Presented at the 2011 Conference on College Communication and Composition, Louisville, KY, USA

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Creating the Future Community with Visual Communication in the Urban Planning
Profession
Alissa Barber Torres, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Central Florida
Presented at the 2011 Conference on College Communication and Composition,
Louisville, KY, USA
Introduction
Technical communication research offers many insightful assessments of
professional communication that identify their rhetorics, discourses, and conventions. In
her assessment of this research, Blakeslee recommends cross-disciplinary work and
community involvement as strategies to bring the field higher visibility (149). Rude
advocates community partnerships as providing insights to the work of educators and
resources for practice (269), and Grabill's significant work in this area asks technical
communicators to bring their skills to the community and to diverse professions (125).
In this light, I hope to bring urban planners to your attention as eminently worthy
of similar study in the context of technical communicators who have started this
dialogue, such as Grabill. In speaking with you today, I first will introduce the planning
profession and the field’s particular challenge of representing both place and the future,
then discuss my initial research investigating visual practices using a regional visioning
project in Central Florida called “How Shall We Grow?” I have examples here of the
primary scenario-based text produced during this process, which are the same artifacts
I am investigating with planners during this research. To conclude, I offer thoughts and
possibilities on the voice of the public as stakeholders in these processes for technical
communicators to consider.

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Introducing the Field of Planning
Planning is a diverse field focused on improving communities, whether oriented
to land use, transportation, housing, land development, or other elements. In planning
literature, James Throgmorton characterizes planners as consensus builders engaged
in rhetorical activities with environmentalists, neighborhood residents, business owners,
developers, and other stakeholders (Throgmorton, Persuasive 367). These diverse
interests create and interpret meaning in different ways, some of which Throgmorton
notes rely on forecasts, scenarios, and other tools (Persuasive 370). Grabill identifies a
significant literature in planning’s rhetorical practices, citing Throgmorton, Healey, and
Forester as major theorists (125).
Urban planners may be of interest to technical communicators for several
reasons. Their communications often incorporate community-generated content, such
as values statements and preferences expressed in collaborative public meetings,
which must direct or be integrated into professional technical recommendations. This
differs from the practices of engineers and architects as allied professions now
represented in technical communication research. Also, the nature of their occupation
involves the long-term development and evolution of a geographical place, and their
work may involve time horizons of anywhere from ten to thirty years. Their professional
communications must be technical in nature, yet immediately accessible to a variety of
professional and community audiences and designed to be understood by future
audiences in a similar manner.
The planning profession continues to rely on a wide variety of visual forms, like
maps, photography, aerial photography, and design graphics, for community

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development or revitalization. This inherently visual practice offers a wealth of
possibilities for investigation of visual language, but those possibilities are not explored
in their own professional literature. While planning is a visual practice, the noted
planning theorist John Friedmann expresses concern that planners undergo diverse
professional training that may be situated in schools of architecture, social science, or
public policy, which results in particularity and difference in both approaches and visual
skills within the profession (251). Perhaps as an outcome, Reid Ewing has identified a
limited visual assessment literature in planning, comprised only of four books and
several studies, dating only from the late 1980’s (269-270). This echoes Kostelnick and
Hassett’s assertion that the study of genre and discourse communities within disciplines
primarily is limited to verbal language (3).
From a cultural perspective, planners are about the future and how it is realized
through decisions that are made today. There is a rich discourse and a translation that
takes place between these diverse interests and that carries a wide spectrum of
interests and disagreements, reaching toward consensus. I argue this chaos and
complexity offers technical communicators rich possibilities for research that serves the
needs of the profession, while contributing to community needs. For at the end of the
day or the decade, that is what this knowledge work produces---a community that is
better or worse than we found it, but likely is not unaffected.
Research Description and Findings
As an example of potential technical communication research into this
profession, my dissertation research examines the visual communication used in
Central Florida’s “How Shall We Grow?” regional visioning project. My research

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investigates how practices of visual representation convey policy information and
community values to planners, with values defined by an independent study of Central
Florida residents conducted during the visioning. I am using focus groups, interviews,
and rhetorical analysis to explore the mental context for the planners’ interpretations
and the function of visual conventions in this profession.
My research incorporates themes from Kevin Lynch’s seminal work The Image of
the City to see how planners situate themselves within the scenario, how place and
imageability are communicated, and how the scenarios are embedded with information
conveying corresponding community values. Lynch’s work involved focus group
interviews and the creation and review of mapping products to investigate the
imageability of Boston, Los Angeles, and Jersey City (Lynch 140-145). Lynch defined
“imageability” as qualities in the physical environment, such as “shape, color, and
arrangement” that create “identity and structure in the mental image” (9). My research
also reviews how the concept of place may be established, using examples of the Great
Plains’ Buffalo Commons, Garreau’s Nine Nations of North America, and others.
However, I will focus less on my own research here and more on the regional visioning
concept and practice as an area with both wide accessibility and potential for technical
communication research.
In regional visioning as it practiced across the country over the past few decades,
community residents and other stakeholders work with planners to develop and depict a
regional-scale “future place” that represents the ideal articulation of community goals
through the arrangement of future land development, transportation, housing,
conservation, and other areas. Often, participants place dot stickers, Legos, or other

