Bringing local voices into community revitalization: engaged communication research in Urban planning

ABSTRACT

The need to better engage low-income communities affected by revitalization of the built environment has been well documented in urban planning. Guided by communication infrastructure theory (CIT), this study presents a research project that made concerted efforts at engaging neighborhoods of Northeast Los Angeles that are experiencing rapid gentrification. The project was a partnership with a multi-sector collaborative working on the revitalization of the L.A. River and its surrounding communities. This paper specifically demonstrates how CIT's social ecological orientation was applied to seek input on L.A. River and community revitalization from storytelling networks made up of residents, small businesses, and local media. We also examine the impact of this engaged research on the organizational partners of the collaborative, and their views on community engagement in revitalization. Lastly, we discuss how the lessons learned broadly speak to future opportunities and challenges that aim for communicative planning approaches to urban revitalization.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication infrastructure theory
• engaged scholarship
• Urban planning and development
• communicative planning
• community engagement

Acknowledgement

The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not represent official views of the funders. The authors would like to acknowledge our anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback that has helped us improve our manuscript. We would also like to thank the NELA community and our NELA Riverfront Collaborative project partners that participated in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The L.A. Revitalization Master Plan was a result of the work of the L.A. City Council's Ad Hoc Committee on the Los Angeles River (created in 2002). In 2005, the Ad Hoc Committee secured funding from the L.A. Department of Water and Power and the Department of Public Works-Bureau of Engineering to conduct an 18-month revitalization planning process. The goal of the process was to establish initial revitalization opportunities for the entire 51 miles of the L.A. River (with a specific focus on the 32-mile stretch within the City of Los Angeles).

2. The NELA RC was funded by a Partnership for Sustainable Communities grant administered by the Housing and Urban Development department, in partnership with the Department of Transportation and Environmental Protection Agency. The City of Los Angeles's Economic Workforce and Development Department was the local lead applicant agency for the collaborative partnership and work.

3. The toolkit can be accessed at http://metaconnects.org/findings/northeast-los-angeles-riverfront-collaborative-2.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a U.S. Housing and Urban Development ‘Community Challenge Planning Grant,’ which was an award to the City of Los Angeles Economic Workforce Development Department’s partner University of Southern California [Grant C-122081—Ball-Rokeach/Villanueva]. The work was also supported by the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands support of the Metamorphosis Project, founded by principal investigator Sandra Ball-Rokeach.