Cities of Difference

I realize that I hadn’t blogged about last week’s conversation with Julian Agyeman, professor at Tufts. As always, Julian presents fascinating ideas and provocative concepts by which to understand our world. There is so much in what he talks about, it’s hard to focus in on just a couple of concepts, but nevertheless here goes …

“Urban planning is the spatial toolkit of white supremacy,” is where we start in this conversation. Food justice — and food injustice more accurately — is a result of a centuries of racist planning. The overall goal is to have just and sustainable cities. From these opening thoughts, Julian walks us into many of the conversations that spin out from there.

“We cannot dissociate the way we’ve planned our cities from the way we police our cities ….” The overall concept of policing public spaces contains so much. The differential between how police address people of color and how they address whites has been part of our national conversation for a while now, but the additional angle that most of these interactions happen in public spaces is at once obvious but also thought provoking, particular when Julian directs the conversation to Minneapolis, the epicenter of our racial dialog over the past year. Whether it’s a street, a playground, a public park or any of the many other public spaces that we all share, how people are treated in them differs wildly. Again, this is an obvious point, but I can’t help but feel there’s a lot there for planners to digest.

I called the episode “Cities of Difference,” from his own phrase in which he describes our cities as places where a multitude of cultures meet. He views harshly the lack of cultural competency in planning schools and he advocates for “deep enthnographic” understandings of our communities, whether it’s in police departments, planning departments or in our non-profits. He cities Benjamin Barber of CUNY and his book If Mayors Ruled the World in response to my question if we have re-entered into a world of the city-state where cities — global, international, multi-ethnic — sit atop the political pyramid.

Finally, he talks about mayors in general and Marty Walsh, the former mayor of Boston, in specific. He calls him a juggler, balancing between the unions, the developers and concerned citizens. He says most mayors are. What they often lack is vision — unlike some Central and South American mayors. He puts in a plug for Michelle Wu, herself a candidate for Boston’s mayor, as he has done some policy work with her.

I am so grateful that Julian joined us on unPlanned. His breadth of thinking and his passionate commitment to a more just and sustainable world, are found in his every word.