Embedded Planning in Environmental Justice Communities: Three Takeaways for Practice
It starts with putting your feet on the ground.
Embedded Planning at the Environmental Justice Enforcement Symposium
The Los Angeles Environmental Justice Network and Del Amo Action Committee (DAAC) in West Carson co-organize the annual Environmental Justice Enforcement Symposium. The focus is environmental racism, which disproportionately burdens working-class communities of color. Homes near industrial factories suffer from noxious air, toxic soils, polluted water, and other environmental ills. This symposium unites local and state agencies and community advocates to share practical lessons for achieving environmental justice. Regulators and residents, often at odds over enforcement efficacy, put aside their differences to educate each other.
I delivered my first Environmental Justice Enforcement talk in 2019. The symposium was held at the California Endowment nestled between Chinatown and Placita Olvera in Downtown LA. At the time, I was thirteen years into my work as an LA County Zoning Enforcement Planner with a track record of writings and public talks on community-based code enforcement. For the panel “Local Land Use Policy: Community Involvement,” symposium organizers asked me to describe community partnerships in enforcing zoning laws. I spoke about my Embedded Planning praxis.¹
Developed through more than a decade of zoning enforcement in South Central LA, Embedded Planning urges planners to relocate their work from behind a desk to the community. Embedded Planners work from the street-level. You go straight to the people. You build relationships at people’s doorsteps. You plan in plain language and the language(s) of the community. You make the neighborhood your office. This doesn’t mean you never work indoors; instead, Embedded Planning means you move with intention to conduct your work as much as possible from the spaces and places of the community.
I drew inspiration from liberatory planning theories to create Embedded Planning. Developed in response to technocratic Rational Planning, approaches such as Transactive, Advocacy, Equity, Radical, and Insurgent planning informed my creative process. I drew, as well, from other fields requiring feet on the ground: Embedded Librarianship, Community and Labor Organizing, Ethnography, Inspection, and Social Work, to name a few. Embedded Planning is a praxis because it puts theory into action to better the world.
To give symposium attendees some shape and form, I described my work as a street-level planner in unincorporated urban communities such as Florence-Firestone, East Rancho Dominguez, and West Carson, all of which are burdened with environmental injustices. I uplifted my partnerships with DAAC’s fearless founder Cynthia Babich and many other unincorporated area residents. My message: regulators can be community partners if they get to know people in their community spaces.
Coronavirus pushed the Environmental Justice Enforcement Symposium online in 2020, and it’s remained online since then. Two years in COVID allowed folks to adjust to Zoom. The virtual setting opened access for residents who could safely attend from home in environmental justice communities across the LA region. With more and more environmental injustice afflicting communities of color, there’s an urgent need to unite residents and regulators to protect our neighborhoods. Everyone of all ages should be at the table. We need folks sharing knowledge, tactics, and solutions. We need partnerships.
With this urgency in mind, I enthusiastically accepted Ms. Babich’s invitation to speak at the 7th annual Environmental Justice Enforcement Symposium in October 2021. I joined the “Land Use Opportunities and Challenges” panel with speakers representing academia, community organizing, and local government. This sophomore presentation covered my prior Zoning Enforcement experience that connected me with DAAC, my current work in West Carson, and key takeaways for practice. I’ve been reflecting a lot about this talk. West Carson residents in the audience said they felt seen, validated by our close bonds. They asked:
“Why don’t more planners work on the ground?”
Exactly.
Takeaways for Building Community Partnerships
In my continuing advocacy for street-level planning, I share the key takeaways from my 2021 Environmental Justice Enforcement talk below. This is drawn from my experience doing Embedded Planning in Los Angeles. With some adjustments for local conditions and climates, this praxis can work in any neighborhood. What follows is street-tested advice for planners striving to build meaningful community partnerships.
1. Build Relationships Where Community Members Are
You need to build relationships in the spaces and places of community members. Don’t expect folks to come to you. Find ways to put your feet on the ground. Deinstitutionalize planning practice. Take planning to the streets. Trust is the bedrock of community-based planning. Never assume trust will be accorded to you. The planner must earn trust, and trust is earned locally. So go to the people wherever they are. Go to their homes, their businesses, their houses of worship. Go to bus stops and transit centers. Go to schools, public libraries, and supermarkets. Pop up at parks and on street corners. Walk the block. Be present. I did this and reached even more people who, as I would learn, cared deeply about planning a just future. I was invited to intimate neighborhood events, from cookouts to quinceñeras, because I’d earned trust. This is how I got to know community members, and they got to know me, their planner. When you earn trust, you become a faithful ally.
