Reimagining Urban Planning with Jose Richard Aviles

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0:00:08.9 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities, and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:39.5 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman, and together with my research assistants, Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partner, Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on Colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory.

0:01:12.1 Julian Agyeman: Today, we are delighted to host Jose Richard Aviles. Richard is a transportation analyst for the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. As part of the community Power and Policy Partnership team, they support government agencies and partners with community organizations by providing trainings, technical assistance and evaluation support, centering lived experience, vision, and self-determination of the communities most impacted by transit inequities. Richard draws inspiration from their involvement with the Bus Riders Union in LA, and participation in other social justice movements like marriage equality. Richard’s talk today is provocatively named Re-imagining Urban Planning. And in a Break with tradition, Richard is going to speak rather than present slides and welcomes our participation. So please put any questions or points in the chat. Richard, a Zoomtastic welcome to Cities@Tufts. Over to you.

0:02:22.0 Jose Richard Aviles: Thank you so much for having me. And just so you all know, and thank you for everyone who’s joining us online. Just wanted to say before we started, this is also a fun reunion. I met Julian six years ago, have been a fan of Julian’s work, and so it’s now exciting in a full circle moment to come back. I was still a student, I think when I first met Julian, and now, well, now, I’m just getting older. Again, thank you all so much for coming today. The talk is called Re-imagining Urban Planning, and it’s based on a webinar series that we’ve been hosting at the Othering and Belonging Institute as part of what’s going to happen in the next couple of months. To give you some context, I am transitioning out of transportation equity work, and now am the lead for arts and cultural strategy at the institute, and we are doing and launching research around the concept of radical imagination for belonging.

0:03:11.3 Jose Richard Aviles: We are framing that work in the context of the design lab. So we’re not interested so much in just producing resources, but rather is producing resources in addition to testing some of these ideas out. And the testing of the ideas is really thinking about activities and prompts and different ways that can exercise the muscle of imagination particularly in a time where it feels like what we’re getting most is hopelessness. There is an urgency not only in our cities, in our regions, in the country, in the world for us to really rethink about how we’re approaching the work that we’re doing, particularly as urban planners.

0:03:53.5 Jose Richard Aviles: And so the Reimagining Urban Planning series was really born out of that, and we’ve been launching, now we’ve have seven to eight seminars. We are taking a break in November, giving the elections, and we’ll come back for our final seminar in December 12th, and I’d be more than happy to share that information so you all have it. And that seminar is called Planning for Dystopic Futures. Though I’ve been sitting with changing the title of that seminar ’cause the dystopic futures are here. And so the series basically intends to really and openly critique the way that we as urban planners have been trained, and propose a new way of thinking, a new way of approaching the work. The seminar has covered topics around belonging, arts and culture, our relationship to land, our relationship to economics, and then our last one is on dystopic futures. And again, just really thinking about what that relationship is.

0:04:53.6 Jose Richard Aviles: So what I’ll do today is I’ll go over through our first introductory descent that we wrote, what’s called State of the Practice, and it’s supposed to ground the intention of the series, and then I’ll begin to share some of the concepts and some of the reframes that have been born out of the speakers who have been a part of the series. And then I’ll share with you some of the new imagination that we’re having, or the things that we’re imagining as the work is picking up. So it is… I strongly believe that there are two types of planners. There are planners that romanticize the cities, and then there are those planners who go into school to try to defend their hoods. And then while we get into the schools, identify as one of the latter planners. I’m from south central Los Angeles. I am based in Mexico City at the moment, but I’m joining you all in Portland, Maine. So there’s a lot of transient movement here.

0:05:45.3 Jose Richard Aviles: And while there is a lot plenty of room within the field to advocate on behalf of communities, we as planners are not trained to be advocates on behalf of communities. Again, reimagining urban planning intends to interrogate the current way that we as planners are being trained, operate, and more importantly, the way that we perceive our relationship with the built environment. At the institute, we’ve been working hard to think about belonging, and to foster belonging as a global norm in the next 15 years. And so we hope that the series has been able to incite conversations that generate strategies and tactics that can foster belonging in an urban planning process.

0:06:23.0 Jose Richard Aviles: First, we talk about planning imagination. There’s… In the essay towards a planning imagination, author Leonie Sandercock states that planning is a project, is a social project whose purpose is to manage the way in which people coexist in a way that celebrates and acknowledges the pluralities that are now true for cities in the 21st century. She argues that planning education has not prepared planners for this new form of coexistence, and this calls for a new planning imagination. Sandercock calls for a planning imagination that is political, audacious, creative, and therapeutic. We as planners have been taught that we are the observers of the built environment, a so-called neutrality they say, yet we as planners are participants in this ecology. We operate from a place where objectivity no longer works. Planning has always been political. Now, we as planners have to ask ourselves, who are we committed to, and where do we stand in this political spectrum? 

0:07:25.5 Jose Richard Aviles: We are trained as planners. When we are trained as planners, we are asked to seek a specialization, whether it is housing, transportation, land use, etcetera. Yet community members don’t experience the built environment in silos. It’s important to understand that so much of what we do as planners are all based on social constructions. The world we live in was someone’s imagination. So we as planners have the ability to imagine, and like I asked before, who are we imagining for? It is important to also remember that planning is powerful from the distribution of capital and resources, to deciding over the use of land, something that inherently does not belong to us. I say all that to say that while planning is a field, planning also operates within systems of power. And if there’s anything that Kimberlé Crenshaw has taught us is that power never works alone, and it never operates in the benefit of those that it depresses.

