Co-Crafting the Just City

Tales from the Field by a Planning Scholar Turned Mayor

James A. Throgmorton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367751043
• eBook ISBN: 9781000544220
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The 2016 election in Iowa City would provide an opportunity that planning faculty have long desired: the opportunity for one of their own to serve as mayor.

In this new book, former Iowa City Mayor and Professor Emeritus James A. Throgmorton provides readers a sense of what democratically-elected city council members and mayors in the United States do and what it feels like to occupy and enact those roles. He does so by telling a set of "practice stories" focusing primarily, but not exclusively, on what he, a retired planning professor at the University of Iowa, experienced and learned as a council member from 2012 through 2019 and, simultaneously, as mayor from 2016 through 2019. The book proposes a practical, action-oriented theory about how city futures are being (and can be) shaped, showing that storytelling of various kinds plays a very important but poorly understood role in the co-crafting process, and demonstrating that skillful use of ethically-sound persuasive storytelling (especially by mayors) can improve our collective capacity to create better places. The book documents efforts to alleviate race-related inequities, increase the supply of affordable housing, adopt an ambitious climate action plan, improve relationships between city government and diverse marginalized communities, pursue more inclusive and sustainable land development codes/policies, and more.

It will be of great interest to urban planning faculty and students and elected officials looking to collaboratively craft better cities for the future.

Winner of the Association of the Collegiate Schools of Planning's 2024 John Friedman Book Award. This award is presented biannually to a book that best exemplifies scholarship in the area of planning for sustainable development.

1 Introduction City Crafting in a Contested Age

DOI: 10.4324/9781003160991-1

This book is about crafting city futures in a contested age. It conveys a former mayor’s story about how the residents and elected leaders of one city in the Midwest of the United States tried, from 2012 through 2019, to craft their city’s future while being immersed in a complex, emotionally charged, and politically contentious flow of action. And it seeks to stimulate creative thought, research, and action about how the crafting of city futures can be improved.

At least since the horrific events of September 11, 2001, those of us who live in the U.S. have found ourselves living in an increasingly turbulent and contested age. As one disaster has followed another, we have grown increasingly conflicted over immigration, abortion and same-sex marriage, racial justice and police–community relations, global climate change and the threat of species extinction, economic globalization coupled with extreme inequality in income and wealth, and, in the deep background, techno-biological threats associated with computerization, biotechnology, robotics, and nanotechnology.¹

Conflicts over these issues have both contributed to and been caused by growing distrust of government, skepticism about scientific expertise, distrust of mainstream news media, manipulation of social media, and more. The familiar world seems to be collapsing all around us, and it is not at all clear whether contemporary politics and practices of governance are capable of responding successfully.

In light of these conflicts, we U.S. Americans have found ourselves increasingly divided by at least three divergent visions for our country’s future. One argues we should live in a country guided by neoliberal globalism and marked by multiculturalism and free trade. Another imagines a country based on social-conservative morality and libertarian economics in the service of ethno-nationalism. And a third envisions people living in a socially progressive and environmentally sustainable country guided by democratic governance. As this book will show, the first empowers the few, marginalizes the many, and thereby undermines democracy. The second explicitly seeks to replace democracy with a more authoritarian style of governance. The third requires and nurtures a democratic form of governance which is skillful but also inclusive and compassionate.

While the public typically focuses on how those polarized conflicts and divergent visions affect national politics, cities are key sites in which the conflicts are enacted. The future of our country and the future of our cities are deeply intertwined. Roughly 82 percent of Americans live in urbanized areas, and at least 39 percent live in cities with populations of 50,000 or more residents (Toukabri and Medina, 2021). The cities in which they live are places where local governments and their elected leaders have to produce real solutions to real problems. But cities are also places in which polarized conflicts and wicked problems become manifest on the ground and have to be addressed in local government meetings, often in ways that are more direct and democratic than is possible at the national level.² We need new ideas about how to guide the transformation, or what I will call the unfolding, of American cities and about how to create better places for all their residents in the face of the profoundly difficult problems and conflicts we face.

However, public understanding of what cities are, how city governments work, what local elected officials can do, and what might happen when constituents and their elected representatives try to change the policies of their city governments is surprisingly thin. Real flesh-and-blood people, whether residents or elected officials, need help in order to create better places. This leads me to pose a question which lies at the heart of this book: how can the real flesh-and-blood residents and elected leaders of a city, using democratic processes of governance, craft their city’s future while being immersed in a complex, emotionally charged, and often politically contentious flow of action?

