Signing “The Planner’s Pledge”

I’ve just signed The Planner’s Pledge, a statement assembled by a team of leading US urban designers including my friend Jeff Speck, author of the Walkable City books. It’s an attempt to create a clear statement of principles, from the planning professions, about the past harms done by the profession and the things that must be done differently. It’s preamble is unsparing: As practitioners of a discipline that has advocated for what it believed to be best practices while inevitably advancing the dominant ideology of its society, we professional planners wish to formally apologize for the significant role that our profession has played in creating the unsustainable suburban sprawl development pattern that now constitutes most of the American built environment, reinforcing race and class segregation while burdening the vast majority of citizens with the mandate of car ownership. To put it bluntly, planners have contributed to the creation of a landscape that separates us ruthlessly both…