Social Actors in Parks - Linking Land Use Planning and Parks Service Operationalization
Or, Why Only the Loons Show Up
Overall Vlog Overview
My return to the academy to earn a PhD after 32 years of parks practice uncovered many (practice) realities extensively studied by researchers. This dual lens gives me a unique inside (practice)/outside (research) perspective (and visa versa) to bridge the two worlds. I will use lots of “I” and “me” to personalize my experiences, with lots of examples. I will share park development policy and practice decision-making using an academic lens (i.e., institutional theory). My practice experiences were in the Edmonton region in the 1982 to 2014 period. Oh, and by the way, I have opinions that may or may not be popular with my planning colleagues. So let’s get started!
Todays Ice Sculpture - Social Actors in Parks
Land use planning processes like area plan development and approvals in Alberta are the administrative and political processes that create park and park land system plans for municipal recreation service delivery (i.e., space creation). It is important for planners and others to understand how park land recreation services are later operationalized. As planners strive to create great places, it is through these latter on-going and evolving processes, park services are co-produced and evolve from spaces to places. What happens in the land use planning institution informs and impacts what happens in the parks institution, and visa versa. To find out more, watch the video below.
Key Takeaways
Institutional decision making holds that decision-making in society is not limited to election officials. Rather, groups of social actors coalesce around specific areas (i.e., parks, housing, truth and reconciliation, transportation, public safety, etc) to influence and inform elected officials and administrators.
These groups form into evolving formal and informal groups, formed of social actors of both government and civil society writ large. Moreover, social actors may also simultaneously straddle more than one institution (e.g., community leagues, administrators and elected officials are engaged in housing and park issues).
This complicates and stimulates government decision-making processes in ways that can be contentious and divisive, particularly where expedited timelines are suggested or demanded by political leaders. The messiness of democracy is not always found in the content of the decision, but the process used to arrive at one. Understanding the impacts of decisions on multiple and competing stakeholders requires or demands transparent timely processes.
Park social actors, including community leagues, community members, minor sport organizations, etc., all largely volunteers, are integral to municipal recreation service delivery (i.e., operationalization of park services). The role of community volunteers in recreation service delivery transform spaces created in the land use institution into places, unlike any other municipal government service.
The parks institution is comprised of not only civil society (i.e., volunteers, developers) but also municipal administrators (e.g., planners, landscape architects, construction project managers), elected officials (i.e., for support of capital and operating funding programs).
Finally, all institutions evolve over time, as do decision-making processes. Bringing this back to the iceberg concept, it is the below the surface decision-making processes and societal institutional settings that define what happens on a park site and park services the past and in the future.