10.1177/0739456X03253694for ARTICLE Corburn Improving Urban Planning Communities at Risk Bringing Local Knowledge into Environmental Decision Making Improving Urban Planning for Communities at Risk Jason Corburn Iexperiencingconcerned ncreasingly, lay publics, especially the most disadvantaged populations the greatest environmental exposure risks and health effects, are demanding a greater role in researching, describing, and prescribing solutions to ame- liorate the local hazards they face (Cole and Foster 2001 Di Chiro 1998). These com- munities are demanding environmental justice and are speaking for themselves, often drawing on their firsthand experience���here called local knowledge���to address the environmental risks they face (Collin and Collin 1998). The need to take account of local knowledge is putting pressure on environmental and public health planners to find new ways of fusing the expertise of professional practitioners and scientists with the contextual intelligence that only local residents possess (Fischer 2000). As planners increasingly play a mediating role between experts, policy makers, and various publics, they need to learn new ways of taking account of the local knowledge embedded in the communities within which they work. This article highlights the cognitive and norma- tive contributions local knowledge makes to environmental health planning, particu- larly interventions aimed at improving the most at risk communities. I highlight the contributions of local knowledge by reviewing the work of residents in the Greenpoint/Williamsburg (G/W) neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. In this largely immigrant, Latino, and low-income community, residents have organized to research, assess, and offer solutions for the environmental health hazards they face, including asthma, air toxics, and risks from diets of locally caught fish. I suggest that community knowledge provides crucial political and technical insights often over- looked by professionals. The article argues that through both its epistemological and democratic contributions to professional planning, local knowledge should never be ignored by planners seeking to improve the lives of communities experiencing the greatest risks. 420 Journal of Planning Education and Research 22:420-433 DOI: 10.1177/0739456X03253694 �� 2003 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Abstract: This article reveals how local knowledge can improve planning for communities facing the most serious environmental and health risks. These communities often draw on their firsthand experience���here called local knowledge���to challenge ex- pert-lay distinctions. Community partici- pation in environmental decisions is putting pressure on planners to find new ways of fusing the expertise of scientists with insights from the local knowledge of communities. Using interviews, primary texts, and ethnographic fieldwork, this ar- ticle defines local knowledge, reveals how it differs from professional knowledge, and argues that local knowledge can im- prove planning in at least four ways (1) epistemology, adding to the knowledge base of environmental policy (2) procedural de- mocracy, including new and previously si- lenced voices (3) effectiveness, providing low-cost policy solutions and (4) distribu- tive justice, highlighting inequitable distri- butions of environmental burdens. Keywords: local knowledge environmental health community planning Jason Corburn is on the faculty in the De- partment of City and Regional Planning at theUniversityofPennsylvania.Heisalsothe Associate Director of the Center for Occu- pational and Environmental Health at Hun- ter College, City University of New York.

What Is Local Knowledge? While this study argues for the professional recognition of local knowledge in research and decision making, I also aim to clarify what I mean by local knowledge. I seek to avoid reifying the categories ���professional��� and ���local��� as if they were invari- ant or monolithic entities (Agarwal 1995 Wynne 1996a). I therefore analyze the tendencies and differences among pro- fessional and local ways of knowing. The policy sciences litera- ture characterizes local knowledge as ���knowledge that does not owe its origin, testing, degree of verification, truth, status, or currency to distinctive . . . professional techniques, but rather to common sense, casual empiricism, or thoughtful speculation and analysis��� (Lindblom and Cohen 1979, 12). Local knowledge can also include information pertaining to local contexts or settings, including knowledge of specific characteristics, circumstances, events, and relationships, as well as important understandings of their meaning. Another definition of local knowledge comes from Geertz (1983), whose seminal anthropological work titled Local Knowledge defines it as ���practical, collective and strongly rooted in a par- ticular place��� that forms an ���organized body of thought based on immediacy of experience��� (p. 75). Geertz suggests that local knowledge can be described as simply as ���to-know-a-city- is-to-know-its-streets��� (p. 167).1 To further characterize local versus professional ways of knowing, I ask who holds the knowledge? Local knowledge is often held by members of a community that can be both geo- graphically located and contextual to specific identity groups. This means that a ���knowledge community��� might be a neigh- borhood and/or a group with a shared culture, symbols, lan- guage, religion, norms, or even interests. In contrast, profes- sional knowledge is generally held by members of a profession, discipline, university, government agency, or industrial associa- tion. However, this does not imply that identity is a fixed con- cept and predetermined by such things as religion, ethnicity, or neighborhood. As my empirical study will make clear, understanding identity means embracing intersectionality and anti-essentialism���or the notions that no person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity and that no absolute ���truth��� exists from any one perspective (Haraway 1991). A second way to distinguish local from professional knowl- edge is to ask how evidence is gathered. The differences between professional and local ways of knowing can be charac- terized by examining the emphases each place on information collection methods, standards of evidence, and analytic tech- niques. Local knowledge is often acquired through life experi- ence and is mediated through cultural tradition. Practitioners of local knowledge make explicit their reliance on evidence from time-honored traditions, intuition, images, pictures, oral storytelling or narratives, as well as visual demonstrations such as street theater (Van der Ploeg 1993). This knowledge is easily accessible to locals and widely shared. Tacit awareness and understanding, which are the product of historical experience and not merely a hunch, are also emphasized by practitioners of local knowledge (Krimsky 1984). In addition, local knowl- edge rarely conforms to technical rationality, particularly the need to search for causal models and rely on universal princi- ples and theories for getting to the ���truth������both standard practices in most professions (Habermas 1970). Conversely, professional knowledge is largely gathered through experi- mental methods and disciplinary tools, such as risk assessment in environmental health problem solving (National Research Council 1996). A third question that helps distinguish local from profes- sional knowledge asks what makes evidence credible? For com- munity members, local knowledge is rarely a hunch or sponta- neous intuition but rather evidence of one���s eyes tested through years if not generations of experiences. Furthermore, local knowledge is rarely instrument dependent. Community activists often draw from their experiences of seeing their own or a neighbor���s sick children, combined with observations of industry smokestacks and foul odors, to piece together credi- ble evidence (Tesh 1999). Community knowledge comes in part from actual sights, smells, and tastes, along with the tactile and emotional experiences encountered in everyday life. Yet, community members often make two different claims based on experiential evidence. The first claim represents a type of local knowledge that identifies or poses a problem. This claim is reflected in statements like, ���I���ve seen sick people��� and high- lights contextual knowledge that allows professionals to focus on things they may have missed. Another claim reflects a type of local knowledge that hypothesizes a relationship between a hazardous exposure and illness. This claim is reflected in state- ments such as, ���I know if dioxin and mercury are going to come out of an incinerator stack, somebody���s going to be affected.��� Too often, professionals assume that local knowl- edge is only of the second kind, dismiss these claims, and miss the importance of the first type of local knowledge. A final question that helps distinguish local from profes- sional knowledge asks how the forums where evidence is tested differ. Local knowledge is generally tested in public narratives, community stories, street theater, and other public forums. In contrast, professional knowledge is generally tested through peer review, in the courts or through the media. Admittedly, all these distinctions can fluctuate, particularly when activists organize to try and stake out part of the traditional scientists��� terrain���be it in academic journals, the courts, or the media. Community activists concerned with their own health and safety are increasingly wrangling with scientists about issues of Improving Urban Planning for Communities at Risk 421