The Baldy Center Podcast

The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo
Episode #43
Podcast recording date: 5/15/2024
Host-producer: Logan
Speaker: Kate Nelischer
Contact information: BaldyCenter@buffalo.edu

Transcription begins.

Logan:

Hello and welcome to The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy Podcast. I'm your host Logan. On this week's episode, we are joined virtually by Dr. Kate Nelischer, assistant professor at the UB School of Architecture and Planning. In today's episode, we discuss her recently published paper titled “Privately-directed participatory planning: Examining Toronto's Quayside smart city.” We talk about the different facets of urban planning policy and the importance of community engagement within regional development and urban planning. Here is Dr. Nelischer. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate your time. I would like to first start off by having you introduce yourself to the audience, telling them about your background, your academic journey, and your research focus.

Kate:

Great. Thanks for having me, Logan. So I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo's School of Architecture and Planning, and I've been here for about two years. Previous to this, I worked at a number of universities in Canada where I'm from. I taught at the University of Waterloo in the School of Planning there and also Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of Toronto. Previous to that, I was also the assistant dean of academic planning and governance at the University of Toronto Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. And then in another life previous to academia, I worked in consulting, in planning for a firm in Toronto and also for the city of Toronto. And a lot of that work really informed my research interests. My research tends to focus on participatory planning and community engagement in planning processes.

Logan:

And before we dive into your research, I wanted to first briefly discuss urban planning policy and what that is. For the past season on the podcast, the audience and I have been learning about how factors such as history and religion help to structure formal legislation and influence things such as federal or state law, whether it be US or international, in a much more traditional sense. So could you tell us how urban planning plays a role in the world of law and policy?

Kate:

Absolutely. So this is a really broad topic and I'm sure many of your listeners coming from law will have a good understanding of how planning intersects with law and certainly those who study municipal planning law will have a good understanding of this. Because it's so broad perhaps it's helpful to narrow it down a little bit to talk about housing just because it's such a hot topic at the moment in both the US and Canada.

We're in the midst of a housing crisis in both countries, which is a term that refers to really severe and long-term scarcity of affordable housing, and then just a lack of supply of housing, not meeting the general demand as well. So why do we have a housing crisis? There are many different factors that contribute to a housing crisis, but one of them actually planning policy and planning law as well, particularly zoning. Zoning is a kind of land use regulation and it's very broad, but it basically determines where things are built and how much is built, what uses go where, and what forms those buildings take. And land use controls, including zoning, are stipulated by local governments, power given by state governments usually.

Because of this land use controls and zoning laws vary dramatically by location, and that means that we can have different outcomes as it relates to housing. That means that some places build more housing, and some places build less housing and struggle even more with meeting the demand that we need at the moment. They also stipulate what forms those buildings can take, what density those buildings are. We have something within this kind of umbrella of land use regulation zoning called FAR or Floor Area Ratio. This is the ratio between the building floor area and the total area of the lot that the building resides on.

Different density can mean that we can build more housing when we're specifically talking about the needs for housing. Or lower density can mean that there's more sprawl, that buildings are more spread out. There is a lot of need for more density across the United States in different communities, both to try to reduce the amount of sprawl and to try to address the housing crisis, to try to build more housing and provide it to those who need it as well. So this is critically important in a discussion of housing. It's what's called zoning capacity as well, that is particularly relevant, how many residents zoning allows for in a particular place.

Many cities in the seventies and eighties actually reduced their zoning capacity by doing something called down zoning, meaning that they change their zoning to limit the density, limit heights and locations of new residential developments. And today we're continuing to feel the repercussions of those downsizing processes because it has slowed down housing production. More recently, some cities have tried to up zone, try to increase density and allow for more residents in a particular community. Zoning also has really strong ties to the perpetuation and enforcement of racial segregation in our cities across the United States. Early race-based zoning laws in the US prohibited black families from owning land or living in specific areas.