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tactile objects on a map of the community to indicate their preferences and values.
These artifacts are filtered through Geographic Information Systems or Adobe Creative
Suite software to create a map of the future place that embodies these intentions. For
the “How Shall We Grow?” process, after consideration of several scenarios by the
public, organizers created a final scenario called “4Cs”, based on four themes identified
as Corridors, Centers, Conservation, and Countryside.
At the end of a regional visioning project, a community’s preferred scenario is
selected that best represents the community participants’ goals and preferences as
developed and articulated by visioning project components, and the expectation is that
local planning efforts will be reconciled with this larger regional vision. This
implementation of regional/spatial planning at different scales throughout the region
over time invests the community’s preferred land use scenario with rhetorical functions.
It is a visual product and “keeper” of this vision, but the specific meanings and
interpretations attributed to these scenarios by multiple stakeholders are not well-
understood. In this context, the scenario embodies a set of community directives and
values, while simultaneously being situated in and furthering a mental image of the
place represented.
As John Friedmann writes, “planners face the almost impossible task of
representing the city or region in two-dimensional space that can be visualized at a
single glance. Every map is a model, and every model is a radical simplification—an
abstraction—of reality” (251). Planners and other project participants must decide what
information is sacrificed in simplification and what is featured, constructing an apparatus
and corresponding perspective. These have implications for community participation

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and intention and are often mediated by technologies in ways that are not transparent.
The creation of scenarios, invested with the weight of community consensus and
expectations, create an obligation for urban planners as a profession to meet
challenging technical and visual communication needs.
Without formalizing and articulating visual conventions within the planning
profession, scenarios are dependent on textual reinforcement and communicative
activity over time to form interpretations and create meaning within communities of
practice. Kostelnick and Hassett warn that visual conventions may be fleeting and can
only be assessed as a particular moment in time (190). Several implications for
scenarios are apparent, including the probability that the local discourse community of
planners may not sustain conventions needed to interpret the scenario over its intended
life, the year 2050. My interviews with local planners reviewing the scenarios have
found that the meanings they interpret vary, often by their own specializations within the
field or their own value systems. Also, two of the five community values defined during
the process have not been identified within the scenario by any reviewer. Their
responses highlight the challenge of defining a region, as their own boundary
conceptions vary and a regional sense of place does not appear to be emerging.
The planning profession requires improved methods of visual training and
enculturation within this professional community for enhanced dialogue and pedagogical
methods. These methods only become more necessary with increasing use of
accessible digital technologies for visualization of cities, such as Google Earth and
GoogleSketchUp. There is an important role for communication studies in illuminating
that transition for planners as a discourse community, in part to allow scenarios to

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perform their roles as information artifacts appropriately over time and to realize the
future community.
Planning and the Public as an Opportunity for Inquiry
In doing research about planning communication and processes, it is clear that
citizens as a public have an established and important role in that space. Conceptions
and experiences with the public in research may vary and may find them less informed
and participatory within their situated history or experiences. My claim is that their
contributions are diverse, have varying degrees of power in the manner envisioned by
Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of public participation (217-222), and exhibit rhetorical and
performance-based strategies. This claim is based on my situated experience in
practice in Florida, a state that may differ from other communities across the country.
Florida has had land use regulation since the 1970’s that requires public
participation, with the public taking a larger role since that time in Florida’s growth
management process. This role encompasses required public hearings, evening
meetings in community settings about proposed policies or land development projects,
large-scale visioning and plan development processes, citizen-organized forums, direct
communications, presentations, and other strategies. In the context of these histories,
the citizens can be powerful, with well-articulated voices and very strategic rhetorical
displays, which I can illustrate through stories from my practice and events seen
throughout Florida. In the interests of time, I will note only that this year, Florida will vote
on a constitutional amendment that would subject all comprehensive plan changes and
changes to land use to public referenda, an expression of Arnstein’s citizen control.

