How Municipal Actors Leverage Evidence to Support Urban Planning: Perspectives from the City of Regina

Abstract

Despite growing calls for evidence-informed policy-making, policy- and decision-makers in municipal governments often face barriers to the integration of evidence into their work. These barriers may be especially prominent in small-to-medium-sized cities, which are often comparatively resource-strained relative to the larger cities that are the focus of much of the existing literature. We interviewed 30 municipal actors involved in urban planning at the City of Regina—the municipal government representing the medium-sized city of Regina located in western Canada. Our study revealed that evidence was often positioned differently among policy- and decision-makers. Interviewees had different definitions of evidence, accessed various sources of evidence, placed differing levels of trust in certain forms of evidence, and experienced different barriers to the integration of evidence into their day-to-day work. This article contributes to a better understanding of the role of evidence among urban planners and has important lessons on how to bridge the gap between urban planning policy- and decision-makers and producers of evidence.