YEAR 4: URP 611 Radical Planning Winter 2026

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, Hoa Le

FUNDING PARTNERS

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan

ABOUT THIS YEAR

Year 4 of the Radical Planning Initiative arrives with a deepened sense of who it is and what it is building toward. The course continues under Dr. Chanel Beebe's leadership, now with a fully redesigned assignment structure organized around a three-part arc: Reflection, Connection, and Confidence. This arc grew directly out of the prior year's student feedback and the team's ongoing work on an RPI Theory of Change, which holds that transformative planning practice requires continuous cycles of internal reflection, relationship-building across difference, and embodied confidence in one's own positionality and commitments.

The student leadership team, which spent Summer and Fall 2025 conducting outreach, hiring a new co-design member, and building deeper institutional relationships across Taubman College and the University of Michigan, brought a curriculum that extends and complicates the questions raised in Year 3. Where Year 3 asked students to explore Indigenous technologies, housing justice, and coalition building as distinct domains, Year 4 asks how these domains live inside practitioners and communities simultaneously, and what it means to show up in planning work from that integrated understanding.

The semester also marked the formalization of RPI Allies, a new student engagement pathway that offers students who want to go deeper a flexible, interest-driven way to contribute to the initiative beyond the classroom. And for the first time, the course assigned structured weekly reflection entries alongside the zine-making process, building a richer archive of student thinking across the full arc of the semester. The culminating Zine Fest (Final Exhibition and Networking Celebration), scheduled for April 28, 2026, brings students, alumni, practitioners, and community partners together to share the creative work students have made and the networks they have begun to build.

BIG THEMES

• Identity, positionality, and power as the foundational starting point for radical planning practice, before strategy or tools

• Hip hop, art, and creative culture as legitimate and generative forms of city planning and community-making

• Disability justice and accessibility in planning, and the gap between accommodation and genuine design for full participation

• Community journalism and hyperlocal media as planning infrastructure, surfacing neighborhood knowledge that institutional processes miss

• Black food sovereignty, land stewardship, and the politics of who controls what communities eat and grow

• Queer youth, connection, and the planner's responsibility to design spaces and systems that affirm rather than erase

• The sonic dimension of cities, and what urban noise research reveals about whose comfort and whose presence planners prioritize

• Coalition building, facilitation, and the embodied skills that make collective action sustainable over time

• Mapping communities and networks as a form of relational knowledge-making and a tool for staying connected beyond the classroom

GUEST SPEAKERS

• Ginsberg Center | U-M Edward Ginsberg Center for Community Engagement | Topic: Anti-Racist Community Engagement Workshop

• Ivi Lewis | Topic: Hip Hop as City Planning [Placeholder: confirm full affiliation and pronouns]

• Alan Heijl | SparkAccess | Topic: Disability Advocacy in Planning [Placeholder: confirm full title and pronouns]

• Lindsay Calka | Ground Cover News | Topic: Community Journalism and Planning [Placeholder: confirm full title and pronouns]

• shakara tyler saba | Topic: Black Food Sovereignty [Placeholder: confirm full affiliation, title, and pronouns]

• Keith Cheng | PhD Candidate, Urban and Regional Planning, University of Michigan | Topic: Queer Youth and Connection [Placeholder: confirm pronouns]

• Black Bottoms Archive | Topic: [Placeholder: confirm speaker name(s), affiliation, and topic framing]

• Jennifer Hsieh | Topic: Urban Noise Research in Taiwan [Placeholder: confirm full affiliation and pronouns]

• Office of Community Impact and Engagement (OCIE), SEAS | University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability | Topic: Facilitation Workshop

MAJOR OUTPUTS

Weekly Reflection Entries. Students completed short written reflections after each speaker session, choosing from a curated Reflection Bank or connecting the session to their own emerging questions. These entries, nine in total across the semester, form the most detailed longitudinal record of student thinking the RPI has generated in any year.

Reflection Zine and Connection Zine. Building on the zine practice established in Year 3, students completed two in-class zines: a Reflection Zine synthesizing themes from the first half of the semester with the support of the SEAS Community Impact Collective, and a Connection Zine mapping the networks, organizations, mentors, and questions students want to carry forward beyond the course.

Radical Planning Zine Fest: Final Exhibition for URP 611 Winter 2026 (April 28, 4-6pm). You are invited. On April 28 from 4 to 6pm, students will present original creative work connecting course themes to real-world examples of radical planning in formats of their own choosing: paintings, podcasts, zines, maps, timelines, short films, installations, performances, design concepts, and more. The Zine Fest brings together students, alumni, practitioners, and community partners in a shared celebration of the semester's learning and the relationships students have built. Come see what radical planning looks like when students get to define it themselves. RSVP at tinyurl.com/RPI-ZineFest26.

RPI Allies Launch. Year 4 marked the formal introduction of RPI Allies, a flexible student engagement pathway offering community building, curriculum feedback, issue-based advocacy, and outreach opportunities for students who want to participate in shaping the initiative beyond the classroom.

A NOTE ON YEAR 4

By its fourth year, the Radical Planning Initiative has become something it could not have been at the start: a place with a history. Students arrive having heard about it from people who took it before them. The student lead team carries institutional knowledge across years. The zine-making has a rhythm. The exhibition has a shape. And the question the course keeps returning to, how does change actually happen, has accumulated layers of meaning from every cohort that has sat with it.

Year 4 tries to hold all of that lightly. The Reflection, Connection, Confidence arc is not a formula. It is an invitation, offered to students at the beginning of their professional formation, to understand that radical practice is not primarily a set of techniques. It is a way of being present to yourself, to other people, and to the communities whose futures your work will touch. The speakers this year, from hip hop as city planning to urban noise research in Taiwan to disability justice to Black food sovereignty, trace a through line that the curriculum team has been building toward: that there is no neutral planning, and that the most important thing a planner can develop is not a skill set but a formed and honest sense of what they are for.

The culminating Radical Planning Zine Fest, the Final Exhibition for URP 611 Winter 2026, brings students, alumni, practitioners, and community partners together on April 28 from 4 to 6pm to share the creative work students have made and the networks they have begun to build. All are welcome. RSVP at tinyurl.com/RPI-ZineFest26.