Seeking Justice and Showing Communities Love Through Planning

American Planning Association

When social justice planner Monique López, AICP, MCRP, MA, talks about her anti-racist, values-driven participatory planning and design firm called Pueblo Planning, she describes its work in no uncertain terms: “I still very much see this as an experiment in love … an experiment in justice. … And coming in with that particular mindset allows me to be flexible, allows me to be open-minded and open-hearted when I am held accountable by community members, when I am held accountable by, by social-justice movements that maybe say, You know, that planning process that we engaged in? It should have been done this way.”

Pueblo Planning has done work with people who are unhoused, earn lower incomes, do not claim English as their first language, are senior, and are part of the LGBTQ community. Monique tells host Courtney Kashima, AICP, stories from some of Pueblo’s projects, merging anecdotes with the wisdom they brought her to create poignant takeaways for listeners. From divulging her planning “origin story” (in her early twenties, fighting a sewage sludge treatment plant that was threatening to come into her neighborhood), to musing on why Sherry Arnstein’s 1969 JAPA article on citizen participation is still relevant today, to revealing why Pueblo Planning couldn’t run headlong to the Zoom platform when the pandemic hit, Monique displays a passion for social justice that will inspire planners working in every sector.