Director of the University of California Transportation Center (UCTC) and Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning Karen Trapenberg Frick recently published two articles in the Journal of Planning Theory & Practice and the Journal of Planning Education and Research.
Journal of Planning Theory & Practice No Left or Right, Only Right or Wrong:
“There is no left or right, it’s about right or wrong.” Tea party and conservative activists in the United States emphatically argued this point in conversations with me during my research on the Tea Party movement’s ascendency which occurred after President Barack Obama’s election in 2008 and in the wake of the Great Recession (Trapenberg Frick, 2013 Trapenberg Frick, K. (2013). We spoke for hours about the conservative traditions and interests of the Tea Party and other activists, on such subjects as reduced government and taxation, fiscal responsibility, free market economics and the protection of constitutional rights.
Journal of Planning Education and Research No Permanent Friends, No Permanent Enemies: Agonistic Ethos, Tactical Coalitions, and Sustainable Infrastructure:
Turbulent debates between divergent actors are part of the fiber of planning. One manifestation of tensions is the emergence of tactical coalitions with citizens finding common ground across the political divide. This article seeks to theorize such coalition formation for which planning scholarship is sparse. Drawing from agonism, other scholarship, and three U.S. cases of sustainable infrastructure, I develop a typology of tactical coalitions based on their level of strategic interaction, duration, and transformation. This research and theorization provides compelling evidence that polarized citizens connect in agonistic and deliberative ways outside of formal planning processes and have influence in decision making