What can and should urban planners do about this troubling trend? We’ve tried inclusive zoning and promoting more public spaces as a way to bring people together. Culturally competent urban designers work to make disadvantaged communities more visible by developing streetscapes that reflect the art and voices of their culture.
But we need to go beyond land use solutions. Planners should use their ability to see the relationships among people and the built environment to transform how communities address diversity. What distinguishes planners from other land use professions, such as architects and civil engineers, is our focus on the dynamic network of relationships in places. (In other words: architects design boxes. Engineers design the connections between the boxes. Social workers help people who use the boxes and connections. Planners develop and manage the relationships among all these things.)
A plan can be a first draft of a community. Both plans and drafts are similar in that you learn as you do. You can see connections, opportunities, mistakes and bad assumptions as you plod through. Of course, the more you try to accomplish, the more you struggle.
By engaging leaders and power brokers over time, planners have the opportunity to shape how they think about diversity and integration, and build their confidence to do the right thing. But here’s the thing: It’s not going to happen in one meeting with a bunch of good data and charts. It’s not going to happen in a single public hearing with a bunch of pretty pictures. Transformative leadership requires commitment, patience and persistence, as well as excellent strategic communication skills. The quiet conversations together are more powerful than the soapbox orations.
To do transformative leadership that promotes sustainable solutions involving diversity and inclusion, you need to be culturally competent. Cultural competency is more than “being nice to people who are different than you.” It is a set of analytical and communication skills – a competency – that allows individuals to better understand and adapt to culturally diverse environments. For more on this, read the works of Leonie Sandercock, a professor at the University of British Columbia.
We need to work on these issues now because our society is becoming more fractured. It’s not just that people are moving away from one another and clustering with people who look and think like them. The explosion of different media means that many people are not seeing the same information or hearing common interpretations of the facts. We are in a society with a shrinking mainstream and less common ground.
Why is self-segregation so bad? Shouldn’t American planners and other land use professionals respect the rights of people to live how they want – and with whom – even if we don’t agree with their decisions? I believe that the most critical responsibilities of American planners are to enhance opportunities for all people to fully partake in society, protect individual freedoms that do not restrict opportunities for others, and develop solutions to sustain the world so future generations have equal opportunities and freedoms. When people move away from one another physically, intellectually and emotionally, conflict is easier to start and harder to resolve. History tells us that dominant groups in society will use their powers to restrict opportunities and freedom for others. (Low-income housing built on the opposite side of the highway. Ordinances banning taco trucks. Exclusionary zoning.) Whether we do neighborhood or regional planning, the problems we face – environmental, economic, traffic – are spread wider than the communities in which we work. We need people to work together to promote opportunity, protect freedom and pursue sustainability.
Planners can help. But it means spending less time looking at maps and spreadsheets and more time leading conversations.
Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP
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