Embedded In Urban Planning
Whittier College Students Learn about Urban Ecosystems
Intentionally walking around the City of Whittier offers new perspectives to many things that you might otherwise not notice. Intentional walking is shorthand for closely observing your surroundings, such as the historical houses across the street from campus, the courthouse, city hall, the public library, bus stops, benches, parking lots (or lack there of), sidewalks, trees. All these things can easily be missed on your daily commute, but intentional walking can provide opportunities to learn much about our urban environment.
This is what a group of college students, primarily from Whittier College, but also some students from other schools such as Cal Poly Pomona and even a student from USC getting her masters in urban planning did on November 11th after meeting at Mendenhall Hall on Whittier College’s campus. The Embedded Planning Walking Tour was organized by Whittier Professor Dr. Cinzia Fissore and Johnathan Pacheco Bell.
The two previously met when Pacheco Bell, an urban planner and the creator of Embedded Planning, the goal of which is to get urban planners out from behind their desks and into the city streets, spoke on “Why be an Urban Planner?” The ocassion was the Hartley House “Jobs for Justice” discussion series hosted by Dr. Rebecca Overmeyer-Velazquez last spring. Overmeyer-Velazquez then asked Pacheco Bell if he could do a community walk with students specifically in Whittier. Overmyer-Velazquez was inspired by the idea that “we could talk about urban planning issues and embedded planning while actually living the values of it, putting your feet on the street.
Fissore later reached out to Pacheco Bell to see if he could do another tour around Uptown Whittier for her Urban Ecosystem Ecology class. “I explained to him how having a hands-on experience would be valuable for the students to appreciate an additional piece that pertains to urban planning and it would be great to hear it directly from him,” said Fissore.
During Pacheco Bell’s guided tour, we started walking towards Mar Vista Street, and stopped at the Los Angeles Whittier Courthouse. Right in front of the courthouse is one of the few bus stops around with shade and seating. However, the bus bench has handlebars in between the spots to prevent people from laying down on them. This design choice falls under the practice of hostile architecture, among other practices such as implementing metal skateboard deterrents on railings. Hostile architecture is defined by having the same elements of the environment but intentionally displacing people in the community, particularly teens, working class, and homeless people. In a sense, the built environment is pushing you away.
Following the walk, Pacheco Bell said, “The purpose of the walk was to understand the built environment, to understand what urban planning looks like, interact with social history and uplift embedded planning as an idea for potential future planners that are in the class that I was trying to recruit into the planning world.”
“It’s pushing your work to the street level and building partnerships on the ground so that you’re there for people, not just for one particular project and then you disappear.”
According to Professor Fissore, her Urban Ecosystem Ecology class studies “urban ecosystems more broadly, and we are really trying to understand what is unique to urban ecosystems.” She points out that there is an emphasis on not seeing urban ecosystems in a negative light, but instead with objectivity. “We are trying to simply understand how urban ecosystems function, what’s contributing to its functioning, the role of humans, but especially look at the relationship between humans and nature and how they influence each other in a city setting,” says Fissore.
Andrea Wainwright, a fourth year Environmental Science and French major at Whittier College taking the course describes it as an ecology class, but within cities. “It’s about how humans have made a built environment and how it affects nature,” says Wainwright. One of the class projects involved choosing a city and looking into its waste management practices.
So how does this class relate to embedded planning?
First, embedded planning is a term created by Johnathan Pacheco Bell to describe city planning that prioritizes street-level engagement. Typically as a city planner, you rarely go out to community meetings or onto the street, which can create distance between the planner and the community planning is meant to serve. With embedded planning, planners are constantly interacting with community members by having meeting at parks, libraries, homes, churches, businesses, and even bus stops. Events such as the recent walking tour are one of the community outreach methods Pacheco Bell describes that helps create plans, policies, and regulations that better understand the everyday challenges communities deal with.
Fissore’s class and embedded planning interconnect in a few different ways. First, environmental justice is a big topic for both. “Air pollution, access to parks, and access to cleaner air depends a lot on the zip code which is frequently associated with social mobility, demographic, and race,” says Fissore.
During the guided walk we discussed how communities might have a hard time speaking to city planners about what they want to see in their neighborhoods due to language barriers, lack of internet access or fluency, inaccessible community meeting times, and the uninviting atmospheres of typical meeting spaces such as city halls.
Another connection could be seen in the December 2 presentatios Fissore had her class do on different urban ecosystem topics at an EPA Action Day event at Whittier College. Tiah Sherman, a student who presented on air pollution and redlining — thee discriminatory practice in real estate and other financial services that denies access to minorities — said learning about racism’s impact on city planning stuck out to her. Aidan Moore liked how the class had an environmental justice focus and how urban planning can be used to solve a problems. James Koike thought learning that redlined communities are usually black or hispanic and are disproportionately affected by pollution related health issues was eye-opening. Another student, Khloie Avilas, said she liked learning about green spaces in the class.
Pockets of green spaces in cities are not only hot spots for biodiversity, they also benefit the communities. We may miss smaller green spaces in our own communities as we walk by them everyday. This phenomenon is called biodiversity blindness, and it is when plants or animals are overlooked in urban environments. “We are very passive users in my opinion of the city environment and we don’t understand why certain things are there or the reason why a building is built in a certain way versus another or even when we look into green spaces the benefits we get out of it,” says Pacheco Bell. “I feel myself as a passive user sometimes.”
After meeting Dr. Overmeyer-Velazquez at a conference on environmental injustice several years ago, Pacheco Bell has visited with Whittier College and its students several times, and he is sure to come again. Staying in touch with communities is another pillar of the embedded planning that Pacheco Bell promoted. “That’s really what embedded planning is about,” he says. “It’s pushing your work to the street level and building partnerships on the ground so that you’re there for people, not just for one particular project and then you disappear. That’s one of the major problems in planning. Instead it’s about building those relationships in the spaces of the community.”
