Question your teaspoons : tea-drinking, coping and commercialisation across three planning organisations

Purpose As part of a wider ethnographic project that examines the significance of the public interest across three public and private sector UK planning organisations, this paper uses tea-drinking as a lens to understand structural forces around outsourcing and commercialisation. Reflecting across the five case studies, the analysis supports Burawoy's (2017) recent critique of Desmond's Relational Ethnography (2014). Using Perec's (1997[1973]) notion of the “infra-ordinary” as an anchor, it highlights the insight that arises from an intimate focus on mundane rituals and artefacts. Design/methodology/approach The data were gathered through participant observation, chronicling the researchers' encounters with tea in each of the sites. A respondent-led photography exercise was successful at two sites. Up to 40 days of ethnographic fieldwork were carried out in each site. Findings The tea-drinking narratives, while providing an intact description of discrete case study sites, exist in conversation with each other, providing an opportunity for comparison that informs the analysis and helping us to understand the meaning-making process of the planners both in and across these contexts. Originality/value The paper contributes to critical planning literature (Murphy and Fox-Rogers, 2015; Raco et al., 2016), illuminating structural forces around outsourcing and commercialisation. It also generates methodological reflection on using an everyday activity to probe organisational culture and promote critical reflection on “weighty” issues across study sites

Fenham Pocket Park: a holding ground

Fenham Pocket Park (FPP) is a community-led urban space, founded in 2016 in a context of austerity imposed by the British Government. Beginning as a University-third-sector collaboration, the project transformed an undefined soulless space between a swimming pool and a library into a place for exchange, dwelling and celebrating. It also gave rise to a residents’ group, the Friends of Fenham Pocket Park (FFPP), who became custodians of the space and committed to developing it further. Six years on, the area has suffered further from the impact of austerity and retreat of public services, and the FFPP group has experienced setbacks and a lull in participation. This study documents, through student journals and participant observation, the role played by BA Architecture-and-Urban- Planning students in re-charging the project through playful creative practice interventions and dialogue with residents. It explores the entanglement of civil society with students in a process that is framed by Freire’s critical pedagogy and recent scholarship on lively materials. Here, making is theorised as a vehicle through which pedagogies of hope can embed themselves in the community. The paper thus meditates on the agency of emplaced student-led making in (re)kindling community action, creating collectively shaped social and climate futures

Counter-Conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Popup Civic Actions in Mexico

This paper draws on Foucault’s concept of counter-conduct to move beyond the binary understandings of civil society and social movement. Using illustrative examples of popup civic actions in the aftermath of a flooding disaster that hit the Mexican state of Guerrero in 2013, we argue that for many grassroots and indigenous people with a longstanding struggle for recovery of communal lands (ejidos) and autonomy, mutuality (perceived as the domain of civil society) and resistance (perceived as the domain of social movement) are co-constitutive and continually invoked in their counter-conducts. That, their ethical desire for ‘being otherwise’ and ‘doing things differently’ is constitutive of their political will ‘not to be governed like that’. Using a Foucauldian analytics of counter-conduct, we discuss how self-organised popup actions in Guerrero both unsettled power relations by creating new fields of visibility, techniques, and knowledge, and imbued critical self-reflections, engendering new political identit

Drag Force Measurements of Vegetation Elements

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchiv

Working in the Public Interest? What must planners do differently? Critical thoughts on the state of planning

The current moment is generating huge challenges and raising significant questions about how our societies operate and the future of our cities and countryside. Economic shutdowns are bringing structural inequalities into sharp relief even as they illustrate the daunting scale of the transformations required to reduce our environmental impacts. Many pieces have already been written about how we might not just adapt to a post-Covid world but take the opportunity to build better, healthier, fairer, greener cities. Any hopes for significant change would entail fundamental shifts in the role of planning. At the same time, however, powerful property lobbies threaten a return to a business-as-usual model of development that is led not by care for people and place but the greedy hand of an ever less fettered free market. In England, this is symbolised by a new Conservative government promising to yet again radically streamline a planning system it sees as an impediment to economic recovery. Current circumstances also therefore challenge us to think more broadly about what planning and being a planner really mean in 2020. What is the purpose of planning? Do planners have the tools, resources, and capabilities to address significant societal challenges, and are they trusted to do so? What role should public authorities have and how might this interface with the logics of the market and private-sector driven development? And finally, what is the ‘public interest’ that planners often invoke as the foundation for their work, and how might it be compromised by the nature of the systems we operate in and where we work? The ESRC-funded Working in the Public Interest project has been seeking answers to these questions over the past three years. The project team from the University of Sheffield, Newcastle University and University College London has been engaging closely with contemporary planning practice in both the public and private sectors, focusing attention on what planners do all day. In depth interviews, focus groups to discuss contemporary challenges in planning, and extensive and engaged ethnography have yielded a rich set of insights into the state of planning and the nature of contemporary planning work across the UK. In this booklet we offer a series of brief overviews of key themes that this research has highlighted. Our aim here is not to offer a definition or detailed theoretical discussion of the public interest. Instead we hope to explore how various different facets of planning work are changing. At a broad level our argument is that a much wider range of issues and practices, including for example work-life balance and organisational change, need to be considered alongside issues such as professionalism and ethics when thinking about what it means to work in the public interest. In doing so we hope to stimulate broader debate within and beyond the planning profession about the nature and value of planning. We also aim to highlight a series of key questions and challenges that are shaping planners’ work and that will have significant implications for the future

Voicing job satisfaction and dissatisfaction through Twitter: employees’ use of cyberspace

This article adopts a work orientations perspective to consider how, through the medium of Twitter, employees voice the things they love and hate about their jobs. Using 817,235 tweets posted by 650,958 users in the calendar year 2014, the findings provide new insights into both the employee voice and job satisfaction/dissatisfaction literatures as well as an enhanced understanding of the nature of the employment relationship. First, our findings indicate that Twitter, in its expression of very personal and individualistic needs, might be considered a new form of employee voice. Second, Twitter captures the positive, the negative and the ambivalence in the notion of job satisfaction. Third, the description of the methodology used to access and analyse Twitter data illustrates how new methodological approaches, particularly those embedded within computer science, may be of value to social scientists in their analysis of 'Big Data'