Peace and Planning

I’m about to start a long, exciting adventure – (hopefully) obtaining my PhD in Conflict Analysis and Resolution. How did I get here?

After graduating with my masters in city and regional planning, I felt no more prepared to meaningfully engage with communities than I had before I started my graduate program. While I took the sole departmental elective in dispute resolution and had ventured to take classes at the School of Government in mediation and facilitation, the training I received never touched on topics such as identity, empathy, or belonging. We implicitly covered the concept of trust, but only as it pertained to the traditional framework of negotiation – if you’ll be working with this developer again, they’ll remember what you did in this situation so you better behave!

In my professional experience in disaster recovery planning and in developing federal resilience programs, I found that practitioners were at a loss for knowing how to frame the “why” of stakeholder engagement and that their “for whom” (not to mention “with whom”) was often unclear. As a volunteer designing a public participation plan for my own neighborhood as we prepared to build a new community center, I wanted to make the engagement process something that deepened connection between my neighbors and cultivated a sense of agency but was left uninspired as I scoured the internet for ideas.

As I began to consider the “how,” I was intrigued by the promise of the peace and conflict resolution field, which seemed to have more evolved thinking when it came to equipping practitioners to navigate fraught spaces and make conflict constructive. So here I am – just a girl, standing in front of a complex challenge, hoping to cross disciplines and move the needle in how neighbors collaborate to make positive change.

I hope to post here with some frequency, and plan to use the practice to further hone my critical thinking and writing as I encounter themes and questions during my formal coursework and informal discussions with peers. While most of my posts will be about urban planning, community engagement, and peace and conflict resolution, there might be a few stray topics threaded throughout. That said, don’t be surprised if over time my interests shift as I encounter literature in this field that opens my eyes to new possibilities!

I invite dialogue and hope to connect with others passionate about more nuanced, thoughtful, deliberate, meaningful, and generative urban planning practices.