Concrete Strategies for a More Radical Praxis
The following is an excerpt from A Student's Guide to Radical Planning Praxis, a zine created by Allison Gable as a creative research project for the Spring 2024 Urban Studies and Planning Honors Thesis Seminar at UC San Diego. The zine, which includes interviews with many members of Planners Network, can be read in its entirety here.
Concrete Strategies for a More Radical Praxis
There are many ways that leftists who might want to get a job in the planning field can use their knowledge, skills, and professional position to help contribute to a more transformative kind of change than the profession itself is willing to implement. In putting theory into action, it helps to learn from those who have already tried to fight these battles and developed a variety of tactics that we can use. We’re lucky to have many radical planners who came before us and are ready to help pass on the struggle to those just entering the field.
This section covers advice for ways we can do radical planning praxis—not just specific to radical planning theory, but related to any kind of planning for radical change.
Organize!
This should not surprise any leftist, but advice I received many times in many different ways was to organize, organize, organize. This could look a lot of ways—organizing within the workplace, with other planners across workplaces, or outside the workplace with community groups and social movements—in any combination or all at once. We are always stronger together.
Within the workplace, organizing with your coworkers can give you critical support for when you want to push back against management or advocate for different ways of doing things. This can start with talking to the people you work with about your critiques and ideas for change to see if they have them too, or if not, to plant the seeds.
If you’re just on your own, standing up against projects you know will cause harm can still be an important way to act in line with your values—“If I knew a project was coming and it’s going to displace X hundreds amount of Black, brown, or Indigenous people,” Desiree (Dee) Powell, creator of Do Right By The Streets (DRBTS) planning firm, told me, “I would say it’s wrong to [somebody who’s a janitor] and wrong to [somebody who’s a] CEO or [a] developer.” However, as a lone voice, you’re likely to just get ignored or even made to feel like an office pariah. “But if you have several voices and you’re organized,” Jonathan Pacheco Bell advised me, “then it’s harder for management to resist.”
And organizing internally doesn’t have to be an isolated process. You can do this in conjunction with organizing with communities, and by getting the public involved you can bring a coalition of inside and outside voices to pressure management and even elected officials. In the case of stopping large development projects or other more difficult campaigns, I’m not sure this would be a strong enough strategy on its own, but for something like bringing Embedded Planning into your workplace this combination of internal advocacy plus external support could be enough to succeed.
Another way you can organize at your workplace is by getting involved in union work—but while municipal employees will usually be represented by a union, you’re less likely to find this in the private or nonprofit sectors. So at least within the public sector, union involvement is an opportunity to find support and connections outside your unit in the planning department. As part of a larger, organized group of workers, planners who do take job risks with their political activity inside or outside the workplace could mobilize the union’s power to help protect themselves and each other.
In the public sector, and likely in big private firms as well, you may be unable to find many coworkers who share leftist political beliefs (especially depending on what city you’re working in). In this case it becomes all the more important to organize with radical planners in different workplaces. You can do this informally, by finding who’s trying to do radical work nearby and connecting with them outside of work to discuss, share ideas, ask questions, keep each other accountable, and strategize.
You can also do this more formally by joining an organization like Planners Network, which can help connect you to leftist planners in cities, regions, and campuses across Turtle Island and beyond. There are several local chapters of PN throughout the U.S. and Canada, with two international chapters in Mexico (Ciudad Juárez) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well. San Diego doesn’t currently have its own PN chapter (unless we want to organize one!), but you don’t necessarily need a local chapter to become a PN member. Through their conferences, newsletters, LinkedIn group, and more, PN offers opportunities for planners, students, academics, and organizers from anywhere to connect and—you guessed it—organize.
If you’re outside the public sector, you might have more opportunity to organize across workplaces that can put their combined institutional weight together to make more things happen. For example, Alex Schafran, who does a lot of activism around housing and runs his own consulting firm, described to me how he is currently “[organizing] people with business cards” in order to try and build a housing coalition. By making connections across different organizations in that more professional space, especially among nonprofits or other mission-driven organizations, you can try to mobilize a larger number of people and resources to achieve a shared goal. However, organizing outside the world of professionals is possibly the most critical organizing work that radical planners need to be involved in. By volunteering your free time with community-based organizations, advocacy groups such as tenant rights organizations, and larger social movements, you can develop relationships with these groups and get to know the landscape of social justice work in your specific local context. Then, through your integration into a broader ecosystem of change, you can more effectively make things happen. Tom Angotti, Professor Emeritus at CUNY Hunter College and longtime leftist planner who entered into the field through his involvement in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the 60’s, emphasized that changing government has to come from the inside and outside and that it’s too much for any one person to do themselves. “It doesn’t happen because of you,” he told me.
