Planning beyond Mass Incarceration

Abstract

The policing and penal systems play an oversized role in shaping the built environment and budgets of cities, alongside the lives of urban residents. Law enforcement systems are also deeply inequitable with poor residents, and communities of color disproportionately harmed by the violences of the system. Planning’s contribution to the creation of durable spatial stratification in the built environment implicates planning in the class and race disparities in law enforcement systems. Planning research and theory has also supported this inequity by largely neglecting the relationships between policing and penal systems and planning. The articles in this volume address this neglect and employ a wide variety of core theories, methods, and methodologies from planning to engage with the relationships between planning and law enforcement. The articles are connected through attention to racial justice including analyzing moments where planning supported and produced injustice, and identifying opportunities to support greater equity, decarceration and even abolition where planning practice, education and research support the creation of systems of safety and care beyond mass incarceration.

What is planning without property? Relational practices of being and belonging

“…The preservation of private property and the protections of the rights of landowners relies on the disciplinary powers of the state. Planning is thus complicit in the creation and maintenance of a property regime as well as the carceral regime that sustains it (Simpson et al., 2020).…”

“…In the realm of planning, Indigenous expressions of planning and territorial authority have often been criminalized (Borrows, 1997;Dorries, 2017). Planning is connected to this regime of violence, threating the life of Indigenous, Black, and other racialized people through its connections to creation and maintenance of the racial property regime (Simpson et al, 2020).…”

“…Planning’s commitment to property accounts for planning’s entanglements with colonialism (Porter, 2010) and explains how settler colonialism (Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019) and racial capitalism are spatialized as urban processes that render urbanization always anti-Indigenous and always anti-Black (Dorries, et al., 2019; Rutland, 2018). Through state-driven processes that hinge on the reproduction of racial hierarchies, propertied landscapes become intertwined with geographies of criminalization, surveillance, and incarceration (Garcia-Hallett, et al., 2020; Sherman, 2020; Simpson et al., 2020) and contribute to the displacement and dispossession of racialized and economically marginalized communities (Blomley, 2004; Roy, 2003, 2006).…”

Aging Back Into the Closet: Community Planning for Older LGBTQ + Adults

“…For example, police have long been a source of fear and violence for the LGBTQ + community (Boggs et al 2017;Chauncey 1994;Cohen 1997;Delany 1999;Faderman 1991;Faderman and Timmons 2006;Fredriksen-Goldsen et al 2011;Hanhardt 2013;Martinez 2015;Quinn 2019;Warner 2002;Winkle 2015). As many planning scholars have advocated (Dorries and Harjo 2020;Simpson, Steil, and Mehta 2020;Stein 2019), planners can promote sharp reductions to police and military budgets in order to increase budgets for inclusive services and the built environment, which would also reduce the exposure between law enforcement and potentially vulnerable people, both domestically and abroad.…”