Community Animators and Participatory Planning

Ryan Anders Whitney and Trudy Ledsham

Journal of the American Planning Association, 2024, vol. 90, issue 2, 336-348

Abstract: Problem, research strategy, and findingsIdentifying and implementing equitable participatory planning processes is challenging for city planners. Through a qualitative analysis of the Families and Educators for Safe Cycling Project (FESC), an active school travel (AST) project in Toronto (Canada), we identify a potential new path to increase the range of voices heard by planners and decision makers. Specifically, we present community animation and animators as an effective approach for community engagement in AST planning through analyzing 27 semistructured interviews, reviewing key project documents, and coding key themes. We showcase how community animation can play a key role in the meaningful engagement of school communities by deepening and enriching the participatory planning process. We conclude by suggesting that community animators can foster more equitable participatory planning processes by working to include historically marginalized communities within urban planning.Takeaway for practiceSpecific groups of people, such as school communities, continue to be excluded from participatory planning processes. By providing insights into the value of community animators, this research allows planners to understand, conceptualize, and apply more equitable participatory planning processes during infrastructure development. Though the case is based on a specific program related to AST in Toronto, the results can assist planners in other communities in enriching their local engagement processes.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01944363.2023.2240794 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rjpaxx:v:90:y:2024:i:2:p:336-348

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rjpa20

DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2023.2240794

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the American Planning Association is currently edited by Sandi Rosenbloom

More articles in Journal of the American Planning Association from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().