Planning As Storytelling: Sustaining America's Cities
University of Iowa 15-17 June 2000
PARTICIPANTS:
Robert Beauregard is a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City. There, he teaches urban and public policy. He recently co-edited The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late 20th Century City (Sage, 1999) with Sophie Body-Gendrot. His previous book, Voices of Decline (Blackwell, 1993), was a study of the representation of the urban decline of postwar U.S. cities. His current book project is an historical analysis of the "short" American Century focusing on the intersection of declining cities, suburbanization, domestic prosperity, and U.S. global dominance.
Joe Barthel was born into a white working class family that lived in a black neighborhood in a decaying part of an eastern industrial city. He escaped to New York City and Columbia University, where he plunged into the social upheavals and the urban excitement of the late '60s. Curiosity and the effort to organize projects soon led him to live in the Lower East Side, Harlem, South Bronx, and Far Rockaway. For a while he edited an organizing journal, Part of The Problem, which criticized poverty programs from the left while defending them from the attacks of the right. Barthel moved to the San Francisco area in the early 70s, to be closer to changes then taking place on the west coast. Grayer and more sedentary than he used to be, Barthel has been a legal investigator for the past 15 years, specializing in capital case defense and civil rights investigation. He gathers the stories and works with the storytellers that can help jurors understand and identify with the defendants who come before them. He is conscious of having a job which offers a critical vantage point on our culture; that is, he has spent much of his adult life looking at violence and evil, in order to find grace and compassion and to understand the forces that generate them both.
A Cornell College graduate and a botanist by training, Liz Christiansen spent the first nine years of her professional planning career working, first, with the Southeast Iowa Regional Planning Commission and then with the East Central Iowa Council of Governments. In 1994, Cedar Rapids and Linn County hired Liz to help them establish the new Bluestem Solid Waste Agency. She acted as Bluestem's recycling/education coordinator and as its spokesperson during a difficult landfill siting process. In March, 1999, Governor Vilsack appointed Liz to the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission, and she has just been named Administrator of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources' Land Quality and Waste Management Assistance Division. "I've learned that the best way to turn a reluctant recycler into an environmental advocate," Liz says, "is to show them a landfill, up close. It's something they'll never forget."
Seymour Mandelbaum was educated as an historian though he has crafted a career concerned with communication and planning theory largely in the planning academy. As he has moved from History to Planning, he has carried with him an abiding interest in the forms of narrative and the construction of time. His latest book is Open Moral Communities (MIT Press, February 2000), an extended reflection on communitarian sensibilities.
Ken Reardon was born and raised in the NYC area. He attended UMASS, Hunter and Cornell before working as a community organizer with citizen organizations in NJ, CT, and NY for seven years. He has taught urban studies and planning at Cornell and Illinois for the past 15 years. Since 1990, he has directed University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's East St. Louis Action Research Project. This project is committed to improving the quality of life in East St. Louis' poorest neighborhoods through an empowerment approach to planning which integrates the principles and methods of participatory action research, direct action organizing and education for critical consciousness into a single social change process.
Carlo Rotella, who teaches at Boston College, is author of October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (U. of California, 1998). He is currently writing a second book, "Good with Their Hands," on boxing, blues, crime stories, gambling, and other forms of culture with deep roots in city life. His boxing essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, South Atlantic Quarterly, Harper's, DoubleTake, Transition, and the Washington Post Magazine.
Leonie Sandercock has a Ph.D. in Urban Research and had written a number of books on Australian cities and planning by the mid-80s, when an epistemological crisis struck. She quit academia and enrolled in film School at UCLA, where she discovered the communicative powers and epistemological joys of storytelling, and realised what a difference it could make to academic teaching and writing. Since returning to academia, she has tried to practice what she preaches, and is continually frustrated at how easy it is to slip back into academese. She currently teaches architects, planners, urban designers and builders at The University of Melbourne.
Drawing on the disciplinary perspective provided by geography, Edward Soja is a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of many influential publications, including Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989), Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Blackwell, 1996), and Postmetropolis (Blackwell, 2000 ). He is also co-editor of The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (1996).
Larry Wilson's professional background is in landscape architecture, urban design and planning, including 11 years in private practice as a landscape architect/planner with a landscape architectural firm in Louisville, Kentucky. Six years was also spent as a City Planner and Director of Urban Design with the Louisville and Jefferson County Planning Commission. Another 11 years was served as campus planner for Kansas State University, University of Missouri's four-campus system, and for the system's Columbia, Missouri campus. The last 9 years have been spent as campus planner of the University of Iowa.
Clyde Woods holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at UCLA and is currently teaching in the Department of African and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University. The author of Development Arrested: Race, Power, and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta, 1830-1992 (Verso, 1998), he is now at work on two major projects: "The Evolution of the African American Community in Los Angeles, 1781-1996" and "The Blues as a Social Research Methodology."
CO-DIRECTORS:
Barbara Eckstein teaches about storytelling, storyreading and post-war U.S. urban literature in the English Department at the University of Iowa. A former resident and engaged citizen of New Orleans, she is working on a book called "New Orleans Exceptionalism." The book asks which memories of New Orleans literature sustains and whether these contribute to sustainability as urban scholars imagine it. She has just completed an essay about the simultaneous closing of the Desire streetcar line and the Broadway success of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. She is the author of The Language of Fiction in a World of Pain (U. of Pennsylvania, 1990).
Jim Throgmorton is currently an associate professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Iowa, specializing primarily on issues pertaining to the interaction of sustainability and storytelling. He is the author of Planning as Persuasive Storytelling: The Rhetorical Construction of Chicago's Electric Future (U of Chicago, 1996), is nearing completion of "Small World: Practicing Sustainable Politics in the Heart of America," and is beginning a study of the cultural and historical complexity of storytelling in shaping the future of Berlin, Germany. He has also worked for city agencies, private consulting firms, a national research laboratory; has been active in a variety of environmental and social justice groups; and has served as an elected member of the City Council of Iowa City.