0:08:22.8 Jose Richard Aviles: Lastly, in the essay planning as a heterosexist project, Dr. Frisch argues that planning is a social project that only seeks to promote heterosexuality while discriminating against queer identity. Now, Frisch makes it clear that planning doesn’t explicitly discriminate against queerness, but rather planning as a project, the work of linking systemic structures and representation, rather than specifically writing policies that openly discriminate against queer folks, urban planning as a heterosexist project focuses on the discourse of sexual difference as it formulates what is order versus disorder, public versus private, and family versus household.

0:09:06.5 Jose Richard Aviles: It’s important to note that this project, this social project, is not limited just to heterosexism, it is true for White supremacy, capitalism, settler colonialism, patriarchy. Let it be known that there are entire wars happening in parts of the world in the name of settler colonialism. And what we’re witnessing in the Middle East and in Gaza is an extreme violence of gentrification. Planning is informed by the discourse that surrounds each of these systems of powers and oppression. Power dynamics are not neutral. They must be challenged and transformed, and as planners, we have that capacity. That was the opening introductory descent for the state of the practice and how we started talking about reimagining urban planning, the series.

0:09:51.6 Jose Richard Aviles: In our arts and culture webinar, we really focused on this notion that what arts and culture has done within the planning field has only been limited to institutional thinking. What do I mean by that? Usually, what happens is that they’re still nonprofits that are seeking for policy funding of who has access to art versus what art we’re putting out there, but what we’re forgetting is the power of culture. Culture teaches us what are the motivations, aspirations, fears, and joys of communities. The thing, one of the things that Julian and I pondered over was that I’m also trained as a social worker and we talk a lot about cultural competency, and it’s something that is missing in the planning field. We don’t talk enough about cultural competency. And it’s important to understand that there is so much room in how we’re able to understand culture. In the arts and cultural seminar, we talked about the importance of looking at arts and culture as a process to planning, and not a product, in the same way that we talk about equity as a process and not a product.

0:10:55.3 Jose Richard Aviles: I became an urban planner ’cause I love my hometown Los Angeles. More importantly, I love the people who grew up in that city. I first became a planner before I knew that the field of urban planning existed. I organized with the Bus Riders Union at the age of 15, and was talking about the consent decree of 1996 in transit racism at the age of 17, and little did I know that was a field called transportation planning. And well, now we’re here. As a student bus rider, I had access to the entire city. Through each bus ride, I had the opportunity to witness a different shade of Los Angeles. I grew up along the line, the 105, which travels northwest across the city from Huntington Park to West Hollywood, two very different cities, racially, economically, ethnically, and linguistically. While in the beginning, I was very excited about the fact that I had both access to both quinceaneras, and the queer clubs, quinceaneras being the place. In Huntington Park, there’s a street named Pacific Avenue that is known for being the place where everyone go gets their tuxes and their dresses and all of the necessities for producing quinceaneras, and West Hollywood is our queer district in Los Angeles.

0:12:10.6 Jose Richard Aviles: I soon started realizing that the built environment also changed while South Central was overwhelmingly full of check cashing places, hotels and motels, liquor stores, and fast food restaurants. West Hollywood was the complete opposite. It was a home to grocery stores, hospitals, planned Parenthoods, coffee shops. Growing up, I was conditioned to believe that only white people deserve the nice things. I share these stories just to highlight the importance of the built environment in its relationship to human development and identity formation. The places that we come from highly inform the people that we are, the way that we behave, our values and our priorities. As planners, we have been trained to position the benefit of the state as the focus of our work, but where has that led us? We need to refocus our practice with a more critical lens.

0:12:57.4 Jose Richard Aviles: Again, I ask, whom are we planning for? And of course, before we can achieve a full paradigm shift within the field which feels closer than we think, we must advocate for this new way of thinking, a new way of planning. This notion that we as planners must be neutral and objective no longer works. If we’re being honest, this field was never neutral and objective. It has always benefited those with the most power and resources, and we need to politicize planning. A poor people planning, if you will. Now, the question become, how do we become advocates? The advocate represents an individual group or organization. They affirm their position in language understandable to their client and to the decision makers they seek to convince.

0:13:44.0 Jose Richard Aviles: And again, like I mentioned before, I believe that there are two types of planners that romanticize the city and planners that wanna defend their hoods. I do believe that the field has shifted greatly over the several years. And as more planners like myself step into the field planners with lived experience, we are planners that work at the intersection of technical expertise and lived experience. I joined the field ’cause I don’t only know gentrification, I myself, and those around me have been displaced. One of the main differentiations between the two planners I just mentioned is positionality. Well, the first type of planner, we will speak about marginalized communities from a position of other. The second type of planner is part of the other. And again, while planning theory will tell us that we must operate as planners from a positionality of objectivity, we simply can’t do that.

0:14:33.1 Jose Richard Aviles: The first step to truly being an advocate within urban planning is to have an understanding of social theories, critical race theory, gender theory, and other normative theoretical frameworks that inform our identity, power and privilege, especially now. Having a sensibility to these different positionalities makes it clear that we as urban planners understand that space is political. So with that, I’ll end some more of the formal talk and I’ll let you know a little bit of what the series has been able to do. The series now has about 8,500 members in a network. I was sharing earlier that when we first planned the series, we were hoping we were gonna have 20 people. And in our first seminar, we had over 1200 folks join us from all over the world. We’ve had people join us from Nigeria, from Kenya, from India, from Vietnam. We’ve had people in the all over Europe. We’ve had people all over south and Latin America, and we’ve had people all over the US, and we did not know and still don’t know what to do with this network.

