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DECOLONISING PLANNING: A THREAD
Yas Beebeejaun @yasminah_b & I have been thinking about planning & colonialism. We know the COVID-19 pandemic is disproportionately affecting the BAME community.* Is the UK planning system partly to blame? 1/15
https://www.tcpa.org.uk/the-right-answers-to-the-right-questions
Yas Beebeejaun @yasminah_b & I have been thinking about planning & colonialism. We know the COVID-19 pandemic is disproportionately affecting the BAME community.* Is the UK planning system partly to blame? 1/15
https://www.tcpa.org.uk/the-right-answers-to-the-right-questions
After WW2, the BAME community were forced to settle in poorer urban areas, where housing was lower quality. Discriminatory labour and housing markets, exclusion from financial products like mortgages & racial assumptions in housing allocation systems were partly to blame. 2/15
More recently, racial assumptions have been built into algorithmic types of decision-making around things like credit scores. 3/15
Plus, the move away from Equality Impact Assessments has concealed the negative impact of built environment reforms on the BAME community (with permitted development a particular area for concern). 4/15
Beyond this, planners have located transport infrastructure, waste incinerators, and industry close to poorer neighbourhoods. Consequently, the UK BAME community is badly affected by issues such as bad air quality and exposure to toxic pollutants. 5/15
This has significant health impacts for people, which are worsened by the fact that they are also more likely to live in places with little access to greenspace, or poor quality greenspace. 6/15
But if we shift to an international lens, we begin to see a powerful intersectional relationship between these environmental injustices in the UK and the uneven geographical harms of climate change in the global south. 7/15
Historically, the global north has driven greenhouse gas emissions. And the development of fossil fuel capitalism in the UK was made possible by extractive forms of colonialism, involving black slavery and coerced labour. 8/15
Today, the harms of these emissions, in the shape of climate change, fall heavily on vulnerable, poor black and indigenous communities in the global south. 9/15
The built environment is a huge contributor to this problem – some estimates suggest construction and buildings account for nearly 40% of global energy use and related CO2 emissions. 10/15
Planning decisions in the UK are therefore not, in any way, straightforwardly “local”. They have global impacts. 11/15
Planning needs to confront this historical and geographically uneven legacy. BAME political and professional representation within planning, and a much greater attention to racial and ethnic inequalities and experience could help. 12/15
Planning should also lead a national conversation about who we lionize in public spaces, and why. 13/15
And our article has some other take-home suggestions about how we might move forward in a way that confronts this racist legacy! Check it out! 14/15 https://www.tcpa.org.uk/the-right-answers-to-the-right-questions
* NOTE: BAME is a contested term, but it has a political history rooted in the struggles of British Black and Asian communities (and other minorities). 15/15
