The Perils of Participatory Planning

Abstract

In the 1970s, urban planners in Austin, Texas, developed Austin Tomorrow, a public planning initiative that sought to undermine the hegemony of the city’s growth coalition in urban planning by using a neighborhood-based model. The aim was to mitigate development to minimize environmental degradation. The initiative failed largely because it did not take the historical racial inequities and spatial discrimination inherent in Austin’s geography into account. Racial minorities were skeptical of Austin Tomorrow and had far different political aims and perceptions of what constituted the environment than Anglo Austinites. While urban planning usually looks to create a better city in the future, I argue that planners must also be very cognizant of the past to effectively include vulnerable populations.