0:15:35.9 Jose Richard Aviles: But if there’s something that we’ve learned is that there is a hunger for a new way of thinking and a new discourse to be introduced in urban planning. When we talked about our… On our seminar on land, we talked about this notion that now more than ever do we really need to understand that this relationship to land is not neutral, that it’s also constructed. The idea of land ownership sits at the heart of the extraction based global operating system. And because private property is a fundamental pillar of capitalism and othering, changing our relationship to land is essential to transitioning away from these systems and moving toward equity and belonging.

0:16:17.7 Jose Richard Aviles: Now, the work of shifting away from transactional systems that commodify land is both in every day and in a generational project. In the present day, people are already creating alternative legal forms of community ownership, rematriating and stewarding land, rethinking their individual responsibility as title holders, and building an ecosystem of practitioners centered around a broad vision of community stewardship that spans multiple sectors, private, public and nonprofit movements, housing, labor, climate justice, and racial justice, and geographic scales from local to global. These experiments must fit within the currently frameworks for private property while also trying to transform them.

0:17:02.3 Jose Richard Aviles: As we think about some of the next steps for reimagining urban planning, and I’ll begin to wrap up so we can have a conversation, one of the things that we have been doing… If folks know me, you all know that I like to talk shit and I am very informal about the way I do the work that I do. That’s the way that my community taught me to do the work, and I do believe that the best planners are the senoras who sell the tamales or the folks who are out on the streets, folks who are walking in the streets, that’s where real planning happens for me and I try to relate. That’s where I come from, and I try to be as close to that even as planning has taken me to different places and different opportunities, but I don’t never forget where I come from, and that’s where I’ll always talk about South Central.

0:17:47.5 Jose Richard Aviles: And because of this informality and the way that I talk shit in the first couple of seminars, I talk shit about APA. I was like, we need to do something like who’s listening, and this is even being a member of the APA Foresight committee and thinking a lot about forecasting within the field. We then found out that the current president, Angela Brooks, who is now a really good friend, we just met up not too long ago, was attending all of our seminars and yes, appreciated the APA shit talking. And now one of the things that we are imagining and working on is for the next national conference in May or April. In fact, check me on that, which will be happening in Denver. Reimagining urban planning will be a track within the conference. So not only will we be presenting some of the content and frameworks that have come out from the series, but we will be co-creating a couple of a new discourse to the field. Right now, the dream is to be in partnership with other organizations who are doing similar work to do a systemic analysis of planning curriculums across the US, identify the competencies in which planners are being trained in now, do a gaps analysis and propose new competencies that are needed for urban planning in the world that we live in today, not only geopolitically, but also in the climate that we’re living in literally.

0:19:06.0 Jose Richard Aviles: And so one of the things that’s coming out from those conversations, the one thing that we noticed, all planners, we need to be trained in basics of human behavior. What do I mean by that? I’m, again, being a social worker, of course, my mind always goes there. We have a course that’s called Human Behavior In the social environment. We’re proposing something of a course called Human Behavior in the Built Environment. And usually what that means, it’s how do you mitigate change and conflict? A lot of times community members may be in opposition to your projects, and it’s not because of you, it’s not because of your design. It might just be that there is some attachment that we need to work through. It might be that folks just don’t know how to mitigate conflict and need more support doing conflict resolution. The point is we need to know the basics of human behavior because at the end of the day, we need to centralize people and not justify their existence in the built environment.

0:20:00.4 Jose Richard Aviles: We also talked a little bit about that the urban planner needs to become an archivist. Thinking about the ways in which urban planning is currently being done. Y’all know that there is a thing called engagement burden. Communities are tired of being asked to fill out surveys, to participate in focus groups, in charettes, when there’s nothing that’s being accomplished. And so one of the things that we’ve discussed as a framework, would be what would it look like if the urban planner operated from a sense of an archivist? Unpack all of those plans and all of those false promises that have been already talked to community and identify what is implementable in the current timeline, in the current scope. So we’re not recreating the wheel. We talked about, the last thing I’ll share is that we mentioned a little bit about what would it look like to reframe our relationship to time as urban planners. A 2025 year master plan no longer works, particularly in a climate that is constantly changing.

0:20:57.2 Jose Richard Aviles: And we’re feeling the impacts not only be greater, but they’re coming more quickly. And so what would it look like if we planned for five years, for seven years, for years under which administrations can actually accomplish something and not in these 20, 35 years as the climate is rapidly changing. And the last thing I’ll share is that some of the dreams that we have for the series right now, in the same way that we’ve talked about re-imagining planning, we’re thinking about re-imagining the construction of the environment. So that is engaging engineers, that is engaging construction workers, construction managers, and engaging architects because we know that’s when the community feels the most impact when we begin to break ground. But the urban planner has no relationship in that moment of the work, and we should. The other series we’re re-imagining is a series on long bridging and doing bridging work between planners and engineers and architects so that there’s common ground for the way that we’re centralizing equity and people in the work.

