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As our environment becomes increasingly urban, the governance of urban regions faces multifaceted challenges. There is growing recognition that studying the governance of urban regions requires looking beyond individual plans and examining networks of plans. Existing work on plan networks focuses on documents, neglecting the agency of the people and governments who create and implement the plans. To help fill this gap, we develop and test an analytical framework for assessing urban governance within a network of plans, focusing on the alignment of plan content, interactions, and the relative efficacy of the plans. We apply this framework in metropolitan Austin, Texas (USA), studying five strategic plans that address the region's built environments, transportation systems, and natural areas over a 20 year-period. The analysis reveals how voluntary regional scenario-planning conducted decades earlier continues to shape city and regional development goals; how alignment between plans on paper can belie poor cross-jurisdictional coordination in practice; and how plans addressing transportation and natural areas are more efficacious for implementation than plans for the built environment. In addition to making plan dynamics visible, the framework thus allows for rigorous, empirical assessment of regional governance through a network of plans. • A framework is proposed to analyze urban-region governance with a network of plans. • The framework is tested with five strategic plans in Austin, Texas (USA). • Evidence is found of a network consisting of documents and agency. • Network-of-plan research benefits from the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The complex, diverse, and embodied nature of Latin(o/a/x) placemaking calls for place-based pedagogy that foregrounds intimate learning outside the confines of the classroom. A 'third space' approach to landscape pedagogy seeks to facilitate co-production with residents in a variety of outdoor learning spaces, thus fostering landscape literacy by encouraging students to grapple with the multiple meanings of Latin(o/a/x) landscapes while challenging top-down, expert-driven placemaking discourses. We assess the learning outcomes from a one-year, two-semester studio sequence that produced a community-based design proposal for a neglected city park in Austin, Texas. The outdoor learning spaces provided diverse opportunities for critical and creative engagement, relationship building, and co-production of research processes, cultivating critical awareness of the complex social contingencies of places, actors, and placemaking practices. Such a third space approach to landscape studio pedagogy can contribute to more just, participatory place-based landscape design in Latin(o/a/x) landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores specific relationships between humans and nature and seeks an extended ‘social construction of nature’ in the direction of place agency. The research assumes that place can be in agented action and a reciprocal relationship with human and non-human beings. The study’s main aim is to identify whether, from the perspective of contemporary city users, a partnership with the biotic and geographical environment is possible both within and outside the city. From this aim arises a research question: Does an inhabitant of a large city realize the possibility of a dialogue involving an ‘exchange of meanings’ between two entities of interaction that are often highly different (human and non-human beings)? The research uses a questionnaire survey (to recognize general quantitative opinion) and in-depth interviews with selected respondents (to look for deeper explanations). Results show that some urban respondents can see some environmental elements (in and out of the city) as agents and can describe the relationship human-environment in case of a reciprocal action called dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]