This document discusses colonial urbanism and its legacies in cities such as detention centers, segregated neighborhoods, and food deserts. It asserts that cities are designed to reproduce social hierarchies and that planners act to protect wealthy white cisgender interests. It presents principles of insurgent planning from Faranak Miraftab, including being transgressive, counter-hegemonic, and imaginative. It emphasizes that decolonization requires centering indigenous dispossession and working with indigenous communities in reclaiming land. It asks how a radically imagined just city could function and what collectively developing just cities for mutual liberation would look like.

1. Planning Just Cities :
Rejecting Colonial Urbanism to
Radically Imagine the Future
Samara Almonte (she/her/ella)
B.A Urban Planning & Sustainable Development
Western Washington University ‘19
Alto Pacifico / Coast Salish Land

2. Colonial Urbanism :
Legacies in Cities
● Detention centers
● School-Prison-Pipeline
● Food deserts
● Segregated neighborhoods
● Native reservations
● Water pollution (i.e Flint, Michigan)
● Gentrification
● “War on Drugs”
● Exploitation of all types of workers

3. Space & Tools of Colonial Urbanism
● Cities are more than physical spaces
● They are spaces designed for social projects
○ e.g heteronormativity, class & racial hierarchies, abled-bodied
● Planners act as tools of the state & neoliberal economy to reproduce
social structures (David Harvey)
● Planners’ objective : “Plan for the public interests”
○ The public interest = protection of the White, cis, and wealthy

4. Insurgent Planning Principles - Faranak Miraftab
1. Insurgent (radical) planning is
transgressive in time, place and action
a. Time: Intergenerational knowledge &
hxstorical context
b. Place: “transgresses national boundaries
by building transnational solidarities of
marginalized people”
c. Action: redefines the idea of “citizenship”

5. Insurgent Planning Principles - Faranak Miraftab
2. Insurgent planning is counter-hegemonic

6. Insurgent Planning Principles - Faranak Miraftab
3. Insurgent planning is imaginative
Art : Joshua Mays
Art : Sadekaronhes Esquivel

7. Decolonization & Radical Planning
“DECOLONIZATION IS NOT A METAPHOR. Gentrification is a symptom of colonialism, but not
colonialism itself. Reasserting that gentrification is (the new) colonialism is not only grossly
incorrect, but it is also extremely anti-native/anti-indigenous, as colonialism still exists and all non-
native people continue to occupy indigenous lands that native people CONTINUE to be
dispossessed from. Even people experiencing gentrification still have more access to indigenous
homelands than the people whose ancestors have lived on them for tens of thousands of years
do..If gentrification [urban planning] activism doesn't center the original dispossession, genocide, &
removal of the indigenous population from that land (and work with that community in reclamation)
it will NEVER be a decolonized act, it will NEVER be liberatory, it will NEVER NOT be anti-native, and
the fight against it will NEVER be successful...” - Savage Feminism (FB post)

8. Developing Just Cities
How does your radically imagined city function?
What do physical “just” spaces look like?
How can our collective imaginations
develop just cities for mutual liberation?