Getting Started (Part2):
When Your Planner Can’t Partner
In my last post, I talked about finding your local planner. But what happens if they don’t have the bandwidth - or the freedom - to work with you? (One planner I know who did a bunch of super innovative planning projects with a museum started getting ham-strung by politics when their champion in city leadership left office, so they took a job in a different city. Planning is still so rich in potential museum content and so important to your community that I say keep going – just find different partners.
Planning is still so rich in potential museum content and so important to your community that I say keep going – just find different partners.
Look to Your Local Grassroots Organizations
Several are certain to be working on planning-related issues. There should be plenty to reach out to: local environmental justice or housing justice organizations, urban forestry, farming, or gardening groups, local arts collaboratives or festivals working in public spaces, civic education groups, and on and on. They may not think of themselves as being tied to urban or regional planning, but if you can find a connection between their work, your work, and shaping the future of your community, you’ll probably find a way that, together, you can amplify the public’s input into your community’s master planning process. (By the way, when planners are seeking public input, they’ll frequently set up a booth at the arts or science festivals, street fairs, and farmer’s markets put on by grassroots orgs, so planners definitely see the orgs’ connections to planning.)
Go to College
Since many of us are used to partnering with university researchers – definitely consider local urban planning professors. When I worked at the EcoTarium, we partnered with a researcher (now Department Chair) of the Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. There are plenty of potential research topics to explore, but definitely look into public engagement, in part because it is a repeated theme in the American Planning Association’s Research Agenda, and in part because it aligns so closely with visitor learning and engagement. (Admittedly, I’m biased because our NSF-funded project with UMass researchers focused on community engagement in planning within the City Science exhibit.
Just like searching for local plans and planners, you might need to give your search engine a workout to find university planning folks. Programs or degrees have names with some combination of “Urban”, “Regional”, or “Community”, with “Planning”, “Development”, “Studies”, “Sustainability”, “Policy”, and/or “Preservation”. And they can be under the umbrella of the Geography, Architecture or Design, Landscape Architecture, Public Policy, Environmental Policy, or Urban Studies department. I’m sure I’ve missed some –but keep digging if research partnerships are your jam.
Or Go it Alone
Simply forge ahead in the name of increasing civic education. Look for ways to bring a planning lens to your next exhibition or program. Within the scope of your museum’s mission, how could you tweak upcoming exhibitions to foster community discussion about planning-related issues? Document neighborhoods and communities eradicated by 1960s urban renewal. Highlight how policies and plans shape your community’s transportation past and present, and invite visitors to design a better transportation system for the future. Highlights justice issues in your climate exhibition or climate issues in your art exhibition.
Tell me about it!
If you’ve launched a partnership - or just started conversations - let me know how it’s going! I’m collecting stories to see if we can find patterns to what works, what doesn’t, and what surprises people find along the way.
~ Betsy Loring1
The Planning-Curious Museum Person
Sharing stories and ideas for other Planning-Curious Museum People and for Museum-Curious Planning People.
Betsy Loring is founder of expLoring exhibits & engagement. She has over 20 years’ experience in project management and exhibit development in multidisciplinary, indoor and outdoor museum settings. Her services include exhibit master planning, content and interactive development, and writing, with a focus on hands-on STEM. She also offers staff training in exhibition planning, formative evaluation, and prototyping. Special interests include multi-institutional collaborations, peer-to-peer professional development, and of course – collaboration with municipal planning practitioners.