Tired, But Hopeful

Planning scholarship and practice from the vantage point of Portland, Oregon in the past year and a half has left me wishing for a theoretical classification well beyond ‘wicked’. The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated every persistent problem with racial disparities, economic inequality, and housing instability to the point where the word crisis is inadequate. It has revealed how badly hollowed-out our public institutions are, as workers from closed industries wait months for unemployment insurance payments due to outdated software and insufficient staffing (Rogoway, 2020), with state agencies relying on contractors to create the IT and finance systems to disburse emergency rent relief before the hundreds of evictions filed each week proceed to judgment (Biggars, 2021). Coming to the end of summer 2021, we returned to coronavirus restrictions due to the surging Delta variant and watched tent cities appear across Portland as shelters and services for people experiencing houselessness were overtaxed. We are entering a city budget cycle in which the Portland Police Bureau, having experienced a budget freeze in 2020 for the first time in decades, will seek more resources and positions despite over one hundred days of protest and a U.S. Department of Justice finding of ongoing civil rights violations and a need for continued federal oversight. The political environment for progressive planning – for any planning, really – has become toxic: from a national breakdown in democratic functioning; to a state legislature breached by right-wing rioters allowed in the building by an elected lawmaker; to a local backlash against social justice movements by growth machine-gunning developers (Carpenter, 2021). Among my colleagues and comrades – community-based researchers in urban planning; professional planners in state and local governments; and practitioners in community-based organizations – it can feel as though we’ve stalled entirely in our work of shifting plans towards environmental sustainability and social equity, towards community-based models for upstream health, towards anti-displacement policies, and towards interventions supporting well-being instead of policing and incarceration. A year ago, I would have taken inspiration in the words of my editorial colleagues in this journal volume – Andy Inch urging planners to care for the future and be part of a progressive recovery (Inch, 2021); and Crystal Legacy’s exhortations to resist power and reimagine planning itself (Legacy, 2021), referring back to Libby Porter’s description of TINA (‘there is no alternative’) planning that traps planners into a position of acquiescence to existing power relations (Porter, 2011). After 19 months of ‘unprecedented events’, however, exhaustion with even the most radical of planning theories has set in. Instead, along with my students – young, emerging practitioners of planning and community development – I have been exploring the creative world of visionary fiction. Author Alexis Pauline Gumbs pushes us to “vision to the end of what we could imagine [in our movements], and be creative there, be expansive there” (Gumbs, 2020). We’ve created stories about futures without national borders, or where land has been re-indigenized, or with a universal basic income. Visionary fiction practices don’t require that we explain how we’ll get there, at least not just yet. They allow us to exit a reactive present to become more clear about the world we’re aiming for. The stories in my classes have explored how we might restore ecological balance,