Strengthening Planning’s Effectiveness in a Hyper-Polarized World/Responding to the Conservative Common Sense of Opposition to Planning and Development in England/The Limits to Negotiation and the Promise of Refusal/Planning Contexts in a Hyper-Polarized World/A Right to Sanctuary: Supporting Immigrant Communities in an Era of Extreme Precarity/Planning and Climate Change: Opportunities and Challenges in a Politically Contested Environment/Speaking with the Middle 40% to Bridge the Political Divide for Mut

Abstract

With each week's news coverage of late, it seems we are in a 'race against time before the 'next big one' hits, be it a natural disaster or drastic political and policy swings due to increasing polarization, rising conservatism and other challenges across the globe. The practice and scholarship of planning also is intimately connected to its own race with timeboth in planning for the future, based on knowns and unknowns, and also sometimes against what time has wrought, righting the wrongs of past acts of history. Planning values and objectives have sought to benefit all members of society. But the increasing organization of opposition groups, on the right and the left, assisted by the new technology of social media, is making hyper-polarization a more central feature of planning audiences and public policy. Thus, planning in our current contentious moment provides a vexing problem, particularly when the views of leaders in local and higher-level government, as well as some in the outspoken citizenry, do not align with progressive planning goals. As a result, planners are challenged to reassess and newly strategize the field. How do we proactively plan for the future in practice, research and education, with a long view about the role of planning while confronting today's political challenges? Further, how should planners seek to communicate with conservative critics of planning? Might there also be ways of finding common ground on policy positions and narratives that speak to opposing actors across difference? This Interface edition seeks to address these questions and related topics via the insights and writings of scholars who examine planning in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Time, intergovernmental and citizenry conflict and waning public trust in government are omnipresent in these contributions. So too are differing perspectives about the extent to which common ground is possible any more, or whether it is considered a worthwhile endeavor or just a devil's bargain. The questions of time and intergovernmental and citizenry conflict vary, however, as partisan conflicts between actors manifest differently across the cases and issues examined. Heather Dorries writes about the long view steeped in 400-years of conflict regarding the takings and efforts for reappropriation of Indigenous land in a Canadian settler history. This becomes crystallized through Dorries' case examination of pipeline infrastructure that would cut through Indigenous land while simultaneously rupturing recent national efforts to confront the treatment of Indigenous people. Indigenous communities have engaged in a politics of refusal in opposition to this pipeline, spatially embodied in part by building 'Tiny Homes' in the pipeline's proposed pathway. Dorries argues that alongside such a history, searching for common ground would be a

Political Partisanship and Transportation Reform

“…Previous research suggests that transportation policies and investments are increasingly shaped by partisan ideals (Freemark, 2011;Held, 2010;Nall, 2018), with support for the car-dominated status quo and backlash against alternatives split across partisan lines (Frick, 2013;Trapenberg Frick et al, 2015). These findings echo the narrative of an increasingly polarized planning environment in the United States (Foss, 2018a;Frick & Myers, 2018;Liao et al, 2020) where planners must navigate a partisan maze to advance local and regional transportation agendas (Higashide, 2019). More broadly, American society is also growing more polarized (Klein, 2020), with policy agendas mired in partisanship and policymakers unable to win support from those outside of their own party (Hacker & Pierson, 2019).…”

“…We conducted this research in a context of deepening partisanship and political polarization in the United States (Boxell et al, 2020) and a growing emphasis on the consequence of partisanship for planning (Foss, 2018a;Frick & Myers, 2018;Liao et al, 2020). Within this context, we found most respondents supported shifting trips to walking, biking, and transit and embraced the idea of mixing homes and businesses in the same neighborhood.…”

“…Evidence from climate change planning suggests concrete tools for planners to effectively engage a hesitant-or even outright opposed-public and sway policy preferences: deploying positive messaging that focuses on local rather than global outcomes and applying active learning strategies during community engagement. Foss (2018b) explained that positive messaging motivates people more effectively than doomsday predictions because people are more likely to act when they believe they can engender positive, tangible differences. Messages should also be context specific so people clearly understand how they and their community may be affected by a policy proposal (Foss, 2018b).…”

“…Foss (2018b) explained that positive messaging motivates people more effectively than doomsday predictions because people are more likely to act when they believe they can engender positive, tangible differences. Messages should also be context specific so people clearly understand how they and their community may be affected by a policy proposal (Foss, 2018b). Engaging a wider public could also reduce the outsized influence of a small number of vocal opponents who dominate the participation process and thwart reform efforts.…”

On belonging and becoming in the settler-colonial city: Co-produced futurities, placemaking, and urban planning in the United States

“…While the literature on Indigenous recognition in and through planning is still relatively small, a noticeable shift has occurred away from a politics of inclusion within the structures of state-based planning authorities to a model of planning that acknowledges that potential incommensurability of Indigenous and non-Indigenous approaches to social-spatial governance and that strives for a coexistence between the two (Porter & Barry, 2016). Dorries (2018) pushes this critique even further, arguing that the search for Indigenous within planning may be nothing more than a justification of planning's continued intervention in and control over Indigenous lives. Rather than politics of recognition, she argues instead for a politics of refusal.…”