People, Policy, Planning, Place and Product: Lessons from a City Planner

ANNUAL DIVERSITY, EQUITY, INCLUSION AND BELONGING LECTURE

Presented by Christopher A. Watson, M.Sc., Ph.D.[c] Director of Planning and Development Services, Murphy Schiller & Wilkes LLP

Planning as a tool is ideally to organize the physical environment to effectuate the life course of residents, so that they can be triangled with the resources needed to live successful life courses. Often, whoever gets to make the decision as to how space is organize determines the outcome for those residents, enveloped in those planned areas. To better provide the support residents need to advance themselves, personal agency aside, planners must be able to be the best translators of residents’ voices within planning principles that forward an agenda that is inclusive of community voice. Without this key understanding in practice, space is disorganized, and the evolution of society is stymied by confusion.

This conversation will explore these themes and will allow us as planners to have an honest conversation as to what our mandates are, how we practice these mandates, and how we come together to organize space around who we are planning for. Planning for people should include their voices, and this lecture is to provoke a conversation as to how we get to this realization in our practices.