Critical Planning

This is a review of geographer Lindsey Dillon's 2024 book Toxic City: Redevelopment and Environmental Justice in San Francisco. A majority of the book describes remediation following the designation of a former Naval shipyard for Superfund. But Dillon provincializes the US Navy as one in a series of polluters who produced southeastern San Francisco as a wasteland (Voyles, 2015) and, consequently, as one of several political bodies invested in its quick conversion into developable land. Against the displacing forces of redevelopment, Dillon charts a continuous history of Black-led activism. Since the 1960s, Black activists in southeastern SF understood housing, health care, and jobs as fundamentally environmental issues. Dillon argues that we understand their efforts at “counterplanning” as environmental justice work that precedes and exceeds the field’s codification in the 1980s and 90s.

The book’s third chapter, “The Politics of Environmental Repair” could stand alone as an introduction to contemporary environmental justice, anchored by a concise survey of the federal Superfund trust and a nuanced discussion of the politics of risk that form the foundation for modern cleanup programs. But Toxic City is best approached as a whole: Dillon returns consistently to the question of what it means for activists to appeal to the state for repair when it’s largely the state who has done the harm. This is her most interesting provocation, and a tall order she doesn’t entirely fill. It’s an ethical question that allows Toxic City to contribute to several bodies of literature, including environmental justice, theories of waste and its remediation, and an emerging literature on the afterlives of domestic sites of US militarism (see Krupar 2013; Reno 202; Cram 2023; Taylor 2024).

People cannot be economically mobile if they are not able to be mobile. People cannot access employment, healthcare, or education if they cannot get there. Transportation policy and decision-making has been dominated by white, male, able-bodied, cisgender engineers (Frisch, 2002; Lowe, 2021). As a result, many of the decisions made by transportation policymakers lack the grounding in racial justice or the life experiences of the most vulnerable users (Barajas, 2021; Frisch, 2002; Lowe, 2021; Lowe et al., 2023; Vigar, 2017). In City Limits, Megan Kimble aims to pull back the curtain on transportation decision-making and the effects of those decisions as she takes the reader through the journey of how a highway gets built and who it violently destroys in the process. Divided into three sections, City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways, uses three Texas cities and freeways as case studies to detail the fight for and against Houston’s I-45, Austin’s I-35, and Dallas’ I-345 through the eyes of several community members, elected officials, government staff, small businesses, and community organizations. 

The contributions assembled in Volume 28: Margins and Junctures demonstrate just how scholarship rooted in the margins can illuminate the political, material, and affective pressures which shape our present junctures. Across the volume, authors show how the margins function simultaneously as sites of acute vulnerability and of world-building. They reveal how violence (e.g., infrastructural, bureaucratic, spectacular) is rendered ordinary via the doctrines of planning, instruments of finance, and the routines of institutions. At the same time, they foreground how alternative social relations are practiced and defended in spaces often dismissed as marginal: in libraries, housing struggles, accessibility audits, creative practice, and collective organizing. Taken together, these works insist that critical urban scholarship cannot remain detached from the conditions it analyzes. It must remain accountable to those who live at the sharpest edges of contemporary urban restructuring, where the consequences of political decisions are most immediate and where the possibilities for different urban futures are being actively forged.

Increased population and need for public services, coupled with a lack of public spaces have driven the Los Angeles Central Library to evolve over time, offering civic resources and becoming a communal place that goes beyond the traditional understanding of a library. Despite decreased staffing, the connection to and provision of services from the library to external spaces—both physical and virtual—has increased dramatically. The institution continues to adapt to the dynamic social, economic, and climatic needs of its patrons, especially those most vulnerable among Angelenos. The Central Library and the librarians who sustain it occupy a space between public commons, civil refuge, social services coordinator, and educational resource conglomerate. As public spaces become less accessible, library patrons have more frequently sought access to social and technical services in the Central Library.

We seek to understand the Central Library’s role in providing essential public services that extend beyond the physical boundaries of the library. Our observations incorporated archival research through collaboration with historians, map specialists, and librarians; spatial analysis through our own observations and interviews, and what the Urban Humanities Initiative program guides termed “multi-sensory attunement (the use of sound, smell, and feel to ‘make sense’ of space).” To do this, we created a "thickmap" to call attention to the ways in which the library has provided for the public both within the traditional expectations of what a library and its staff can provide, and well beyond. 

