Events -
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Conferences -
PN2008 Conference in Winnipeg, July 17-20. For more information, www.pnmb.org |
News
Airing Planning's Dirty Laundry
We organized a clothesline event in Temple Buell Hall from 3 to 5 pm on Thursday April 24th. The goal was to create a display of the good, the bad and the ugly done by planners and policy-makers to affect people's lives and communities through history. Planning happens at many levels some coordinated and some not but they all intend to affect change for someone. This project was really trying to bring to the fore, the inequality wide spread in planning practice.
We hung laundry with phrases and descriptions of planning and policy decisions, programs, and projects from the past and present for all to see. Around thirty students and faculty from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning participated in the event. The clotheslines were displayed in the atrium of the building for two hours, and participants had the opportunity to write and display their thoughts in T-shirts, pants and other clothes. Some examples of the planning projects and policies were: “Sundown towns”, “Using parks to promote racist drug-enforcement policy”, “Bad planning affects good people”, “Urban renewal”, “Red lighting”, among others.
We want to dispel the myth of the benevolent planner and demystify the results of harmful policy-making. Community decline is not a natural process but is the result of often racist and gender blind planning and policy making such as redlining, restrictive covenants, boarding schools for Native Americans, and anti-immigrant ordinances. Planning has a lot of dirty laundry and it is time we air it out and clean it up!
Look at some pictures: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
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Planners Network Chapter
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The Planners Network Chapter at UIUC is an organization of students,
faculty, professionals and other activist planners involved in
community development for social justice.
Collectively we ascribe to the international organization of
the Planners Network statement principals set forth below:
“We believe that planning should be a tool for allocating resources and
developing the environment to eliminate the great inequalities
of wealth and power in our society, rather than to maintain and justify the status
quo. We are committed to opposing racial, economic, and environmental injustice
and discrimination by gender and sexual orientation. We believe that planning
should be used to assure adequate food, clothing, housing, medical care, jobs,
safe working conditions, and a healthful environment. We advocate public responsibility
for meeting these needs, because the private market has proven
incapable of doing so.
We seek to be an effective political and social force, working
with other progressive organizations to inform public opinion
and public policy and to provide assistance to those seeking
to understand, control, and change the forces which affect their
lives” (http://www.plannersnetwork.org).
Specifically, we determined this preliminary mission statement
for the purposes of educational and professional development
for all members of this Chapter:
We pledge to make planning education and practice more inclusive at UIUC by
including materials/values/methods/issues that are often absent
and marginalized in traditional planning, whereas
an inclusive planning curricula is,
- Multicultural and necessarily plural, whereas
planners and students of planning are of all nationalities,
class, race, gender, ethnicities and age and not represented
by a singular ideology or dominant culture.
- Multidisciplinary and multi-vocational,
whereas planning occurs inside and outside of all
levels of public and private sectors (such as community organizations
and not-for-profits), and planners are of essence
anyone who actively and purposefully affects for change, regardless
of “field” or area of work/study, compensation
level and professional title (such as activists and organizers).
- Multi-knowledge and multi-modeled, whereas
there are just as many ways of knowing and experiencing as
there are as many ways of learning and teaching.
- Multi-issued and fundamentally social, whereas
planning affects multiple aspects of everyday experience, in
addition to the physical, and concerns any number of issues
involving social justice.
To learn more or join the Planners
Network Chapter at UIUC please
contact sortize2@uiuc.edu and rserpa2@uiuc.edu
You can also join the Chapter listserv and stay informed of upcoming
events by clicking the link below:
http://listserv.uiuc.edu/wa.cgi?SUBED1=pn-uiuc&A=1
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