Chloe Dotson Email & Phone Number

I believe...As a relatively young profession, urban planning must broaden the current planning models beyond illusions of grandeur and growth. Rather than focusing on pro-growth strategies, I argue that there are other ways to empower communities, by engaging, supporting, and facilitating the people’s process through the utilization of empathetic ethnography.In general, WE have over looked the historical discourse of development and social construction of race as major contributors to the degradation of post-industrial cities. WE have often failed to recognize residential resistance and survival techniques. WE must realize that social constructions of racial and ethnic hierarchies within in American capitalism are prominent in determination of social capital and access to economic resources; as blight and crime merely reflect deeper structural failures.WE must endeavor to bring to light new solutions that focus on the quality of life for all residents. People have ideas, dreams, aspirations that are generally undermined and/or hindered when not incorporated into official “plans” for the city. Any proposal for Detroit, Camden, Newark, Gary, East St. Louis, and similar cities requires an understanding of the causes of conditions and how the residents perceive and respond to them. In order for us to explore viable enhancements to the quality of life for residents living within these cities, the citizens must have a forum to exercise voice and agency in their own “development” processes; as they are the city's greatest and most powerful resource.As an energetic, hardworking, empathetic, young, multi-talented, charismatic individual, within an ever-shifting, transitional economy, I wish to investigate and generate alternative as well as innovative and creative forms of public policy, design, programming and management inductive to holistic approaches to economic-social empowerment. I am an advocate, activist and artist.I am awake, aware and able.

Listed skills include Urban Planning, Sketchup, Regional Planning, Land Use Planning, and 16 others.