Special Feature (Vol.17)

Advice for Progressive Planners

The Community and Regional Planning Program at the University of Texas at Austin has developed relationships with and produced a great number of impressive progressive practitioners and scholars. This year, Planning Forum is devoting a special section to the wisdom and experience of a small handful of these individuals. We asked what advice they have for planners who want to work from within a progressive political framework. What follows is each author’s answer to this prompt.

Jared Genova:

So much of progressive planning frameworks—whether it is sustainable development or smart growth—is based on making systems-level connections. However, starting a planning conversation with high-level concepts like resilience is often a nonstarter. By knowing your audience, learning what they care about, and building upon it, rather than reducing to it, the name of the concept will hopefully become irrelevant. When we talk about city resilience planning in New Orleans, the conversation point of entry is always different: sometimes it’s housing, or water management, or transportation. If we can meaningfully address a community concern and also build awareness and action potential for other, interdependent themes, we are probably doing something right.

Related to knowing your audience is the recognition that you might not be the best person to deliver your own message. Progressive planning is about building partnerships and setting the stage for collaborative efforts. At some point as professional planners we almost surely work in places where we are considered outsiders, so forging relationships with local and respected community allies is invaluable in helping you build credibility and trust in the communities you serve. Before you act, do your research and be humble enough to recognize that you probably cannot anticipate everything. Ultimately, progressive planning is all about people and relationships. Take the time to cultivate meaningful bonds with other agencies, advocacy groups, and neighborhood leaders with local knowledge and experience, and empower them to deliver messages on your behalf.

Bo McCarver:

Planning in a modern capitalist country is at best a compromise and at worse an abdication. In America, the unwritten dictum of development is “money talks.” In Texas, which serves as the armpit of capitalist accumulation, planners serve largely to collect pencil-whipped data that policy makers shape and pick through to support whatever they were going to do anyway. And those moguls serve the 1%.

Steeped in a pervasive environment of conservative politics, a degreed planner with vision and liberal morals will be faced quickly with limited jobs in which to practice. Passive alternatives, such as teaching or sifting through grant applications for foundations, are limited in quantity and pull bright people away from lived praxis in the trenches.

The contradiction is shared by most other supposed professions such as fine arts, where you either teach or survive by getting rich patrons drunk at openings, and journalism, where you are channeled to write vehemently about strife in the Unisian Islands while ignoring the local real estate industry that is systematically displacing the poor.

If you really want to make changes that respect the planet’s crust and diverse species, you will have to alter the pervasive political system. Until then, almost all degrees generated in the Ivory Towers are absurd.

In a conservative, consumptive society, all jobs are absurd; if we’re fortunate, we get to pick the level of absurdity we can tolerate.

Dave Sullivan:

My advice to planners is that the best ways to build a sustainable community are to select undeveloped areas for protection from development; select developed areas for slow, targeted change to protect lower-income persons; and then judiciously select areas for new development, particularly old commercial property with large parking lots or unwanted land uses such as major polluters, and draw on new urbanist principles to develop mixed uses, naturally landscaped open spaces, joint water quality/detention infrastructure, and bike/ped/transit-friendly transportation infrastructure with housing catering to a broad range of incomes. Modest increases in housing stock in single-family areas can be achieved with small, well[1]designed accessory dwelling units and well-placed 3- to 10-unit “missing middle” housing stock near bus routes. Be open to new building types such as Kasita homes, Katrina-kit cottages, shipping containers, tiny homes, micro-unit apartments, etc. It is also important to prepare for a different transportation environment when robotic cars replace human-driven cars, particularly if they lead to narrower roads and declines in car ownership and thus reduced needs for parking.

Beth Rosenbarger:

To me, a progressive political framework means working to challenge the status quo by reexamining the values that both shape and reinforce our surroundings, reimagining our built environment, and reconsidering who is involved in that process.

From my perspective as a municipal planner, working from a progressive framework starts with you, followed by coworkers, supervisors, board members, elected officials, stakeholders, and community members. It’s unlikely you’ll find a place where all seven categories are composed of people who want to come together and make progressive changes in a town or region. For those planners looking to challenge the status quo, there are cities that will celebrate your efforts, other towns that will provide resistance at every corner, and every version in between.

My advice to planners is not to ignore the places where your progressive political framework is an anomaly. I work in a town that is resistant to change, in a state that passes antiurban legislation regularly, and a new interstate is being constructed through our community. That said, there are plenty of people who want to make Bloomington, IN a better place and are open to change; they aren’t the loudest voices at public meetings, and you have to work to find them. Change is incremental and often painfully slow for those of us who want to see dramatic transformations. Learn to accept incremental and small victories and build on those, but don’t let go of the bigger vision and purpose. Often it might feel as if your voice isn’t heard, but despite that, it is still important to speak up.

With climate change, obesity, and other looming crises, we need to make dramatic changes to our built environment and in our daily lives. Consider the impact you can have on a community to improve walkability, health, and climate change. Don’t shy away from the challenge!

Sherief Gaber:

In Egypt in early 2011, at the height of its revolutionary fervor, an informal community cut off from Cairo’s ring road built themselves an on ramp and off ramp to the highway. They did this with their own engineers, labor, and planning; the result was nearly indistinguishable from those built by the government’s corps of engineers. Over my years working in Cairo on community development, I saw the city transforming itself, for better or worse, as thousands of plans were put into action each day by people, most of them poor or working class, shaping the very material of the city to better suit their lives and livelihoods.

Against the neglect and incompetence of the government, people were building and creating a different Cairo, but it is not enough to celebrate the ingenuity of the people when they are forced to bear the cost of remedying their own marginalization. As a planner you should help, champion, and enhance people’s efforts to make their cities better, but also use your profession to hold accountable and call into question the failure of public institutions and the careless violence of private development.

Work with communities, but work for a city itself, for ensuring it can be a just place for all who inhabit or would seek to inhabit it. Participatory planning should not be a process of legitimating the opinions of those whose voices are loudest but a means of giving voice to those who have been silenced and excluded from the processes that shape and make our cities.

Humility and forceful conviction are not opposites but complementary traits necessary to insist on what is right. Yet, recognize that you yourself could be wrong. Understand the distinction between expertise and control, and how ceding the latter does not mean that you have no use for the former.

Avoid buzzwords, but champion slogans: insist that Black lives matter, refugees are welcome, and all should have the right to not just live in but also shape the places where they live. The people still want the fall of the regime. These ideas should be part of the plan; find out how to build these politics into the streets themselves.