0:21:55.3 Jose Richard Aviles: Again, from design to procurement to construction to evaluation. That’s always been my big question of what is the role of the planner during construction. A lot of the times that means in the relationships that I’ve been able to build with community members, when you do engagement in a way that’s more relationship built, community members will say things along the lines of like, girl, why are you starting to break ground at 7:30 in the morning? We have elders here. Can you start at 9:00? Who’s managing that relationship? Who’s telling the construction folks to go out at 9:00 versus 7:30. There’s the little things that can still happen. And again, inequities are constantly happening throughout the entire process.

0:22:31.0 Jose Richard Aviles: And there is an opportunity and a way to also continue to think about equity as a product, as a process. No. Not my own fatty and slip, oh my God. I’m like cancelled in those five seconds. But equity as a process and a process that is continuously happening. And there is an opportunity for we as planners to be stewards of land as opposed to facilitators of land transactions. With that being said, that is a little bit about reimagining urban planning. So I welcome questions and thoughts, particularly from you, Julian, I don’t even know… I wonder what you must be thinking about this series. But yeah, that’s pretty much the talk.

0:23:09.4 Julian Agyeman: Thank you so much, Richard. I’m just having a little bit of trouble getting back on screen, so while I’m doing that, I don’t wanna waste a moment. That was fantastic. I love the radicalness of this, Richard, and I was thinking… Oh, excuse me.

0:23:29.0 Whitney: Points for the dog though.

0:23:33.1 Julian Agyeman: Yes. Yeah. Much more handsome than me. One thing I was thinking, Richard, both what do you see as the main opportunities within the sort of planning system as it is, and what’s the pushbacks that you’re getting? But let’s do opportunities first.

0:23:49.6 Jose Richard Aviles: 100%. Again, like I mentioned, I think we’re at the precipice in the field where there’s a lot more planners that are being louder than before, that are bringing in all of these lived experiences into the work. So they think now as we’re seeing concepts like CLTs and circular economies and land stewardship be part of the conversation, I do believe that there is that perfect opportunity to begin to push more and more radically. Again, one of the things that I’ve been sitting with right now as an opportunity really is what would it look like if planners were also trained to be emergency responders? I’m just thinking about Tampa and Asheville. We have a stake in that conversation as well. As built environments were destroyed, we know we have seen before that developers use that opportunity to come in and take land. And so what is the role of the planner in that moment? 

0:24:43.3 Jose Richard Aviles: Do we sit back and just allow a developer to take lands and redevelop in a way we saw it with Katrina and we’re continue… We’re gonna continue to see that. We know that our facilities are not up to code and are not… We’re not constructed to withstand the conditions that we’re living in now. So there’s an opportunity, I think, along those lines, especially now as leading the work and following after the work of environmental justice activists. We all need to be that now. It’s no longer an exceptional thing. And I think that the work is really how do we make these exceptional frameworks into the norm practice and that we do. Some of the pushbacks, oh, I think are the old school planners. There are still some people who operate from a place of redlining, or let me not even go that far.

0:25:33.6 Jose Richard Aviles: Los Angeles, not too far, not too long ago, our deputy planning director got charged and indicted for bribery. Let me be hella honest about that. So I think that, again, the interest still lies in those who can… Who have the most resource and capital, whether it is developers, whether it is political feasibility, again, is also a pushback. And the fact that we continue to think under those lines, particularly in terms of planning is frustrating. And I think another pushback also is that we don’t… We haven’t taken the opportunity to look at planning as a cultural shift, as a cultural strategy. Really planning can allow us to really shape in the ways that we’re approaching relationships to the built environment. We all have it.

0:26:19.7 Jose Richard Aviles: And so planning the fact that it just lives in a too technical way, but it could also function as a cultural strategy to help shift paradigms, I’m thinking about nimbyism, I’m thinking about the housing crisis. I’m thinking about transportation. We still continue to look at transportation and public transit as a nuisance. And who’s writing it and all those things that come into play. So I think that there is an opportunity and some of that pushback is that we’re still too caught up in the technical. Again, I think that we’re just at that cusp of there being a transition. Again, it’s why we have so many folks who are interested in the conversation.

0:26:53.7 Julian Agyeman: Right. Thanks. I’ve got so many more questions, but there’s a load of questions coming up now. And the first one is from one of our great alums, Whitney. Hey Whitney. I absolutely agree that we need to move away from the white male, European nuclear style of urban planning. The whole concept of zoning is so removed from the way people live.

0:27:21.6 Whitney: So my thought is, and by the way, this has just been fantastic. And while some of us were at UEP freaking ages ago, I just wanna reassure you that it’s… We were talking about similar things, not quite as thoroughly as you are, and I’m just so thrilled. And I’m in Seattle, so we have these, and I’m doing affordable housing. So we have some of these conversations over here too. So please come up. So my question is, zoning seems to me like a failing idea of an academic way of looking at the city. It feels like a bunch of white guys were sitting in a room, modernists. Thinking like, how can we oversimplify this and just squish it onto people and force our ideas in a very simplistic manner? 

0:28:06.8 Whitney: But it was largely academic. My concern is, and I hear you doing both, not I don’t hear you doing that, but I think that sometimes when you use words like decolonization, it’s another academic argument. It’s an important one, but I think we should be having it in circles like this. But when you go out into the real world, when you talk to our grandmothers and our family members and people just trying to have a small business that’s not top of mind, top of mind, often as things we probably as planners don’t wanna admit, like they’re worried about parking.

