Laura Tate, PhD (University of British Columbia), is an urban planning scholar, lecturer and consultant. Laura has an extensive practice background in city planning and public health. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia, and has most recently held the position of Visiting Lecturer at the California Polytechnic State University. Brettany Shannon, PhD in Urban Planning and Development (University of Southern California), studies how media arts and digital communications intersect with urban and social placemaking. As the USC Bedrosian Center for Governance Scholar-in-Residence, she continues her research in the interview-based podcast, Los Angeles Hashtags Itself.
""In our interdependent urban world how do people sustain real community? Tate & Shannon weave sixteen answers into three hopeful strategies: discover and invent objects to moor people to a shared place; perform social actions designed to carve out community spaces; and use purposeful cultural, political and professional strategies to heal spatial rifts hewn by indifferent development. Bravo!"" -Charles Hoch, Professor Emeritus, Department of Urban Planning & Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA ""Planning for AuthentiCITIES is a timely, novel, and stimulating book that will advance conversations and debates about the growing desire for and claims making about ""authenticity."" Written in an engaging manner and marked by compelling portraits of efforts on the ground to preserve perceived authenticity, this comprehensive text promises to guide conversations within and beyond the classroom about this charged topic. Crucially, this collection provides insights about when, how– and whether– planners ought to grapple with concerns for authenticity."" -Japonica Brown-Saracino, Associate Professor of Sociology, Boston University, USA ""Planning for AuthentiCITIES contributes in a particularly lively way to our understanding of the role of place, identity and territory in our post-structuralist age. Co-editors Laura Tate and Brettany Shannon have enlisted both established scholars and new talents in a volume which brings to life the dynamics of how we see ‘authenticity’ as animating city and space, while not shrinking from individual and collective experiences of exclusion, marginality and inequality."" -Tom Hutton, Professor of Urban Studies and City Planning, University of British Columbia, Canada