Conspiracy, exile, & resistance : planning & narrative in Chelsea, Massachusetts

In contemporary American cities, urban planners ordinarily work amid conflict in complex institutional environments alive with rival interests, distinct identities, disparate resources, and competing claims. For planners who have responsibility for crafting a consensus out of participatory processes, interpreting these discrete voices is a critical professional task. Accurate interpretation, however, is an enormous challenge, particularly under the joint pressures of time and controversy. This dissertation identifies a methodology for examining variant strands of narrative encountered in zones of conflict and for using narrative details to inspect participants' institutional analyses of the precipitating crisis and its proposed resolution. The proposed interpretative method directs attention to narrators' figurative language for a series of interpretive cues found in the rhetorical patterns collectively known as tropes, hypothesizing that three specific tropes reflect the institutional dimensions of the conflict at hand: *the trope of conspiracy (causality and motive), *the trope of exile (invisibility and exclusion), and *the trope of resistance (authority and defiance). The three tropes correspond to aspects of power relationships: the concerted and motivated use of power, degrees of alienation from power, and the consequent answer to power. For the planner, these tropes serve as heuristic

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Riesman, Jean A. (Jean Ann)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Langley C. Keyes.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8519

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8519