YEAR 2: URP 611 Radical Planning Winter 2024

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan

FACULTY LEAD

Dr. Larissa Larsen, Chair and Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning

STUDENT LEADERSHIP TEAM

Annie Lou Lively, Brooke Troxell, Catherine Diggs, Griffin Sproul, Sukhmony Brar, Yutong Zhao Fall 2023 Planning Lead: Vaidehi Shah

FUNDING PARTNERS

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan CEW+ (Center for the Education of Women+), University of Michigan

ABOUT THIS YEAR

In its second year, URP 610 Radical Planning deepened its roots as a student-organized, practitioner-centered learning experience. Building on the momentum of Year 1, the course expanded into two tracks: a one-credit speaker series and a companion three-credit research seminar (URP 610.004) in which students developed original case studies of radical planning efforts under faculty guidance. The six student leads, who had spent the prior fall conducting outreach and soliciting student input, organized a semester arc around three themes that students themselves named as most urgent: Land, Right Relationships with Community, and Technology for Radical Change. 

With 17 pre-course survey respondents representing MURP, SEAS, architecture, and other graduate programs, Year 2 drew an interdisciplinary cohort united by a desire to understand planning outside the capitalist mainstream and to learn from practitioners doing justice work on the ground. The semester included a field trip to Sanctuary Farms in Detroit, a Mapping Justice panel, a Radical Technology panel, and a culminating session featuring student poster presentations, marking the first time research produced in the course was publicly shared. Year 2 also marked the formal introduction of discussion sections, a format students had requested after Year 1 to allow deeper processing of speaker content alongside assigned readings.

BIG THEMES

• Land back, rematriation, and Indigenous sovereignty as active planning frameworks, not historical abstractions

• The colonial roots of the planning profession, including chattel slavery, redlining, and the Doctrine of Discovery, as necessary context for contemporary practice

• Community organizing and the Just Transition as vehicles for reclaiming power from extractive industries and monopoly utilities

• Design justice and the importance of centering lived experience, cross-identity solidarity, and community agency in planning processes

• LGBTQIA+ identity in planning practice, including queer approaches to budgeting, representation, and political risk-taking

• Technology as neither neutral nor inherently radical, and the responsibility of planners to interrogate whose values and biases are encoded in digital tools

• Participatory budgeting, wicked problems, and the practitioner's responsibility to build authentic public relationships while protecting their own wellness

• The limits of top-down planning and the transformative potential of insurgent, co-produced, and community-driven approaches

GUEST SPEAKERS

• Malu Castro (he/they) | PhD Candidate, U-M School for Environment and Sustainability | Topic: Land Back in Hawai'i

• Tim Burke and Apil KC | Graduate Researchers, University of Michigan | Topic: Climate Mitigation and Just Disaster Action

• Wenona T. Singel (she/her) | Associate Professor of Law and Director, Indigenous Law and Policy Center, Michigan State University College of Law | Topic: Indigenous Land Rights

• Michelle Martinez | Inaugural Director, Tishman Center for Social Justice and the Environment, U-M School for Environment and Sustainability | Topic: Community Organizing for Environmental Justice

• Michael Mendez (he/him) | Assistant Professor and Andrew Carnegie Fellow, University of California Irvine | Topic: Localizing Climate Activism

• State Representative Jason Morgan | Michigan House of Representatives, 23rd District | Topic: LGBTQIA+ Planning and Budgeting

• Ezra Kong | Executive Director, Design Future Forum; Co-Founder, Reflex Design Collective | Topic: Designing with Community

• JosE Richard Aviles (they/he/elle) | Equitable Transportation Analyst, Othering and Belonging Institute; Adjunct Professor, UC Berkeley | Topic: Radicalizing Urban Planning, Power Analysis, and Equity in the Built Environment

• Taru (she/her) | PhD Candidate in Urban Planning, Taubman College, University of Michigan | Topic: Insurgent Planning and Deep Democracy: Speaking Truth to Power

• Yodit Mesfin Johnson (she/her) and Jessica A.S. Letaw (she/her) | Co-Founders, FutureRoot | Topic: Returning Home: Community-Driven Planning, Power and Vision Building

• Juan Jhong Chung (he/they) | Climate Justice Director, Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition | Topic: Planning for a Clean and Just Energy Future

• Valerie Lemmie (she/her) | Director of Exploratory Research, Kettering Foundation | Topic: Planning and Co-production: Working with the Public to Develop Inclusive Land Use Policies and Practices

• Mike Huggins (he/him) | Retired City Manager and Community Development Director, Eau Claire, Wisconsin | Topic: Wicked Planning Problems and Participatory Budgeting