An example of what we call exclusionary zoning, and we've seen the continuation of that through redlining processes and through more covert ways as well more recently. There are different, I guess, zoning tools that can be used to increase the supply of housing to provide more affordable housing. Inclusionary zoning is one of these tools, but this is just one example of how planning is so linked with different policies and different laws. And I think it's something that if you're outside the planning and outside of the law world, you don't necessarily make that connection right away.

Logan:

So last month you published a paper titled “Privately-directed participatory planning: Examining Quayside smart city.” Could you lay some groundwork for what prompted you to research this specific topic and what this research is about?

Kate:

Certainly. So this paper actually came out of my dissertation research at the University of Toronto. While I was doing my dissertation in Toronto, a new project was launched called Quayside, or some might know it as Sidewalk Labs or the Sidewalk Toronto project. And this was a smart city project that was proposed for the Toronto waterfront. It was a really high profile project, a lot of media attention for a number of reasons. The first is that this is very profitable, very developable land, very highly sought after land.

Toronto is a very quickly growing city with a lot of development demand, and there is an area of the waterfront that is kind of a post-industrial area that hasn't been redeveloped. And so it's a very desirable place to develop. That area of the waterfront is run by an organization called Waterfront Toronto, which is a tripartite government organization. It includes representation from the city of Toronto, the province of Ontario, and the federal government as well. And in 2017, Waterfront Toronto sought to find a private development partner to help develop a neighborhood called Quayside, which is just a 12 acre neighborhood. And Sidewalk Labs, which is an American startup company, a subsidiary of Alphabet and Google, won that bid and created a partnership to then launch in 2017 what they called Quayside or Sidewalk Toronto, which was envisioned as a smart city built from scratch, or they often referred to it as from the internet up. So this idea that this new neighborhood would be really exciting place to test new technologies, to test new services and would be built with this private partner. This was really exciting to me and a great opportunity for me to study particularly how citizens would be engaged in this smart city planning process.

We don't know a lot about not only the smart city planning process because it's relatively new, but also how people and community members and residents can have a voice in those processes. So that's what I wanted to study, and that's kind of where this paper came from. In terms of the definition of a smart city, I think that's quite interesting to think about in the context of this project because it was a very amorphous project. It started out as a lot, really exciting different ideas, but also it received a lot of pushback from community members, right from the get go over frustrations that they didn't have an opportunity to determine what company be selected for this project, that they didn't have an opportunity to determine the overall vision and goals, whether or not a smart city was the right choice for this piece of land, this very valuable and important piece of land. The project was very interesting and very controversial. It actually ended in 2020 when Sidewalk Labs, after a few years of work on the project and dedicating tens of millions of dollars to it, actually walked away from the project. So a lot of lessons coming out of this.

Logan:

Could you dive deeper into the definition of what a smart city is and perhaps explain it through the context of the United States providing some examples of smart cities?

Kate:

Absolutely. So this is something that is debated by smart cities scholars, so it's difficult to define because as I mentioned earlier, the smart city is kind of this broad, overarching amorphous definition. I think that very broadly we can consider the term smart city to refer to any urban development that has digital technologies integrated into the physical infrastructure, the public realm or digital technologies used to enhance citizen government services. So things like managing garbage collection, managing how you pay your taxes. Critically I would also say that the smart city is defined by the involvement of private technology corporations in city building processes, whether that means ongoing development processes, new development processes or smart city technology companies acting as almost intermediaries between citizens and their government as well. And there are lots of examples of all of these different kinds of forms of smart cities in the United States and in other areas of the world as well.

One particularly that I think of is Kansas City, which was studied extensively because of the Google Fiber project a number of years ago. So Google came in and tried to integrate new high-speed internet into the community through a public private partnership with Kansas City. There's been a lot of scholarship on this project and some of the challenges that were involved in this project. Also, the Union Point Smart City project in Boston has been studied as one that demonstrates some of the conflicting objectives and responsibilities between municipal governments and technology corporations that makes these partnerships challenging. One that is newer and perhaps a little bit more unknown at this point is a new proposed project in Northern California called California Forever, and this is currently still in proposal.

