Four Decades of Research on Racial Equity and Justice in Urban Planning

Abstract

How have urban planners addressed racial equity and justice in their scholarship? Using topic modeling and qualitative text coding, this study analyzed articles from twenty top urban planning journals from 1980 to 2019. The findings indicate that only 1.8 percent of planning articles are related to racial equity and justice throughout the four decades, with a slight uptick in attention paid to these topics in recent years. The dearth of planning scholarship on these topics in high-impact journals suggests that planning, as an academic discipline, has not prioritized and centered research and teaching about racial equity and justice.