October as National Community Planning Month (and "defund the police")

Salt Lake City is big on the use of yard signs, and other community engagement techniques aimed at getting people involved in various planning-related initiatives.

October is National Community Planning Month, sponsored by the American Planning Association. This year's theme is "Planning Is Essential to Recovery" focused on: 

how planning and planners can lead communities to equitable, resilient, and long-lasting recovery from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Interestingly, on the eve of the start of community planning month, an e-list I'm on included this article from Bloomberg, "The City Planners' Case for Defunding the Police."  A petition to the APA, signed by 650 planners, calls for acknowledging the link between planning ("design decisions") and coercive police practices.  From the article:

“Historically, planners have been responsible for manifestations of institutional racism including redlining and the construction of freeways and toxic industrial development in poor and Black and Brown neighborhoods, among many others,” reads the letter to the APA dated July 24. “These actions have had reverberating effects, including creating the preconditions for over-policing of communities of color and disinvestment in community health and safety (just as they created the conditions for safety, wellness, prosperity, and limited policing in predominantly white suburbs).” 

One example they provide is Vision Zero initiatives, which aim to reduce or eliminate traffic fatalities. Despite their good intentions, the programs “rely on police-led enforcement and may inadvertently direct additional resources to police.” The letter also points to how transit planners have deployed transit police “who notoriously harass riders of color over fee evasion,” and housing planners who’ve ignored how policing contributes to gentrification despite pledged support for affordable housing.

I hate to think that as I age "I am becoming more conservative," because I think of myself as a progressive, albeit mediated by the reality of having lived in a center city for more than 30 years, spanning really bad times and an unexpected and robust revitalization.

But I still remember the bad times, and one of the lessons is that order is neither easily achieved nor maintained.

There is no question that the history of segregation in land use in all its manifestations is not pretty.  For example, restricting African-Americans and others ability to live wherever they wanted, access to "public accommodations," differentiated allocation of resources, segregated schools, policing, etc.

But at the end of the day, planners work for the people in power. I always laugh at citizens who make their support of a mayoral candidate dependent on firing the present planning director. I try to explain that the director doesn't really have agency like they believe. Planning directors  do what they are told to do by elected officials.

But planning and the planners that do it face the classic conundrum of boundary spanning as laid out in the "social psychology of organizations."  They have two audiences to serve, the people in power, and the citizens, and these interests aren't always congruent.  

Also because planners are supposed to help a town, city, or county be economically and socially successful, and there isn't always consensus or agreement on how to achieve this.

WRT policing, there is no question that many elements of policing, especially in how it is implemented, as Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow, are "racialized social control."  But the answer isn't "defunding police," it's rearticulating public safety and how to deliver it in a much more nuanced fashion.

-- "Is it too late to change the messaging on "Defund the Police"? How about "Reconstruct Policing"?" 

I have been strongly influenced by my experience living in DC in the late 1980s and 1990s, when the city was in precipitous decline, when in part as a result of the crack epidemic, crime and murder especially rose significantly.  And it happened I lived in one of the neighborhoods seriously impacted.  

I had chosen to live there because I wanted to live in the city, not the suburbs, and it was close to Downtown and the central business district.

I didn't know that only a few blocks away was a major crack sales and distribution center.  

I joke that I wish that Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (Atlantic Magazine article) had been published before I moved to the city, so I could have been better prepared.

And I had plenty of bad experiences--muggings, stolen car, burglaries and thefts, the rape of my then wife during a burglary which led to the dissolution of our marriage, etc.

Out of that experience I was strongly influenced by the concept of Broken Windows--that places where decay was unchecked got worse, Moynihan's paper on "Defining Deviance Down," and Fred Siegel's The Future Once Happened Here, about the decline of the center cities.

The idea of defining deviance down, just like Moynihan wrote, leads to disorder. Yes we need to refashion how we deliver public safety. But "defunding" police is simplistic and naive. At least if you've ever lived through high crime and murderous times and places, as many of us have. 

I have no problem sanctioning people for fare evasion. OTOH, I also advocate for low income discounted fare programs. 

It reminds me of the decline of NYC when John Lindsay was mayor, where a park official defended the destruction of a park bench saying, "that's how some people consume parks." 

Equity planning.  Making places safe and functioning is not rainbows and unicorns. You only need a small percentage of criminal behavior to ruin a place for everyone. Especially these days with social media and rampant gun ownership and a president that stokes mayhem.

You can acknowledge institutional racism and aim to change it without disavowing the need for order and socialization. 

And I argue that to address that history of institutionalized racism a massive program of investment in communities, places, and people should be our foremost priority.

That's why I've been thinking long and hard about equity planning and new approaches to building and extending civic asset networks as a way to create more equitable communities.

-- "Equity planning: an update" (2020)

-- "An outline for integrated equity planning: concepts and programs (2017)

-- "Social urbanism and Baltimore" (2019)

Although my joke about urban planning is that communities don't have "offices of planning" but "offices of land use," and planners don't seem to make much headway in getting to work on other matters of public administration, unlike what Norman Krumholtz got to do in Cleveland in the 1970s, where he developed an approach called advocacy or equity planning, a more socially engaged method. 

-- "A Retrospective View of Equity Planning Cleveland 1969–1979," Journal of the American Planning Association, 1982

-- Rebel with a Plan: Norm Krumholz and “Equity Planning” in Cleveland

The planning agency there did more than "land use planning and building regulation," it also provided support to other city agencies with the aim of improving operations, policy, and practice.

That was a one-off.  The idea of offices of planning really being a city's "planning" office beyond land use hasn't been adopted anywhere.

What the planning profession should say in response to "defund the police."  Planning is supposed to be positivist, based on knowledge and its application.  "Defund the police" is a glib statement with zero nuance.  From the Bloomberg article:

Sara Draper-Zivetz, a housing and food planner, and one of the eight authors of the letter, said the planning organization’s failure to substantially address systemic racism is one reason why neither she nor the other seven abolition planners who co-authored the letter are actual APA members. 

“We perceived this moment as an opportunity to pursue a conversation we’ve been needing to have for a long time,” said Draper-Zivetz, who is in talks with other planners forming an organization called “Planners for Abolition.”

What planners should say is 

(1) public safety needs to be rearticulated much more broadly, where policing is one leg of a multi-pronged approach.

-- "Towards a public safety model that is broader than policing" 

-- "Creating community safety partnership neighborhood management programs as a management and mitigation strategy for public nuisance programs: Part 3 (like homeless shelters)"

(2) institutionalized racism does and has exist(ed) and needs to be addressed in a proactive manner now, through various community, social and civic investment programs.  (Some people call that reparations.  To me, that's an equally charged term, like "defund the police.")

(3) planning as a profession, as a servant to power, has been an element in creating and maintaining structural racism, and this needs to be acknowledged and addressed by the profession.