6 Research Summary: Building a Place-Based Theoretical Planning Framework with and for Salt Lake City, Utah

Faculty Mentor: Keith Bartholomew (City & Metropolitan Planning, University of Utah)

Cities are complex socio-ecological systems with continuously changing elements (Ossola et al., 2021; Pickett et al., 2016). As an applied field, urban planning guides and regulates this change while addressing inevitable challenges. It has typically done so through a ‘top-down’ framework, where planners designate areas of focus, develop proposals, and share them with decision-makers (Pissourios, 2014; Semeraro et al., 2020). However, this top-down framework positions planners as the responsible ‘experts’ of vastly complex urban systems, which can result in the oversimplification of urban challenges as well as macro-scale, “one-size-fits-all” approaches that negate the unique history, geography, and identity of individual cities (D’Acci et al., 2024; Giles-Corti et al., 2022). Theoretical frameworks are necessary for guiding the growth of cities with consistency and forethought.

Therefore, many planners have developed or are developing new frameworks better suited for modern urban systems (Yu et al., 2018). A common challenge cited in developing these frameworks is making their theoretical forms tangible. Urban systems typically evolve and respond to changing social contexts and landscapes, so a strong planning framework must guide growth while still being flexible and capable of evolution once implemented (Buffam et al., 2022). But many new planning frameworks are still unidirectional: they rely on select experts to continuously set them in motion, which can promote rigidity (Giles-Corti et al., 2022). Community engagement is an additional challenge. Though many planning frameworks recognize the importance of community engagement, developing one specific to an individual city or community – rather than at the macro-scale of top-down planning – remains an emerging practice (Vigiola, 2022).

Following global trends of population growth and urbanization, Utah is becoming more diverse and urban, with a projected 500,000 new residents by 2060 (Hollingshaus et al., 2024; Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, 2024). A unique planning framework suited for the complexities and fast-paced growth of Salt Lake City is needed if urban planning is to effectively evolve alongside our changing urban landscape. To fulfill this need and address common challenges of implementation and community engagement, this project proposed the development of an urban planning framework with and for Salt Lake City. The project aimed to build framework capable of existing as a ‘living’ approach to planning in Salt Lake City that is 1) reactive to the overlapping social, economic, and political opportunities that drive urban evolution, 2) capable of planning for complex, intersectional challenges, and 3) cyclical rather than unidirectional, or structured to be collectively upheld by the existing work of community members rather than solely by planners.

This first phase of exploratory research used a combination of qualitative research methods to collect the necessary design inputs for building the framework: urban ethnographic observation and semi- structured interviews with local community leaders, including planners, designers, artists, community organizers, and policymakers. The ethnographic studies involved repetitive, immersive, observational fieldwork in select public settings – 4 public parks in the four quadrants of the city, 2 central bus routes, and 2 TRAX lines from start to finish within city boundaries – to gain a holistic understanding of how people currently and naturally navigate, interact with, and exist within Salt Lake City.

Locations were selected with priorities of geographic variety, opportunities for different uses and users, and histories of popular use in the city. Each location was visited twice at two separate times of day for around 1 hour per visit. As a non-participant observer, I performed physical notetaking, sketching, and limited film photography to capture narrative descriptions, personal impressions, methodological notes, and visualizations and diagramming of place. For the interviews, purposive sampling techniques were used to identify and enroll 11 local leaders who are current residents of Salt Lake City with extensive experience in their respective fields. The leaders included a Public Lands planner, a Planning Commissioner, two directors of government departments (one municipal and one state), two urban designers, a performing artist, a small business owner, an arts non-profit director, an ecological non-profit director, and a public health program director. The interviews were audio- recorded and lasted between 60-to-90-minutes. Semi-structured questioning was used, with similar guiding questions oriented around personal experiences, desires, needs, and visions for the community, ideas for the framework, current or expected challenges, and anything else participants wished to share. Ethnographic observation and interviews were conducted simultaneously over the course of several weeks and informed one another. All data was transcribed and coded for design inputs. I first planned my coding methodology with MAXQDA software. However, because of the wide variety of fields and experiences involved in this data, I began coding manually with the approach of identifying common “actors” – the public and private sector, urban design, the arts, and community – and the relationships between them. The framework itself followed a typical iterative, recorded design process.

The resulting urban planning framework is composed of three intersecting elements – Visibility, Structure, and Happenings – that together encompass the coded themes and design inputs from the qualitative data analysis. Visibility refers to what we have chosen to make visible or invisible in the urban fabric and how we might better implement the spectrum of visibility to suit the changing needs of our city. It contains the themes of identity, history, perception, information, transparency, physical resources, and representation. Structure refers to both the structures we can touch and the intangible structures we experience, work within, or cannot access. It contains the themes of place, venue, scale, flexibility, collaboration, and bureaucracy, and asks how we might bend overly stringent structure in the public and private sectors while building missing structure into the arts and our community. Finally, Happenings refers to a new role for planners and policymakers. It questions their prescriptive role as ‘choreographers’ of the city and suggests instead a shift towards a role as the ‘responsive facilitator’ of existing community improvisations, or ‘happenings’, that have spontaneously built and will continue to build our city’s identity. It contains the themes of interaction, engagement, relationships, activation, and actionable policy.

In its composition, this framework aims to ‘live’ in practice just as cities do. Cyclical and interdisciplinary in nature rather than static, it highlights active feedback loops naturally occurring within the urban landscape. Additionally, the framework takes a socio-ecological systems approach and emphasizes the interactions between various urban elements as much as the elements themselves. To address common challenges in planning scholarship with the actual implementation of new theoretical planning frameworks, the next phase of research will utilize live, interactive, portable urban design installations to evaluate the framework for effectiveness and potential scalability via community survey. Three installations will represent the three themes and encourage engagement in public locations defined by the Salt Lake City Entertainer and Artist Permit through improvisational dance performance and physical interaction with the installations. In its totality, this project aims to redevelop the approach to planning in Salt Lake City for the modern urban fabric to ensure that our current and future city truly evolves in alignment with the visions and goals of the community.

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