Peace and Planning

Category: Wayfinding

  • Care culture > car culture

    The way we build our cities and communities says a lot about what we value. When you walk around your neighborhood, what design and planning decisions do you see and what do they tell you about what our society prioritizes? Whose movements and activities do they most facilitate? Whose needs…

  • Urban planners = urban peacebuilders?

    A few themes stand out in the readings I completed to round out my investigation of the urban peacebuilding literature – and they stood out primarily because of what was absent rather than what was present. Namely, 1) who gets to be considered a peacebuilder (especially in urban areas), 2)…

  • Is urban transport a contact (theory) sport?

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve focused on reading about Allport’s contact theory (1954) which hypothesized that the right kind of contact (see four conditions below) could reduce intergroup prejudice. As perhaps one of the most studied theories in the social sciences, it posits that 1) cooperative contact between 2) equal-status…

  • Maybe I should call it my first “syllacar” (because buses aren’t silly…but my puns are)

    This semester I have a neat opportunity to take what’s called a “Directed Reading” – basically a chance to create my own syllabus around a topic I want to dive into the literature about. In partnership with a professor, I’m using this course to gear up for my eventual comprehensive…

  • Reflecting on the Deflections of the Principle-Policy Gap

    While I’ve been done with the first year of my PhD program for a over month now, it took a little time to get used to the new rhythms of summer life (stay tuned for updates in a future post!). However, the past few weeks have offered an opportunity to…

  • Public Diss-course: When Things Get Heated

    For one of my final papers this semester, I attempted to take a narrative approach to public discourse. Specifically, I was interested in how members of the public presenting testimony at a DC Council hearing on transportation policy framed their arguments. While I have very little training in narrative analysis,…