YEAR 3: URP 611 Radical Planning Winter 2025

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan

FACULTY LEAD

Dr. Chanel Beebe, Faculty, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan

STUDENT LEADERSHIP TEAM

Irene Nguyen, McKenna Litteral, Saloni Kapoor, Sukhmony Brar, Annie Lively, Chelsea Arenas

ABOUT THIS YEAR

Year 3 marked a significant turning point for the Radical Planning Initiative. For the first time, the course was offered under new faculty leadership, with Dr. Chanel Beebe stepping in as Faculty Lead. The course also moved to a new course number, URP 611, reflecting its maturation as a distinct program within Taubman College. The student leads, many of whom had shaped the prior year's work, spent the summer and fall of 2024 conducting outreach across the MURP community to identify the themes students most wanted to explore. What came back was clear: Indigenous technologies, planning with low-income communities, and coalition building and guerrilla planning. These three themes became the architecture of the semester.

Year 3 also introduced significant pedagogical innovations. Rather than written reflections, students completed three in-class zines over the course of the semester, one per theme, as a form of embodied, creative documentation. These zines served simultaneously as personal reflective tools and as contributions to a collective body of student knowledge. The semester culminated in a Zine Exhibition and Personal Project showcase on April 25, 2025, where students presented original work in formats of their choosing: maps, paintings, manifestos, podcasts, poems, infographics, and how-to guides. The course expanded to 1.5 credits, recognizing the depth of engagement it asked of students. Seventeen students completed evaluations, and the feedback was among the most enthusiastic the RPI has received in any of its three years.

BIG THEMES

• Indigenous technologies as living planning frameworks, including rights of nature, tribal sovereignty, and land-based design approaches rooted in self-determination

• The relationship between planning and displacement, and what it means to design with, not for, low-income communities navigating housing instability and economic exclusion

• Film as a vehicle for radical planning education, and the role of documentary storytelling in making housing justice visible and legible across audiences

• Youth leadership and transformative justice as planning tools, including peer-led organizing models and the role of young people as legitimate experts in their own communities

• Artist-centered coalition building and the role of creative practice in place-shaping, cultural resistance, and radical imagination

• Housing rights and participatory planning at the global scale, including tenant organizing and insurgent planning models in cities of the Global South

• Grassroots power, guerrilla planning, and the use of community organizing as a direct counterforce to exclusionary urban development

• Zine-making, creative documentation, and the idea that how we record knowledge is itself a political act

GUEST SPEAKERS

• Dr. Ted Jojola | Distinguished Professor and Director, Indigenous Design and Planning Institute, University of New Mexico | Topic: Indigenous Design and Planning

• Morgan Fett | PhD Candidate in Urban and Regional Planning, University of Michigan | Topic: Rights of Nature in the Context of Planning in the Global South

• Larry Jacques | Director of Strategic Planning, Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians; Interwoven | Topic: Indigenous Technologies and Tribal Strategic Planning

• Filmmaker [Name TBD] | Topic: A Decent Home film screening and conversation on housing justice and documentary storytelling [Placeholder: confirm filmmaker's full name and affiliation]

• Rukiya Colvin | Sidewalk Detroit | Topic: Planning with Low-Income Communities in Detroit [Placeholder: confirm title/role]

• Pa'Lante Transformative Justice Youth Leader Panel | Pa'Lante, Bronx, NY | Topic: Youth-Led Transformative Justice and Community Planning

• Artist Panel | Topic: Artists' Role in Coalition Building and Place-Shaping [Placeholder: confirm individual panelist names and affiliations]

• Hussain Indorewala | Topic: Housing Rights and Participatory Planning in Mumbai [Placeholder: confirm full affiliation]

• Whitney Hu | Churches United For Fair Housing (CUFFH) | Topic: Coalition Building and Housing Justice Organizing

MAJOR OUTPUTS

Course Booklet

Three In-Class Zines per Student. Each student completed one reflective zine per thematic arc over the course of the semester, created during in-class discussion sessions and drawing on speaker content and peer conversation. These zines collectively form a student-generated archive of the course's intellectual and emotional life.

