Category: publications

Notes from the Trenches: Reflections from Recent PhD Graduates on Navigating the Academy

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Journal of Planning Education and Research (2023, ahead of print)

Authors: Deidre Zoll, Raksha Vasudevan, Bri Gauger, Sarah Gelbard, Carla Maria Kayanan, Julie Mah, Ariadna Reyes

Abstract: PhD planning graduates face an increasingly competitive academic job market. In this commentary, seven recent graduates provide qualitative descriptions of the complicated and ever-changing expectations graduates face. We situate this within a larger reflection on the neoliberal academy that promotes a culture of competitiveness over care and production over purpose. We emphasize how this system is seemingly antithetical to the transformative planning work needed to address the most pressing planning issues of our time and provide suggestions for meeting shifting expectations, evolving training and support needs, and opportunities for a more compassionate tenure-track market. Our commentary has implications for doctoral pedagogy, the tenure-track market, and the academy.

Published: 4 September 2023, ahead of print

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X231195729

Radical Solidarities in Punk and Queer Refusals of Safety and Inclusion Narratives in Planning

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Urban Planning Vol 8, No 2 (2023): Queer(ing) Urban Planning and Municipal Governance

Abstract:  Recent call-outs against Ottawa punk venues have fueled public debates about safe space and the inclusivity of local music scenes. The Ottawa Music Strategy released in 2018 translated these debates into cultural development policy that links creative placemaking and safe space discourse. This article examines the civic response to activist call-outs by analyzing how the Ottawa Music Strategy integrates diversity and inclusion strategies into cultural policy, and how cultural policy and safe space policies intersect with cultural revitalization and economic development priorities in the Ottawa Official Plan. Punk counter-narratives developed through grounded ethnographic research in the Ottawa punk scene unsettle normative public safety narratives that frame punk spaces as unsafe. Place-based histories of anti-oppression tactics, logics, and traditions of punk space and activism contextualize alternative responses by local punk venues and promoters. Drawing upon literature in queer planning and queer geography and literature on intersections between radical queer and punk politics, spatialities, and identities, this article discusses punking planning in solidarity with queering planning through alternative community-based responses to issues of safety, inclusion, and participation.

Keywords:  creative placemaking; cultural planning; punk; queer planning; spatial justice

Published:   22 May 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v8i2.6372

“Did You Hear? Mavericks Is Closing!” Punk Refusal of Gentrified Endings

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GeoHumanities Volume 9, 2023 – Issue 1 Abstract: Decades of experience with closed, relocated, and renamed venues, make punks very familiar with cycles of gentrification. Often established in edge neighborhoods, punk venues participate in reproducing the “grit” of urban decline and subculture. Urban revitalization plans that promise community, livability, and culture, rarely leave spaces for established punk community and subculture. The newly branded Retail, Arts, and Theatre District in Ottawa, Canada is a case study in cultural urban development that operationalizes creative placemaking and its future-oriented visions of urban revitalization through cultural spaces and activities. Although the city’s Official Plan celebrates that existing cultural venues add diversity to the district, the pressure placed on punk venues by surrounding development reveal that not all venues are to be recognized by the city as legitimate or desirable forms of either diversity or culture. Close readings of official city planning documents, urban histories, development proposals, and marketing literature are juxtaposed with auto-ethnographic, storytelling, punk histories, and song writing. I argue that punk counter-cultural placemaking practices provide counter-information, counter-environments, and counter-temporalities to space in the city to resist gentrification and refuse displacement as endings. Gentrification kills punk. But punk always comes back, finds new places, haunts old sites, and remembers its past. Key Words: creative placemaking, gentrification, punk, revitalization, urban planning Published: 14 Apr 2023 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2023.2180418 

Assimilation City: Inclusive Planning and Histories of Exclusion

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Canadian Readings of Jewish History: From Knowledge to Interpretive Transmission
D. Maoz & E. Mayer (Eds.)
Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Abstract: Pressing concerns surrounding neighbourhood change, urban inequities, and social movements are burdened with complex histories of exclusion and the complicity of urban planning in reproducing unjust urban landscapes. Ottawa is among the many cities around the world to adopt an “equity and diversity lens” as a tool for tolerance, inclusion, and equity. Within the City’s Official Plan and planning policies, there are pronounced and strange interplays between inclusion and diversity policies and progressive narratives. By tracing the conflation between inclusion and equity in city planning documents and discourse, I reveal how these policies and narrative reinforces normative values and identities of majority groups. By intersecting ontological, theological, and material-spatial analyses, Jewish urban experience unsettles many dominant narratives of place and belonging, whereby place and meaning of place exist in tension with, and in response to, dominant culture. In this paper, I offer a critical autoethnographic case study of looking for and through Jewishness in Ottawa’s urban core. I argue that a deeper interrogation of Jewish histories and experience of and in the city not only offers insights for Jewish cultural studies but might also be placed in meaningful dialogue with other critical urban geographies.

Published: 16 March 2023

ISBN13: 978-1-5275-9003-8