SEEKING LANDED SECURITY IN (DE)INDUSTRIALIZED DETROIT AND (POST)COLONIAL MEXICAN EJIDOS [2022]
[CRITICAL PLANNING JOURNAL 25: PLANNING IN CRISIS | DOWNLOAD THE ARTICLE HERE]
Critical Planning Journal is a peer-reviewed, graduate student-run journal housed in the UCLA Urban Planning Department. CPJ began in 1993 as a forum for the urban studies and planning communities to debate current issues, showcase emerging research, and propose new ideas concerning cities and regions. The journal attracts submissions from scholars, graduate students, and practitioners from across disciplinary boundaries and from around the world. The core mission of Critical Planning Journal is to promote criticality and social justice. This issue was edited by Daniel Iwama and Jessica Bremner.
The article was cowritten by Samuel Maddox and me.
ISSUE ABSTRACT:
In 2020, social life is consumed by crises. Climate change and environmental degradation; COVID-19 and the shortcomings of government responses; white supremacy and police violence; pending mass eviction; fragile democracies; struggles for sovereignty and autonomy; the rise in authoritarianism. In spite of their intersection and entanglement, these crises are often treated as separate and terminable moments. What results is an everyday that is dominated by learning to plan during, rather than for, crisis. For its 25th volume, Critical Planning revisits planning and crisis. We invite submissions that explore planning’s ability to exacerbate or mitigate ongoing and future crises.
We seek to understand planning and crisis, and their relationship, in new terms. We welcome perspectives that reject the temporal notions often associated with crisis, such as event, singularity, and newness. Planners have failed to take seriously decades of calls for course correction, which would center BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) experiences and the more-than-human, and reimagine economy and state. But, planning is also found in the counter-movements, advocacy, organizations, scholar-activism, and daily practices of people who oppose these unequal outcomes and often the State apparatus itself. Therefore, we encourage submissions that take into account planning as a field of inquiry and practice that produces, intensifies, or subverts race-, class-, and gender-based inequalities and environmental degradation.
When planning produces tools for reifying or rectifying the structures of inequity and crisis, what direction can planners take? How does prioritization happen across multiple crises? How do the inadequacies of past planning cultures call for new ways of doing planning? Of managing crises? Who are planners planning for/with, who is being left out, and how does this exclusion/inclusion lead to crises? To what extent are the needs of future generations being accounted for amidst the intensity of the needs of today? These are some of the questions motivating Volume 25’s Editorial Collective.
ARTICLE ABSTRACT:
The utility of land as a form of security is nothing new; however, the exact interpretation of “security” has shifted during times of crisis. Security through landedness can mean grounds from which to extract resources; a commodity to be bought, managed, and sold; a tract from which to draw sustenance; or a space for habitation and community building. This essay explores these many conflicting fluctuations in the identity projected upon land, by both the state and private interests, through the rise and fall of two specific patterns of land tenure: the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan and the agrarian, communal ejidal settlements of Mexico.
