Planning Education before College Experimentation in Community Engagements & Youth Leadership

DOI: 10.5176/2425-0112_UPPD15.19

Authors: Bruce Frankel

Abstract:Urban Planning, while manifest with strong professional values, organization, and accomplishments, substantially remains either unknown or misunderstood by citizens, and especially by the most ignored constituency of adolescent youth, our future. Selecting planning as an undergraduate or graduate course of study may be characterized as accidental, albeit rewarding. When unknown or misunderstood in our civic affairs, the power of the planning profession is severely compromised, with public policies and private enterprises regarding place formulated and adopted absent planning values and discipline. Planning’s gap in influence can be ameliorated through the education of youth, who in turn edify their families at the dinner table and, surprisingly, are listened to and deferred by older stakeholders in their communities. Under State of Indiana sponsorship, Ball State University completed in May 2015 an inaugural program for youth leadership in planning and civic affairs, entitled “My Community, My Vision [MCMV].” The author served as principle investigator, and herein assesses this experience, presenting lessons and recommendations for a secondary education in urban and regional planning. Through planning steering committees, surveys and stakeholder meetings 504 youths participated in five rural community experiments. Between the dual objectives of MCMV of instilling loyalty in a community’s youth to stay or return in their hometown [or other Indiana rural town] and instilling civil leadership and planning values of civic participation, the latter had a more marked program impact. Those adolescents participating in the program already had a general inclination toward their hometown, but developed a strong favor toward the discipline of planning through the program. Utilizing Hart’s hierarchy of young people’s participation and Innes-Frankel’s conditions for effective participation, we conclude that youth experienced a degree of citizen power and addressed in their stakeholder meetings all of the conditions for communicative planning. Embedding this mini course of study into the high school curriculum and with buy-in by high school faculty and administration would insure further success.

Keywords: Urban planning, communicative planning, youth civic leadership, rural youth, planning education.