Refusing to Appropriate: The Emerging Discourse on Planning and Race

Abstract

The local planning process has become more urgent in light of recent global changes: economic, social, and spatial restructuring and the parallel concentration of capital, technology, and information in smaller numbers of transnational corporations. The ability of communities to plan and determine their futures is at stake. Yet communities are not homogenous, and as we speak of improving the planning process, we must ask questions about what it will take to ensure the participation and influence of those who in the past have been the victims of that process. How can the planning process be opened to communities who have been bulldozed by urban renewal, redlined into apartheid-like conditions, deserted by capital, or indeed, revitalized virtually out of existence? The commitment to social justice requires planning professionals to look closely at the deadly consequences of uneven development and ask “What can we do to make the community planning process more equitable?”