‘Eligible to be heard’ in transportation planning

ABSTRACT

Planners often use the phrase ‘hard-to-reach’ to describe youth, people of color, and people with low incomes, people from whom they need information but are unsuccessful in reaching. Consideration of cultural premises for communicating can help explain why some people are ‘under-heard’ rather than ‘hard-to-reach.’ This study uses cultural discourse analysis to study under-represented community group deliberations about transportation, convened through a model of public engagement for environmental justice. Data include transcripts of 29 group deliberations and fieldnotes. Analysis and interpretation of cultural discourses about public participation processes focuses on three radiants of meaning: (1) respect for users and sociability, (2) being involved and efficacy, and (3) having a voice and feeling worthwhile. The model of engagement in deliberative processes allows for a reconfiguration of notions of being, acting, relating, and feeling in which participants give themselves amplified voice and agency. It contributes to literature on public engagement and how culture is conceived.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural discourse analysis
• planning
• deliberation
• environmental justice
• transportation

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges the support of the FTA and collaboration of various agencies, students, colleagues, and community members who participated in this project and the feedback from the editor and reviewers.

Background

Work from this essay was adapted from a white paper fulfilling a grant from the U.S. DOT- FTA Public Transportation Participation Pilot Program CT-26-1000. A draft was presented at the 2018 National Communication Association Convention. An earlier draft was presented in 2012 by invitation at U.S. Department of Transportation Environmental Justice Workshop and at the White House 'Champions of Change for Transportation Innovation' ceremony.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Federal Transit Administration [Grant Number CT-26-1000].