Communicaitons & Interaction

Question 1

What are ways for planners to collaborate with communities affected by environmental injustice?

Answer 1

1. Bridging the impacted community with government resources.
2. Offering technical expertise.
3. Buidling coalitions and shared goals across communities.

Question 2

What are the steps in the Arnstein Ladder of Citizen Participation (in ascending order)?

Answer 2

1. Manipulation
2. Therapy
3. Informing
4. Consultation
5. Placation
6. Partnership
7. Delegated Power
8. Community Control

Question 3

What is a charette best used for?

Answer 3

A visible design project that will impact people’s lives.

A charrette is an intense, short-term workshop that strives to design a land use planning project or envision a solution to a planning problem. Charrettes are best for uniting multiple stakeholders in close collaboration on a distinct project that people will interact with often, such as a public park or transportation station or system.

Question 4

Which kind of map would work best to represent the percentage of residents below the poverty line in each census track?

Answer 4

A choropleth map.

Choropleth maps are the best way to link statistical data to discrete geographic areas using different colors or shades of the same color.

Question 5

Who is an ideal first contact to solicit resident input into community planning?

Answer 5

A neighborhood political or social leader.

They would have the most comprehensive circle of interested residents at their disposal. Journalistic and social media outreach are both important, but its best to contact residents directly, and canvassing has a lower yield rate of interested residents than appealing to pre-formed groups. Unaffiliated residents can and should be contacted later in the outreach process.

Question 6

When engaging community members in a diverse and historically underserved community, the best outreach meeting…

Answer 6

Occurs in dialogue with community members’ needs.

Virtual meetings and walking tours are strategies to consider once community member needs are heard, but they are not fitting for every issue or community. Textbook implementation emphasizes the importance of planning theory, which should be considered, but sometimes, planning theory must become secondary to community needs.

Question 7

You plan to post a video of a recent city council meeting on Facebook to share with the public. What should you do if you are concerned about whether a social media post is a public record according to the Sunshine Laws?

Answer 7

Unclear; consult state and local regulations to determine if social media posts are considered public record.

Whether social media posts are considered public record is a matter of state and local regulations around noticing and records retention. You should consult these regulations if you are concerned about whether a social media post is an appropriate place to post the video of a recent city council meeting.

Question 8

The process used to arrive at a group opinion or decision by surveying a panel of experts is called…

Answer 8

The Delphi method

The Delphi method is defined as a forecasting process framework based on the results of multiple rounds of questionnaires sent to a panel of experts. The fishbowl method is a method of arranging small group conversations. Citizen control is a rung of Arnstein’s Ladder in which participants or residents can govern a program or an institution independently. Crowdsourcing occurs when planners seek information into a project by recruiting the services of a large number of people.

Question 9

What are the four recommended environmental justice policies?

Answer 9

The four recommended environmental justice policies are as follows: encourage triple bottom-line outcomes; give deference to local knowledge; encourage collaborative problem-solving; organize and support pro-bono planning efforts.

While private-public partnerships can be part of justice-oriented planning, PPPs are not inherently beneficial to underserved communities experiencing environmental justice issues.

Question 10

What is the key component of equity - an essential consideration in planning?

Answer 10

Being fair or impartial.

Equity is all about improving the distribution of resources, funding, or access in a fair or impartial way and understanding how discrimination has created these inequities.

Question 11

An ideal public meeting considers school and work hours, location accessibility, language barriers, and…

Answer 11

Means of present and future communication, literacy challenges, and access to remote technologies.

Question 12

John Snow’s famous map of London’s 1854 cholera outbreak - and most maps of the same data that followed - could not be interpreted as?

Answer 12

A cartogram map.

John Snow originally used a form of a dot density map - which actually used bars not dots - to represent the location of each case of cholera in a London neighborhood, but many cartographers have since created heat maps with the original location data. A cartogram is a map that distorts the geography or size of regions in order to convey the information of an alternate variable. This would not make sense given the presence of location data points and not an alternate statistical variable.