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This more complex conception of the public should inform our research, as we
recognize citizens’ rhetorical powers and influence. This has been expanded through
their use of online technical information and new Geographic Information Systems-
based web mapping tools for citizen-based research. While my local experience to date
has not included examples of taking those community-based strategies to social media
and locative media spaces, such as Twitter, Ning, or BlockChalk, we are certainly at a
point where that may emerge as part of a larger societal turn. My hope is that these
expressions, both through their experience and new platforms, also may develop to the
point where their power moves to the poetic, which may encourage that regional image
to be created and developed.
To illustrate this possibility, Abbott and Margheim note that a regional sense of
place is found in Portland, Oregon, in part, due to its Urban Growth Boundary (UGB)
regulation that strictly defines which areas may be urban or rural, becoming a focus of
public attention (197). Abbott and Margheim note the UGB has captured a unique place
in the public imagination, as in their words, “this modernist land use regulation has
experienced a postmodern apotheosis: It has become a text! People read complex
meanings into the UGB that go beyond its simple legal function. They try to capture and
claim its essence through metaphors, depict it in paintings and photography, write
poems about it (texts about a text), and interpret it through performance” (199).
With this emphasis on the visual and metaphorical, this approach to regional
place echoes Ulmer’s urging to use poetics and assemblage as a lens for inquiry and
agency in solving applied community problems (Ulmer 81). The recent New Media/New
Methods collection on the influence of Ulmer and the Florida School highlight for us the

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possibilities of that poetic turn, but as Barry Mauer has suggested, “training in metaphor
and image making are required.” Within technical communication theory, Jeff Rice
illustrates this process of creating meaning from cultural and personal experiences with
his treatment of Detroit’s Woodward Avenue, in which he applies meanings to a
“rhetoric that moves meanings for purposes of exploration, a rhetoric that understands
Woodward’s topology as not a fixed topos, but instead as a series of meanings merging
in unestablished ways “(239-240). Within planning theory in “Inventing the Greatest:
Crafting Louisville’s Future Out of Story and Clay”, James Throgmorton simultaneously
weaves the story of Louisville’s urban transformation with his own narrative and that of
Muhammed Ali, both as natives of this community. In doing so, Throgmorton notes “to
make any city-region more sustainable, the people of that place need to begin telling a
persuasive story that makes narrative and physical space for diverse locally grounded
common urban narratives” (Inventing 239).
Rice and Throgmorton’s experiments create a loose, inventive narrative, while
accessing the rich tradition of spatial practices that ranges from the practical outlook of
Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte to the poetic nature of deCerteau. Again, we are
confronted with the possibilities of the local and the tension of extrapolating them to the
regional, as well as the need for training and methods to make that possible. In planning
theory, Patsy Healey links mental and material states to larger relationships that shape
actions on a regional level, using “particular values and histories” to create attitudes and
values that become “systems of meaning” (113). However, Healey finds these
meanings rely on mental models that are challenged by the different “spatial range and
temporal reach of the relations that transact the space of a place” (115) and that may

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not be shared. Without a visible regional identity or established visual conventions, the
regional scenario is in the difficult role of creating meaning without these contexts and
commonplaces that could help bring the future community to light.
Conclusions
As noted by William J. Mitchell, communities of the future involve “balances and
combinations of interaction modes…at particular times and places…within the new
economy of presence” (144), creating enormous uncertainty in the process. Regional
visioning processes are implemented over time with a visual image based in land use
scenarios and thousands of “mental maps” created in the minds of community
residents. More particularly, scenarios may be characterized as Lefebvre’s
representations of space that may not allow for spaces of representation (Soja 66-68).
From the perspective of each individual resident, to the 20,000 participants in the “How
Shall We Grow?” process, to over three million residents living in the 9,000-square mile
region today, the sense of this regional place and its possibilities is unique, particular,
and not easily represented, with regional scenarios charged with containing both
information and aspiration.
Works Cited
Abbott, Carl and Joy Margheim. “Imagining Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary:
Planning Regulation as Cultural Icon.” Journal of the American Planning
Association 74.2 (2008): 196-208. Print.
Arnstein, Sherry R. "A Ladder of Citizen Participation." Journal of the American Institute
of Planners. 35:4: 216-224. July 1969. Print.
Blakeslee, Ann. “The Technical Communication Research Landscape.” Journal of
Business and Technical Communication. 23.2: 129-173. April 2009. Print.

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Ewing, Reid, Michael R. King, Stephen Raudenbush, and Otto Jose Clemente. “Turning
Highways into Main Streets: Two Innovations in Planning Methodology.” Journal
of the American Planning Association 71.3 (2005): 269-282. Print.
Friedmann, John. “The Uses of Planning Theory: A Bibliographic Essay.” Journal of
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Print.
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Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace. Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell. 1996. Print.
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Throgmorton, James A. “Planning as Persuasive Storytelling in a Global Scale Web of
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Ulmer, Gregory L. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. New York: Longman,
2003. Print.