A number of tech entrepreneurs have gathered together to buy up farmland in Northern California to build eventually a proposed new community, new smart community. There are other smaller examples of this as well. Some people think of the smart city as kind of a new form of the company town that we've known for a long time where major employers will build specific communities for their employees. We've seen Meta or Facebook do this. Google has gotten involved in this in California as well at a different scale. And some of these newer housing communities, specifically for employees of these companies do have technology integrated into them in new ways. So they could be considered a form of a smart city as well.

Logan:

One of your main talking points is about facilitating individual participation and planning processes, or as you put it, how to best operate with a citizen-centric approach and the roles each actor plays within this process, whether it be a public or private entity. So would you be able to provide us with an example of a notable planning policy that perhaps didn't have that much community input or wasn’t citizen-centric that ended up not being very favorable?

Kate:

So this was one of the findings of that paper I recently published on Sidewalk Labs, which was that that project, some of the challenges that arose in that project were a direct result of a lack of power given to citizens in decision making processes. The Sidewalk Labs planning process was originally advertised as being very citizen-centric, as providing lots of opportunities for citizens to get involved. And there were opportunities. Sidewalk Labs in Waterfront Toronto held many different community meetings, many different workshops. I think that they reported in the end that they had engaged tens of thousands of Torontonians in this planning process. The challenge here though was when that opportunity for participation arose, and that was only after Sidewalk Labs had been retained as the private partner to lead this development, and only after the overall vision and goals for this to be a smart city development had already been established. And so the challenge here was that community members felt, and certainly the ones I interviewed for this research, felt that they didn't have an opportunity to have a say early on enough in the project to really impact the overall vision for the neighborhood. And I think that that's a really key component that citizens need to be engaged very early on in the process in order for them to be able to meaningfully change this.

Of course, this is not a new story. This kind of challenge arises in many different contexts, not just smart city projects. One that comes to mind recently is actually the park redevelopment in Williamsburg, New York of the Marsha P. Johnson Park, which some may have heard about a few years ago. The state of New York was actually leading a redevelopment process for this park along the waterfront and tendered the project and found a designer and proposed a new design for the park without having meaningfully engaged with the community previously. And so there was a lot of negative community reception to that proposal at the park, and so much so that the state actually went back out and re-tendered the process, held a more inclusive community visioning workshop beforehand and basically redesigned the park because of that resistance. So I think that you see more and more some of these municipal organizations, state organizations responding to communities wanting more of a say in these planning processes and in these design processes as well.

Logan:

And what does public participation mean or look like? I think when many people think about what public participation in urban development or local policy is, they may think about parks and recreation, the public forums they would hold or perhaps surveys and feedback forums. So could you provide us with a few examples of what participation and urban planning looks like?

Kate:

I think it looks like a lot of different things. I think when we think of public participation, I think many people will visualize the town hall meeting where you have a consultant up at the front presenting a proposed plan and the community members listening in the audience or perhaps getting up to the mic to ask questions or respond in some way. I would say that's a very limiting format for participation and many planners, many designers practicing today are making concerted efforts to go above and beyond those more traditional forms of engagement. And a lot of these more inclusive processes that you see today are influenced by a lot of planning scholars working in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and publishing on participatory planning models, communicative planning models and deliberative planning models that encourage planners to find ways to empower citizens rather than to just educate them or tokenize them through engagement processes.

A lot of this work is influenced by Sherry Arnstein, who was a planning scholar, who published a really influential work in the 1960s called “The Ladder of Citizen Participation,” where she provides a tool to kind of visualize how participation, depending on how it's designed, how these participation processes are designed, can mean really meaningful engagement and empowerment of citizens and can also mean that you're limiting the power that they have and kind of checking a box. Oh, we went out to the community, and we told them what's going on, that's enough. And of course it's not enough. We need more than that. In the end, I think that participation is beneficial for many reasons. Number one is that local residents are the experts on their own communities, and planners and other municipal and state officials can come in and they have different expertise, but it's the people who live in these communities who know them best and that's why there's a need to engage them meaningfully and early enough. As I was saying earlier that I found in the Sidewalk Labs case, that was the key challenge, is that community participation opportunities weren't provided early enough in the planning process for them to really meaningfully change the direction of that process. And so I think that early engagement, early and often is really key here.

