Brettany Shannon
Lecturer

Brief Biography

I am an urban planning and development scholar whose research complicates conventional understandings of community development. In Co-Creative Placekeeping in Los Angeles: Artists and Communities Working Together (2023), co-authored with David C. Sloane and Anne Bray, we present a new concept, equitable peacekeeping, to describe the inclination of historically marginalized community members to steward their neighborhood’s development, improve local amenities, engage in social and cultural production, and assert a mutual sense of self-definition—and the efforts of socially engaged artists to aid them. In so doing, we also push against the narrow conceptualization of the artist-as-gentrifier, further complicating the neighborhood change literature. In Planning for Authenticities (2019), co-edited with Laura Tate, we explore the power of authenticity and its ambiguous relationship with contemporary community development. The essays consider: "How does the definition of ‘authenticity’ shift in different social, political, and economic contexts?" And "Can planning promote authenticity? If so, how and under what conditions?" It includes healthy skepticism about the concept and proposals to promote its democratic, inclusive expression in neighborhoods and communities.

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