0:28:43.7 Whitney: I am a get rid of parking minimums person, 110% and more transit. But we need more transit. But I just… I worry that sometimes we replace one academic argument with a different one. And I’m not hearing you advocate that completely. In fact, I’m hearing you say, I am using these words and I… These… I just heard you say you’re using regular words and you’re talking to regular people. So I just wanna say thank you for that. That’s really great. And then how do we push back against people who get super lofty and academic? How do we bring them back down to the real world, make real world changes like you suggest? 

0:29:17.8 Jose Richard Aviles: And I think that’s why the concept that at least in the radical imagination work that we’re doing, we’re so interested in this design lab and studio. ‘Cause we get to go out and test and pilot. It’s not just about writing an article. It’s not about publishing it. The dream right now for the radical imagination work is that we’re gonna do a toolkit that’s co-authored by different artists and cultural strategists who are doing the work. And we’re identifying now different partners that can become then the pilots to test them. But I agree with you 100%. This is why I say that to me, the true urban planners are the senoras who are out on the streets. It’s the gossip, it’s the chisme. We know that there’s a current… There was an iteration of urban planning being a flaneur. Like literally your job was to just go walk around and get the gossip of the city. And I do believe in gossip, I think it’s strategic information. I listen, I don’t report the gossip though. You’d never report the chisme.

0:30:11.6 Jose Richard Aviles: It just teaches you comportment. But if it’s institutional chisme, oh, you spill that. You spill that. I come from an organizing background that taught me to organize contra dentro y fuera del estado which translates to against within and without the state. And so I may work within the state, that’s where the decolonization and the academic argument comes in. But know that my spirit will always be against it. And so when community members were like, girl, you’re not being accessible right now, it’s okay. Dope. I’m gonna be very honest with you. I had a workshop this morning where I might have triggered someone, a survivor of a crash. And in that moment, I had to really step back and reassess the way I was framing that argument because yes, I’m talking about transit and transit equity and whatever, and I have experience. I still am an abled bodied when I still haven’t lived that in my body.

0:31:06.4 Jose Richard Aviles: Luckily, this is where the benefit of also being a social worker comes in. I get to be trauma informed and to have that conversation and to apologize and to know when I’ve made the mistake and to take the L. So I agree with you. I think there is a way to definitely present academic language and to shift the discourse because at the end of the day, also, there are a lot of planners who are gonna come through academia and are gonna be trained in ways. And so we need to use that language to get buy-in, to push out the discourse in a way that we have to within these institutions. But the real planning happens on the street. So I like to live in the… Julian and I have talked about this. I was like, I’m not gonna go get a PhD. I’m just gonna be a practitioner. And if I get to be a professor somewhere, then I’ll just be as a lecturer. And that’s cute and that’s fine. And again, the multimodal approach to the work, I think it’s important as well.

0:31:53.0 Julian Agyeman: Right.

0:31:55.1 Whitney: Thank you.

0:31:57.1 Julian Agyeman: Thanks Whitney. Judith, I see you’ve got a question or is it a statement? Do you want to speak to Richard? 

0:32:03.3 Judith: Thank you all. This is great. Great work. But I am although didactic and so I come from the streets, but I’m a real estate broker and we have our ears to the ground and… But we’re not in the conversation very much. I’m the other person in the room. But here in Philadelphia, we changed our zoning code and we have the RCO registered community organization process, which is a fraud, okay? But I’m keeping it like you, Richard. So how can you get more people who are interested? They know me because I attend all the meetings. So can you all look at the list of the average citizen who attends the meetings, who are interested in this process, and let us in. But a lot of talk is academia, ivory tower, I go there too. Go to all the forums, all of that. But then when it comes down to the where the rubber meets the road, like they’re trying to put a police facility on our historic card or Diamond Street, Google that you all, demolition by neglect, et cetera. We have no voice. Politics takes over. So let’s talk a little bit about politics and how politics usurps all of us. Thank you.

0:33:19.7 Jose Richard Aviles: No, 100% Judith. And I think I agree with you. We need to be more expansive in who we’re bringing into the conversation. One of the things when I taught at UCLA a couple years ago, and I taught a class called Community Organizing for Urban Planners. But what they didn’t realize was that the acronym of the class was coup. So basically I used to say I got hired to stage a coup. And we got to read a wonderful Text of Violence. It’s a chapter in the book, Wretched Of The Earth by Frantz Fanon. And the whole argument, right, is that the language of colonization is violence. So if the language of that is the… What we’ve only known is in the language of decolonization violence as well. Again, also a very academic argument. But what’s interesting about that is what I told my students was what would it look like if we as urban planners, and we as city staff went on a strike and we shut down the city because they are not doing their job.

0:34:10.1 Jose Richard Aviles: They being elected officials. Again, we as urban planners and a lot of times, as folks who work in helping operate the city, we live in what I call the place of… The purgatory of power. It’s a weird limbo state where we do have power because of our technical expertise, but we also don’t have power ’cause these projects have to go through some governing body. But what happens if we held them accountable through that position of power. If our community members cannot come to a 3:00 PM meeting because they’re working, why is the urban planner stuck behind, say, a desk and not out on the streets where people are there? You know what I mean? I believe I always say that I’m gonna look cute. I’m gonna have business casual. I’m gonna have a cute outfit, but I’m gonna have tennis shoes on.

