Planning for Change: DCP's Commitment to Addressing Racist Practices in Planning

The City of Atlanta has a story like no other American city. It began as a small railroad terminus and grew into a hub of education, transportation, culture, and business; and since the Civil War has played a central role in redeeming for all the promises made during our country’s founding. For some, it is a place of opportunity and progress—a place to learn, work, create, and call home. For some, it is a place of struggle, imperfection, and inequity. For still others, opportunity and progress remain only a dream.

Atlanta is called a “City too Busy to Hate”—a motto coined during turbulent times in the city at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. However, this motto is rooted in a system of public-private agreements and arrangements to avoid outright public conflict in exchange for progress and stability for some, but little long-term change for many. Further, this motto has become a shield distracting the City from fully acknowledging its history and the resulting inequities that continue to this day. In some ways, Atlanta has been too busy to solve the problems related to hate.

Historically, the Department of City Planning has used racist and other discriminatory practices on behalf of, as well as, against residents and communities in the City. They are in our development plans, zoning and design regulations, code enforcement work, housing and economic development programs, and other planning activities. Many favored newcomers at the expense of those who truly built Atlanta or they ravaged neighborhoods in the name of “progress”. Furthermore, these inequities and biases are not abstract notions read about only in books or screens—they can be seen, felt, and experienced all around the city, every day. They live in our neighborhoods, businesses, streets, and parks, to name a few. The Department of City Planning must take decisive and direct corrective action to address its role in the inequity and racism found in Atlanta and make the city the place we think it is. As a part of this difficult journey, the Department of City Planning must examine all its actions—from the seemingly mundane to the visionary and strategic—to correct past mistakes that continue to this day. Our work must be guided by and responsive to all people who truly love the City of Atlanta.

While this will be a long journey, the Department of City Planning will take the following initial steps to begin down this road of reconciliation:

• Create a volunteer, internal task force to compile and implement staff recommendations that will serve as the beginning of a more equitable and just Department;

• Share specific examples from the City’s past illustrating the racist practices and programs administered or sanctioned by the Department;

• Survey our own employees to assess their experiences with racism and inequity in the Department and how to address it;

• Share with the public self-identified examples of bias in the Department’s current work;

• Actively engage the public to learn what we should do differently to confront racism and inequity in our work;

• Commit as a Department to understanding Dr. King’s vision of a “Beloved Community” as described in Atlanta City Design and use those values to reshape what we do;

• Use significant upcoming initiatives, including the update of the Comprehensive Development Plan, to enshrine these values as specific, defensible criteria for evaluating future planning decisions; and

• Using those enshrined values, discontinue our role as just a referee or general moderator for planning decisions and proactively shape an equitable and just future for the city.

  We must take this journey while at the same time embracing and respecting those who came before us who created true opportunity and process in Atlanta through struggle and hard work. Further, we will not let our history, culture, and communities will be lost in this effort—they will be strengthened along the way and made the cornerstone of a truly great and unique Atlanta. The Atlanta we know today is the result of decisions made in the past—decisions that we cannot undo. Therefore, our decisions today must confront this past while planning for a future that is equitable and just for everyone who loves Atlanta.

  Together we can make Atlanta truly a place for everybody. Join us in this effort.