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By the 1960s the urban renewal program was well underway, and it was largely controlled by the downtown planning regime. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) had cleared over 1,280 acres in the Fillmore (or Western Addition) neighborhood, displacing more than 13,500 people, mostly African Americans. As the built environment of the Mission District deteriorated, local institutions began to worry that the SFRA might be planning something similar for their neighborhood. They also worried that the coming BART stations might trigger speculative displacement. In response, a social service agency called the Mission Neighborhood Centers (MNC) produced a study of the Mission in 1960. The document identified problems with a deteriorating environment and inadequate services, but also identified strengths in the neighborhood's multiethnic character and longstanding institutions.

Neighborhood groups like the Mission Council on Redevelopment and later the Mission Coalition Organization were eager to collaborate with the SFRA. But under urban renewal law, the SFRA was unable to give neighborhood groups veto power over any specific plan. Primarily for this reason, neighborhood groups came out against the plan, eventually succeeding in blocking it. Soon thereafter, Mayor Joseph Alioto nominated the Mission for a grant under Model Cities, a Great Society program that funded neighborhood-based planning efforts. Thus was created the Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation (MMNC), a local planning authority. Collaborating with the SFRA, the MMNC built public housing, began social programs, and had a number of other successes. Though it was a multiethnic organization, it received some challenges from the Latino left, particularly a group called Los Siete de la Raza. However, the chapter argues that the ultimate failure of the organization is best explained by the Nixon administration's defunding of Model Cities.

Chapter Five contrasts recovery in four neighborhoods adjacent to Broad Street near downtown New Orleans. The varied experiences across these neighborhoods are more representative of New Orleans’ neighborhoods after Katrina than the highly organized communitywide rebuilding that occurred in Broadmoor and Village de L’Est . They demonstrate how conditions before the storm, neighborhood geography, community civic capacity and large-scale rebuilding projects combined to shape neighborhood recovery. Neighborhoods with a sizable base of homeowners and who mobilized around shared neighborhood goals realized more extensive neighborhood recovery. Three of the four neighborhoods were targets of new development interest after Katrina, including large government redevelopment projects. Consequently, the nature of this development and ability of each neighborhood to negotiate and shape these development plans was a major factor in how their rebuilding unfolded.

This chapter details the surprising encounter between the neighborhood-based planning groups and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA). The neighborhood groups had originally invited the SFRA to engage in collaborative planning for the Mission District, partly because they viewed the urban renewal program as the best tool to prevent the speculative displacement that might be triggered by the coming BART stations, and partly because they worried that the agency might otherwise try to clear the Mission. In fact, the SFRA had never planned to clear the neighborhood, and it proved willing to collaborate with the new Mission Council on Redevelopment (MCOR). However, problems arose when the SFRA revealed a plan that would have radically transformed the areas immediately surrounding the coming BART stations.

Chapter Three details resident-led efforts to rebuild the heavily flooded Broadmoor neighborhood. An existing neighborhood association worked with emerging leaders to complete a neighborhood plan, implement a community repopulation campaign and build capacity to implement key rebuilding projects and programs. The chapter documents Broadmoor’s extensive work to help homeowners return and rebuild, get its elementary school and library rebuilt and the challenges it faced implementing a housing development strategy. It highlights two cornerstones of Broadmoor’s implementation strategy: building extensive partnerships with other organizations and creating its own community development corporation. After five years, Broadmoor had improved its neighborhood cohesion and civic capacity and achieved a higher repopulation rate than the entire city and a similar nearby neighborhood. However, recovery progress was uneven, with a much higher repopulation and housing occupancy for white residents and in the higher income sections of the neighborhood.

This chapter reviews the debate over predetermination, that is, whether neighborhoods should and can be planned into existence. The planned neighborhood is the result of deliberative action, either through a physical plan or as a set of orchestrated actions, in contrast to spontaneous neighborhood formation. The emphasis here is on the contrast between planning for a specified end state and “neighborhood planning” as a process with no predetermined outcome, especially in physical terms. A common narrative is that top-down neighborhood planning has been harmful, for example when it was used to motivate wholesale destruction of existing neighborhoods in the urban renewal period. The resolution of this debate proposes merging the best of both worlds: neighborhoods that do not ignore the importance of bottom-up generation but are still open to the possibility of a planned physical ideal.

Picking up the themes raised by the previous two chapters, this chapter focuses on the creation of neighbourhood forums as a product of the Localist Act (2011). New rights to neighbourhood planning have led to the creation of these new forums in urban areas where parishes had long been abolished. The chapter looks at the development of neighbourhood planning in Exeter St James (Devon), Holbeck (Leeds, Yorkshire) and Highgate (London). It outlines the community-led work that has been done by these forums, and the challenges faced where the community has limited capacity to act independently (in this case in Holbeck in Leeds). The research again highlights the importance of shifting the power relations between the council and the local community.