0:34:52.0 Jose Richard Aviles: ‘Cause if I need to go out to the streets and talk to people, then that’s what we do. I think there’s nothing wrong and should be the practice that we’re really writing about 60% of our time out on the streets, not behind plans and not behind desks, but really getting to know community members and really being in conversation because that’s the real, that’s the richness of this field that I, again, I make the joke. I was like, I love community engagement work because I get paid to gossip and all of a sudden you’re spending time in a corridor enough and then the senoras come out and bring you coffee and say, mijo, did you eat already? There’s just this beautiful relationship that we have an opportunity for, that I think, again, if we’re not shifting who we’re committed to, whether it is being committed to a politician or it’s committed to a city or it’s committed to the state versus being committed to people, even that paradigm shift changes our approach.

0:35:45.7 Julian Agyeman: So Richard, when I was a kid, we had Bobbies on the beat. Are you saying planners on the beats? We need planners on the beats.

0:35:50.9 Jose Richard Aviles: We need planners on the beats. Yes.

0:35:52.5 Julian Agyeman: Planners on the beat. That’s right. You heard it first here folks. Crystal, you’ve got 20 questions in your one posting here. Crystal, can you distill it down and ask one question to Richard? 

0:36:07.3 Crystal: So yeah. Hey, Crystal, they/them, first semester of UEP. I’ve just been in the middle of trying to figure out, like coming to the program as someone who’s a community organizer and works in food insecurity and like accessibility. Like I’m having the experience of being a member of the community for over a decade, but there not being accessibility within the community as like part of our sense of self. And I’m like, but we’re here. But also Somerville is so inaccessible that the chair of the commission for persons with disability could not find housing that was wheelchair accessible and had to leave the city. Like it’s dire. So how do we shift that to include like definitions of our community, people who exist but are not being prioritized in our plans for the city, I guess is the like… Like It is part of our community. It’s just not the part that’s prioritized.

0:37:06.0 Jose Richard Aviles: 100%. That’s a very hard question only because as I’m learning more about New England, I’m like, Ooh, new England is a hot mess. I’m like walking around cobblestone streets and I get it historic, but history for who, again, it’s all like social constructs. I’m like, take that shit off. Ain’t nobody need this no more, let alone Boston. I got to live a summer in Boston and I was like, what are these places? Oh my gosh. When there was… Literally, Boston was planned when there was still no right away in the field. And ’cause there is no right away in Boston. So it’s a hard question given that infrastructure and context and just thinking the rate at which we need to change the infrastructure to meet those needs. One thing I really love about working in pedestrian safety, and that’s what my background is in, in Vision Zero work, the opportunity to do quick build solutions. Quick build solutions, usually either meaning temporary project… With temporary materials is always interesting.

0:38:06.8 Jose Richard Aviles: Just to begin to shift the paradigm a bit, you know what I mean? And… ’cause it’s gonna, ugh, now I’m sounding like an incrementalist. Oh lord. But just thinking about the rate at which the infrastructure needs to change, because some of this infrastructure, again, in Los Angeles, at least in the context of the US, it’s a newer city. Los Angeles is a very old city, but it’s never been part of the… It has been not part of the US for longer. But just New England is such an interesting place for that reason because it has such a weird history. But to your point, I think that again, there is that reshift of understanding. One thing I’m very inspired with.

0:38:43.0 Jose Richard Aviles: And I’m leaving with, after being in Maine. The group did an amazing job at bringing in folks with diverse abilities and in so many ways and so many different abled bodied people and understanding and, hearing those stories in real time. And then becoming that problem solver and that thinker of like, “How do I really create a place where everyone belongs? What are the ways in which like someone who has the ability to see versus someone who doesn’t, how are they talking to one another and is there an interdependence as opposed to codependence?” Right? And so, there’s some framing and some reshifting, again, as the way that we also perceive people with different abled bodies and accessibility as a whole. One thing that right now Los Angeles is doing, just as an example, the Olympics are coming to Los Angeles in 2028.

0:39:30.1 Jose Richard Aviles: The way that Los Angeles pitched the bid was that they didn’t have to construct anything new. ’cause all of the facilities are there, they’re just making it more regional to connect. And so that kind of gave space for other types of projects to come through. But we also know that the app Paralympics are coming, alongside with the Olympics. And so what that became, it’s, I know of a lot of folks who are advocating in LA to really reassess ADA compliance across the entire city. Because if you’re saving money over here, well, boo, let me tell you y’all, some of these ramps, some intersections don’t even have ramps. And then some of your pedestrian ramps are so bad. And so there that became an opportunity. So I say that to say it really poking maybe in some places how we can bring that into the conversation. I go back to what I mentioned earlier. We’re just so caught up in the silo of what this field or what this scope of work looks like. And I think what’s important to understand, it’s like the scope of work should always be flexible because we know it’s gonna constantly shift on the ground. That was a very long-winded and maybe vague answer for a very hard question.

0:40:37.2 Julian Agyeman: Thanks, Crystal. We have a question from AB who says, in what ways could we empower communities to do planning? How do you see fugitive planning in practice? 

0:40:50.3 Jose Richard Aviles: I don’t know if I understand what fugitive planning is, but it sounds fun.

0:40:53.4 Julian Agyeman: It does sound fun, doesn’t it? Can you tell us, give us a one sentence what fugitive planning is? 

