Changing the structure of planning participation by moving across scales

This paper discusses how urban planners seek out and borrow innovative ways of coordinating scales from other planning departments across the nation to more successfully induct public participants into the planning process. Planners routinely imagine possible changes for communities and urban areas, but in an age of participatory planning, need public backing to leverage support from other governmental agencies involved in implementing change. Incorporating local residents and business owners into the planning process necessitates a new kind of scale coordination so that participants can eventually "see" their community as a planner. While maps at the planimetric scale are commonly used in public meetings and provide a visual of a large area that is not within reach of the body, some planners promote "charettes," or workshops, where residents and other stakeholders experience their community at a walking-scale, accompanied by a planner. Becoming intrinsic to the space under consideration is talked about by planners as having considerable advantages over extrinsically dominating the area as one does when viewing a map. This innovative technique of regaining the body at a walking-scale, and coordinating it with a representational scale in community workshops, is an effort to simultaneously instruct and construct a participating public in the "professional vision" (Goodwin, 1994) of urban planners.