Personal Project Exhibition and Zine Fest (April 25, 2025). The semester culminated in a public exhibition and celebration held from 4 to 6pm on April 25, 2025, in which students presented original creative projects connecting course themes to real-world examples of radical planning. Projects took a range of forms including maps, zines, paintings, podcasts, poems, manifestos, infographics, short films, and how-to guides. The exhibition marked the first time student-generated work from URP 611 was displayed in a gallery-style format

STUDENT FEEDBACK

What students loved: 

• Students were emphatic about the quality of the guest speakers, consistently naming them as the most transformative element of the course. 

• Hearing directly from community leaders and practitioners working on the front lines of planning justice gave students a sense of the field that no textbook could provide. 

• Many students highlighted the course's emphasis on critical dialogue and the freedom to take genuine intellectual and political stances in the classroom. 

• The student-driven structure, which gave students real agency over the direction of learning, was named repeatedly as something rare and valuable in a graduate program. 

• Zine-making and other hands-on activities were described as memorable, meaningful, and surprisingly generative as reflective tools. 

• Students also praised the informal class environment and the sense that their voices genuinely shaped what happened in the room.

What students wanted more of: 

• A recurring note was disruption from technical difficulties during remote speaker sessions, particularly around audio and microphone quality. 

• Several students wished they had received more background information on guest speakers in advance so they could come to sessions better prepared to engage. 

• A small group of students suggested adding lightweight discussion posts or check-ins between sessions to sustain momentum in weeks without a speaker. 

• A few students noted that the large lecture hall format made the space feel less intimate and harder to navigate for the kind of deep dialogue the course called for. 

• One student also asked for more structured opportunities for student-led discussion relative to instructor facilitation.

What students learned: 

• Students left Year 3 with a deepened sense of the range of tools, scales, and forms that radical planning can take. 

• Many described a shift in their understanding of what technology means in a planning context, expanded to include relationships, zines, art, and community organizing alongside digital systems. 

• Students connected their learning to their own communities and career paths in ways that were often personal. 

• The course reinforced for many that planning's most powerful practitioners are frequently those working outside institutional structures, and that staying radical in professional life requires active, ongoing cultivation. 

• A notable strand of feedback expressed a desire to see the course formally institutionalized, with one student simply writing: "Make her faculty."

By the numbers: 

• 17 students completed course evaluations

• 1.5 credits (increased from previous years)

• 3 thematic arcs: Indigenous Technologies; Planning with Low-Income Communities; Coalition Building and Guerrilla Planning

• 3 in-class zine sessions

• 9 guest speakers across 3 thematic arcs

• 1 culminating Zine Fest and Personal Project Exhibition

• Instructor sensitivity to minority issues: 16 of 17 students rated Strongly Agree

• Student interest in subject increased: 10 of 17 students rated Strongly Agree

A NOTE ON YEAR 3

Year 3 asked a different question than the years before it. Where prior iterations asked "What are practitioners doing?" this year asked something more interior: "What kind of practitioner do you want to become, and how will you document that becoming?" The zine, humble and handmade, became the course's central form. It pushed back against the idea that knowledge production in a graduate program has to look a certain way. Students cut and folded their way through three of the most contested terrains in contemporary planning: the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples over land and technology, the material conditions of low-income communities navigating housing precarity, and the underground, insurgent, artist-driven forms of planning that institutions rarely recognize or reward.

Year 3 also marked the RPI's first full iteration under Chanel Beebe's leadership, and students felt it. The feedback was clear: this was a course where people felt seen, challenged, and genuinely respected. The exhibition on April 25 was not just a final presentation. It was proof of concept. Students made things. They showed them. They shared them with each other. That act, of making knowledge tangible and presenting it in community, is as radical as anything taught from a podium.