Question 13

When interacting with the media, planners should…

Answer 13

Interact with media in several ways, such as interviews, letters to the editor, and guest editorials.

There is no prescriptive way to interact with media beyond the basic rules of confidentiality, honesty, and professionalism. Planners should make use of the expansiveness of media options and styles to communicate with the public and share planning knowledge.

Question 14

A neighborhood is struggling to determine how they want the new community center to look. What method of structuring public participation is most appropriate to solve this conflict?

Answer 14

Visual preference survey.

A visual preference survey best determines aggregate resident preferences, especially around the physical look of the natural and built environments. A public hearing is best at the end of the planning process to allow for final thoughts, and brainstorming is best for determining goals at the beginning of the project rather than specific details. Mediation is best for identifying interests and priorities of opposing groups, rather than getting a sense for general resident preferences.

Question 15

The benefits of a participatory approach include

Answer 15

Creating space to obtain input from all participants

Promoting buy-in to the evaluation

Empowering participants as it facilitates building evaluation capacity within the community

Question 16

Which is the best description of the “planner-as-person” idea?

Answer 16

Planners should act with personal authenticity and carefully reflect on their positionality.

In his book Reflective Planning, Richard Wilson endorses the idea of “planner-as-person,” defining it as a practice of reflexivity and careful self-knowledge. Neutrality, imposition, and self-ignorance are all antithetical to this planning ideal.

Question 17

The planning process exists to serve the public interest. With this in mind, planners should…

Answer 17

Examine their implicit biases and relationships to power and privilege.

Planners have a responsibility to serve their community with specific mind to residents’ concerns and the burdens placed historically and presently on marginalized communities. Thus, planners as individuals have to reckon with their own privileges to avoid replicating planning decisions that created inequitable communities.

Question 18

What is a disadvantage of using closed-ended questions in a survey?

Answer 18

Limited primacy effect.

Primacy effect describes the tendency to choose earlier answers in a list of elaborated options. When provided with a list of responses in a closed-ended survey question, respondents are more likely to choose earlier options, potentially creating a disconnect between respondents’ true beliefs and their chosen answers.

Question 19

What are advantages of using closed-ended survey questions?

Answer 19

Easily summarized data
Typically higher response rates
Increased response specificity

Question 20

What should a planner do when preparing for a contentious public meeting?

Answer 20

Personally invite advocates and vocal residents to the meeting to build goodwill.

Planners have a responsibility to build and maintain trust and goodwill in the communities they serve, but it is also important to keep public meetings controlled. The other choices risk derailing planning meetings, but the correct choice emphasizes the importance of community members without allowing them complete control of the meeting.

Question 21

What do facilitation and mediation have in common as methods for structuring public participation?

Answer 21

A third party with no direct stake in the outcome facilitates the discussion.

Question 22

What is an example of the best open-ended sample survey question?

Answer 22

Which additional environmental improvements would you like to see?

Open-ended questions should ask for specific recommendations to specific questions or scenarios. Questions that address two problems, questions that ask for people to describe difficult to communicate values and morals, and questions with unnecessarily complicated phrasings are not appropriate for surveys.

Question 23

Spatial justice is defined as:

Answer 23

How our cities are organized has a significant bearing on whether people have access to what they need.

Spatial justice is linked to the concept of social justice; while the goal of social justice is people being able to realize their potential in the communities they live in, the interest of spatial justice is how where people live affects their access to resources. The ability to live anywhere in a city or equitable zoning practices are certainly important, but they do not define spatial justice.

Question 24

When interviewing a resident about their opinions, what kind of statistical bias are you most likely to experience?

Answer 24

Recall bias

Recall bias occurs when interviewees present incorrect accounts or inaccurate data because of shortcomings of their own memory. This could easily happen in an interview setting.

Question 25

The 3 C’s of public engagement

Answer 25

The APA recognizes 3 C’s of public engagement: Coalition building, Consensus building, and Conflict resolution