In the past several years, I’ve had the privilege of helping launch and begin teaching in the newest planning school in Canada – Vancouver Island University’s Masters of Community Planning Program in Nanaimo. This school is an exciting new adventure in the education of planners – based on a premise of “practical scholarship.”
As part of our work in shaping the school, we decided to focus primarily on teaching planning theory, skills and perspectives closely linked with the unique reality of “small communities.” Most Canadian post-graduate planning schools are located in or very near Canada’s largest urban metro areas and most of these are typical research / publishing and tenure-track oriented universities. These realities deeply shape the curriculum, the instructors and the education given to students over time.
In contrast, VIU is in a small, beautiful Island context in a small post-industrial evolving economy with a diverse, eclectic community.
In our conscious shaping of this new school, we noted some very interesting differences in the planning realities between small communities and larger cities.
| Small community planning | Larger city planning |
| · A generalist’s skillset: A planner will need to be able to function in nearly every aspect of planning (policy, regulations, consultation, all types of approvals, etc…) due to the fact that there is often only one or a few planners to handle all planning work. | · A specialist’s skillset: Larger planning departments with significant support systems, groups with special expertise and significant resources. |
| · Self-reliance: There is a relatively small presence of the “state” in a small community, due to limited services, funding, regulations and enforcement capacity. Small communities directly feel the impact of global trends but have few resources with which to address them. The needs of a small community rarely show up as a high priority for senior governments and therefore attention and investment is limited. These factors tend to breeds culture of independence. In the absence of major resources to respond to issues or opportunities, small communities must become pragmatic and self-reliant. | · State interdependence: There is a significant presence of the “state” in the governance, scope of larger cities in the many government services offered, major infrastructure investments, and others – ever-present in the daily experience of a larger city. Larger cities feel the impacts of global trends but are also significantly more independent due to the stability of their internal economies. Large cities are also major elements of the provincial and national economies and thus carry significant influence in senior government policy to assist in responding to their major issues. |
| · Capacity limitations: Small communities have limited capacity and few conventional resources to address issues. Local social capital becomes critical as a substitute for financial capital in many areas. | · Significant capacity: Larger cities have extensive capacity and resources available across many sectors. This capacity is matched by the scope and complexity of the challenges they must address. |
| · Local complexity: The complexity faced in small community planning is less technical and more political and financial. The complexity is typically around managing the deep, barely conscious politics of history and associated emotional opinions as well as the reality of having to plan and make progress with few to no financial resources. | · Substantive complexity: The complexity in larger city planning is extensive, dealing with highly challenging technical, regulatory and financial issues associated with complicated projects in contested, dense environments. The politics tends to be more organized and endeavours to frame positions as more rationale than emotional. A roster of experts in these complexities is also generally available to assist. |
| · Organic process: The opinions of a few influential individuals in a small community have inordinate weight in decision making. The technical defensibility of a planning process based on external criteria is often less important to achieving a supportable outcome than building support and buy-in from those who have significant influence. | · Defensible process: The planning and consultation process in a larger city must pass significant technical and legal scrutiny in order to be considered the sound. The emotional opinions of any given person or group has less sway in decision making if the process is considered defensible and rationale. |
| · Partnerships: In a small community, where all who need to be engaged can be engaged quickly and simply, but where resources are scarce, few initiatives can progress without partnerships (formal and informal) between community members and organizations. This changes the nature of the plan as “who” is going to do things matters as much or more than “what” is proposed to be done. | · Permission: In a larger city, the process of building partnerships between large organizations is l complex and fraught with risk analysis, as most arenas of action (physical, legal, etc…) are explicitly or implicitly “owned” by some organization. In this context, gaining permission becomes key and often action is primarily led by one actor who seeks permission and general but often not specific support from other partners. |
| · Principles and micro-undertakings: Plans that include implicitly or explicitly significant government involvement for implementation (resources, project managers, monitoring, etc…) are rarely realistic for small communities. Instead, they do better with a combination of a vision (created by the community), some general principles and an implementation plan of realistic “micro-undertakings” that local organizations and individuals can implement with the resources they can gather over time. As such, small community planning is really “action planning” from its outset. | · Bureaucratic plans: The complexity of taking action in a larger city on any issue or opportunity over time leads to the need for larger bureaucracy-oriented plans that address the complex web of issues and jurisdictions relevant to the project. Because significant resources are at stake, significant time is spent discussing perspectives on issues to ensure the final plan is pointed in the right direction for all concerned. Correspondingly, the larger planning and management bureaucracies of the major players in a larger city have the sophistication and resources to create and implement broad reaching plans. |
We have developed our current curriculum and pedagogy for VIU’s MCP Program around a conscious awareness of these differences and are continually deconstructing it and rebuilding it – to be an agile, responsive and accountable school. We look forward to the success of our students in their careers helping communities – and will seek and embrace critique from them ever after in how to refine the program to provide a better education to the next cohort.