Resisting Displacement and Dispossession
Friday June 21st
Pratt Institute, Higgins Hall
61 St James Pl, Brooklyn, NY 11238
8AM – Breakfast and registration
Come early for coffee and breakfast snacks!
8:45AM – Morning Keynote: Samuel Stein
This year's Planners Network conference comes at a decisive political moment: a time of mass displacement as well as place-based struggles; a time of climate peril and growing awareness of environmental precarity; and a time of rightward drifts and left-wing possibilities. This heightened context makes the dire need for progressive planning ever more clear. The meaning of progressive planning, however, remains elusive, and raises a trio of important questions for practitioners, activists, and theorists.
Samuel Stein is a PhD candidate in geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an urban studies instructor at Hunter College. He is the author of Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (Verso 2019). He is a participant in various tenant and community groups fighting gentrification and displacement in New York City, and beyond.
9:30AM – Concurrent Panels Session I
click on each panel for more info
11:15AM – Concurrent Panels Session II
click on each panel for more info
Building Tenant Power
and Holding Banks Accountable for Predatory Equity
1:30 PM - Multi-City Plenary
Montreal | New York City | Tacoma, WA | Jackson, MS
The plenary panelists will help familiarize us with local forms of resistance that are grounded in reasserting community control, whether through the struggle for indigenous land reclamation, food sovereignty, youth and community organizing, land trusts, the arts, economic empowerment, or by recasting threats so that we understand them as issues of racial and social injustice. Panelists from Kanehsatà:ke (just outside of Montreal, Quebec); Tacoma, Washington; New York, New York; and Jackson, Mississippi will be teleconferenced into this joint, live plenary that kicks off a cross-national dialogue of resistance.
Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel
Tiohtià:ke/Montreal
3:00PM – Concurrent Panels Session III
click on each panel for more info
4:45 PM – Closing Panel | Then and Now, Inside Out: Planning as a Social Movement
Since the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, city planners, diverse urbanists and activists aligned with progressive social movements have challenged plans and planning that reinforce social and economic injustice and promote the destruction of cities by US military aggression. From Planners for Equal Opportunity to Planners Network today and beyond, what has changed and what remains the same? How have the movements for racial and gender justice reshaped our roles and what challenges face the new generation of planners inside and outside the citadels of the planning establishment? Examples of recent initiatives in New York include the work of the APA Metro Chapter Diversity Committee, BlackSpace, and the Student Planners Action Network.
Our panelists represent a spectrum of planners whose progressivism and activism have taken form through collective action. They will address the validity, utility, and future of planning as a social movement.
