For over thirty years researchers in fields as diverse as communication, planning, public administration, and political science have simultaneously sought to make urban planning more democratic at a grass-roots level, recently culminating in a vogue for “communicative” or “collaborative” planning by which communication and mediation intensive community processes intended to build real consensus and understanding across political divides. At the same time, the same researchers have bemoaned the failure of increasingly inclusive planning processes – including communicative planning efforts – to translate into more genuinely open governmental policies. Surprisingly, there has been little academic attention paid to why cities continue to invest time and money in planning processes that are intended to, yet inevitably fail to make urban politics more democratic and inclusive. Based on my ethnographic, activist participant research into Seattle, Washington’s efforts to create a master plan for free public skateparks, I argue that public input based planning continues to be politically popular not in spite of, but because of its potentially anti-democratic uses. By providing elected officials with a variety of tactics and strategies for pursuing the often anti-democratic yet pragmatic day-to-day practices of the professional urban politician, practices of urban planning based on public participation and communication have persisted and thrived.

Lev Manovich (2005) once proposed that the 1990s were about the virtual and that it was quite possible that the first decade of the 2000s was going to be about the physical. At the end of 2009, we might suggest that the next decade will be about location. The development of mobile technologies, and the ability to access the Internet in public spaces led many critics to lament the decline of the public sphere as it has become cluttered with outside connections (Goldberger, 2003, Uzzell, 2008). Global networks, however, are increasingly constituted by local information, and digital interfaces, instead of removing us from the nearby physical space, actually help us to draw connections to local spaces, a practice we call network locality. Implicit to our understanding of network locality is that the self is not mobile, but located, so not only net-local interfaces (such as mobile phones, and mapping applications) allow us to pay attention to what is near, but they also expand the purview of what is near to beyond what is physically proximate. In a net-local situation, paying attention to an anonymous user at a neighboring street corner, visualized on your Brightkite map for instance, can now be just as legitimate as paying attention to the unknown person standing next to you. In this presentation, we examine the practices in which people engage to locate themselves within net-local public spaces. And more directly, how these practices are changing the meaning and engagement with public spaces. What we call net-local public space is any space wherein people move between the immediately proximate and the mediately distant within a carefully crafted set of social rituals that ultimately serves to extend the purview of local space. We begin the presentation by reconsidering the concept of public space as it pertains to net-local interactions. Then, borrowing from sociologist Erving Goffman, we focus on the traditional rituals that transpire within public spaces, and we demonstrate how these rituals of co-presence are being challenged to accommodate elements of network locality. We finish by giving examples of how net-local interfaces shape our interactions with net-local public spaces.

With increased globalization crossing over both national and cultural lines, effective communication will rely more than ever on our ability to understand the communication needs of diverse populations. Immigration and population growth in major urban centers have brought with them unique communication challenges. As a result, there is growing scholarly, government and non-profit attention to public health issues in cities and suburban areas. This paper will examine America’s Blood Centers campaign to empower community members to make good health care decisions and donate to the distinct needs of their urban community through a range of complementary and reinforcing channels of communication. America’s Blood Centers is the largest network of non-profit community blood centers with 77 community-based locations in the United States and Canada. The findings of focus groups, onsite observations and interviews will be examined to understand how ABC is reaching diverse audiences to better enable them to make good health decisions that will contribute to the maintenance of healthy cities. The paper will include an analysis and report and conclude with recommendations for future plans and implementation.

A contemporary trend in television advertisements is to valorize the built environment's mutability. To illustrate, a "free wifi" spot from Marriott Courtyard depicts a business traveler opening a laptop amid a shifting backdrop of interiors and exteriors, people moving closer and further away from him as he manipulates the device. Recent ads from Apple, Lexus, and Sprint similarly invite us to alter our world, or ignore it altogether, with the aid of communications technologies. These ads replace visions of stability in the urban ecology with promises of change. The digital effects employed to produce these media fantasies reflect popular perceptions GPS devices and mobile phones that presumably enable the abandonment of the physical landscape for a synecdoche of the world that is malleable, customizable, and safe. Coca-Cola, of course, critiqued this tendency with their 2009 "avatar" ad, depicting a city filled with people who have been replaced by online versions of themselves. However, their critique requires a purchase of a product that is no more real than the world it rebukes. The performance and affirmation of mutability is a central theme that animates the omnitopia framework, which studies various nodes of a structural and perceptual enclave whose apparently distinct locales convey inhabitants to a singular place. Most recently advanced in City Ubiquitous: Place, Communication, and the Rise of omnitopia, this framework offers a means for analyzing and critiquing the ecology of communication technologies and mutable urban spaces. My paper employs the omnitopian framework to analyze visual tropes in these ads. The paper seeks to identify strategies employed across this collection to naturalize an expectation of editable landscapes. This effort contributes to efforts by UCF to understand how the intersection of media technologies and the built environment is changing the way people navigate the urban environment and relate to their neighbors.

