https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2002-3723
Two Perspectives
Leonie Sandercock has been a significant figure in urban planning scholarship for decades, having crafted an illustrious career and made major intellectual and educational contributions. In her new book Mapping Possibility: Finding Purpose and Hope in Community Planning, (Routledge, 2023) she arranges some of her most significant writings along the trajectory of her professional and emotional life. We read of her early forays into political economy in the late 1970s, her challenge to a planning history that made women and people of color invisible, her critical reflections on the gendered rationality of planning knowledge, her engagement in the 1990s with multiculturalism and cities of difference, her commitment to storytelling and digital ethnographies in the early 2000s, and her current championing of an indigenous planning that recognizes the violence of settler-colonialist societies. Throughout we encounter a reflective scholar committed to social justice and deeply engaged with planning’s past, present, and future.
Our interest here is less with Sandercock’s scholarship than with what such a professional memoir reveals about the evolving history of planning and how it might be read for career advice. The social and institutional environments of planning practice and the planning academy are much different now than they were in 1977 when Sandercock took her first academic position. Her career represents what was possible at the time. Someone late in their career is likely to read Mapping Possibility quite differently than someone who is just beginning. Acknowledging this, we offer two readings of how the book contributes to becoming a planning scholar. Beauregard, whose career has mostly paralleled Sandercock’s in time, reflects on changes within the planning academy. Stahl, just beginning as a planning professor, considers Sandercock’s experiences in relation to her future, taking away several lessons from Mapping Possibility while questioning the boundaries of work and life in the academy.
We preface our comments with a brief overview of Sandercock’s exemplary career. Consider the following: The Davidoff Best Book Award in 2005 for Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century; an honorary doctorate from Roskilde University (Denmark) in 2012; the ACSP Distinguished Educator Award (2015); and induction as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2020. And this is not a full list. Standouts among her publications include the seminal piece “A Gender Agenda” (1992), written with Ann Forsyth, that brought feminism into planning scholarship; her wonderful “Voices from the Borderlands” (1995) that challenged the knowledge basis of planning; Towards Cosmopolis (1998) that stands, still today, as a rare monographic attempt to re-think planning theory and practice; and Making the Invisible Visible (1998), her edited collection that contributed to a re-thinking of planning history. Then, there are her academic appointments, beginning with her first job in 1977 as an assistant professor of urban studies at Footscray Institute of Technology in Melbourne; head of Graduate Urban Studies at Macquarie University (Sydney); adjunct professor at the University of California Los Angeles (1986–1996); head of the Planning Program at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; professor at the University of Melbourne in the Faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning; and now (since 2000) professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia, with each move triggered by the many opportunities made possible by her intellectual accomplishments and guided by her personal concerns.
Fewer Possibilities: Beauregard
Over the last 40–50 years, significant changes have occurred in university governance and in attitudes toward scholarship. Academic planning has not been spared. These changes suggest that the career trajectory followed by Sandercock might not be so easily replicated today. I offer four such changes as personal observations.
A first major influence on academic careers was the well-documented growth in the numbers of university administrators relative to full-time, tenured faculty. This expansion led to a concomitant spread in procedures meant to standardize academic quality across departments and programs and rationalize hiring and promotion. While one of the benefits of this rationalization has been to reduce white, male bias, it also limits the flexibility of programs in responding to hiring opportunities. Hiring and promotion are much stickier today than in the 1970s and moving about, as Sandercock did, seems less possible.
Second, in the 1960s and the 1970s less emphasis was placed on faculty productivity. The rise of university administrations has coincided with the introduction of metrics to assess candidates for hiring and promotion. These metrics (e.g., citation measures) emphasize the quantity of publications over their quality and their contribution to academic debates. The quality of one’s scholarship is still deemed important, but the balance has shifted. In the 1970s, for example, newly-minted Ph.D.’s applying for assistant professor positions were not expected to have numerous peer-reviewed publications. Now, not having them is a deficit difficult to overcome. Doctoral students experience this pressure and, leery of a tight job market for tenure-track professors, feel compelled to publish sooner and earn their Ph.D. more quickly than was previously expected. Amplifying all of this is the expansion in the number of publication outlets for planning books and articles, joined more recently by open access journals. Many more journals are looking for content and numerous publishers have business models premised on a large and steady flow of product. Academic careers responding to these conditions are required to unfold at a faster and more intense pace, making the academic environment less hospitable to the ‘slow’ pacing of publications that Sandercock had at her disposal.
Third, Sandercock’s career began in the throes of the political turmoil of the Sixties and Seventies brought about by the civil rights, anti-war, environmental, and feminist movements; the decline of industrial cities, protests against racism in the US, and the embrace by planning professors and the profession-at-large of the need to address social problems through more democratic planning. Today, however, the profession is less hospitable to the fervor of those years, less radical, and more wedded to (neoliberal) capitalism than it was in those turbulent decades. Advocacy planning became public participation, while in the academic realm the Marxism of an earlier time (which Sandercock embraced early in her career) has been marginalized by the politically thinner and more malleable notions of the just city and the right-to-the-city. In the world of practice, attention has turned to climate change, smart cities, affordable housing, and reining in the automobile, all admirable endeavors and all potential contributors to greater social justice, but hardly politicized in the way planning once was. And while internal critics are more or less tolerated, one is hardly encouraged to do so.
