Problem, research strategy, and findings: Youth are traditionally excluded from participation within planning venues, though planners increasingly recognize the value and knowledge that youth can bring to planning efforts. Yet planners struggle to find ways to incorporate youth ideas and decision making that are not exploitative, tokenizing, or coercive. Arnstein’s “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” provides useful insights into how youth can participate in decision making through partnerships with adults for whom the ladder was designed. In this article, we use case studies of youth-focused planning initiatives to examine the potential for including youth in Arnstein’s original ladder. These include Youth–Plan Learn Act Now (Y-PLAN), Youth Engagement and Action for Health (YEAH!), and Growing Up Boulder (GUB). Within each case study we analyze the goals, methodology, and projects of each program to determine how each expands or limits youth participation. The case studies vary based on the degree of participation, youth experience, and their geographical and institutional bounding. We then propose new rungs located between “placation” and “partnership” that offer youth an opportunity to partner with adults to engage in a planning project. Each new rung offers youth opportunities to participate in the planning process, though adults retain decision-making power. These rungs are divided by their directionality of power and whether youth are granted power to participate or seek it themselves. Further research could refine these rungs, especially within larger contexts of planning theory and the history of shared decision-making processes. Methodological challenges to this study could be addressed in some of these future research efforts. Takeaway for practice: Practicing planners are challenged with ways to authentically include youth voices in productive and nontokenistic decision-making frameworks. Planners can apply these lessons to engage youth in different contexts to support the elevation of their involvement, voice, and power in the planning process.

(2019). Gigs, Side Hustles, Freelance: What Work Means in the Platform Economy City/ Blight or Remedy: Understanding Ridehailing’s Role in the Precarious “Gig Economy”/ Labour, Gender and Making Rent with Airbnb/ The Gentrification of ‘Sharing’: From Bandit Cab to Ride Share Tech/ The ‘Sharing Economy’? Precarious Labor in Neoliberal Cities/ Where Is Economic Development in the Platform City?/ Shared Economy: WeWork or We Work Together. Planning Theory & Practice: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 423-446.

(2019). Planning and the So-Called ‘Sharing’ Economy / Can Shared Mobility Deliver Equity?/ The Sharing Economy and the Ongoing Dilemma about How to Plan for Informality/ Regulating Platform Economies in Cities – Disrupting the Disruption?/ Regulatory Combat? How the ‘Sharing Economy’ is Disrupting Planning Practice/ Corporatised Enforcement: Challenges of Regulating AirBnB andOther Platform Economies/ Nurturing a Generative Sharing Economy for Local Public Goods and Service Provision. Planning Theory & Practice: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 261-287.

Clarkston, a little town in Metropolitan Atlanta, comes bearing big city nicknames. Often called the “Ellis Island of the South” and “the most diverse square mile in the U.S.,” Clarkston is just east of the city of Atlanta and has a total population of about 12,600 with an immigrant and refugee population of around 5,900 (U.S. Census Bureau, ACS, 2012–2016). It is the primary place in the state where refugees from all over the world have been resettled since approximately 1980, and as a result, it has undergone demographic changes related to several waves of resettlement in the United States, alternating between East African, Southeast Asian, and Middle Eastern points of origin. The merging of those migration waves has created a “city of refugees,” and in 2014 marked Clarkston as Georgia’s most foreign-born city. This paper reviews the attractions of a small, southern, suburban town and explores the interactions of refugees with city leaders on issues of housing, public safety, and policing, as well as how local regulatory ordinances have immense impact on new American communities that cannot yet vote in local or federal elections.

The primary aim of this paper was to assess the association of after-school club characteristics with changes in physical activity, nutrition, and attitudes in students of color after participating in the “YEAH!” Advocacy-based Physical Activity Program. We examine the strengths of school-based vs. non-school based programs in promoting feelings of self-efficacy and empowerment among students learning to become more physically active—and importantly, also test the strength of how programs that are more connected (to community-based partners) may contribute to students’ optimism around policy and public health as it directly affects them. This study examined differences in the youth advocacy training impact across four after-school club types: school-based with community partnerships, school-based without partnerships, non-school-based with community partners, and non-school-based clubs without partnerships. We measured improvements in youth’s “optimism for change”, “assertiveness” and “decision-making” as related to after school activities and found that non-school-based programs with community partners showed highest positive impact.