Whiteness and Urban Planning

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings: The ability of planning to address America’s urban problems of inequality, crime, housing, education, and segregation is hampered by a relative neglect of Whiteness and its role in shaping urban outcomes. We offer a justification for centering Whiteness within urban planning scholarship and practice that would examine its role shaping and perpetuating regional and racial injustices in the American city. The focus of planners, scholars, and public discourse on the “dysfunctions” of communities of color, notably poverty, high levels of segregation, and isolation, diverts attention from the structural systems that produce and reproduce the advantages of affluent and White neighborhoods. Planners and planning scholars frequently invoke a “legacy of injustice” with regard to concentrated poverty and disadvantage but not in regard to neighborhoods of White affluence. One is segregated and problematized and the other is idealized.

Takeaway for practice: Planners and planning scholars need to understand the role of Whiteness, in particular White affluence, to assess the potential impacts of planning interventions. Doing so will inform a wider range of planning approaches to problems of racial and spatial equity.

Keywords:

• affluence
• equity
• race
• segregation
• whiteness

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their considerable contributions and insights.

Notes

Notes

1 An exception is the focus on exclusionary zoning and its role in creating and maintaining exclusionary White communities.

2 The terms structural racism, institutional racism, or systemic racism appear somewhat more frequently, five times in JAPA and 16 times in JPER.

3 Though we limit our argument to the United States, we make no claims that it is unique in terms of the systems of racial subordination.

4 Jardina (2019) examined national surveys from 2010, 2012, and 2013, and three from 2016.

5 Other elements of fair housing policy and implementation accommodate the “settled expectations of whites,” including much of the history of the Act’s implementation (see National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, 2008) and the timidity of efforts to overcome White suburban resistance to subsidized housing (Bonastia, 2006; Danielson, 1976).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edward G. Goetz

EDWARD G. GOETZ ([email protected]) is professor of urban and regional planning in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

Rashad A. Williams

RASHAD A. WILLIAMS ([email protected]) is a PhD student in urban and regional planning in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota with research interests in planning theory, racial capitalism, and reparations in the context of urban planning.

Anthony Damiano

ANTHONY DAMIANO ([email protected]) is a PhD student in urban and regional planning in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota with research interests in housing planning and policy, neighborhood hierarchies, and gentrification.