Since I officially begin my experience in Delft next week, I’ll touch back on this week’s prompt more directly in the next few blogs. This week I’ve been working towards my capstone via independent research and through interviews with two U.S. urban planners. These interviews will serve as a foundation for my comparisons between U.S. and Dutch urban planning.
This week I spoke to Karina Amalbert, a fourth year urban and regional planning PhD candidate at FSU, and Tia Maxwell, a planning professional for the city of Atlanta. Karina was my instructor for my Sustainable Development in the Americas course, which is what actually got me into sustainable urban planning from an environmental science background. She looks at planning from the social sphere and has done research in Puerto Rico. Karina recommended I speak with Tia as well, who focuses on climate adaptation and mitigation. I asked them various questions relating to my main research question: “What role do community voices play in sustainability initiatives?”
This first question I asked was if they feel residents have a voice in how their community develops. Karina noted that community participation in planning often depends on an individual’s awareness on what urban planning is, if they are aware they usually will participate. Some areas like parts of Tallahassee and Kissimmee lack accessible outreach or have cultural barriers to engagement. Therefore, getting creative with community meetings is important to make them more inclusive, noting that factors like education, language, and caregiving responsibilities. Tia explained that in Atlanta, there’s more people than generally believed to be informed about the planning process, with strong civic involvement through their Neighborhood Planning Units, where residents are empowered to vote and often contribute ideas. Even if they don’t realize it’s urban planning they usually have comments regarding flood infrastructure or traffic patterns.
Tia observes that sustainability topics often become a victim of people’s circumstances. When she worked in North Carolina, people had more questions about environmental topics because they face more natural disasters than Atlanta. Also, when the city has other social determinants such as the health or success of your city, sustainability often falls last, so participation in sustainability activities has to be embedded in other types of activities. Other factors like political landscape impacts sustainability participation, with planners being told they can’t use specific terminology (more “durable” instead of more “sustainable”). She finds that you have to find a way to communicate that makes sense to not only the people you want to participate, but also decision makers because to have “good public participation around sustainability efforts, you have to have people who are fiscally and emotionally and socially invested in sustainability.”
From Karina’s work in Puerto Rico, people are constantly devastated by environmental hazards so they tend to be more passionate about environmental initiatives. Due to a history of colonialism, people become very resistant when they get a sense that a foreign development is coming in. From a sociological aspect, collectiveness is part of the Latino experience, verus in the continental US planning initiatives are more individualistic. Therefore, encouraging participation in environmental sustainability requires thoughtfulness when portraying it to different groups with different cultural values.
This interview gave me a deeper perspective of what public participation looks like in the U.S., and as I begin my time in Delft, I look forward to learning about how public participation is approached there, and their main environmental issues and values.
I want to end with a quote about what mindset Tia explained when speaking about how to approach planning. Being a planner means servicing other people, so when collaborating with people who you don’t share opinions with it’s important to be “willing to learn. Because you will run into people who are not. And when you see that, it’s like, oh, I don’t ever want to be that. I don’t ever want to have an opinion so strong and so immovable that I’m not willing to be educated, or at least empathetic to another position.”
Atlanta’s “urban forest,” the city has the largest tree canopy of any major U.S. urban area. Source: treesatlanta.org
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