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Style (APA)

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4 PROGRESSIVE PLANNING

Keynote Speech • Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Conference • Houston, Texas, October 22-25, 2015

Advocacy, Planning, and Land
How Climate Justice Changes Everything
Tom Angotti

tice in the US. We can follow Paul Davidoff and start
by linking land use planning with advocacy in the US,
but now more than ever we have to address the ques-
tion of economic and racial justice at the global scale.
Today climate change poses an existential threat to all
humanity, especially the poor and oppressed who suffer
the worst consequences of environmental degradation.
Focusing on the big issue of global climate justice is
consistent with the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
who understood that opposition to US foreign policy
and the War in Vietnam was connected to the struggle
to end the violence against Black people at home.

An appropriate starting point for this focus is
Naomi Klein’s claim that, in her recent book by
the same title, This Changes Everything. She places
economic and social justice at the center of the cli-
mate debate. This is not just a theoretical discus-
sion but reflects a global movement seeking climate
justice. Climate justice forces us to re-think every-
thing at a global scale, far beyond the objectives of
adaptation and conversion to renewable energy.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Most of the world’s
largest metropolitan regions are along coastlines and
face the certainties of sea level rise. This has been a
wake up call, but our urban resiliency plans will do
nothing for the Pacific Islanders who are now being
forced to abandon their homes. Indigenous people
around the world are being displaced by invasive min-
ing and drilling, which leaves the landscape barren and
degraded. Global land grabbing is replacing ecologically
sound and productive stewardship of the land with un-
healthy and polluting monocultures in agriculture. But
perhaps the most visible evidence for us of climate in-
justice is in our own cities where it is disproportionately

It Is an honor to speak at this conference dedicated to Justice and the City, but I must confess my
discomfort with planning education today, which is at
an impasse when it comes to the issues of racial and
economic justice. The string of recent police murders
of Black and Brown people from Staten Island, New
York to Ferguson, Missouri, in cities and suburbs,
tells us that progress on racial justice is overrated.
Too often discussions in planning education about
racial justice skip over these stories of today’s violence
and end in abstractions about justice. In our mostly
white world of planning education we suffer from
a systemic color blindness. And even when race is
considered, we only look back at advocacy planning,
the 1960s and the great civil rights movement. Or we
dwell on only small local fixes. And we don’t act.

Let’s be honest. Efforts to open up the white suburbs
and redevelop central cities through pluralistic planning
are stalled before the roadblocks of institutional racism,
segregation and market-driven gentrification. Race still
matters, a lot. Forty-seven years after the Fair Housing
Act, segregation reigns, a symptom of the wider sys-
tem of racialized exploitation and violence. So what are
planning educators who want progressive change to do?

I would like to make a giant leap and connect today’s
struggles for Black lives with global climate change. Let
me propose that focusing on global climate justice can
help us rethink our views on racial and economic jus-

Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs & Planning
at Hunter College, co-editor of Progressive Planning
Magazine, and author of New York For Sale: Community
Planning Confronts Global Real Estate.

NO. 206 | WINTER 2016 5

poor people and people of color who die during heat
waves, can’t afford flood insurance, and live in the most
vulnerable and polluted environments, victims of the
new urban epidemics – diabetes, obesity and violence.

As cities and nations deal with sea-level rise and cli-
mate change, the most powerful trend in planning
is problematic: it would protect the most privileged
urban and rural enclaves against the changing cli-
mate, as in post-Katrina New Orleans and New York
City after Sandy, and sacrifice the rest of the world,
which is left to adapt on its own, literally in “sacrifice
zones.” This is the problem at the heart of climate justice.

Land Beyond “Land Use”

What does this have to do with advocacy and planning
in the US?

If nothing else, planning is about land. The global
movement for climate justice forces us to question the
relationship of humans to land – both urban and rural.
The majority of the world’s population lives in cities,
which produce 70% of greenhouse gases and occupy
only 2% of the earth’s surface. They are consumption
machines and giant generators of waste. Rural areas
have instead become voids with factory farms produc-
ing monocultures, extractive mining, and wilderness
enclaves serving the urban world. The city isn’t the
problem, the countryside isn’t the problem, nor is it
the amount of land being used. The problem is the re-
lationship of people to land, both urban and rural, and
the systems of exploitation of both land and people.

Bringing home the questions of land and climate jus-
tice, Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his brilliant book, Between
the World and Me, reminds us how the use of land is
related to violence against people of color in the US
and throughout the world. This country, he says:

. . . acquired the land through murder and
tamed it under slavery . . . whose armies fanned
out across the world to extend their dominion.