• Germaine Halegoua and Chanel Beebe | Associate Professor of Communication and Media, U-M LSA (Halegoua); Faculty, Taubman College (Beebe) | Topic: Radical Technology Panel

• Nick Okafor and Matt Williams | Founder, trubel&co (Okafor); Senior Advisor on Neighborhood Economic Development, City of Detroit Mayor's Office (Williams) | Topic: Mapping Justice

• [Brazil Housing Speaker] | [Affiliation TBD] | Topic: Affordability and Sustainability in Housing in Brazil

MAJOR OUTPUTS

Course Booklet: URP 610 Radical Planning, Winter 2024. A designed, printed document produced by the student leadership team documenting the three thematic arcs of the semester, including speaker profiles, session takeaways, and student reflection prompts. The booklet serves as a lasting artifact of the course and a resource for future cohorts.

Student Case Study Poster Presentations (URP 610.004). Students enrolled in the three-credit research seminar developed original case studies of radical planning efforts, which were publicly presented during the final session on April 22, 2024. [Placeholder: if titles of specific case studies are available, they can be listed here.]

Field Trip to Sanctuary Farms, Detroit. On March 29, 2024, students visited Sanctuary Farms in Detroit and met with founder and director Jon Kent on site. The visit grounded classroom discussions of urban agriculture and community food sovereignty in lived practice.

STUDENT FEEDBACK

What students loved: 

• Students consistently named the quality and range of speakers as the most meaningful part of the course. 

• They appreciated hearing from practitioners and researchers who brought personal stakes to their work, from people like Michelle Martinez, whose passion for environmental justice work in Detroit was described as palpable, to Ezra Kong, whose reflections on staying radical within institutional constraints resonated with students thinking about their own career trajectories. 

• Students were moved by sessions that connected lived experience to theory, including Malu Castro's framing of land back as both a moral imperative and an ecological necessity, and Yodit Mesfin Johnson and Jessica Letaw's grounding of white supremacy culture in specific neighborhood histories students recognized. 

• Many students named the interdisciplinary composition of the cohort as a strength, appreciating that the course brought together perspectives from MURP, SEAS, architecture, and beyond.

What students wanted more of: 

• Students asked for more recorded sessions and greater clarity about asynchronous options before the add/drop deadline. 

• Several wanted deeper theoretical grounding to complement the practitioner focus, including more engagement with international examples and global radical planning movements. 

• Specific topics that came up as gaps in the survey included food sovereignty, prison abolition and decarceration planning, disability-inclusive planning, participatory planning models, guerrilla and tactical urbanism, and greater representation of Black planners as speakers. 

• A number of students wanted more structured time to work through and apply what they were hearing, rather than only receiving and reflecting.

What students learned: 

• Students left the course with a substantially expanded sense of what planning is and where it comes from. 

• Many articulated a new awareness of planning's roots in racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and chattel slavery. 

• They developed vocabulary for concepts like power mapping, climate embodiment, insurgent planning, co-production, and the Just Transition that they expected to carry into their professional lives. 

• Students described a shift in how they thought about their role in communities, moving from a service orientation toward something more reciprocal and accountable. 

• Several named specific sessions as career-changing, including the Mapping Justice panel and the technology discussion, which pushed them to think about equity and ethics in domains they had not previously connected to radical planning.

By the numbers: 

• 17 students completed the pre-course survey

• Two course tracks offered: 1-credit speaker series and 3-credit research seminar

• 15+ guest speakers across 13 sessions

• 3 thematic arcs: Land, Right Relationships with Community, Technology for Radical Change

• 1 field trip: Sanctuary Farms, Detroit

A NOTE ON YEAR 2

Year 2 of Radical Planning arrived with more infrastructure, more ambition, and more student ownership than the year before. The student leads had spent months in outreach before the semester even began, listening for what their peers most needed to understand. What they heard became the course: land, relationships, technology. Three themes that, taken together, ask a profession to reckon with how it has historically been deployed as an instrument of harm and to imagine what it might become in different hands.

The course that emerged was not tidy. It surfaced hard histories, opened questions without clean answers, and asked students to sit with discomfort alongside practitioners who had learned to do the same. What it also produced was community. Students from architecture, environmental policy, social work, and urban planning found themselves in the same room, working toward a shared vocabulary for justice. The case study seminar gave some of those students a place to go deeper, translating what they heard in speaker sessions into original research.

Year 2 also marked an important formalization of the RPI's commitment to student-generated knowledge. The booklet, the poster presentations, the field trip, and the discussion sections all reflected a course that was not simply delivering content but building something, a body of practice, a network of relationships, a set of habits of mind that students would carry with them. The work of radical planning does not end at the classroom door. Year 2 made that clear.