It happens because you have a connection with radical social movements. That’s what matters… I knew who to talk to in the housing movements, I knew who to talk to in the community garden movements, and take back the land movements. I knew how to keep in touch with where the movements were going and what they might need or be able to get from government.
Staying connected to organizing outside the workplace is critical if we understand that lasting, transformative change is something that’s driven from the bottom-up—but that also, it’s something we can use our position “on the inside” to help support. Norma Rantisi echoed this perspective: “Unfortunately, most of the pressure has to come from outside the system,” she said to me. “So I think the most beneficial thing is when planners have a foot inside and out.”
Being involved with social movements outside of work probably seems like a natural thing for many of us to do, and even a personal moral responsibility. Seeing the commitment that many of my peers have shown to making social change through participation in protest, organizing, and other political action that has nothing to do with our school or work obligations—and most likely won’t be a part of our resumes—I’m reassured knowing that this won’t be new information for many of us.
But I still find it important to emphasize, especially because we have so much pressure to focus on securing careers and channeling our energy into activities that look good on paper. And it’s worth reiterating that organizing as part of larger social movements is often the most important thing we can do to create change, as “planners” and as people. As Deshonay Dozier said to me, “Staying principled, staying organized, and staying in movement, in general, is the way in which we can—outside of a planning job, but as human beings—get at this… staying in struggle is what’s key.”
Educate
Most ordinary people don’t know much about planning, even when it affects them directly through zoning codes, housing policy, or environmental issues. Traditional methods to get the public involved tend to be rigid, formal, and overall very intimidating, so many of the planners I interviewed have taken it upon themselves to make learning about planning more engaging and approachable. Jonathan Pacheco Bell brings plain-language planning conversations into the community’s own spaces through Embedded Planning; Dee Powell’s firm DRBTS makes urban planning flashcards and plans placemaking projects in and with communities; Josh’s Radical Planning YouTube channel tries to reach a broader online audience through engaging video essays.
By deprofessionalizing planning in this way, trained planners have the opportunity to take what they know and make it something everyone can know, at least enough to understand how it impacts them and what they can do about it. Education is a key tool that radical planners can use to help the public feel empowered to organize around planning issues and make change in their own communities. Jonathan Pacheco Bell said to me, “That’s the vision for planning that I have, to make it so radical, decentralized, and horizontal that you don’t need me anymore, you can do it yourself. I wanna make myself irrelevant.”
Through more informal and accessible planning education, we can also help make radical planning ideas and alternatives understandable to a wider audience, and help push the narrative beyond mainstream liberal urbanism. Through videos on his YouTube channel, Josh critiques popular urbanist rallying cries such as “just build more housing” or “we need more third spaces”, and offers alternatives—community-controlled, decommodified housing development and reclaiming the right to the city, among others. You also don’t have to do this work on your own—through Sabrina Bazile’s work with Anti-Displacement NYC, a communist housing organization, they help critically analyze local government housing policies and do political education to help people understand alternative viewpoints beyond “capitalist housing propaganda”. Anti-Displacement NYC also is not Sabrina’s employer, which goes to show that sometimes your most important and fulfilling work as a radical planner is work that you’ll do unpaid.
Another word of advice is that, especially as young and relatively inexperienced planners, we shouldn’t go into the world just with a goal to “educate” people—we may have college degrees and more technical knowledge in the field, but we don’t know everything. We need to also set out with a goal to learn, especially from those who have been harmed by planning decisions. In order to build genuine relationships with people, “education” needs to be a two way street.
Be a Guide
The previous section covered something radical planners can do in the public sphere by connecting with anyone, anywhere. However, within social movements and organized community groups, there are specific roles that can be helpful for planners with technical training and job experience to take on. These aren’t fixed roles, but instead are suggestions about ways we can approach the relationship between our professional and political lives with the goal of being an asset to the movements we care about.
First, planners can be guides: they can facilitate emerging community organizing, help inform movement strategy based on behind the-scenes knowledge of government, and help groups navigate local planning and political apparatuses, for example. Samuel Stein, who got his Master’s in Urban Planning and then a Ph.D. in Geography, works as a housing policy analyst whose research helps housing movements analyze proposals, choose targets, determine strategy, and develop campaigns. You can do this work informally through the relationships you have with local movements, even when it’s not part of your career. Another example of being a guide would be that if people want to form a worker co-op or tenant union, if you know some of the legal rules surrounding those things you might be able to help facilitate the organizing process.