He hits on the connection between racial injustice here
and global climate justice:

. . . the Dreamers [for Coates, a vaguely defined
white America] have improved themselves, and
the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction
of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have
enabled an expansion in plunder with no
known precedent. And this revolution has freed
the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of
humans but the body of the Earth itself.

For Coates, the global plunder parallels our urban
history:

It is the flight from us [Blacks] that sent them
sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the
method of transport through these new subdi-
visions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the
noose around the neck of the earth, and ulti-
mately, the Dreamers themselves.

The question of land has always been at the center
of the civil rights and social justice movements in the
US. Slaves could not own property; they were prop-
erty. Blacks and other minorities have been redlined,
foreclosed, and displaced from the land by numerous
forms of “urban renewal.” Native Americans were
chased off land which they understood, as so many
indigenous nations do, as a set of relations not only
among humans but incorporating all of nature, as op-
posed to our culture and profession which treat land
as a “thing.” This, surely, is related to climate justice.

In the 21st century it is time for planners to stop talking
about “land use,” an anthropocentric and racially
charged concept. This nation’s expansion through dis-
placement created the idea that land was a thing to be
taken, bought and sold, consumed and then disposed of
when it no longer yields a profit. Confronting climate
justice requires a fundamental shift in our understand-
ing of land and the relationship of humans to land.

Advocacy Planning Today

Surely most urban planners understand the link be-
tween urban land and climate change. But in practice
they tend to look for, or sell, technological fixes that fail
to take into consideration economic and racial justice.

6 PROGRESSIVE PLANNING

In his encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis, sound-
ing very much like Naomi Klein, states:

Technology, connected to finance capital,
pretends to be the only solution to problems.
In fact, it is incapable of seeing the multiple
relations that exist between things, which is
why it sometimes resolves problems by creating
new ones.

Urban planners all over the world sell technological
fixes and best practices, instant recipes for green
infrastructure, sustainable communities, citizen
participation and – yes – social justice. They advance
formulas for urban density and diversity and the
cosmopolitan society, and sell popular brands like
Smart Growth and the New Urbanism.

Local sustainability and resiliency plans seem good
because they attempt to go beyond the fashionable fixes
and narrow reductionist science, towards a holistic,
ecological approach to the city. However, unless local
plans place the fundamental inequalities across the
land at the center of their work, they will instead turn
our cities into fortified enclaves for the privileged
while the rest of the planet faces the catastrophic
effects of climate change. Therefore, the challenge
is not just adaptation or resilience but climate justice,
which means asking the question, resilience for whom?

Climate Justice and the City

In sum, the fundamental problem is how we, the hu-
man species, relate to land, urban and rural, at local
and global scales, in an integrated way. One of the
least quoted parts of the Pope’s Encyclical says:

. . . a truly ecological approach must become a
social approach, that should integrate justice in
the discussions about the environment, to listen
to both the cry of the land and the cry of the
poor.

Francis talks about “the ecology of daily life,” the
defense of public space, acknowledgment of “the

other,” and the need to prioritize public transpor-
tation, among other public services – but beware
the technological fix and be an advocate along with
those in greatest need. He opposes the privatization
of natural resources and echoes Naomi Klein’s cri-
tique of extractive and neoliberal capitalism. Both
the Pope and Klein call for defending the commons as
public land is plundered through public-private part-
nerships in which the private partner dominates.

If we take off the orientalist blinders of Western
urban planning we can learn from some of the more
recent breakthroughs that seek to change the way we
deal with land, construct new common spaces and
develop strong relationships between urban and rural
areas. These include, for example, the establishment
of the rights of nature in the Bolivian constitution,
the alliances between rural and urban workers in the
Brazilian Landless Peoples’ Movement (MST) and
Via Campesina, urban agriculture in Cuba, and an
increasingly expansive view of the Right to the City
which includes the rights of those who do not live in
cities, and the Slow City movement, which questions
the benefits of shrinking time-space differences
that was made possible by global technology.

Orientalist planning sees global urban problems through
the lens of the wealthy and powerful. It has brought
us to the brink of a climate catastrophe. It has fostered
white privilege and blindness to systemic racial injustice
at home. In response, we must struggle for a truly
democratic and ecological approach to land in which
the primary agency belongs to those who are stewards
of the land and respect the ecological integrity of all
life on earth, and those who struggle for racial and
economic justice. We must be advocates, with them,
for they bear an unrecognized wisdom about how we
humans can live with the earth and not just on the
earth. We must be activists, with Davidoff, Coates,
Klein and the Pope. This can change everything. P²

BOOKS CITED:

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me. NY: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

Papa Francesco, Laudato Si’. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane 2015.
[Translations by T. Angotti]