Cities@Tufts Lectures

Reimagining Urban Planning is a talk based on the monthly webinar series of the same name hosted by the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley.

This talk openly critiques the ways in which Urban Planners have been trained and the impacts it has had in the ways Planners approach the Land, and the People that inhabit the land.

This talk will share the key highlights from the series while also providing examples, shared by the speakers, that get us to an alternative approach to planning. The hope is that this talk will inspire planners to be more critical of how the field currently operates.

Jose Richard Aviles is a Transportation Analyst for the Othering and Belonging Institute. As part of the Community Power and Policy Partnerships team, they support government agencies and partners with community organizations by providing trainings, technical assistance, and evaluation support centering lived experience, vision, and self-determination of the communities most impacted by transit inequities.

Aviles draws inspiration from their involvement with the Bus Riders Union in Los Angeles and participation in other social justice movements like marriage equality.

In addition to this audio, you can watch the video and read the full transcript of the conversation on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman.

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation,

Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor, the original portrait of Jose Richard Aviles was illustrated by Anke Dregnat, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn.

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

Most researchers of environmental and climate justice agree that political and economic inequalities hurt the environment, racial minorities, Indigenous Peoples, and other marginalized communities. Yet, these conclusions are based, almost exclusively, on analyses of the distribution of "environmental bads" (e.g., industrial pollution and toxic waste).

Drawing on a longstanding and cumulative multi-methods research program focused on the distribution of "environmental goods" (biodiversity conservation), this lecture offers an alternative analysis of the relationship between environment and inequality with normative implications that are more complex than those implied in the environmental justice literature.

Such ambiguous normative implications test the ability of societies to prioritize climate justice over climate action with dubious social impacts.

In conclusion, we engage in collective reflections on the prospects of developing politically-resilient strategies for promoting environmental and climate justice.

Prakash Kashwan is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Brandeis University. He is also the Chair of the Environmental Justice concentration in the Master of Public Policy (MPP) program at the Heller School of Social Policy and Management.

His teaching, research, and scholarship focus on the intersections of environment, development, and socioeconomic and political dimensions of global environmental and climate change. Kashwan’s academic engagements build on this interdisciplinary background, including a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), a Master’s in Forestry Management), and a Ph. D. in Public Policy awarded under the tutelage of late Professor Elinor Ostrom, a political economist, who was the joint winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences. Equally important, Kashwan’s research and writings are shaped profoundly by his over two decades-long engagements with global and international environmental governance, including a pre-academia career in international development (1999-2005).

In addition to this audio, you can read the full transcript of the conversation and watch the lecture recording on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman.

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation,

Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor, the original portrait of Prakash Kashwan was illustrated by Jess Milner, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn.

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

Measured by distance and speed, today North Americans move more than ever. Movement, however, is but a means to an end; more movement is not in itself beneficial. Movement is a cost of meeting daily needs, and provided these needs are met, less movement is generally advantageous. Nevertheless, since the 1930s traffic engineers have pursued movement maximization in North American cities as if movement is an end in itself, and even as if movement is in itself freedom. The human costs have included unbearable burdens measurable as financial, health, safety, equitability, livability and environmental costs. Together these burdens impair human autonomy; that is, by constraining people’s choices about where and how to live, they diminish freedom. Automobility, promoted as a deliverer of freedom, has instead imposed car dependency, a kind of unfreedom. Paradoxically, many engineers now pursue so-called “autonomous” (robotic) driving, promising thereby to sustain unsustainable quantities of movement, when the sole worthy end of movement is not machine but human autonomy. To escape the traps that these errors set for us, we must trace them to their origins. Though engineering is defined as applied science, history reveals that the origins and persistence of prevailing traffic engineering principles lie not in scientific research but in power politics, and that such principles have more in common with religious dogmas than with natural laws. Far more practical possibilities await us when we escape the confines these dogmas impose on us and recognize movement as a secondary good that serves us only as it contributes to human autonomy.

Peter Norton is an associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. He is a member of the University of Virginia’s Center for Transportation Studies and has been a visiting faculty member at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Norton is the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, and of Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving. He is a winner of the Usher Prize of the Society for the History of Technology, and a frequent speaker on the subject of sustainable and equitable urban mobility.

In addition to this audio, you can watch the video and read the full transcript of the conversation on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman.

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation,

Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor, the original portrait of Peter Norton was illustrated by Anke Dregnet, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn.

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

Hacking the Archive: The Quest for More Just Urban Futures with Karilyn Crockett explores a Boston-based project that gamifies collective memory-driven social research and local knowledge sharing to anchor the intergenerational creation of future urban plans. Hacking the Archive (HTA) is a coalition of two dozen civic, faith-based and archival institutions advancing a novel data gathering and dissemination approach for populations underrepresented in the archive yet overrepresented in land-based battles for urban space. This talk focuses on HTA's current work to examine past and present grassroots strategies for tackling economic justice.

Karilyn Crockett’s research focuses on large-scale land use changes in twentieth century American cities and examines the social and geographic implications of structural poverty, racial formations and memory. Karilyn’s book "People before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making" (UMASS Press 2018) investigates a 1960s era grassroots movement to halt urban extension of the U.S. interstate highway system and the geographic and political changes in Boston that resulted. In 2019 this book was named one of the “ten best books of the decade” by the Boston Public Library Association of Librarians. Karilyn holds a PhD from the American Studies program at Yale University, a Master of Science in Geography from the London School of Economics, and a Master of Arts and Religion from Yale Divinity School. She has previously served in Boston city government; first, as Director of Economic Policy & Research in the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development and later as the City of Boston's first Chief of Equity, a Cabinet-level position. She is a professor of urban history, public policy and planning at MIT and currently leads the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce in partnership with the Boston Federal Reserve Bank to assess the regional racial wealth gap.

In addition to this audio, you can watch the video and read the full transcript of the conversation on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman.

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation,

Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor, the original portrait of Karilyn Crockett was illustrated by Anke Dregnat, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn.

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

Addressing the climate crisis requires more than incremental reforms; it necessitates a transformative approach that dismantles deep-seated inequalities and confronts the historical injustices embedded in global structures. Achieving global climate justice hinges on decolonizing fossil fuel politics and dismantling obstructionist forces at both national and international levels. By drawing from and critiquing the Green New Deal movement, Professor Noel Healy explores what genuine economic and political transformation looks like in practice, emphasizing that these systemic changes are inseparable from the pursuit of global justice.

Noel Healy is a Professor in the Geography and Sustainability Department at Salem State University (SSU) and the Director of the Climate Justice and Just Transitions Lab. His research explores the socio-political dimensions of rapid climate change mitigation, climate justice, fossil fuel politics, and climate obstructionism, with a focus on economic and racial justice in climate and energy policy. Dr. Healy was a contributing author on the UN’s IPCC (AR6/WGIII) report, and he serves on the advisory board of Cell Reports Sustainability and the editorial board of Energy Research and Social Sciences.

In addition to this audio, you can watch the video and read the full transcript of the conversation on Shareable.net – while you’re there get caught up on past lectures.

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman.

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation,

Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor, the original portrait of Jose Richard Aviles was illustrated by Ronna Alexander, and the series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn.

“Light Without Dark” by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.