Equity planning thought leader Norman Krumholz died (in 2019)

In recent years I have been publishing an annual piece listing urbanism-related obituaries on people (and businesses) that died in the previous year.

In the piece for 2019, I didn't know that Norman Krumholz, former director of planning for the City of Cleveland and the leading progenitor of the concept of "equity planning" died in late December.

-- "Former Cleveland planning director Norman Krumholz, nationally respected advocate of equity planning, is dead at 92," Cleveland Plain Dealer. From the obituary:

Instead of producing a traditional plan for the physical development of Cleveland, Krumholz led the formulation of the city’s 1975 “Policy Planning Report.” It stated that, “in a context of limited resources and pervasive inequalities, priority attention must be given to the task of promoting a wider range of choices for those who have few, if any, choices.”

Translated into action, equity planning meant promoting better transit service in the city, pushing for an end to redlining, and helping neighborhood organizations.

Krumholz was part of a generation of urban thinkers who reacted against federally-funded Urban Renewal projects that displaced low income and minority residents.

“Norm represented the interests of the people versus the corporate interests, the development interests, the growth machine, the people who had little care for, little thought for, the people of the city of Cleveland,’’ said Hunter Morrison, the city’s planning director from 1980 to 2000.

In a planning history class, I was transfixed reading one of his papers ("A Retrospective View of Equity Planning Cleveland 1969–1979," Journal of the American Planning Association, 1982), where he talked about "planning offices" being more involved in other questions of government operations, not just land use.

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

I haven't read his books on equity planning, Making Equity Planning Work: Leadership in the Public Sector and Advancing Equity Planning Now (complete download) but I should.

My own stab at a framework for equity planning may need to be more ambitious:

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