Planning the Green New Deal: Climate Justice and the Politics of Sites and Scales

Abstract

Climate change and the rise of a grassroots–legislative political–environmental movement in the United States should change how urban planners think and act on spatial change and social justice. After the 2018 U.S. elections, organizing movements and progressive legislators endorsed the Green New Deal. In this Viewpoint I look at the Green New Deal’s potential implications for urban planning. I analyze it in reference to the 1930s’ New Deal inspirations and current climate and urban challenges, and illustrate the contradictions between large-scale spatial change and community-scale social justice. I explain how the imperatives of the Green New Deal, in conjunction with the shifting sites, scales, and politics of planning for climate change, should encourage planners to reframe their spaces and politics of practice toward a reconceptualized urban regional scale and a new politics of more public participation.

Keywords:

• climate change
• Green New Deal
• planning theory
• spatial politics
• urban ecology

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank the JAPA Editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments, especially on clarifications of comparisons between the present moment and the New Deal era and of practical implications for planners. I also thank my informants and collaborators in New York and Jakarta, Indonesia, whose courage and commitment have deeply informed the research that led to this article.

Supplemental Material

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Notes

Notes

1 In brief, see Davoudi, Crawford, and Mehmood (2009) and Wilson and Piper (2010) on spatial planning; Carmin, Nadkarni, and Rhie (2012), Anguelovski and Carmin (2011), and Shi et al. (2016) on urban adaptation responses; and Bartlett and Satterthwaite (2016) on development planning. Much climate change planning research is based on theoretical frameworks from the related fields of geography (Adger, Arnell, & Tompkins, 2005; Bulkeley, 2013; Hodson & Marvin, 2010; Pelling, 2011) and environmental sciences (Rosenzweig, Solecki, Hammer, & Mehrotra, 2010).

2 Lawmakers have proposed aligned legislation with more details. In November 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act (2019), with the objective of upgrading the country's existing public housing to be more energy efficient, sustainable, and resilient.

3 Already, the U.S. Senate failed to pass a procedural vote on the GND in March 2019, widely seen as an attempt by Republican senate leaders to put Democratic members on record supporting a presumably unpopular bill before an election year. As of September 2019, almost all Democratic presidential candidates have expressed support for the GND, although their specific climate plans vary.

4 By transformative I mean for systemic change in social relationships (Friedmann, 2011) and, relatedly, systemic socioecological change (Romero-Lankao et al., 2018).

5 Some New Deal initiatives, such as the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation mortgage maps, have been charged with helping perpetuate racial segregation and did not result in betterment for all groups, something the GND recognizes.

6 One example from a different context: In researching urban flooding and spatial politics in Jakarta (Indonesia), I show how tracing biophysical and sociopolitical interactions across an urban watershed exposes not only patterns of marginalization but also new strategies of urban socioecological movement building and planning beyond the limitations of local, place-based struggles (Goh, 2019b).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kian Goh

KIAN GOH ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, researching urban ecological design, spatial politics, and social mobilization in the context of climate change and global urbanization.