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Indigenous planning text wins national award

A community planning textbook that grew out of an international collaboration begun at the College of Arts & Science has received a national award from the Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP).

Reclaiming Indigenous Planning (McGill-Queen’s University Press) was honoured with the Planning Publications Award of Merit in the CIP’s 2014 Awards for Planning Excellence.

The book was coedited by two U of S faculty members—Ryan Walker (associate professor of Regional and Urban Planning) and David Natcher (director of the ILMI and associate member of the Department of Geography and Planning and Department of Archaeology and Anthropology)—along with Ted Jojola of the University of New Mexico.

Reclaiming Indigenous Planning, explains Walker, is about providing a snapshot of current academic thought in the growing field of Indigenous planning.

From the perspectives of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors, the book examines cultural approaches taken to community planning by Indigenous groups around the world.

“Prior to resettlement by people of European descent, … Indigenous communities were doing their own community planning and had their own institutions of governance and their own processes for engaging their people for future-seeking endeavours,” says Walker.

Ryan Walker

Those processes are now reemerging, he continues. “It’s breaking back through an area of practice that for the last hundred-plus years has been really overwhelmed by a planning tradition that derives from Britain.”

The book’s international approach—with contributors from Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand—makes it the first of its kind.

Inspiration came from the International Roundtable on Indigenous Community Planning and Land Use Management hosted by the College of Arts & Science and the ILMI in 2010. The international experts in attendance agreed to collaborate on a book that would capture the discussion at the event.

The project created cohesion among its contributors, says Walker, and has helped to define the reemerging field of Indigenous planning.

In addition to Walker and Natcher's contributions, Reclaiming Indigenous Planning features a chapter by Regional and Urban Planning Program Chair Robert Patrick.