This chapter extends the idea of Britain being in a post-regeneration era by detailing key policies enacted by the UK Coalition Government, and governments in Scotland and Wales since 2010. A detailed exploration of what the Localism Act in England means for communities suggests that urban policy is increasingly leaving communities to fend for themselves. Neighbourhood Planning is more likely to be used by affluent communities to resist development, and deprived neighbourhoods are expected to manage their own assets. Local Economic Partnerships put city-regions in competition with one-another. Meanwhile the Connected Communities programme marks a break with the largescale social-science knowledge of communities created in the 1990s and 2000s, with new knowledge created from a plethora of different disciplinary perspectives. While policy might be leaving our most marginalised communities in a precarious position, new ways of doing research offer promises to give them a voice and be engaged.

This chapter explores the role of planning's publics within the emergent technocratic landscapes of planning. It does so by drawing on ongoing research into the localism agenda in England and in particular on neighbourhood planning. Neighbourhood planning was introduced in 2011 as a ‘community right’ to draw up a statutory land-use plan. The chapter explores the extent to which technical and ‘expert’ knowledge and the power of public and private planners is being challenged or displaced by the knowledge, emotions, and actions of citizen planners. As such, the chapter shows that technocratisation is a more varied and complex process than previously thought and that these seeming spaces of de-regulation are not immune to forms of re-regulation which seek to re-create local knowledge to align with technocratic language and purposes.

Looks at the history of planning at a community scale in England and particularly at the use of parish plans in rural areas. It considers the use of these plans for communities themselves and for the policy process. It further examines attempts to integrate very local planning activity (informal) with the policy development of local government (formal), asking how integration can be achieved, if it is deemed desirable.

In China, political leaders, professional planners and designers, and the public at large typically view the modernization of cities as a matter of ordering them. Many outside observers, awed by the scale and speed of China’s urbanization and the monumental mobilization of labor and resources involved in it, are willing to accept that the drive towards order is both necessary and desirable. This chapter will question dominant official and professional characterizations of what constitutes orderliness, and discuss the actual coexistence of order and disorder in the Chinese urban landscape. In addition, by examining a series of community design activities in the city of Quanzhou, in Fujian Province, between 1993 and 2005, followed by village surveys and some modest design studies in 2007 and 2008, this chapter describes how an official and popular recognition that standardized approaches do not provide answers to the city’s unique conditions led the city’s planning authorities to sponsor an experiment in more incremental and resident-driven urban visioning. While the experiments were limited in their impact, they have served to reveal more clearly the obstacles that community-engaged planning must overcome in China.

This chapter describes the evolution of Chattanooga Organized for Action as they transitioned from a popular protest group into a 501-C3 non-profit who initiates, supports and connects place-based social justice movements across downtown Chattanooga. It also discusses two components of a participatory action research initiative related to this research project: the Sustaining People and Reclaiming Communities (SPARC) Initiative and the Planning Free School of Chattanooga. Both were experimental community planning processes, designed to offer alternatives to mainstream citizen engagement and capacity building in the city.

This chapter evaluates the nature and extent of resident involvement in the regeneration of east Manchester taking into account the temporal and spatial realities of the area. Participation in formal structures such residents’ associations and neighbourhood planning processes is examined alongside less formal participation in parties in the park and community and social events and instances of protest, both sporadic and sustained, are also examined. The analysis recognises the attempt by the regeneration structures to involve residents while also acknowledging the constraints and barriers to participation.

This chapter examines the latest local government policy developments and roots them in a wider debate concerning the legitimate function of the state in respect of planning and service delivery. A spotlight is placed on government policy since 2010 and the meanings attached to ‘localism’ by the UK Coalition government;

This chapter details the mess of the current planning system and suggests how planning can win back a degree of legitimacy. Planning has become a battleground. The system almost ensures that participants take unreasonable positions. Conservationists and local people take up opposition almost in principle because they have no confidence in what will emerge from the process. On the other side, developers use their legal and financial power to intimidate weak local authorities who are desperate to meet housing targets to get what they want. If the public is losing belief in planning, the solution is not to depoliticise it by making it more responsive to market signals or putting ‘experts’ in charge. Part of the solution is to engage more people and get their buy-in. Neighbourhood planning is a good way of doing this. However, the planning system must also show that it can deliver.

Between 1800 and the 1880s, Matanzas experienced an impressive urban expansion. Growth was so obvious that a city booster suggested Matanzas be known as “the Tyre of the Western Seas” after the ancient Phoenician trading center. An immediate consequence of growth was an improved transportation system. A scheduled steamship route between Havana and Matanzas began in 1819, and a railroad passenger service was started in the 1840s. Important buildings went up, such as the Esteban (Sauto) Opera House (the work of Roman architect Daniele Dal'Allio, who also designed St. Peter the Apostle Church in the planned neighborhood of Versalles). Growth was not chaotic, but well regulated and mindful of a difficult topography (the city proper is crossed by the Yumuri and San Juan rivers). This chapter explores urban growth and change from a material perspective—how Matanzas was put together.