Planning for Trust: A Relationship-Centered Approach to Community Engagement in City Planning Practice

Abstract

This thesis outlines Relationship-Centered Community Engagement (RCCE) as a new approach to conducting community engagement in city planning practice. The vision of RCCE is to shift from a transactional approach based on soliciting public input, to a relational approach based on building trust with the public. The central argument guiding RCCE and this study is that by centering trust, community engagement can be redesigned to build relationships with, rather than over community. Trust is especially important for people of color and other marginalized communities that have been and still are disproportionately undervalued in land-use decisions impacting their immediate surroundings as a result of historic and continued inequities within participation processes. Based on research about city planning and engagement processes, RCCE was developed to present a framework for planning for and building trust. RCCE has the potential to challenge and supplement existing approaches to community engagement in city planning practice. The development of RCCE represents an effort to plan community engagement from a relationship-centered approach.