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Abstract
This paper situates the micro-politics of planning in the array of places in which practice occurs. Using a case study of the attempted siting of a sanitary landfill in Iowa (USA), it argues that places of practice influence not only planning deliberations, but also who participates and the transparency of the planning process. These places are thus central to our understanding of planning events as well as to the realization of democratic and just planning. The paper concludes with a discussion of the differences among place, space, and context, and a call for practice-based theorists to attend to practice places.
Keywords:
Notes
1. The exceptions include Graham and Healey (Citation1999), Lapintie (Citation2007), Smith (Citation2007), and Stephenson (Citation2010).
2. Many studies treat place similarly. See, for example, Beauregard (Citation2004) and Gualini and Majoor (Citation2007).
3. Fainstein is also interested in the nation, but treats it more as a space than a place, a distinction I discuss below.
4. In any planning event, decisions are made by both planners and non-planners, and thus in the places where planners work and the places where others work.
5. The following is a summary of a case written by Michael Berkshire (Citation2003) who was the regional solid waste planning coordinator for Bluestem during this time. I selected the case because it refers to a variety of places of practice; in presenting it, I emphasize those places.
6. The staff might have also gathered information outside its offices, but this is not mentioned in the case.
7. At this time, the state legislature in Des Moines was debating changes in the existing condemnation (i.e. taking) law. This added another place to the process and increased the pressure on the Bluestem planners to act quickly
8. The issue here is not why a landfill should be distant from an airport but how politicians are able to use legislation to block a locally unwanted land use.
9. In considering these two aspects of place, I ignore another dimension of practice's materiality and that is the relation of planners to things (but see Beauregard, Citation2012).
10. Winkler (Citation2011, pp. 260–261) hints at such differences with her typology of closed spaces, invited spaces, and claimed spaces. Clearly, the public–private distinction is a crude one. I use it simply as a way to enter into the discussion.
11. Gieryn (Citation2006) claims that the credibility of scientific knowledge depends, in part, on the place – the truth-spot – from which it emanates, not just who conveys that knowledge.
12. In discussing the places of policy transfer, McCann (Citation2008, p. 900) writes that “these microspaces frame the ways in which policy actors imagine their practice and their policies” (my emphasis). A more poignant example involves the essayist and historian Tony Judt who died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in August of 2010. Of his last days, his wife, Jennifer Homans (Citation2012, p. 6), wrote that “he had lost his students, his classrooms, his desk, his books; he couldn't travel or take a walk. He had lost, in other words, the places that had helped him to think through his ideas” (emphasis in original).
13. For an introduction to the relationship of place to democracy, see Jackson's (Citation2008) history of urban renewal in New Haven (CT) that explicitly recognizes “the ways in which social movements are grounded in particular community spaces” (p. 224).
14. In his well-known article “Ends and means in planning”, Edward Banfield (Citation1959, pp. 365–366) wrote that it would be imprudent for an organization to publicize a course of action in advance since doing so would invite opposition and give it an advantage. Staeheli and Mitchell (Citation2008, pp. xx–xxiii) make a related point in relation to the politics of public space. As regards community gardens, they write (p. 108) that “since difference was so critical to the function of community, these public spaces were created through acts of exclusion to create safe places in which it was possible to conceive of different kinds of [counterpublics]” (emphasis in original). This point, of course, is related to Goffman's (Citation1973) front and back regions where different kinds of performances occur.
15. Scott (Citation1998, p. 78) notes that legibility and transparency confer political advantages on those “who have the knowledge and access to easily decipher the new state-created format.”
16. A parallel process occurs when states turn politically robust citizens into clients or beneficiaries (Krause, Citation2010).
17. Planning stories about the defense of place often equate place with empowerment (for the inhabitants) and site with their victimization. In most of them, planners are stripped of place, and this (arguably and ironically) empowers them by making them less visible, unreachable, and thus less vulnerable.
18. As a supplement to this site–place–context triad, the reader might consider the divisions of territory, place, scale, and network discussed in Jessop, Brenner and Jones (Citation2008).