0:41:00.5 Asha: Yeah, sure. And I think you, oh, my name is Asha by the way. I think you’ve been speaking to this quite a bit, but it’s taking this sort of information and practice that we have and disseminating that to the community so that they become planners themselves. And so I think just, I guess in background, I was born and raised in Chicago. I grew up on the South side. I became a planner because I noticed the sort of what ways in which the city was super segregated and like experiencing that violence firsthand that occurs spatially. And so as I’ve moved more into the practice of planning, I’ve, okay, excuse my language, but I’ve just seen like how we’re so wrapped up in the kind of bullshit of it all, but we’re not actually implementing anything. And so while people continue to suffer in these spaces, how do we move towards putting ourselves outta business, so to speak, and empowering the community to implement solutions themselves? 

0:41:52.6 Jose Richard Aviles: Yeah, I think, okay, now I like fugitive planning. Okay, I see. Okay. It’s more like this anarchist planning. I love it. I think a lot of it… A lot of things need to shift within the field as well. For example, some and just some practical things. This is very much a long-term strategy for sure. But some practical things that I think come to mind are really reframing engagement as a phase. Engagement is not a phase. Engagement is constantly happening. You’re in community and in relationship with people all the time, and you’re not an engagement just to collect data. But one of the things that we do at the institute, we have a toolkit, and I’d be more than happy to share this resource later on, transformative research. We use participatory action research. And this is a process where we work with community members to not be the subjects of the research, but rather to be the research designers, the data collectors, the data analyst.

0:42:43.7 Jose Richard Aviles: And it becomes a whole research process. And the way that we’re interested in, the way we frame research at the institute is really research is just generating knowledge. And we know that our communities have generated knowledge in many different ways or through oral histories in some practices and in some, the diaspora through braiding through song and dance. There’s knowledge being generated all the time. And I think restrain, reframing even the way that we do engagement as a way of collecting knowledge is very important. Working hand in hand with your organizers. I think if you’re in planning, and again, I come from an organizing background, little story that I’m gonna share, right quickly. When I was at the Department of Transportation and LADOT in LA, oh, they’re gonna come from me, Julian. See, I’m telling you all the secrets. But I was friends with the administrative assistance because they knew the calendars.

0:43:35.8 Jose Richard Aviles: And in our city, LADOT is across the street from city hall. So when our general manager had a meeting across the street, girl, I’d hit up all the organizers go getter. She’s crossing the street, now she has a meeting at 10:00. It’s 9:50 go getter. There’s always an opportunity to work in conversation with agitators, not with the politician. Again, that’s who I steer from though. There is a conspiracy in LA for me to run for city council and it’s a conspiracy that I started [laughter], but could you imagine me, Julian talking about F this and F that in city hall.

0:44:09.9 Julian Agyeman: I’ll Work on your campaign [laughter], let me know buddy.

0:44:12.0 Jose Richard Aviles: I have a couple of months to think about it, but we may run for city council and again, but what the goal is to agitate, there is nothing wrong with agitation. So I think from the position of planning, I think being able to work alongside your organizers who are on the ground and doing the membership work and the capacity building, if you work alongside them to move the needle in that way, I think that’s also important. And girl put politicians business out there. They have a voting record. Put it out there. Let people know what they’re up to. ‘Cause you know, when you work in planning, you know who the commissioner is, who is an asshole. You know what the city council member’s gonna decide. We know a lot of things in the way the city operates and if we’re able to share that public information because FOIA and then you don’t want to get in trouble [laughter], but if you wanna share public information and help create strategy for organizers, I think that’s a way to really be more of a fugitive within planning.

0:45:05.1 Julian Agyeman: We have a question from Kate. Hi Kate. Kate’s another one of our brilliant alumnus. Kate, what’s your question? 

0:45:12.2 Kate: Hello everyone. Thank you, Richard. I am just, it’s such a breath of fresh air to hear what you’re saying about our field of work and it was more sort of affirming comment I think to really invite and encourage and push my fellow colleagues in this field to get radical in the work, in the occasions, in the moments we have, whether it’s with our teams, whether it’s in a community meeting to ask questions that are heart-centered, that encourage people to speak, turn toward your neighbor, look at one another, have a conversation about a memory, get people with stories. I think about bridging work and really the wave of the future is if we’re going to be able to imagine, we have to remember where we came from, our past experiences, those moments as young people, we are the most vulnerable, the scary places that we are socialized to not go. I just think we really need to ruffle up how we do our work and how we think about it. Take the seriousness away for a little bit and just, let’s get real, let’s get humble. And I just, that really informs my work. And so I just feel a lot of kinship with what you’re talking about here and likely a lot of other people on this call.

0:46:22.3 Jose Richard Aviles: Yeah. One thing I’ll share about the word radical, the reason why we use the word radical in radical imagination, but also in reimagine urban planning and be more radical twofold. One, yes. The scary, definition of radical, the scary connotation, I should say that the word radical has is appropriate because we need to be more radical one and two, the etymology of the word radical is root. It’s to go back. It’s to remember what is the root cause? What is the essence of relationship to land in bodies. I say that to me. Urban planning is not about materials. It’s about restoring the sacred relationship we have between body and earth. And now more than ever do we need it. So just wanted to add a little bit of why we use the word radical.

