Research seminar | What makes a place civic: Porous planning and the making of Chicago’s Millennium Park - 01 Sep 2025

Abstract: How can people and organizations from different sectors build civic places that work for the many? In this talk, I will preview my book project investigating how public places (e.g., public parks, libraries, community centers) can be made civic -i.e., widely embraced by different social groups in a geographical community like a city. The book’s thesis is that making a place civic is facilitated by porous planning: a set of organizational processes by which different ideas about a place are generated and combined into the place’s physical form. Porous planning is a “third way” to organize a place making project, differing from both centralized and participatory planning approaches, and incorporating elements of each. What matters for making a place civic is not (de)centralization, but porosity: the ways in which the diverse ideas of multiple social groups are included and organized into a place’s physical form, eventually making such form multivocal, i.e. capable of eliciting multiple meanings for different social groups. To develop this thesis, the book draws on a micro-history of the making of Chicago’s Millennium Park, a highly successful civic place built at the turn of the 21st century (1998-2004), analyzing thousands of primary archival data, 105 interviews and mobile phone data on the public reception of the park. The book is inter-disciplinary and multi-method, aiming at contributing to organization studies, the sociology of place and materiality, and urban studies of public places.

 

 

About Santi Furnari

Santi Furnari is Professor of Strategy at Bayes Business School in London, Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University in Chicago, and a Senior Editor at the journal Organization Studies. He was a 2023-24 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and previously served as Associate Dean for Executive Education at Bayes. Prof. Furnari studies how organizations can have impact on local communities and society, for example by shaping the emergence of industrial clusters, work practices, and new social spaces (such as social impact incubators and civic spaces). Recent research focuses on how business, philanthropic and political actors in cities can collaborate to create successful civic places, such as widely used public parks and libraries. He is also an expert of organization design, business models and configurational thinking. Prof. Furnari is a multi-disciplinary researcher combining insights from economic sociology with organization theory, and using qualitative and mixed methods (such as fuzzy-set/Qualitative Comparative Analysis or fs/QCA). His research has been published in leading academic journals, such as the Academy of Management Review, the Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, Organization Science and Strategic Management Journal (among others). His paper titled “Interstitial Spaces” has received the AMR Best Paper Award for the best paper published in the Academy of Management Review in 2014 and he was a finalist for the same award in 2021 with his co-authored paper "Capturing Causal Complexity". From 2019 to 2022, Prof. Furnari served as the Representative-at-large of the Organization and Management Theory (OMT) Division of the Academy of Management. He is one of the co-founders and co-ordinators of the EGOS Standing Working Group on “Organizations and Place-Based Communities”.