With this question in mind, this book tells a story about how people in one relatively small Midwestern American city tried to guide the future unfolding of their place. I narrate this story as a retired professor of urban planning who served as a city council member from 2012 through 2019 and, simultaneously, as mayor from 2016 through 2019. By providing a fine-grained tale about what happened in one city during those years, I offer readers a ringside seat from which they can (1) gain a better understanding of the kinds of problems we U.S. city residents face and (2) learn what cities and local elected officials can and cannot do to address those problems in a democracy. I hope as well to help readers discover ways by which, using democratic processes of governance—which include conflict, persuasion, negotiation, compromise, inclusion, and transparency—we can imagine and enact better ways of (1) addressing those problems, (2) guiding the transformation of American cities, and (3) creating better places for all city residents.

Insofar as this book focuses on the transformation, unfolding, and future of cities, urban planners have a critical role to play. They often serve quite ably in local governments, but they (and the scholars who study and theorize what planners do) rarely govern. Consequently, planners and scholars of planning often acknowledge but do not understand the critical role that elected officials play in crafting their cities’ futures. I hope in this book to enhance planners’ understanding of what elected officials actually do and thereby enhance their mutual ability to guide the step-by-step unfolding of their cities.

Aims of the Book

I have four specific aims. First, this book intends to give readers a sense of what democratically elected city council members and mayors in the United States do and what it feels like to occupy and enact those roles. The book does so by telling a set of “practice stories” (Forester, 1999) focusing primarily, but not exclusively, on what I experienced and learned as a council member from 2012 through 2019 and, simultaneously, as mayor from 2016 through 2019 in Iowa City, Iowa. I narrate these practice stories from a first-person singular point of view, which necessarily focuses attention on what I witnessed, thought, felt, and did.³

Second, this book seeks to document what happened when council allies and I tried, during my term as mayor from 2016 through 2019, to lead our relatively small Midwestern city toward becoming a more inclusive, just, and sustainable place.⁴ My sense is that there is a big difference between being a mayor who wants to keep her or his city on its current path versus mayors who seek to alter the direction of their cities’ step-by-step unfolding. When I was mayor in Iowa City, the vision of fostering a more inclusive, just, and sustainable city acted as my “north star,” and, to move in that direction, we took actions to reduce race-related inequities, increase the supply of affordable housing, adopt an ambitious climate action plan, improve relationships between city government and diverse marginalized communities, pursue more inclusive and sustainable land development codes/policies, and more. These efforts involved engaging in, and sometimes ameliorating, conflicts with (1) members of the local/regional “growth machine”;⁵ (2) libertarians, white supremacists, Christian fundamentalists, and ethno-nationalists allied, at that time, with the president of the United States; and (3) progressive allies of ours who demanded immediate action on their priorities while displaying little concern about legal constraints or spillover effects on related issues.

Third, this book endeavors to help readers understand what it feels like to be an urban planning scholar serving as a council member and mayor, and to share lessons I learned with other scholars, especially those who focus on planning theory. Inevitably, all local elected officials draw upon their own unique background and experiences when serving as a council member or mayor; however, it is relatively rare for professors to serve in those positions. Even more rarely does one find urban planning scholars occupying them.⁶

Fourth, the book offers a practical, action-oriented set of ideas about how city futures are being (and can be) shaped. These ideas emerged primarily during the first 4 years of my council term and guided much of how I performed the role of mayor during the subsequent 4 years. The set of ideas begins with a simple premise: to get to the future city, one has to continually start from the here and now.⁷ And it presumes that action (what really gets done) is more important than formal plans about what should be done. As is discussed in slightly greater detail near the end of this introduction, my initial thoughts about cities, the key issues pertaining to them, and how their futures can and should be crafted were based on decades of research, writing, traveling, and conversing with urban planning scholars around the world. That background shaped what I was thinking when I joined my city’s council in 2012. From that point on, I encountered novel situations and challenges, learned through experience, and refined my thinking about how cities change and the ways in which elected officials can guide the direction of tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: City Crafting in a Contested Age
• 2 Trying to Be a Team Player, 2012–2013
• 3 Turning toward the Just City, 2014–2015
• 4 City Crafting as Mayor, 2016–2019
• 5 Two Days in the Life of a Mayor
• 6 Conclusion
• Index