Radical planning challenges paternalistic, top-down approaches to urban planning by centering community-led decision-making, collective power, and accountability. It asks planners to examine how inequities are materially produced in the built environment, and to imagine and practice alternatives rooted in justice, care, and lived experience. Rather than treating planning as neutral or technical, radical planning understands it as relational, political, and deeply connected to questions of power.
The Radical Planning course emerged from student organizing at Taubman College, inspired in part by conversations with Britt Redd, 2022 Sojourner Truth Fellow, whose work surfaced the systemic inequities embedded in planning practice and education. What began as a student-led response has evolved into an ongoing, collaborative initiative that grows and shifts each year based on student insight, community partnership, and reflective practice.
Today, Radical Planning continues as a student-designed, faculty-supported course that explores how planners can act with humility, solidarity, and imagination to support lasting structural change in cities and communities.
This speaker and workshop series is part of a student-led effort to challenge the status quo of planning education and practice. Radical Planning invites practitioners, organizers, and community leaders to share lessons from work rooted in lived experience, accountability, and collective action. Rather than positioning speakers as experts removed from context, the course centers people actively engaged in communities and movements, offering students concrete strategies for justice-centered planning.
Special attention is given to how historical and contemporary planning decisions have produced lasting spatial inequities. Through weekly speakers, workshops, and guided reflection, students explore how power, identity, and positionality shape planning practice. The course encourages students to move beyond critique by collectively imagining and articulating new approaches to planning that are relational, ethical, and grounded in real-world conditions.
Topics explored reflect representative areas such as Indigenous land and sovereignty, racial and spatial justice, community organizing, environmental justice, participatory and insurgent planning, coalition building, and global approaches to community-led development. Speaker confirmations are released on a rolling basis to allow the course to remain responsive and relational.
Goals of the Radical Planning Speaker and Workshop Series
Elevate diverse voices and perspectives through an intersectional lens
Prioritize skill-building and practice-based approaches to planning
Expand existing curriculum with underrepresented tools, topics, and ways of knowing
Cultivate a culture of inclusivity, accountability, and care within Taubman
Foster a harm-aware learning environment that acknowledges planning-generated and systemic trauma