Fourth, the balance between specialists and generalists has continued to shift. Whereas in the 1950s, a planner might be described as a generalist-with-a-specialty, now most planning students and faculty are trained to be specialists. In addition, as planning education in the US moved away from architecture and became more engaged with the social sciences (and now data sciences), it opened itself to geographers, economists, and, later, urban studies job candidates. Always a minor profession with little control over the field, the planning academy became more permeable and job competition more intense. For those hoping to be generalists, none of this is good news. The continued marginalization of theory in planning education means that although a number of young scholars have taken up the planning theory banner, its tenuous presence robs the field of a critical perspective to protect planning from its seemingly inescapable vulnerability to the capitalist commitments and authoritarian inclinations of the state. In contrast to the career path traced by Sandercock, the contemporary planning academy supports fewer opportunities for emerging scholars to think deeply about planning as a way to enable different people to live well together.
Mapping Work/Life Boundaries: Stahl
Mapping Possibility offers a glimpse of the trajectory of Sandercock’s life as her career unfolded alongside her influential writing. I take three primary lessons from it: acknowledging that detours can be pathways; understanding the enrichment and risks of community-based work; and recognizing the importance of being a lifelong learner inside and outside of the academy. As I start my own career, I am also left navigating where the boundaries of work and life belong.
In generously offering us a look into her personal life, Sandercock paints a vivid portrait of the people, places, and events that influenced her and reveals how these forces shaped her work within the academy. For instance, falling in love with John Friedmann led her out of the security of a full professorship in Sydney and into film school in Los Angeles, eventually prompting her to pursue critical community-based filmmaking and to reflect on the role of storytelling in planning. As people who experience life’s griefs and joys while pursuing a career, we inevitably assume many roles beyond just ‘scholar.’ As a parent, I cannot attend every conference or accept every travel opportunity. As a cancer survivor, it is critical for me to have a job and live in a city with access to quality and affordable health care. Sandercock’s personal story lends permission to treat life’s detours and experiences not as disruptions but as part of a career, including as inspiration for new research pathways, critical framings, and ways of seeing and knowing.
Mapping Possibility also shows what is gained – and risked – in community-based work versus more ‘traditional’ scholarship. While I appreciated and related to Sandercock’s early experiences with imposter syndrome, she spent the beginning of her career incredibly productive in terms of publications. As a junior scholar who is starting to publish the first of my evolving ideas, I would have been interested to learn more about how – and why – her thinking shifted away from her early scholarship on political economy, a body of work that is absent from this book. It is worth noting that Sandercock’s pivot from ‘traditional’ scholarship to community-oriented work occurred towards the middle and end of her career when she already had the security of tenure. Mapping Possibility shows the rich range of relationships that community-based work fosters, as well as how such collaborations strengthen academic research. Yet many junior scholars, particularly scholars of color, are penalized for the time it takes to build and nurture such relationships. This tension is only exacerbated by the increasing quantity of publications that are now necessary for tenure.
She also offers the useful lesson that the best scholars are lifelong learners. This is reflected in how well-read she is, as she dexterously cites authors across disciplines, fiction, and contemporary media. Her self-reflexive nature is also apparent in the trajectory of her work, from advocating for different ways of knowing in planning to different ways of unknowing. This culminates in her research, teaching, and filmmaking partnerships with indigenous communities in British Columbia. In my classroom 20 miles from the border with Mexico, I have been humbled by my students as they engaged with Sandercock’s (1998) “Voices from the Borderlands” in its most literal sense, several of them having spent their lives in the liminal spaces between San Diego and Tijuana. Mapping Possibility reminds me to read widely outside of planning while remaining keenly aware of the limits of my knowledge, experiences, and positionality within it.
This book highlights the diverse and beautiful range of relationships that an academic career in planning offers. With mentors, colleagues, co-writers and co-advocates for justice, the boundaries of work, play, and friendship intersect in university hallways, at conferences and protests, and on film shoots. But I am also reminded of a useful mantra I tell myself when an article I wrote gets not-so-gently critiqued in the peer review process or when a rejection for a grant appears in my inbox: I am not my work. For the people that truly know me – my husband, daughter, family, and friends – my academic career will be a distant second to the moments that we’ve spent together. The personal and professional intersect with one another, as Sandercock repeatedly and usefully shows. Yet Mapping Possibility highlights that the best life’s work is the love we’ve bestowed, the meals we’ve shared, the advice we’ve offered back and forth, the tears we’ve shed, and the literal and figurative mountains we’ve climbed.
San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA
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Robert Beauregard
Columbia University, New York, NY USA
[email protected]