Sixty Years of Racial Equity Planning

John C. Arroyo, Gerard F. Sandoval and Joanna Bernstein

Journal of the American Planning Association, 2023, vol. 89, issue 4, 438-458

Abstract: Problem, research strategy, and findingsDebates about race in the United States are front and center in the 21st century. From the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement to the caging of indigenous migrant children from Mexico and Central America to rising Asian American and Pacific Islander discrimination during COVID-19, the urgency for an explicit definition of racial equity planning and examples of how the ethic evolved could not be more pressing. Historically, social justice–oriented planners focused efforts on racial equity despite a lack of a collective understanding of the topic. By demonstrating diverse, applied approaches through an analysis of 17 municipal and community-led plans at various scales, we traced the primacy of race in equity planning through four key eras: civil rights, Model Cities and successive programs, HOPE VI and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Sustainable Cities Regional Planning Grants, and contemporary. How and why has racial equity planning evolved in the academic planning literature and representative racial equity plans in the last 60 years? Racial equity planning has always been a cornerstone of the field, and lessons from the literature and relevant plans merit deeper attention, especially as White supremacy gains stronger ground.Takeaway for practicePlanners should affirm a unified definition of racial equity planning informed by relevant scholarship and operationalize its tenets in their work. Recognizing key milestones where racial equity has successfully informed contemporary urban policies offers progressive planners a rich set of alternative policies, strategies, and programs to use across diverse communities.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01944363.2022.2132986 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rjpaxx:v:89:y:2023:i:4:p:438-458

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rjpa20

DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2022.2132986

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the American Planning Association is currently edited by Sandi Rosenbloom

More articles in Journal of the American Planning Association from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().