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Planning (process and substance)

Planning is a systematic, creative way to shape the future of places, from neighborhoods and cities to regions and beyond (ACSP). Process is how decisions get made (analysis, engagement, adoption, implementation); substance is what gets decided (land use, housing, transportation, environment, infrastructure).

General Plan

The long-range policy document every California city and county must adopt to guide physical development. It sets out goals, policies, maps, and implementation programs, must be internally consistent, and serves as the foundation that zoning and other land use decisions must be consistent with.

Required elements

Land Use, Circulation, Housing, Conservation, Open Space, Noise, Safety, and Environmental Justice (for jurisdictions with disadvantaged communities). Some jurisdictions have added requirements (for example, air quality provisions for cities and counties in the San Joaquin Valley). Cities may adopt optional elements, such as health or climate.

Implementation tools

Zoning ordinances, specific plans, area or neighborhood plans, subdivision regulations, and capital improvement programs translate General Plan policy into decisions on the ground.

SB 1000 (2016) and the Environmental Justice element

Requires cities and counties with disadvantaged communities to adopt an EJ element, or integrate EJ goals, policies, and objectives into other elements, when they update two or more elements. It must address pollution exposure (including air quality), public facilities, food access, safe and sanitary homes, physical activity, civic engagement, and prioritizing improvements for disadvantaged communities.

Disadvantaged communities (DACs)

In California, areas disproportionately burdened by pollution and socioeconomic vulnerability, commonly identified with CalEnviroScreen (see Week 4), or low-income areas with disproportionate exposure and health risk.

Infrastructure as a planning lens

Public works (water, energy, roads, parks, libraries) are where planning decisions become material. Our Day 1 sort into “must-have” and “should-have” systems returns in Week 5 as the primary/secondary distinction.

Housing and climate risk

The UCSC News reading connects California’s housing affordability crisis to climate disaster risk. Housing pressure shapes where people can afford to live and how well they can prepare for and recover from disasters.

Why the regional scale

Many sustainability problems cross city lines: commutes, housing markets, air basins, watersheds, and transit networks. City-by-city planning also invites fiscal competition and exclusion. Regional planning can coordinate growth, infrastructure, and conservation across jurisdictions.

Environmental review (NEPA and CEQA)

NEPA (federal, 1970) and CEQA (California, 1970) require public agencies to study and disclose the environmental effects of discretionary projects before approving them, through documents such as an Environmental Impact Statement (NEPA) or Environmental Impact Report (CEQA). CEQA goes further than NEPA by requiring agencies to adopt feasible mitigation for significant impacts.

Public disclosure and comment

Environmental review is often described as procedural, yet comment letters on environmental documents are one of the most direct formal channels communities have for raising environmental justice concerns about a project.

Federal review since 2025

In 2025 the Council on Environmental Quality rescinded its government-wide NEPA regulations, leaving agencies to set their own procedures, and the Supreme Court (Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County) directed courts to give agencies substantial deference on the scope of their NEPA reviews. CEQA is unaffected by these federal changes.

SB 375 (2008) and the Sustainable Communities Strategy

Requires each metropolitan planning organization to prepare a Sustainable Communities Strategy that aligns land use, housing, and transportation to meet regional greenhouse gas targets for cars and light trucks set by the California Air Resources Board (CARB).

Plan Bay Area

The nine-county region’s long-range plan, prepared jointly by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), which serves as the region’s Sustainable Communities Strategy. The first version was adopted in 2013; the newest, Plan Bay Area 2050+, was adopted in 2026. Growth is steered toward Priority Development Areas (locally nominated infill areas, often near transit), while Priority Conservation Areas identify open space and agricultural land for protection.

The 2013 Plan Bay Area lawsuits

The first plan was challenged from several directions at once: property-rights and anti-planning groups (Bay Area Citizens, represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, and the Post Sustainability Institute), the Building Industry Association, and environmental and EJ advocates (Communities for a Better Environment and the Sierra Club, represented by Earthjustice).

GPG Chapter 5, Equitable and Resilient Communities

State guidance on building equity, environmental justice, climate adaptation, and resilience into General Plans, paired with the GPG’s guiding principles for community engagement.

LCI Vulnerable Communities Platform

A state mapping tool used in the Week 2 activity to explore indicators such as nearby hazardous facilities and asthma rates, and to turn spatial observations into planning questions.

Sustainable development (Brundtland, 1987)

“Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The full definition contains two concepts that popular usage often drops: the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given, and the limitations that technology and social organization place on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.

Competing definitions (Wheeler)

Sustainability means different things depending on what is being sustained, for whom, over what time horizon, and who decides. Every definition carries a worldview.

Four axes of disagreement

Weak vs. strong sustainability (can built or financial capital substitute for natural capital?); growth vs. sufficiency; end state vs. process; technocentric vs. ecocentric.

Livability Prism (Godschalk, 2004)

Adds livability as a fourth corner to Campbell’s triangle (Week 5), along with three new tensions: gentrification, green cities, and growth management.

