This article examines how local newspaper stories in a college town created a dominant cultural narrative about an urban redevelopment project using tropes of physical blight and financial obsolescence. The article discusses descriptive tactics that appear throughout 16 years of coverage alongside patterns in the stories’ frequency, focus, and authorship. The conclusion shares a series of practical takeaways for technical writers looking to collaborate with communities facing redevelopment.

When an urban planning project is announced, local media outlets often focus on broadly describing the building or project. But how can we listen to and value the stories from people displaced by large-scale urban change? This article adopts a case-study approach to share complicated stories from four residents displaced by a redevelopment project and suggests technical communication approaches for productively placing stories from the displaced in dialogue with broader planning project stories.

In this original research article, we report findings locating technical and professional communication (TPC) courses and programs from 1,235 not-for-profit two-year colleges (2YCs); argue for an updated 2YC TPC research agenda at 2YCs; and provide concrete steps for increasing 2YC faculty inclusion in the field of TPC through conference attendance, service, and membership in national TPC organizations.

In this article, the authors confront challenges faced in public planning projects when the desire to implement participatory design is complicated by the need for mass quantities of data. Using one case of participatory design in urban planning, they suggest that planners struggled to effectively employ participatory design methodology because they neglected to collect the tacit knowledge generated through their participatory processes. Coupling participatory design with a listening rhetoric, they suggest that participatory processes that include tacit knowledge and representative citizen participation might augment public planning projects that hope for both big data collection and democratic approaches to urban planning.