From Racial to Reparative Planning: Confronting the White Side of Planning

Abstract

This paper advances a conceptual apparatus capable of accounting for planning’s entanglement with white supremacy and racial capitalism by developing a theory of racial planning. Racial planning, as the public production of racialized space, has been at the heart of the American planning tradition. It argues that racial planning occurs via three modes (public and private action and public inaction) and that it serves both the expropriative character of racial capitalism and the status hierarchy of white supremacy. The paper concludes with a normative call for the field to embrace reparations via a reparative planning.