undertake compensatory actions as quickly as feasible.     

Livable Streets,Livable Arterials? Characteristics of Commercial Arterial Roads Associated With Neighborhood Livability

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Planners and engineers traditionally consolidate motorized traffic onto arterial roads that pose challenges for surrounding neighborhoods. We investigate the positive and negative impacts of commercial arterials with nodes of activity on the livability of surrounding neighborhoods. We examine 10 arterials in Denver (CO) and survey respondents in adjacent neighborhoods, asking how they view those arterials. We use factor analysis to create a typology of neighbors' perceptions of these arterials. Neighbors like arterials that they perceive as a) vibrant with good transit access and b) quiet and clean; they dislike arterials that they perceive as a) unpleasant and b) sketchy. Vibrant arterials contribute to the perceived livability of the surrounding neighborhoods, whereas sketchy arterials are negatively associated with livability, but the same arterials are often simultaneously vibrant and sketchy. Residents clearly value the social functions that arterials provide and seem less aware of traffic volumes; some low-volume arterials are not more livable than those with higher traffic volumes. Our findings are limited by the small sample size; we do not try to validate objective measures of livability with residents' perceptions.

Takeaway for practice: Arterials can be good places for surrounding neighborhoods while still serving as major traffic corridors; accessibility and mobility do not always conflict. Planners should develop economic development plans for affected neighborhoods and enhance neighborhood livability by encouraging active land uses on arterials, maintaining the safety and cleanliness Livable Streets, Livable Arterials? Characteristics of Commercial Arterial Roads Associated With Neighborhood Livability Carolyn McAndrews and Wesley Marshall of arterials, and enhancing the pedestrian environment along those arterials.     

Model Cities First Round: Politics,Planning, and Participation

The provision for “widespread citizen participation” in the basic Model Cities legislation has been implemented in the context of a growing social movement by residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods for a greater role in neighborhood and citywide decision-making. The struggle between neighborhood groups and city hall for control over the Model Cities program has characterized the “planning stage” in many cities. Community decision organizations, such as urban renewal agencies, boards of education, health and welfare councils, and anti-poverty agencies, active in the initial stages of planning in many cities, have been eclipsed by the neighborhood-city hall struggle, but they may participate more actively later in specification and implementation of plans. Meantime, the complex sociopolitical contest of Model Cities planning offers a challenge to the present generation of planners and important implications for the education of the next generation.     

Whiteness and Urban Planning

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings: The ability of planning to address America’s urban problems of inequality, crime, housing, education, and segregation is hampered by a relative neglect of Whiteness and its role in shaping urban outcomes. We offer a justification for centering Whiteness within urban planning scholarship and practice that would examine its role shaping and perpetuating regional and racial injustices in the American city. The focus of planners, scholars, and public discourse on the “dysfunctions” of communities of color, notably poverty, high levels of segregation, and isolation, diverts attention from the structural systems that produce and reproduce the advantages of affluent and White neighborhoods. Planners and planning scholars frequently invoke a “legacy of injustice” with regard to concentrated poverty and disadvantage but not in regard to neighborhoods of White affluence. One is segregated and problematized and the other is idealized.

Takeaway for practice: Planners and planning scholars need to understand the role of Whiteness, in particular White affluence, to assess the potential impacts of planning interventions. Doing so will inform a wider range of planning approaches to problems of racial and spatial equity.     

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.     

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.