Logan:

And like you said, some urban planners are trying to integrate new forms of public participation into urban policy. So what are some of these things that urban planners and smart city providers are doing or can do in order to make the planning process more accessible to the general public?

Kate:

Yeah, I think in terms of the smart city context, one of the pieces that's really necessary is an educational component. I think some people might be scared off by the term smart city. It sounds like the Jetsons, it sounds very futuristic, it sounds very technology focused. And if people aren't empowered with the knowledge of what a smart city is, what is being proposed, then they perhaps are more reticent to engage in these conversations. So I think any planners working on a smart city project or anything that's built as a smart city, or a tech-focused project or new development needs to be really clear about educating community members so that they are equipped with the tools and knowledge to be able to participate meaningfully and fully.

On the other side, I would also say that an accountability structure, a very clear accountability structure is really necessary. And this is something that came out of my research into the Sidewalk Labs project. Because that project, like many other smart cities, was a public-private partnership, it created a very fuzzy accountability structure. So normally when a municipal government or a state government comes in and wants to work on a new development with the community or has a plan proposed, the accountability structure is quite clear between citizens and elected officials and planners working for public sector organizations. When you add a private company to the mix, like a private smart city technology provider like Sidewalk Labs was in the Quayside project, that accountability structure becomes a little bit more fuzzy, and it's a little bit more difficult for citizens participating in that process to have any sort of recourse, to have any sort of clear idea of who to go to if they are unhappy with a decision that was made. How can they ask questions? How can they respond? Who can they keep accountable to make sure that what is said in these meetings is then reflected in the subsequent decisions made? So I think that within this broader structure of public private partnerships, where you see these quite often in the smart city context, that accountability structure needs to be made clear between the partners and then also to citizens participating as well.

Logan:

And while Buffalo may not be described or categorized as a smart city, are there any connections that can be made between your research and urban planning happening within the Buffalo community?

Kate:

Certainly, I'm fairly new to Buffalo, but what I have learned since moving here and since working here for a couple of years now, is that there is a strong tradition of grassroots organizing in Buffalo. And that is something that also benefited Toronto in the smart city case. There was a lot of resistance, community resistance to the Sidewalk Labs case, and I argue that some of the success that resistance movement found was because of the grassroots organizing that was done by individual groups and then collectively this network organizing approach that I think is fairly unique to Toronto.

Toronto has, similar to Buffalo, a strong history of grassroots organizing, and it was really mobilized in that moment where a lot of these groups with strong local histories were able to work together to respond to what was happening at Quayside and to challenge it as well. I think that we can learn from what happened there, and we can also learn from what's happening in Buffalo where the same thing is happening. Lots of individual groups in Buffalo do excellent work on their own and are also working together and collaborating together to empower one another and to also create strength in numbers between those organizations. So this networked approach to grassroots organizing is something that I think that planners in particular need to pay attention to because it's incredibly powerful and it's also incredibly beneficial to the overall objective of planning to better communities. I think if we can have an eye to what the community wants, what they're saying they want, and what they're already doing, and find ways to support their goals and their efforts, we'll be better off in the long run.

Logan:

Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you coming in and speaking with me.

Kate:

Thanks, Logan. That was fun.

Logan:

That was Dr. Kate Nelischer, and this has been The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy Podcast produced by the University at Buffalo. Let us know what you think by visiting our X, formerly Twitter, @baldycenter, or emailing us at baldycenter@buffalo.edu. To learn more about the Center, visit our website, buffalo.edu/baldycenter. The theme music for the season was composed by Matias Homar. My name is Logan and on behalf of The Baldy Center, thank you for listening.

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