For several months now, I have been part of a collaborative group working to craft a Symposium about the future of Colorado. We titled it “Planning to Thrive: Equity, Justice & Integrated Strategies for Colorado's Future” and intend to present a narrative of both reality and hope. The opportunity presented itself when a mentor of mine, Dr. Rocky Piro, decided to retire from a career at University of Colorado, Denver, and move to join his family in the Pacific North West.
He’ll also do some teaching at University of Washington, probably from the first comprehensive and integrative textbook for Sustainable Planning, that he was forced to write, out of a deep lack in the field, and an even deeper call to serve and guide the conversation, to share a lifetime of expertise, insight, and guidance.
And that too is why he called the Symposium into being at all. By the time you read this, the Symposium will be either on its way or long over. It is being held in downtown Denver on Thursday, June 16th, and I am both the event moderator and the final speaker.
I am overwhelmed by this, and excited by it. I studied for and received my Master’s in City and Regional Planning over 20 years ago, and have been in professional ministry ever since. I do sometimes work in planning related fields like community organizing or site plan review, and the policy side of my education has served me very well.
But I have never worked as a planner, I just think like one.
One of the things that planners are trained to do is to identify and adapt existing systems that are brought to bear on their municipalities, the regions being studied and planned, the broader community contexts. We should be the holders of the collaborations and tables, as we are (should be) trained in interdisciplinary language, tools, and techniques. Comprehensive planning, planning that is regenerative and community based, realistic and diverse in its modes and schemes, is possible. This happens not by re-creating new systems, nor by doubling down into any one existing system, but by uplifting and leveraging the relationships between the systems, by seeking out and dispersing the models and programs that develop through use, connection, and experience.
When I was in school 25 years ago, the newest models in City Planning were Smart Growth and Collaborative Planning, two great movements that sought to control and guide growth into more efficient and community-oriented patterns and sought to bring more voices into the planning process. A group committed to Public Participation in the Geographic Information Sciences became my only real planning touchstone, outside of practitioner friends.
And so I hadn’t realized that these ideas, these building blocks of a healthier and more sustainable world, had been set aside for developer profit margins, that a community based definition of highest and best use was being ignored for a bottom line, an economic benefit that helped only a few people.
And so here we are again, decades later, having the same debates but this time with a much greater urgency.
I’m heading to bed, and will hopefully be given some sense of what I can tell 200 influential policy makers, deeply authentic frontline community members, and peers and colleagues in the equity and justice work that will bring a sense of practical hope, a grounded direction that embraces the gifts and skills of our systems, and yet does not serve those systems themselves, but the commons, the greater good.
