It Takes a Village to Make a City: Why We Need Equity in Urban Planning

To address the exclusion of people of color in urban planning that perpetuates and institutionalizes patterns of harm, MassINC has proposed a new practice called Joint Local Planning—community-centric and coordinated district, municipal, and regional planning—as a remedy for historically exclusive processes and inequitable outcomes. But what is community-centric planning, why do we need it, and how is it done?

Monica Tibbits-Nutt of the 128 Business Council, Leah Bamberger, City of Providence’s director of sustainability and Pol Tavares, Providence resident and operations director for Providence’s Racial and Environmental Committee (REJC), share with MassINC’s Dr. Tracy Corley and WGBH News Transportation Reporter Bob Seay how they have helped transform community engagement in urban planning across North America. They’ll share examples of how past planning efforts have created systems that marginalize Black, Indigenous, and people of color in cities large and small while describing their successes with bottom-up planning processes and outcomes. The group will also discuss how COVID-19 has impacted planning efforts—especially in smaller, Gateway Cities—and why urban residents cannot wait for the end of the pandemic to take ownership of planning their neighborhoods, municipalities, and communities.

This event is one of a series of TTOD Talks co-produced by the WGBH Network Forum and is based on the MassINC report, From Transactional to Transformative: The Case for Equity in Gateway City Transit-Oriented Development. To access the report, click here.

Register here.