Learning from Practice: Environmental and Community Mapping as Participatory Action Research in Planning

While the practice stories of Italian planners will appear in a forthcoming book (De Leo & Forester, 2017), authors have selected Pappalardo’s account to examine here with the help of five distinguished commentators from Italy, Brazil, Kenya, and the USA. The detailed practice account that follows reveals specific aspects of innovating in daunting planning contexts. In particular, we learn about new practices that integrate common and traditional plan-making techniques of planners with skills of enabling productive, even transformative engagements with local people and the territories in which they live. We learn here too about new possibilities of teaching by identifying essential skills that are often neither taught nor tested in university curricula.