Lisa K. Bates

Planning's Core Curriculum: Knowledge, Practice, and Implementation

We examine the core curricula of the master’s degree programs of thirty planning schools in the United States and Canada and discuss patterns in core requirements. We compare current planning core curricula to those described more than fifteen years ago by John Friedmann and explore several questions surrounding core curricula, planning practice, and the demands of academic legitimacy. The article concludes with a brief case study highlighting the implementation of a new core curriculum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Equity Planning Revisited

Our experiences working with local planning departments motivated and informed our thinking about the possibilities for equity planning today and our desire to guest edit this focus issue. Lisa worked with planners and community advocates to get the City of Portland to adopt an overarching equity strategy, anchored by a racial justice initiative, as part of the Portland Plan (2012). Portland’s planning now integrates an equity lens into its Climate Action Plan and its comprehensive land use plan. As Portland updates the land use plan, community groups are building their capacity to speak the technical language of planning, and planners and advocates alike recognize the value of their ongoing collaborative engagement, even when specific policies are in dispute. Marisa worked with local planners to ensure that issues raised by communities of color would not be left out of Plan Cincinnati, the city’s comprehensive plan (City of Cincinnati 2012). For instance, instead of isolating cultural diversity issues into a separate chapter, planners integrated equity issues throughout the plan. The planners also responded to underrepresentation of African Americans on the plan’s steering committee by strategically inviting organizations that primarily served or neighborhoods with predominantly African American community members to serve on the plan’s steering committee. These experiences and our observations of equity planning efforts elsewhere warrant revisiting the work that originally conceptualized the practice. In the 1970s, Norm Krumholz’s work in Cleveland set a bold goal for planning: to adopt policies, administrative practices, and resource allocations that expanded choices and opportunities for those who had the least (City of Cleveland 1974). The equity planning model demanded that planners take an activist role in promoting this goal inside public institutions, to planning commissions, to politicians, and to the public. Krumholz’s equity planners worked in one vein of advocacy planning (Davidoff 1965), the closely related model of planners working towards social justice goals by representing marginalized voices in planning processes and with alternative plans and policy proposals. These models were used across planning fields and in cities around the country, galvanizing practitioners to address social and economic disparities. Yet the promise of equity planning remains unrealized, and this focus issue is being published during a period of acute inequality that entails a growing list of setbacks. The powerful campaign asserting “Black Lives Matter” draws attention to racialized police violence in segregated neighborhoods, as well as a broader consideration of jurisdictional fragmentation that incentivizes overpolicing as a fiscal strategy (Katz and Kneebone 2015). In U.S. cities, gentrification that causes the displacement of low-income communities from inner cities to suburbs results in moving our least-well-off community members away from employment, mass transit, and city services (Maciag 2015). Despite their contributions to our communities, undocumented immigrants are forced to hide in the shadows (Sandoval 2013). We celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which declared war on poverty, as we watched the gap between rich and poor widen. Likewise, the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act also marked the largest racial wealth gap in decades for blacks and Latinos compared to whites (Pew Research Center 2013). In this focus issue, we return to the core concepts of equity and advocacy planning theory to ask “what is the state of equity planning today?” The goal of this issue is to spur conversation about equity planning, equity in planning, and equity planners. This planning model is confronting persistent and emerging challenges of social and economic disparity and political marginalization: long-term poverty and ghettoization of racialized minorities, emerging racial/ethnic demographic majorities, the spatialized effects of the predatory financial sector and its collapse, and impacts of the global recession including differential effects of government austerity. As the articles collected in this issue demonstrate, equity planning is now occurring across wide-ranging fields, urban scales, and institutional contexts. They reflect a range of specializations including community development, economic development, neighborhood planning, regionalism, health, planning pedagogy, and environmental planning. The articles direct attention to the kinds of plans and policies, analyses, modes of practice, and processes that are needed today to advance equity and justice in a multitude of contexts. In the first article, Brand describes the importance of meaning making. Post-Katrina New Orleans provides the locale for Brand’s examination of the limits of democratic participation in defining a shared vision of equity. Her work 589967 JPEXXX10.1177/0739456X15589967Journal of Planning Education and ResearchZapata and Bates other2015

Equity Planning or Equitable Opportunities? The Construction of Equity in the HUD Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grants

In this article, we examine recent efforts by the federal government to promote regional planning that incorporates social equity into sustainability and livability principles through the Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant (SCRPG). We use a plan quality analysis framework to examine grant proposals from the 2010 awardees. The analysis asks whether these regional plan proposals represent a new equity planning or if regional-scale equity policy remains obscured in quality of life arguments. We conclude with respect to the Krumholz model that regional equity planning may signal commitment to equity policy, but that regional capacity to act for equity is lacking.