VLOG OVERVIEW
This free vlog is intended to share my 30+ years of parks practitioner experience married with my recently completed (2019) Phd exploring park decision-making processes. Please read my vlog entitled “The Use Case for Parks Are Like Icebergs Vlog.,” March 5, 2023.
TODAYS ICE SCULPTURE
The Known - Unknowns In Government Processes - My 3 Minute PhD Dissertation
Universities around the world have a competition called the 3 Minute Dissertation. Participants describe in three minutes the essence of their research. Today I will take a crack at it.
Social Actor Engagement in Municipal Decision-Making for Parks, Planning, and Civil Society in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 1960-2010: Institutional Intersections (Priebe 2019)
My dissertation focuses on the processes involved in planning, developing, animating, and decommissioning portions of public parks and park systems. While municipal government decisions can have a significant impact on individuals and communities, it's important to understand the various processes involved in creating and managing public spaces like parks. By studying these processes, we can gain a better understanding of how decisions are made and how they affect different stakeholders. This can help inform future decision-making and ensure that public spaces are developed and managed in a way that benefits the community as a whole.
The 2006 land use change process regarding portions of 20 park sites was done without community notice, input, or engagement. It's understandable that this approach silenced, confused, and angered some stakeholders who felt their influence in public spaces was being reduced.
Studying this event and understanding how and why it happened can provide valuable insights into fair and equitable decision-making processes in municipal governance. It's possible that the decision was made with the intention of addressing a specific issue or need, such as a shortage of housing in the area. However, the lack of community engagement and input raises questions about the transparency and inclusivity of the decision-making process.
My dissertation focussed on social actor engagement processes, not outcomes, although the latter are part of the discussion.
As you look out your window and see an urban park like the one below, park users ebb and flow depending on the weather, time of year, time of week, and time of day. Its a snap shot in time, one built on invisible multiple connected processes and practices heavily reliant on community volunteers. My dissertation is a deep dive into the evolving working relationships between state and non-state social actors in the creation and animation of Edmontons public places over the 1960-2010 period, buffeted by economic, political, planning trends. Social actors included elected officials, senior and frontline administrators, developers, community members, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and site volunteers/programmers.
Research Questions
What legislation, policy, and practices have guided park and park system creation and place creation over time? How and why did the legislation, policies and practices evolve over time? What mechanisms (e.g., legislation, policy) mobilized social actor engagement, and how so? What was the importance of those mechanisms? How did each type of social actor engage and influence outcomes, and influence each other? What were the relative levels of power and agency for each type of actor, and how was the power and agency exercised over time? What does this tell us about fair and equitable municipal processes?
Literature Review
There is no single scholarly or practitioner home to parks and parks service delivery and its relationship to land use planning. An extensive cross disciplinary literature review was required to understand the multiple factors and considerations, based in part in my practitioner background, and further extended in my research journey. Planning, parks, parks planning, and recreation service delivery require navigation of discipline and scholarly overlaps between urban planning, public administration, landscape architecture, sociology, recreation and leisure, and ecology literature.
Theoretical Perspective
The focus of social constructionism includes the collective generation and transmission of meaning. Utterances such as legislation, policy, and processes are nuanced and understood differently by different social actors with inherently unequal levels of knowledge, power, and agency. I chose to adopt interpretivism, that seeks to create “understanding” rather than “explain” human and social reality, or establish causality.
Methods and Materials
Case Study is a method used when exploring a descriptive or explanatory question, in a real-world context, where the case is bounded and where the contextual conditions are blurred (Yin 2014). Case study methodology is a bounded study of a real-world situation. It is useful for looking at a specific case from various perspectives to understand the complexity and particularity of a case to develop a comprehensive understanding of it. Case study methodology can be used to study, among other things, groups, partnerships, specific events, institutions, programs, policies, relationships, projects, processes, procedures, and decisions.
Two neighbourhood case study sites were chosen. Blue Quill and Greenview neighbourhoods were largely low density residential development neighbourhoods (5000 people or less), with a single school and park site located in the approximate centre of the neighbourhood planned and acquired in the 70s, fully developed in the 80s, with portions decommissioned in 2006 and 2009.
