Archive

Here are all of our past articles.

Creating stronger planners through Reflective Practice

In the last half-century, the planner’s role and responsibilities have changed remarkably. Traditionally, planners worked to build and maintain the infrastructure of the public realm. In contrast, the issues that planners now grapple with are complex, interconnected and interdisciplinary—issues like population growth and shifts, social connectedness, housing and homelessness, equitable use of government resources, reconciliation, and accessibility. When we at BC Healthy Communities attended the Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP) conference earlier this year, this was brought into clear relief: the majority of the lectures, case studies and stories shared by planners at the conference described projects that interacted with gender, race, reconciliation, equity, and power. It’s an exciting time to be a planner, but at the same time, the responsibility to integrate all perspectives and dimensions of power and fairness into planning has never been greater.

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Growing together: Reflections from the IAP2 Conference

As an organization, IAP2 focuses on building better approaches to the process variously called “public engagement,” “community engagement,” “civic engagement,” or “public participation,” depending on the field of the practitioner. In our work, we generally call it community engagement. This is the process by which governments, institutions, and other organizations that make decisions affecting the public ask for the public’s input into those decisions.

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