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Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Iowa City is a rapidly growing and increasingly diverse city with a 2019 population of roughly 76,000 residents. The second largest city in the Cedar Rapids – Iowa City region, it is also home of The University of Iowa. Two smaller but rapidly growing cities and several smaller towns are located immediately nearby. They and Iowa City are also located within Johnson County and the Iowa City Community School District.
2. Key publications include: Throgmorton (Citation1996, Citation2003, Citation2007, Citation2008, Citation2013); and Eckstein and Throgmorton (Citation2003). An extensive overview of my scholarly, professional, and political work can be found at: https://persuasivestorytelling.wordpress.com/.
3. Cities are not mentioned in the U. S. Constitution whereas states are. Consequently, cities derive all their powers from the individual states. In some states, local governments can do only that which their states explicitly permit them to do. In other states, some cities (Iowa City included) are granted “Home Rule” authority; that is, they can govern themselves within constraints established by their state governments. Home rule status notwithstanding, states can “preempt” local governments’ authority to act on particular issues. Also, in the U. S., the role of the mayor varies from city to city. Some cities have a “strong mayor” form of government in which the mayor essentially runs the show and typically has the power to appoint and replace key department heads and to veto ordinances passed by the city’s legislative body. Other cities, Iowa City included, have a “council-manager” form of government in which the council formally sets policy, makes authoritative decisions, and appoints a city manager who appoints department heads and executes the council’s policies, plans, and codes, while recommending actions to the council. Uniquely, in Iowa City the city council elects the mayor from one of its members.
4. There is a big difference between being a mayor who wants to keep her or his city on its present course versus mayors who intentionally seek to alter the direction of their cities’ step-by-step unfolding. Almost 40 years ago, Friedmann (Citation1983) distinguished between planning oriented toward system maintenance and planning oriented toward system transformation. The distinction remains relevant today.
5. The scholarly literature on these points is vast. For brevity, I cite only Albrechts and Mandelbaum (Citation2005) and Throgmorton (Citation2003).
6. This was partly inspired by Fainstein (Citation2010).
7. E. Alexander (Citation2017) makes many claims that are quite compatible with my conception of co-crafting, especially when stressing the importance of design, complexity, uncertainty, contingency, reciprocal interdependence, and multiple types of planning practice.
8. There was considerable turmoil within our planning staff from 2014 to the middle of 2018. To a significant degree, this turmoil mirrored political conflicts within the city as a whole. This can be related to ongoing scholarly discussions about the ethical dilemmas practitioners face with regard to conflicts between the planners’ expertise and democratic legitimacy of political decision makers. See Lauria and Long (Citation2019).
9. See Frug and Barron (Citation2013).
10. It also connects with urban theory pertaining to governance by complex multi-sectoral networks at the metropolitan or regional scale. See Da Cruz et al. (Citation2019), Katz and Nowak (Citation2017), and Schragger (Citation2019).
11. For details, see Throgmorton (Citation2019, Citation2020). Hambleton (Citation2014) calls this “place-based leadership.” See also Grooms and Boamah (Citation2018).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
James Throgmorton
James Throgmorton taught urban and regional planning at the University of Iowa until retiring as an emeritus professor in 2010. His scholarly work has focused primarily on the roles of rhetoric and persuasive storytelling in planning, especially with regard to making city-regions more just and ecologically sustainable. He served as an elected member of Iowa City’s city council from late-1993 through 1995 and again from 2012 through 2019. During the last four years of his council term he also served as mayor.