Scholars have readily illustrated how European settlers’ colonial ideas of property influenced the formation of race. Yet, as the role of land and property changed within an American context, so too did the relationship between race and property. With emancipation and urbanization, cities began to confront racial mixing, leading to a movement to racialize not just individual property, but also entire places. This resulting racialization of place became acutely challenging for communities of color in the mid-century with the implementation of the new interstate highway system. While the disastrous impact of the highway system on communities of color has been increasingly researched, scholars have paid far less attention to how race shaped individuals’ propertied realities in the face of these federal and local actions. Using Austin, Texas, as a case study, I examine how the planning for the Interregional Highway 35 (IH-35) threatened Anglo, Black, and Mexican East Austin residents’ property. Ultimately, I assert that each community’s response was shaped by its race-based property realities. I conclude with a brief discussion on the broader implications of urban planning’s spatialization of the intertwining ideology of White racial advantage and property, and what it means to current efforts of racial repair.

The accessibility audit is a largely underutilized tool of disabled community engagement in the design process. This essay shares four case studies of accessibility audits facilitated between 2021 and 2024 for four separate groups of landscape architects, designers, and students. Its methodology is centered in disability justice and crip theory. In the attempt to illustrate how to conduct an accessibility audit by including direct participation of disabled stakeholders and disabled designers and experts, the goal is to assist the landscape architecture and urban design professions in deviating from the usage of sensitivity studies (or disability simulations), which are inappropriate, misguided, and outdated attempts at measuring site accessibility. In this way, designers and students might learn to prioritize disabled lived experience in the design process.

This paper examines how lobbying redirected Land Value Capture (LVC) during Mexico City’s 2016 constitution-drafting process by acting at procedural margins and legislative stages. Using process tracing of drafts, committee reports, floor records, temporary provisions, and media, it reconstructs the sequence: the committee added LVC duties tied to areas of influence; early floor debate removed them; a late compromise adopted weaker mitigation language; a temporary article reset thresholds to existing regulatory limits; later, criteria were delegated to executive agencies. It also shows that the participatory phase expanded input but did not carry into bargaining, limiting citizen influence when decisions were made. The findings indicate agenda control by organized real estate interests that converted enforceable capture into mitigation and shifted the fiscal burden away from redistribution, with disproportionate impacts on renters and low-income districts at the urban fringe.

Over the past ten years, we have endeavored to build a liberated zone within our university. The UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy is a tiny (but we think mighty) center that undertakes research and scholarship for the purpose of dismantling structures of inequality and creating reparative public goods. We do so by accompanying social movements and communities on the frontlines of dispossession and displacement through practices of research justice. In May 2025, we invited Naomi Klein to deliver the Institute’s Distinguished Lecture in Ideas and Organizing because she embodies the ethos of the Institute. Klein’s magisterial text, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, published in 2007 and translated into scores of languages, has given us all unprecedented insight into how world-ending activities are made profitable. It demands that we take seriously the crises wrought by the unending emergency that is racial capitalism and the capitalization of such crises in the form of disaster capitalism. But equally important, the long arc of Klein’s scholarship demands that we create new narratives and understandings of each crisis and mobilize to ensure that such shocks serve as openings for progressive change. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein calls this the people’s reconstruction and it goes to the very heart of the work we do as an Institute here in Los Angeles. In the closing lines of the book, Klein (2007: 466) writes: “These are movements that do not seek to start from scratch but rather from scrap, from the rubble that is all around.” Indeed it is from amidst the rubble of evictions and encampment sweeps, from Echo Park Lake to El Sereno, that poor people’s movements create insurgent ground in the city of angels. They teach us how to struggle for liberated zones and thereby how to strive to make the public university. 

Interview with writer, journalist, and organizer Tracy J. Rosenthal about their new book Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis. In it, we talked about their experience co-founding the LA Tenants Union, the history of working class movements in LA, and the synergies between environmental and tenant activism in light of the LA wildfires. The conversation was motivated by a central puzzle: Los Angeles takes up a large role in urban theory, especially the neo-Marxist school of the 1970s, and those descriptions of the city are deeply cynical. Classic accounts emphasize policing, elite “pleasure domes,” and hostility to working-class people and their movements. At the same time, it is the locus of Rosenthal's efforts, and the largest tenants’ union in the country. We spoke in depth about the opportunities and challenges of organizing in this geography, and how place affected Rosenthal's and their comrades’ strategies.