Critical Planning

Critical Planning, Volume 25, all articles

Front Matter

Article, Poetry, and Photo Essay Table of Contents

Introduction to Critical Planning Volume 25, Planning in Crisis

In Memoriam, Leobardo Estrada

VC Powe, in memoriam

The planning profession has focused on the problems of urban areas and largely ignored issues of rural areas. Within the profession, rural places are most often seen as those yet to become urban. In doing so, planners have not only ignored the needs of rural populations but also the importance of rural landscapes for food production. Cheaper lands in rural areas, especially near recreational amenities, have become popular destinations for relatively wealthy exurbanites searching for an escape from the extreme housing prices and congestion of urban areas.

This paper highlights not only the planning crisis in rural areas, but also how the conversion of rural land and the loss of productive lands in rural places is directly driven by poorly considered application of traditional planning tools. This paper argues that if we continue to use urban planning tools to address rural issues, planners will have actively contributed to the demise of these rural landscapes. Rural contexts beg for place-based approaches that acknowledge land and lifestyle challenges of non-urban space. Absent such a change, planners will continue to play a central role in the conversion of productive rural lands to residential development, perpetuating a crisis of planning.

Poem

Considering the national awakening to the pervasiveness of racial violence, historical acts of planning must be examined for how they have concretized racial inequalities in the built environment. This paper engages with Critical Race Theory to consider how the historical development of the View Park subdivision of Los Angeles contributed to the materialization of White Supremacy. The developer’s plan for the fully improved, racially and socioeconomically restricted subdivision of View Park, especially when compared to its plans for subdivisions intended for Black and working-class persons, illustrates how possession was achieved by design for the exclusive use of White persons through disinvestment in non-White communities.

Photo essay

This article presents a history of jitneys from the Gilded Age streets until their return to discourse among post-1970s transportation neoliberals. Transportation neoliberals were an intellectual set including professors, policymakers, consultants, and con men. They discovered the history of jitneys, which Southern Californians invented during a wartime slump in global commerce in 1914. Abolished in the U.S., jitneys remained in operation in crisis-prone cities like Manila and Harare. Selective memories of jitneys in an age of austere state budgets contributed to the trade’s return as a cheap, unregulated alternative to public transit. History was the tool that led jitneys, in the guise of Lyft and Uber, back into U.S. streets after the global financial crisis.

Podcast accompaniment

Poem

The utility of land as a form of security is nothing new; however, the exact interpretation of “security” has shifted during times of crisis. Security through landedness can mean grounds from which to extract resources; a commodity to be bought, managed, and sold; a tract from which to draw sustenance; or a space for habitation and community building. This essay explores these many conflicting fluctuations in the identity projected upon land, by both the state and private interests, through the rise and fall of two specific patterns of land tenure: the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan and the agrarian, communal ejidal settlements of Mexico.

Mexico City, a crowded and sprawling metropolis of 22 million residents, is not only one of the world’s most populated urban settlements but also one of the most vulnerable. Overburdened by a centuries-long series of compounding crises, Mexico City has always lived on the verge of an imminent and irreversible collapse. Water scarcity, floods, earthquakes, pollution, violence, traffic, overpopulation, and health issues have all taken their toll on a city that has, nonetheless and against all odds, managed to survive. When the first wave of COVID-19 hit in early 2020, Mexico City faced a hitherto overlooked threat: food insecurity. One of the communities hardest hit by the pandemic was the central wholesale market, Central de Abasto, which controls 80 percent of the food bought, sold, and consumed throughout the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico. This article takes a close look at the political, economic, and ideological causes and effects of Mexico City’s over-centralized model of food supply and distribution and how it has added to its state of permanent crisis.

Photo series

Social life in Mexico’s state of Michoacán is consumed by a crisis of violence. Foregrounding critical planning, this paper presents a grounded local history of the municipality of Tancítaro, Michoacán, which has the largest concentration of avocado production globally, and analyzes violence there in light of the production of space, uneven development, and the spatial politics of land. This quantitative and archival research, coupled with theoretical explanations on violence, suggests that considerations of crises and planning require situated analyses with ethnographic methods and embedded fieldwork that cross geographic scales and disciplinary boundaries as they foreground perspectives of affected community residents.

The right to housing is a constitutional right in Brazil. In order for it to be fully complied with, the Estatuto da Cidade provides tools for democratic public administration, one of which is land regularization. However, in the urban policies of Fortaleza, a certain selectivity has been observed in what is considered subject to regularization, losing its transformative potential. This happens when initiatives to make regulations more flexible in response to demands of large economic groups are prioritized- contradicting the understanding of the social function of urban property. This work seeks to analyze land regularization initiatives in the city, and to what extent their transformative potential relies on popular participation.