2. Center Planning in People’s Lives
You must remember that people’s lives are at the heart of planning. This is true at every scale. Whether I was dealing with an informal housing violation, processing an airport land use approval, collaborating with folks on a park design like West Carson’s Wishing Tree Park, or partnering with DAAC to support their bottom-up community vision plan — as a planner, whatever I worked on, I kept people’s lives at the forefront. It informed every aspect of my work. Our actions, big and small, matter to the community’s daily life. Move with intention in your practice knowing this is the reality. When you do this, you avoid the dreadful “check this box” approach still common in planning practice. Community members know it when they see it. At all costs, avoid insincere and extractive engagement; this damages community partnerships, foments distance and distrust, and ultimately dismantles the bridges we’re trying to build.
3. Elevate Respect for Community Members
You need to elevate respect that’s due to community members. Unless you live there too, you’re working in their community. They know it better than you. They’re the experts. A planner is a coordinator, a facilitator, a guide. But community members know the neighborhood’s needs better than any planner despite our extensive training. Let’s be clear: an absence of fluency in jargon and technical prowess to articulate in “planner speak” matters far less than having lived experience to describe a neighborhood’s desired future in everyday language. Planners can learn from that. Indeed, I became a more effective planner when I learned how to speak in plain language and code-switch from English to Spanglish to Spanish and back, if needed, in real-time on the ground. While the planner is positioned to collaborate on and coordinate community actions, decisions about a just future should come from community members. This is what truly collaborative planning looks like — planning that puts the community first.
Next Steps for Practice
Planning has come a long way. We no longer reflexively default to employing the top-down command structure of Rational Planning. Today, participatory planning approaches are the standard, though we still have room for improvement. That’s because for all its growth, planning remains a desk-bound profession. Most planning work is still performed from the confines of an office detached from the community. Engagement is one-off, transactional, project-based. It’s no wonder planners struggle to form meaningful relationships with community members.
Embedded Planning offers an alternative to conventional practices. Embedded Planning has successfully built bridges with marginalized communities harmed by past planning inequities. Embedded Planning has been instrumental in forming lasting community partnerships that center engagement as an ongoing process.
Writing about reflective practice in racial and environmental justice work, Michael Méndez² wrote:
This type of emerging embedded planning offers a multidimensional view of the interactions between people’s well-being and the varying contexts of climate or environment or community shaped by wider political, institutional, economic, and social structures. For practitioners, in particular, such an approach can provide valuable contextual analysis and reflection on what hinders racial and environmental justice reform within the planning and regulatory institutions. These innovative practices are leading the way for planners to be more honest with themselves and others on how they are helping to change the legacy of racial injustice in the field of urban planning.
Through Embedded Planning, planners will better understand what is working and what needs improvement in environmental justice advocacy. Embedded planners will better grasp the disparate impact of racial and environmental inequities. And with feet on the ground, they’re well equipped to develop context-sensitive solutions in partnership with the people. Given our impending climate calamity, the prevalence of eco-injustices in communities of color presents an urgency like never before. The time is now. We cannot plan from our desks. Get out there and connect.
Coda
Having recently received an invitation, I’m returning as a panelist at the 2022 Environmental Justice Enforcement Symposium on September 21st. I’ll speak about Embedded Planning praxis in a conversation about opportunities and constraints in the landscape of planning. The event is on Zoom. It is free to all. Come through.
End notes
[1] Bell, Jonathan Pacheco. “We Cannot Plan From Our Desks.” Planning. October 2018. https://www.planning.org/planning/2018/oct/viewpoint/
[2] Méndez, Michael. “The Reflective Practitioner in the Context of Racial and Environmental Justice.” Eds. Courtney Knapp, Jocelyn Poe & John Forester. Repair and Healing in Planning, Planning Theory & Practice. June 2022. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14649357.2022.2082710
