Background on Urban and Regional Planning

Sustainable development has been a subject of urban planning for three decades now. Planners and practitioners now have a wealth of materials, catalogues, readers, and textbooks at their disposal that discuss local problems and practices. The problem, however, is that sustainable development is a very broad and often contradictory concept that is difficult to implement, and has since become a vector for market-led, exclusionary, urban development and planning. Little progress has been achieved, especially in regard to social equality. At the time of this writing, the global pandemic was also unfolding, which demanded priorities in health care on one hand and opened up new questions about sustainable development on the other. If sustainability and post-pandemic planning (for sustainability) is to be taken seriously, it is imperative to identify, reassert, and re-center social injustices in the productive processes that generate urban and regional spaces. There is a risk that social polarization will widen further still and that it too will be market-led as governments struggle with the crisis. Practitioners need to be careful about how people are included and can benefit from planning practice. There is inspiration from planning theory. Knowledge of public interest, differing epistemologies and ontologies, problems of racism and class, and a revival of kindness in political democratic are some ideas that publicly funded urban and regional planning offices can promote and assert – in the interests of sustainability.