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

Abstract

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

(cont.) devices for institutional analysis embedded in the language of participants' narration. The dissertation's case study examined a city in state-imposed municipal receivership in Chelsea, Massachusetts, from 1991 to 1995. A small city in post-industrial decline and with a history of mismanagement and corruption, Chelsea also was in demographic transition from a predominantly white to a majority Latino population. The case focuses specifically on charter reform, initiated by state-appointed receiver Lewis H. Spence as an exercise in social-capital formation. The charter-drafting process provided an opportunity to observe narrative scenario-building and the operation of the identified tropes in a self-consciously constitutional moment, as Chelsea's constituencies struggled to set the terms for democratic governance and cultural co-existence through new political institutions.