Planning the Anti-Racist Future in Minnesota?

Keywords: Urban Planning, Allyship, White Supremacy, Race
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 6

Abstract

As the discipline of urban planning in the US faces an institutional reckoning due to its
embedded legacies of white supremacy (Goetz et al 2020), the state of Minnesota has emerged as a test ground to evaluate how the professional culture of American urban planning embraces
anti-racist approaches. The increased focus on racial justice in Minnesota following the murder
of George Floyd; the state’s racial disparities in housing, transportation and education impacting
BIPOC and immigrant residents; and its tradition of liberal progressive politics, coalesce to
challenge local planning departments across the state to address racial inequality or elide the
state’s well-documented racist reality.

Building from this context, this study addresses how do white progressive planners and
planners who identify as BIPOC in MN negotiate a range of color blind, advocacy and equitable
planning approaches to forge anti-racist planning? We investigate how anti-racist planning
work emerges in a planning regime that is political, gendered, placed, and located at particular
historical moment of social change in Minnesota. In this context, progressive urban planners
from different backgrounds aim to foster diverse, inclusive and equitable practices in a
professional field that has traditionally been defined by racialized dispossession and violence, the exclusion of new immigrants, marginalization of Native American communities, and state-
sponsored violence against African Americans.