Publics/Counterpublics
Volume 33 (2024)
Editors: Gray Brakke, Xixi Jiang, Nick Shatan
Planning as a discipline and a practice has derived its legitimacy from acting in the name of the “public.” Depending on context this has fallen between identifying a broader public interest through technical expertise and interpreting a popular will through participation and accountability. Planners cannot progress without re-thinking the concept of an unmarked public that can hide social asymmetries, naturalize its differential impacts, or present the interests of one group as the interests of the whole. Can the public still represent a collective political project and a normative aspiration for planning, in the face of the privatization and co-optation of institutions by unaccountable interests? For the 40th anniversary of the Berkeley Planning Journal, we explore the current state of the “public” in planning, its limitations as well as its new interpretations and possibilities for the contemporary moment.
Inside this Volume
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In the inaugural introduction of the Berkeley Planning Journal in 1984, Hilda Blanco wrote that one of the defining characteristics of the Berkeley planning program was a “social conscience, expressed in its early rejection of the planning profession as merely technical expertise, its critical attitude towards established institutions, and its strong advocacy for social justice.” This understanding of planning’s position at the intersection of the technical and the social raises questions about the relationship between planning academia and “the public.”
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In 1987, I decided to do a PhD because I wanted to become a professor. Academia was also the destination of most of my PhD classmates, though a small minority wanted to advance their careers in policy analysis. I chose Berkeley to do my doctorate because I thought that DCRP and other Cal departments would give me, a graduate in archi- tecture and city planning, the training in the social sciences that I needed to address complex urban issues in a rigorous manner.
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Climate change poses major challenges for the city and regional planning profession. Since most of the world’s population live in urbanized areas, the profession, focused as it is on human settlements, will play a key role in facing these challenges.1 Here I will briefly discuss three major challenges or opportunities: the long-range physical planning focus of the profession and its time horizon, its community engagement tradition, and its multi-disciplinary orientation and potential for simulating urban systems and their complexities.
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In March 2024, Berkeley Planning Journal editors Xixi Jiang and Nick Shatan facilitated a virtual roundtable on “Publics and Planning Academia” with five former editors or contributors to the Berkeley Planning Journal who earned PhDs from the Department of City and Regional Planning between five and fifteen years ago: Fernando Burga, Ricardo Cardoso, Jia-Ching Chen, Paavo Monkkonen, and Hayden Shelby. This informal conversation moved between multiple registers, from contemplations of the pub- lics and purposes of planning academia to personal reflections on writing, research, and career trajectories. Over the course of two hours, the discussion covered six major topics: Audience and voice; Resonance, relevance, and accountability; Working across linguistic publics; Planners as interpreters; Public teaching; and Doctoral reflections. This conversation has been edited for clarity.
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The Boston Black United Front (BBUF) was a large meta-organization that stands as a pivotal counterpublic institution in the annals of 20th-century community organizing. This study draws on archival documentation to explore the multifaceted strategies employed by the BBUF, highlighting their innovative use of print media, their dual focus on large and small pragmatic interventions, and their impact on the City of Boston. Central to its classification as a form of counterpublic work, I explore the BBUF’s capacity to hold, process, and engage in discourse around ideological diversity and contradiction. The organization came about during a tumultuous period in Boston’s history, before slowly fading out of existence as members pursued other endeavors, but not without making lasting material impact. Their confrontations with carceral violence, endeavors for economic justice, and efforts to foster community-centered alternatives to oppressive systems form the crux of their legacy. I examine the BBUF’s nuanced position and varied roster, inspired by but not fitting neatly into the broader Black Power movement, and emphasize the breadth of their work. This study positions the BBUF as a model for both contemporary activists and planning scholars, illuminating the pathways of grassroots movements in challenging and reshaping cities.
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This paper investigates how queer women and nonbinary people (referred to as non-males) find space within a heteronormative context that actively resists their existence. In their modes of formation, these spaces actively resist the straightening and commodification of queerness and empower the community in a subversion of patriarchal norms. Using Seattle’s context, the authors investigate historic queer non-male spaces along with two contemporary case studies using archival research, oral histories, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. The result is an identification and examination of two different forms of counterpublic spaces utilized by the queer non-male community to create locations of queer belonging: the exclusive/inclusive space, investigated through the case study of a local lesbian bar, and the non-exclusive/ inclusive space, represented through the case study of a women’s sports bar. Both serve as places of resistance and empowerment. While both create spaces of belonging for queer non-males, the former achieves this by establishing an exclusive space, while the latter does so through a non-exclusive space that actively supports queer non-males. By engaging the inclusive/exclusive dichotomy the cases offer insights into the complex dynamics of identity, community and belonging for queer non-males.
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An internationally celebrated icon of community planning and grassroots activism, the late American urbanist Jane Jacobs is frequently reduced to a caricature of polite, all-purpose sentiments which obfuscate both the complexity and the political specificity of her work. In the first portion of this paper, I examine the popular representation of Jacobs by prominent urban nonprofits, as well as the ambiguity of her intellectual legacy in both urban scholarship and in recent media about her career. Highlighting Jacobs’s warm reception among libertarian thinkers, I devote the second portion of this paper to exploring the intellectual affinity between Jacobs and the famed Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. Demonstrating their key points of convergence on mat- ters of social policy, governance, and expertise in relation to watershed moments in planning history, I conclude with an analysis of Jacobs’s little-discussed writing on American public housing, noting the various parallels between her argumentation and the radical reformation of American housing policy during the turn to “advanced liberalism” which occurred in the decades following the publication of her classic 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
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The article explores how urban densification is defined, measured and conceptualized in the context of Lahore through the narratives of key policy stakeholders. A preliminary analysis of policy documents, and the recent changes in building regulations and land-use rules show that there is a commitment to increase density by discouraging urban sprawl and encouraging the growth of mixed-use, highrise buildings. By conducting an analysis of policy documents and the changes in building regulations and land-use rules through the narrative of key stakeholders in policy making, the research unveiled motivations which underpin policy makers’ commitment to higher densities, illustrating how urban densification is manifested in the realm of policymaking, the forms and typologies within which high densities are envisaged by stakeholders and how these have materialized on the ground, and the implications thereof.