Annette Koh suggests connecting with community organizations that have been engaging with planning systems and processes to help guide them, but also to connect with organizations that don’t have that baseline knowledge yet to point them in the right direction. She recounted a story that took place in Honolulu in which an environmental justice organization had been trying to advocate to the state government about a proposed landfill in their community—only to realize later that the whole time they should have been going to the City and County instead, since local government has the authority on zoning. Professional planners who are aware of these things can be a key asset in situations where movements may not be as familiar with issues of differential government jurisdiction over planning decisions.
Be a Technical Expert
Planners can also use their technical knowledge to assist movements. This overlaps with being a guide, but focuses more on using knowledge and skills from your planning education and experience to decipher information that’s not easily understandable to the public. For example: breaking down zoning information, reading Environmental Impact Reports (EIRs), translating charts and graphs, or spelling out acronyms like CEQA, NEPA, CAP, and SANDAG.
If you have technical skills in creating things as well, you could also offer that help. For example, you could provide grant-writing assistance to a community garden that’s just starting to get off the ground. There might also be opportunities in which it would be helpful to create GIS maps, write alternative policies or plans, or do anything else a planner might have some experience in. And whenever you’re able to pass on some of your technical knowledge and skills so that the people you’re working with can learn how to do things themselves instead of relying on a professional “planner”, that’s critical.
Be an Informant
Sometimes learning the system from the inside gives you opportunities to pass on important information to those who could use it. If you’re working for the city government a community is trying to fight, you might have important information they can use. If you’re working for a private firm that’s planning a project that a movement is trying to resist, you can be a mole from inside the system there as well. Sometimes this channeling of information is just an expediting of information people could have gotten anyway through bureaucratic processes, especially if you’re working for the public sector where most documents can be obtained through public records requests. Other times it might need to be more under-the-table, but the information might be critical enough for you to consider taking that risk.
In a job market where a lot of us might not get our first choice of where to work, it might in some cases be necessary to take a job at an organization our values conflict with—a firm currently designing a new prison, or a reactionary city government that’s hostile to poor and unhoused people, for example. While many of us might decide that working for these organizations goes against our personal ethics no matter what, it’s also possible to do some good in that position if you feel that your options are slim. As an informant on the inside, a planner could help keep movements informed and give them insider knowledge that would help them fight against the planner’s own workplace. This could be constrained if you have to sign an NDA or go through a security clearance, however. It’s also essential to continually reflect on your own personal ethics and whether you feel that the good you’re able to do in that position outweighs working for a less-ethical organization in the first place. So, consider your options carefully and always know your intentions for taking any job.
Speak Out
Although trained planners aren’t the only people with valid opinions on planning, they often have a level of knowledge, experience, and authority on certain topics that can be helpful in swaying public opinion or taking a stance on a controversial issue. There are many ways you can speak out as a professional—with whatever degrees and accreditations that may apply—and, generally, as a person with informed opinions, in order to help shift the balance within planning discourse or bring light to an issue that’s intentionally kept under wraps.
A lot of the people I interviewed make their voices publicly heard in some way—on a blog, Subtack, or Medium; through a Youtube channel or podcast; through writing Op-Eds for a magazine. One interviewee, although he didn’t do this himself, brought up that young planners might want to consider becoming TikTok planning influencers.
PN also has their own online magazine called Progressive City: Radical Alternatives. Articles are free to read at www.progressivecity.net and are written to be accessible to a broad audience, covering issues like racial justice, climate and environmental justice, current events, international case studies, and planning for decarceral spaces. You can submit an article via email, and sometimes they put out calls for articles on specific themes as well. Many of the PN members I interviewed have contributed their writing to Progressive City at some point.
Sometimes it’s harder to publicly attach your name to something you want to say. There might be things that you’re explicitly or implicitly not supposed to speak about, and you might have to deal with the risk of losing your job or other real consequences if you were to take a stand. In these cases, writing under a pseudonym, writing anonymously, or getting the information out to someone else who can speak up about it could help mitigate that risk while still getting out the information that might have a critical impact.
However, sometimes we do have to take risks. Commitment to radical political work in any meaningful capacity usually implies some kind of risk—of losing jobs or job opportunities, of workplace retaliation, of social alienation, and in more extreme cases, of state/legal repression. An interviewee mentioned observing hesitation from people who were asked to sign a petition of architects and planners in solidarity with Palestine, although these people did personally support the petition. Similarly, many university students participating in Palestine solidarity encampments or other direct action on their campuses worry that a suspension or arrest on their records might affect future job prospects and have other serious consequences. Weigh your own personal risk, but know that it’s hard to advance our movements if people aren’t willing to push the bounds of “safety” that are defined by how those in power want us to act—and know that we are safer united as many, rather than having only a few put themselves in harm’s way.
