Dr. C. Aujean Lee and Dr. John C. Harris, professors of Regional + City Planning, recently organized and moderated a roundtable at the 2021 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Conference. The roundtable, titled “Whiteness and Urban Planning: Uncovering what is Unspoken, Assumed, and Missing,” addressed whiteness and white supremacy in planning scholarship, teaching, and pedagogy.
Fields such as urban planning and other built environment disciplines are still overwhelmingly dominated by white practitioners and shaped by white supremacy. In their roundtable, Dr. C Aujean Lee and Dr. John C. Harris defined white supremacy as the sociopolitical system that creates and reinforces white advantages over other groups.
Dr. Lee states, “While built environment disciplines acknowledge that whiteness and white supremacy have shaped our cities (e.g., zoning, enforced segregation, redlining, siting of environmental hazards), there is still more work needed to understand these phenomena given that they are oftentimes unspoken, assumed, or missing. People are also often afraid to directly talk about race, which then affects our ability to understand and address systemic racism. If we can’t talk about a problem, we can’t address it.”
This roundtable gave attendees the opportunity to openly talk about and address the problem of system racism in built environment disciplines. Attendees got to not only hear about current work on whiteness and white supremacy in urban planning, but also were able to share best practices in how whiteness affects their scholarship, teaching, and community engagement.
Roundtable presenters and attendees discussed strategies to talk about whiteness in curriculum and studies that have sought to understand whiteness and white supremacy. The roundtable also included how planning practitioners can further diversity, equity, and inclusion in their fields. These techniques ranged from workplace interactions to promotion guidelines that account for those who do community-based work.
Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture professor and Institute for Quality Communities Director Dr. Amber N. Wiley’s book, Model Schools in the Model City: Race, Planning, and Education in the Nation’s Capital, has received two major honors from the Urban History Association.
Research initiated by Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture alumna Naila Hasan during her master’s studies at the University of Oklahoma has continued through faculty collaboration and resulted in a peer-reviewed publication in HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal.
Gibbs College of Architecture is pleased to announce Esther Thorp, Tyler Boydstun and Chukwuma Nwokoye as the winners of the 2026 Construction Innovation Translation Hub (CIThub) Student Ideas Competition.