A multi-pronged data collection approach was adopted: historical and contemporary document analysis, 27 social actor face-to-face semi-structured interviews, collection of economic data, and ground-truthing park development using historic air photographic research and site visits.
Documents reviewed included planning legislation, municipal development plans, strategic plans, policies, bylaws, legal agreements, park master plans, partnership fund raising programs, etc for the entire 50 year period.
Interviews. The face to face interviews included Government of Alberta legislation planner, municipal elected officials, senior city management staff, municipal land use planners, park planners, community league representatives, community residents, recreation coordinators, etc. Open ended questions were asked about their experiences in park land use change processes in terms of what they heard, who did they hear it from, and their view of processes and outcomes. The data was analyzed to understand the discursive practices including silences, power relationships in those practices understanding the positionality of the interviewees, and how those practices reflected or did not reflect legislation, strategic plans, policies, practices, etc. Interviewees often also had experiences in other park site decommissioning processes in other neighbourhoods before 2006.
Data Analysis. This amalgam of data was synthesized using the perspectives of a long-time parks planning practitioner, with all of the inherent biases and perspectives while simultaneously undertaking a deep dive into broader level political, planning, and economic theories and trends.
Institutional theory and perspective guided the analysis. Institutional analyses emphasize the social context that shape individual action. These social contexts are not defined or captured by an account of formal organizations. The focus of the initiative is not the quality of the decision, but rather the interactions through which a decision emerges. The institutional context constitution of action promotes or constrains the potential for social change, including material and cultural change. In the course of my dissertation I used both social relational institutionalist perspective and historical institutionalism.
I used a form of coding to analyze the data, and continually reflected on my experiences and analysis, where I challenged myself to find biases in my interpretations. This was an iterative process, over and extended period of time, after multiple were prepared early and often (just ask my wife), all used to ensure data rigour and validity.
Outcomes/Findings
The analysis revealed two parallel institutions over the entire 1960-2010 period with ebbs and flows in terms of how power and agency where exercised by each, and influence each - the property institution and the parks institution. The analysis tracked how the park and property institution impacted the other in both physical form (i.e., land use) and substance (i.e., construction, programming, and maintenance). The “space” of parks and park systems are created in the property institution, while the “place” was created in the parks institution. The parks institution itself was a reaction to the inability of the land use institution to act alone to transform “spaces” into “places.”
Both institutions have the same categories of social actors (i.e., elected officials, administrators, community NGOs, community residents) but their prominence and roles are different, and have different temporal “seasons”of power and agency in processes, while the specific social actors within each category change over time.
The interactions were analyzed and revealed three eras closely tied to economic and political realities and trends of the day (1960-1980, 1980-2000, 2000 and 2010). These eras were preconfigured or grounded in previous park and property institution actions and outcomes dating back as far as the turn of the 20th century. Policy, plans and processes supporting the parks institution grew in fundamental ways from the early 80s.
Institutional change was not limited to formal institutional actions or priorities (i.e, municipal government). Community social actors had the ability to exert their influence and enact change with their government leaders, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, which fundamentally changed the property institution process decision-making (i.e., need assessments). Economics seemed to be the primary trigger for institutional change in the 1980s in the property institution initiated by the community. In the 2000s, elected officials in the property institution drove housing development on park lands. Both institutions evolved over time in response to one another over time.
The parks institution social actors negative reaction in the 2000s to the process was grounded in previously approved processes that engaged the community, plans, and policies previously followed by elected officials and (other park) administrators until 2006. As such these documents and processes themselves are a source of institutional knowledge, and mobilized community social actor oppositional efforts. They also represent path dependent reactions when consultation/engagement was minimized. Path dependency was also seen in the property institution where elected officials assume the continued role of the community in park funding, construction, programming and maintenance would continue.
Finally, the analysis revealed the unique character of park lands, which I have previously characterized as a unicorn category of municipal lands. No other form of public lands required the development of a supportive institution to share the development and operation of basic services. There is no transportation institution that funds and ploughs roadways, no utility institution that funds and maintains electrical, power, sanitary and storm sewers, etc.