0:47:04.4 Julian Agyeman: Thanks Kate. Okay, so I get to ask you the last question, Richard. And I’m just wondering, I haven’t heard the R word reparation, reparative, everything you are talking about lends itself to joining the push to shift from racial planning to reparative planning. What, how does your thinking and to the push for reparation through a…

0:47:33.4 Jose Richard Aviles: 100%. That’s a hard question. I only say that’s a hard question from a place of my own racialized identity. And who I am as a non-black person of color, living in Mexico City and trying to figure out, ’cause I’m like, so does Spain give us reparations for 1521? I’m trying to figure out that conversation. I’m like the US owe me reparations from 1985. And of course I totally agree with reparations in the context in which of atoning for, right in atonement. I think it’s important to, to understand in that framing. I think what I could add to the conversation, it’s that it’s possible that atonement does not, and reparations doesn’t have to live, I think in the way that it has been marketed. I dunno, market is the right word. Framed and what it means.

0:48:22.5 Jose Richard Aviles: As a really radical extreme way that it’s, but the harms of enslavement really in the US have, we see them everywhere. It’s in the way that are, are the country. This country’s economic system was created, racial systems, everything. So atonement I think is possible at many scales and many levels and should be what we should be working towards. Atonement with resiliency more than anything because we can’t recreate these systems. It’s the conversation that we have all the time at the ins well that I have at the institute all the time. I’m down for belonging. But don’t make the shit out Kumbaya. ’cause I can’t, no conflict exists in the natural world, in the natural world is how we look at conflict as something generative, as opposed to something destructive that can shift the work in the way that we do the world, the work.

0:49:11.6 Jose Richard Aviles: So I think that when it comes to reparations with this series, and it doesn’t explicitly say it, but it should is in a complete agreement with it. And we have to not only, we owe reparations to many folks and to many societies and to many ecologies. And I think now more than ever, I wrote something quite weird the other day that kind of stuck with me, but I saw no politics involved, but I saw Beyonce’s speech at the Harris rally [laughter], and it was just such a, that was a dystopic moment to see someone of that celebrity statue being there. And I wrote something along the lines of somebody prophesied about this moment, and either a prophecy will be fulfilled or an apocalypse is about to be in. And I only say, and I say those big heavy words because again, we are at such an interesting time and at a shifting point, it feels like the chrysalis is about to be born or is about to be birthed. But it, there’s, it’s tangible. The change is so tangible. And I’ve been reading your work, Julian, for, since I’ve been in grad school and the things that we’re saying are not new. You’ve been saying this for years alongside other colleagues and I don’t know, and now I have a question to you, do you feel that we are are at some sort of turning point in time in the way that we’re having these conversations about re-imagining and radicalizing planning? 

0:50:33.7 Julian Agyeman: Oh, I think, yeah. And you mentioned my great hero, Leonie Sandercock, and I was very privileged two summers ago to go and go to Vancouver. She had a group of people and we talked about her latest book, which was published in one of my book series, and she’s the architect of therapeutic planning. And you mentioned that and social worker therapeutic planning, therapeutic planning is about reparation. Yeah. It’s not about cutting checks, but it’s about a reparative approach in our thinking such that planning becomes a therapeutic process. And so I yeah, absolutely. But I think the calls are getting louder. I’ve actually got a student, and I don’t know whether Lauren Chapman is in the room there, but we are looking at, we are looking at planning authorities and what moves they are making towards a more reparative approach. Now the dream is what would a reparative comprehensive plan look like? 

0:51:32.8 Julian Agyeman: What are the implications for transportation, open space housing, employment policy, et cetera. At the moment, we’re finding examples like housing policy in Evanston, Illinois or some of the experiments, well, restoration of the land in Huntington Beach to the African American family in California. So we’re getting little examples, little experiments in reparation, but when do we get the paradigm shift? That’s what I want to map. When is the first authority gonna come up with a comprehensive plan that is whose paradigm is reparative? And this isn’t just me or you calling for this, mayors organized for racial equity want this. Planning directors want this. Rashad Williams, a brilliant young assistant professor who wrote a classic paper who’s now at University of Pittsburgh, and I’m gonna watch his work. He has pushed this further. So it’s on the way. How do we speed it up? That’s…

0:52:33.9 Jose Richard Aviles: Yeah, ’cause there’s… I feel like there’s an urgency that we haven’t experienced before, even in my lifetime. I feel like the urgency has just gotten louder and more and more dire to be honest. And I agree with you, and I’m hoping that reimagining urban planning and the way, again, I, we did not imagine for there to be this response and now to sit with that. Because clearly there’s folks who are asking for that paradigm shift. I’m an organizer, so I’m a true believer that if we come in numbers, we can move mountains for sure. So hopefully this continues to become a movement in a way that, that I can hold it, that other people can hold it, and that we test ideas. Because I think a lot of it, what’s so hard, it’s that, and like Whitney alluded to this, is that these ideas are living in our head, in our conversations, in our circles. But how are they being tested? How are they being pushed and how are they being refined? And we’re not gonna get this shit right. It’s deconstructing centuries of traumas, so we know we’re never, never gonna get it right. That’s where the therapeutic happens… Therapy happens though.

0:53:37.0 Julian Agyeman: That’s right. Well, Jose Richard Velez, Othering and Belonging Institute, I could go on all afternoon. Yes. Put some time. We need to catch up. It’s been six years. Can we give a warm Cities@Tufts? Thank you to Jose Richard Velez.

0:53:53.1 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video transcript and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University in shareable with support from the Bar Foundation, shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry, light Without Dark By Cultivate Beats our theme song and the graph recording was created by Anke Dregnat. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones, and Candice Spivey. And the series is Co-produced and presented by me, Tom Lewellen. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share it with others. So this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.