This paper reports on the identification and understanding of key changes as seen by
community leaders on Long Island, New York during the 20 years from 1990 to the present.
Leaders' methods of communicating and managing change for the well-being of the community
are reported and examined. Phase One of this research includes a summary of secondary research
in the area of key changes affecting global and Long Island urban communities and the results of
interviews with Long Island leaders in government, and business, and non-profits. This
preliminary leadership picture of the changing nature of the community is compared with
scholarly reports of urban change both globally and on Long Island.
This is a follow-up to my recently completed case study, Community Revitalization in
New Cassel, New York.

Previous research has established that community gardens offer a variety of benefits to urban residents. Few studies, however, have focused on the role of communication in the organization and maintenance of gardens within multicultural and multilingual urban neighborhoods. This qualitative study drew from interviews and methods of participant-observation to explore the ways in which a newly formed community garden in a low-income, diverse Los Angeles community promoted civic engagement, social capital formation, and neighborhood storytelling. The research is presented primarily from the perspective of the citizen Steering Committee, of which the researcher was a volunteer member. The study shows that the community garden served as an entry point for civic engagement for several local residents, many of whom had never before been involved in community groups or issues of local governance. However, due to initial outreach strategies and other linguistic, economic, and social barriers, the Steering Committee was not representative of the broader community. The division between English and Spanish-speaking members proved to be the garden's primary communicative challenge throughout the process, and the study details the strategies that the Steering Committee employed to try to close this gap. While the garden did emerge as a place where neighborhood communication took place, the storytelling networks remained divided on ethnic bounds. With that said, several recent developments suggest that bridging social capital between different cultural groups had begun to take shape.

This study examines the conceptions of home underwriting South African housing policy and considers the casualties of the “War on Shacks” launched by the African National Congress (ANC). Through an analysis of public relations materials, legal briefs, and project designs, I argue that current ANC policy remains indebted to the same spatio-temporal figuring of the domestic that pervades Apartheid-era discourse on housing, one in which home is a locatable, permanent structure rather than an ongoing series of home-making practices. This conception of home is operant in a chain of distinctions such discourse draws between permanent and temporary, formal and informal, decent and inadequate housing—distinctions that serve to denigrate the dwelling places of millions of South Africans and legitimate their destruction in the interest of national progress. Furthermore, I contend that the particular aesthetic and material dimensions of the ANC’s plan to displace all “shacks” and create formal permanent structures is based on a Western and suburban model of home that is incompatible with the immediate housing needs of most South Africans.

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We live in a time of unparalleled migration both within and across national boundaries. Nearly three percent of the world’s population lives outside their place of birth, according to recent figures from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). For some economic migrants, crossing boarders brings new economic prosperity and social opportunity. For others, migration is not about economic gains, but rather about finding peace and security to survive. The IOM estimates that migration has become one of defining issues of the twenty-first century. To be sure, migration is a complex issue, and one that encompasses multiple economic and social factors. This case study will examine how one small Swedish community, located just thirty minutes south of Sweden’s capital city Stockholm, has utilized strategic communication in order to develop policies that assist with the integration of thousands of new Iraqi refugees. The local government in city of Södertälje estimates that between 2005 and 2007, about one hundred new immigrants per month arrived, amounting to some 9,000 new inhabitants over that time period.2 Using a collection of media reports and government statements, this analysis tracks how public debate unfolded over a two-year period, beginning in spring 2007 and ending in fall 2009. A central question that emerges from this study concerns the role of refugees and asylum seekers in contemporary Swedish society: are they a problem for communities or do they offer opportunities for multicultural evolution and change? As this debate unfolds, the experience of Södertälje functions as a catalyst for local, national and international discussions regarding migration, not only of Iraqis refugees but other displaced groups, in both in Sweden and elsewhere. The findings of this case study illustrate how policymakers can utilize crisis communication strategies to confront, address and define integration policies. In the concluding section, several recommendations for strategic communication are outlined for policymakers who are engaged in addressing migration and integration in their own communities.