First Advisor

Lisa K. Bates

Term of Graduation

Summer 2025

Date of Publication

7-3-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Urban Studies

Department

Urban Studies and Planning

Language

English

Subjects

Arts/culture-based Critical Participatory Action Research, Belonging, Urban Planning, Urban Studies, Youth

Physical Description

1 online resource (x, 229 pages)

Abstract

Belonging is a critical human need. Urban planning's history of bureaucratic expertise continues to champion the powerful, resulting in structures and procedures that still separate and damage city communities. This research challenges the current hegemony of urban planning that centers geography--the container of land--in its practice. Instead, centering the belonging of people to each other is the essential quality of healthy urban planning. A people-centered urban planning practice where the community's people are the experts and decision-makers of their own cities--and belonging is the primary objective--is long overdue.

Arts/culture-based critical participatory action research (PAR)--where the research questions, design, data collection, meaning-making, conclusions, products, and actions are created by a community for themselves, from an arts and/or culture perspective, integrated with belonging epistemologies and belonging rubrics identified in this research--is an urban planning belonging infrastructure system that rotates the focus away from geographic space that codifies individualism and capitalism, and instead centers and strengthens communities intergenerationally, pivoting to an effective belonging methodology for regenerative urban planning practice.

This research is multilayered. Case studies of three completed arts/culture-based critical PAR projects--two in New York City and one in Saint Paul, Minnesota--were analyzed. Each project archive was reviewed. Post-project open-ended individual and focus group interviews of twelve youth, 17 to 24 years old, and three adult mentors were conducted. Afterward, a group interview was facilitated with all interviewees invited from the three projects. The participants created questions to ask each other in the group interview. Youth were also encouraged to submit art connected to their critical PAR project and feelings of belonging to their community.

Data from the archives and the artwork were analyzed based on a rubric operationalizing belonging using three models: the Othering and Belonging Institute (OBI) framework, Critical Indigenous Pedagogy of Place (CIPP) epistemology, and the Healing Centered Engagement (HCE) schema. A separate rubric of the youth's understanding of belonging evaluated all the interview transcripts, plus the artwork. The two rubrics--the Three Models Belonging Infrastructure Rubric and the Youth Belonging Infrastructure Rubric--are compared. A short summary of each city's history is also included.

The Youth Belonging Infrastructure Rubric identified these core measures for youth belonging: 1) feeling radically embraced and celebrated as their complete selves; 2) practicing community arts/culture-based inquiry with agency and sharing intergenerationally; 3) organizing through repeated iterations of community gathering, dialogue, and action; and 4) unbelonging as a space of collective agency to undermine oppressive hegemonies and counter othering. Additionally, four related themes resonated in the youth interviews: 1) shared cultural identity is powerful, 2) arts/culture-based critical PAR is effective, 3) youth leadership is essential, and 4) unbelonging is a place of agency.

This research found a strong connection between participating in arts/culture-based critical PAR and belonging for youth (and adult co-researchers) in their communities, neighborhoods, and cities. This opens possibilities for repositioning urban planning away from current community engagement practices that center geography and instead toward arts/culture-based critical PAR, plus OBI, CIPP, and HCE belonging models, and belonging rubrics that first center belonging to each other intergenerationally to develop people-centered cities with youth involved in all processes of city-making decisions and leadership.

Rights

© 2025 Kimberly Rae Nightingale

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/44084

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