Global trends

Urbanization (most people now live in urban areas, with future growth concentrated in Africa and Asia), human domination of Earth’s ecosystems (Vitousek et al.), and unequal consumption and emissions, where a small, high-income share of the world’s population produces a disproportionate share of emissions (Chancel).

MDGs to SDGs

The Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015) had 8 goals aimed mainly at lower-income countries. The Sustainable Development Goals (2015–2030) have 17 goals and 169 targets, apply to every country (universality), and integrate economic, social, and environmental aims.

SDG 11 and “leave no one behind”

Goal 11 calls for inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable cities; its targets map closely onto General Plan elements (housing, transport, disasters, air quality, public space). “Leave no one behind” is the 2030 Agenda’s central equity pledge.

Critiques of global goal-setting

The growth contradiction (SDG 8 alongside Goals 12 and 13), depoliticization of contested choices into technical targets, data gaps (what is not counted is not governed), and the “just sustainability” argument that sustainability without an explicit equity commitment reproduces inequality (Agyeman). The “17 SDGs, 17 Injustices” graphic makes a related argument.

Environmental justice (EJ)

The fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, in the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies (U.S. EPA working definition, later written into California law).

Three dimensions of justice (Schlosberg)

Distributive (who bears burdens and receives benefits), procedural (who participates in decisions, and with what power), and recognition (whose identities, knowledge, and experiences are respected).

Environmental racism (Bullard)

Any environmental policy, practice, or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color, whether intended or unintended.

Redlining and HOLC maps

In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation graded neighborhoods A (“best”) to D (“hazardous”), explicitly using race and immigrant presence. Lending, disinvestment, industrial zoning, and freeway routing followed the grades for decades. Redlining was outlawed in 1968, yet its footprint remains measurable in heat, tree canopy, air pollution, and asthma rates today.

Exclusionary and expulsive zoning

Exclusionary zoning keeps certain people out, for example by banning multifamily housing or requiring large minimum lot sizes. Expulsive zoning rezones low-income neighborhoods and communities of color for industrial or other incompatible uses, pushing residents out and concentrating burdens.

NIMBY and LULU

“Not In My Backyard” describes opposition to nearby projects; communities with money, votes, and political voice can enforce it most effectively. A LULU is a “Locally Unwanted Land Use” (landfills, freeways, warehouses, plants), which tends to land where resistance has the least power.

Cumulative burden

Exposures add up across sources (freeways, ports, rail, industry, contaminated soil) and over time. Industrial land legacies are a major source, and brownfield redevelopment raises the question (Week 10) of whether cleanup helps or displaces the people who lived with the hazard.

Environmental justice (EJ)

The fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, in the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies (U.S. EPA working definition, later written into California law).

Three dimensions of justice (Schlosberg)

Distributive (who bears burdens and receives benefits), procedural (who participates in decisions, and with what power), and recognition (whose identities, knowledge, and experiences are respected).

Movement milestones

Warren County, North Carolina protests against a PCB landfill (1982); United Church of Christ, Toxic Wastes and Race (1987); Bullard, Dumping in Dixie (1990); the 17 Principles of Environmental Justice, adopted at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit (1991); Executive Order 12898 (1994); California’s SB 1000 (2016) and AB 617 (2017); federal EJ executive orders revoked and EPA EJ programs dismantled (2025), shifting more weight to state, regional, and community action.

Environmental racism (Bullard)

Any environmental policy, practice, or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color, whether intended or unintended.

Redlining and HOLC maps

In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation graded neighborhoods A (“best”) to D (“hazardous”), explicitly using race and immigrant presence. Lending, disinvestment, industrial zoning, and freeway routing followed the grades for decades. Redlining was outlawed in 1968, yet its footprint remains measurable in heat, tree canopy, air pollution, and asthma rates today.

Exclusionary and expulsive zoning

Exclusionary zoning keeps certain people out, for example by banning multifamily housing or requiring large minimum lot sizes. Expulsive zoning rezones low-income neighborhoods and communities of color for industrial or other incompatible uses, pushing residents out and concentrating burdens.

NIMBY and LULU

“Not In My Backyard” describes opposition to nearby projects; communities with money, votes, and political voice can enforce it most effectively. A LULU is a “Locally Unwanted Land Use” (landfills, freeways, warehouses, plants), which tends to land where resistance has the least power.

Cumulative burden

Exposures add up across sources (freeways, ports, rail, industry, contaminated soil) and over time. Industrial land legacies are a major source, and brownfield redevelopment raises the question (Week 10) of whether cleanup helps or displaces the people who lived with the hazard.

Critical Environmental Justice (Pellow’s four pillars)

(1) Intersectionality: harms compound across race, class, gender, disability, citizenship, and species, including the more-than-human. (2) Multi-scalar analysis: from the body to the planet, from colonial pasts to climate futures. (3) State and corporate power as a source of entrenched inequality, which questions whether the state will deliver justice if pressured. (4) Indispensability: no people or places are expendable.

Urban political ecology (Swyngedouw)

Treats the city as socio-nature: nature and city are produced together. Urban metabolism describes how water, energy, food, materials, capital, and waste circulate through the city; power decides who is nourished and who is harmed by those flows. Swyngedouw also warns that consensus “sustainability” can become post-political, closing off debate over who wins and who loses.

