Arbor Update

Friday: Urban Planning Faculty Symposium

6. April 2005 • Brandon
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Please join us this Friday, April 8th, from 3 to 4:30 pm in the Art and Architecture Building Auditorium for a faculty symposium about equity planning. The faculty symposium is the second event of the four part Equity Planning Lecture Series. All of the events in the Equity Planning Lecture Series are free and open to the public. Everyone is encouraged to attend any of the events.

The faculty symposium includes four faculty members from the urban planning program. Each panelist will discuss their conception of equity planning or “equity” and a discussion will follow the faculty presentations. This event provides a great opportunity to hear about the various planning theories that inform equity planning research and practice. A reception will follow.

Faculty panelists include:

Scott Campbell
Margaret Dewar
Aseem Inam
Larissa Larsen

Professor Joe Grengs will moderate the discussion.

The Lecture Series is sponsored by the University of Michigan Chapter of Planners Network, the Urban & Regional Planning Department, and the Urban Planning Student Association.

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1. For the benefit of those of us in the great unwashed, what is equity planning? It sounds like a Charles Schwab seminar.
      —tom    Apr. 6 '05 - 07:47PM    #
   
2. Tom, I think you point out a key flaw of the lecture series’ advertising program…
   
   quoting Murph: ”“Equity planningâ€?, for those unfamiliar with the term, is not about how to maximize the value of your home, but about working, within the planning process, to ensure that you’re not reinforcing prior screwing-overs that subsets of the population have endured:
   
   “As significantly, we use ‘equity planning’ here as a shorthand to refer to planning efforts that pay particular attention to the needs of poor and vulnerable populations, populations also likely to suffer the burdens of racial and sexual discrimination, both institutional and personal.� (Making Equity Planning Work; Leadership in the Public Sector, Norman Krumholz and John Forester, 1990.)
   
   For example, “cutting bus service between midnight and 6 amâ€? may appear to be an efficient move that will help to balance the City of Detroit’s budget, but it does so at the cost of people who work nights and can’t afford cars, forcing them into unemployment. Equity planning takes into account not just bottom lines, but on whom the bottom line is falling, and tries to prevent is from falling on the same people whom it has fallen upon repeatedly in the past. It is a fairly Rawlsian mode of planning.”
      —Brandon    Apr. 6 '05 - 11:55PM    #
   
3. Thanks, Brandon.
      —tom    Apr. 7 '05 - 01:49PM    #