July 21, 2023
SCARP proudly celebrates PhD student Wes Regan is an awardee of UBC's Public Scholars Initiative!
Wes Regan's innovative research inquiries, for instance regarding the intersection between planning, trust in institutions, and disinformation, are now recognised and supported by this achievement. This award represents recognition not only of the excellence of his work, but the importance of his ideas for the future of our world.
More about Wes Regan and his research:
Wes’ research interests are concerned with issues of trust and distrust between publics and governments and the nature of communication and conflict in contentious planning processes.
The particular focus of his dissertation research examines how the concept of ‘The 15-Minute City’ emerged as one of the most celebrated visions of post-pandemic urban planning in 2020 only to be recast by late 2022 as a tyrannical global conspiracy to introduce a coordinated ‘climate lock-down’ in cities and prevent people from travelling more than 15-Minutes from their homes.
This conspiratorial rhetoric managed to successfully mobilize opposition to routine planning work in the United Kingdom and Canada which publics came to associate or suspect was part of the 15-Minute City thanks to the influence of misinformation spreading online. This case study illustrates the risks posed to public discourse and public participation in planning by the global “Infodemic”.
Before starting his PhD at SCARP, Wes grew interested in this concept of the Infodemic having worked in a senior policy position at Vancouver Coastal Health during the covid-19 pandemic. Working closely with public health communications on various aspects of the pandemic response, Wes saw firsthand how anti-governmental conspiracy theories and health misinformation based on pseudo-science, ‘conspirituality’, and militant libertarianism, posed direct challenges to the pandemic response in Canada and elsewhere. Now he sees the same trends impacting the work planners are doing. This has been confirmed by recent statements from the Canadian Institute of Planners, raising concern about the nature of anti-planning resistance predicated on the 15-Minute City conspiracy rhetoric and the risks it poses to planners. Similar statements based on research into the impacts of digital misinformation and social media on planners and planning activities in England from the Royal Town Planning Institute also reaffirm this growing concern. These concerns invite substantial questions about the nature of planning communication and public participation in the 21st century.