Post-rational Planning: A Solutions-oriented Call to Justice

Post-Rational Planning confronts today’s threats to truth, particularly after recent news events that present alternative facts and media smear campaigns, often described as post-truth politics. At the same time, it appreciates critical tensions: between rationality (prized by planners and other policy professionals) and desires for positive, socially just outcomes. Rather than abandoning quests for truth, this book provides planners, policy professionals, and students with tools for better responding to debates over truth.

Post-Rational Planning examines planners’ unease with emotion and politics, advocating for more scholarship and practice capable of unpacking uses of rhetoric and framing to support or counter key planning decisions impacting social justice. This includes learning from recent works engaging with rhetoric, narrative construction, and framing in planning, while introducing other valuable concepts from disciplines like psychology, including confirmation bias; identity-protective cognition; from marketing and adult education. Each chapter sheds new light on a specific topic requiring a response through post-rational practice. It starts with recent research findings, then demonstrates them with case examples, enabling their use in classroom and practice settings. Each chapter ends by summarizing key lessons in "Take-aways for Practice," better enabling readers of all levels to synthesize and use key ideas.

Laura E. Tate combines scholarship and practice backgrounds in urban planning and public health. While conducting her research for this book, she taught urban planning and policy in the United States, as a Visiting Lecturer at Eastern Washington University in Spokane, and at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Before that, she worked professionally in Canada, at several Metro Vancouver area cities and for several British Columbia government agencies, including assignments as a Manager of Growth Strategies, Director of Aboriginal Healthy Living, as well as work funding community mental wellness and substance use initiatives in British Columbia. Laura currently works with her partner on a green subdivision using site adaptive planning principles in suburban Victoria, while also providing consulting services. She has a doctorate in planning from the University of British Columbia, and has continued to publish in peer-reviewed planning journals on effectively using evidence and qualitative research. She has co-edited two other books: Planning for AuthentiCITIES (Routledge, New York, 2018), with Brettany Shannon; and Actor Networks of Planning (Routledge, London, 2016), with Yvonne Rydin.