Operationalizing Equity: Keynote of Kruekeberg Doctoral Conference

Reference to “equity” in planning is rather ubiquitous, for good reason. However, moving conceptual terms from theory to practice often belies just intentions in even the best plans and processes of implementation of urban development. In this lecture, Dr. Carolini will discuss the challenges and opportunities of moving beyond equity as a norm and consider its transition in both scholarship and practice–however complicated. While planners have long leaned on participatory decision-making strategies to ensure procedural equities and advance justice in urban planning and development, here she will draw attention to examples of how planners can also foreground epistemic and distributive equities at the local level. To this end, she will discuss project-level considerations of the quality of learning and knowledge production and the criticality of spatialized accounts of fairness in making legible the distribution of a project or program’s material benefits. She will leverage her research from across the Americas and Africa to argue that operationalizing equity can be more straightforward than it sounds. However, this requires a reframing of ex-ante and ex-post evaluative frameworks to incorporate procedural, distributive, and epistemic equities in projects and programs that can move us closer toward that which ought to be in cities.

Gabriella Carolini is an associate professor of urban planning and international development in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) at MIT, where she leads the City Infrastructure Equity Lab (CIEL). Her research and teaching are centered on providing a grounded critical analysis of how the governance of infrastructure development—including its financial architecture, implementation practices, and evaluation—shapes the distributional fairness of infrastructure benefits, particularly for and with marginalized communities.

Conference Registration: https://forms.gle/rWAx3cMnqyTVtZ5S8