Embodied ecologies (Million)

In Indigenous thought, people, lands, and bodies form one system: harm to land is harm to people, and land is a relation with obligations. Locally, the East Bay is Lisjan Ohlone territory, and the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust practices rematriation through urban land return.

West Oakland

A historically Black neighborhood graded D by HOLC, later cut through by freeways, BART, and the main post office, and now surrounded by the Port, rail yards, and truck-serving industry. It is a textbook case of cumulative burden and of long-running community organizing.

AB 617 (2017) and Community Emissions Reduction Plans

California’s Community Air Protection Program, passed alongside the 2017 cap-and-trade extension. CARB selects heavily burdened communities; resident steering committees work with the local air district to develop a Community Emissions Reduction Plan (CERP) and monitoring plan.

Owning Our Air (2019)

West Oakland’s CERP, co-led by the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP) and the Bay Area Air District, built on two decades of resident-collected data. Many of its strategies depend on agencies the steering committee does not control, such as the Port, Caltrans, and the City.

Lessons on community power (MacIver et al.)

Community-generated data can shift who speaks with authority; co-leadership differs from consultation; trust is built over decades of prior organizing; and the formal channel reaches only as far as the air district’s authority.

Vulnerability

Susceptibility of people and places to harm from a hazard, shaped by exposure (who is in the path), sensitivity (who is more affected by the same exposure), and adaptive capacity (who can prepare, respond, and recover).

Resilience

The capacity of a community or system to absorb disturbance, reorganize, and keep functioning. Always ask: resilience of what, to what, and for whom?

Disaster risk

A hazard becomes a disaster when it meets people made vulnerable by poverty, housing, isolation, disability, or discrimination. Risk rises with hazard, exposure, and vulnerability, and falls with coping capacity.

Throughlines: recovery and disability

Recovery after disasters tends to follow pre-existing vulnerability, so the most burdened neighborhoods are often served last. Disability is among the most frequently overlooked dimensions of climate and disaster planning (inaccessible shelters and warnings, power loss for medical equipment).

The four data tools (EJ snapshot activity)

CalEnviroScreen 4.0 (pollution burden and population characteristics by census tract, as statewide percentiles); Census Community Resilience Estimates (share of residents with 0, 1–2, or 3+ social vulnerability risk factors); the Urban Displacement Project (gentrification and displacement typologies); Mapping Inequality (HOLC maps).

The Planner’s Triangle (Campbell)

Three goals at the corners (economic growth, environmental protection, social equity) with sustainable development at the center. Each edge is a conflict: the property conflict (economy vs. equity), the resource conflict (economy vs. environment), and the development conflict (environment vs. equity). Campbell argues sustainability cannot be reached directly; planners approach it indirectly by confronting and resolving these conflicts over time, and must decide whether to act as mediators or advocates.

Wicked problems (Rittel and Webber)

Planning problems are ill-defined and resolved through political judgment. Social problems are never solved, only re-solved again and again. Tame problems, by contrast, have clear definitions and testable solutions.

Ten characteristics of wicked problems

(1) No definitive formulation. (2) No stopping rule. (3) Solutions are good or bad, not true or false. (4) No immediate or ultimate test of a solution. (5) Every solution is a one-shot operation with consequences. (6) No enumerable set of possible solutions. (7) Every wicked problem is essentially unique. (8) Every wicked problem can be seen as a symptom of another. (9) How the problem is explained determines how it is resolved. (10) The planner has no right to be wrong.

Infrastructure classification: primary and secondary

Primary infrastructure is life-sustaining (water and sanitation, core roads and bridges, energy, emergency facilities); failure immediately threatens health, safety, and the economy. Secondary infrastructure supports quality of life (parks, libraries, schools, sidewalks, bike paths, urban forestry).

Infrastructure classification: gray, blue-green, and social

Gray infrastructure is engineered (pipes, levees, roads); blue-green infrastructure uses ecosystem-based solutions (wetlands, bioswales, urban trees); social infrastructure is the community spaces that build collective capacity to survive, recover, and thrive (libraries, recreation centers, plazas).

Equity in certification systems (Yeeles et al.)

Rating systems such as LEED, WELL, and the Living Building Challenge increasingly include social equity criteria, framed through distributional, procedural, and recognitional dimensions. Earning credits for equity does not guarantee an equitable outcome.

California’s EJ policy sequence

AB 32 (2006) set statewide greenhouse gas targets and opened the door to cap-and-trade; SB 375 (2008) linked regional land use and transportation to emissions targets; SB 535 (2012) directed cap-and-trade proceeds to disadvantaged communities and prompted the creation of CalEnviroScreen; AB 617 (2017) created community air protection plans. Climate law came first, and EJ entered through the fight over who benefits.

Challenges of doing EJ inside government

Unfunded mandates, the politics of competitive grants, following through beyond lip service, and institutional risk aversion.

Hopeful directions

Neighborhood activation and urban greening, with examples such as the East Oakland Neighborhoods Initiative plan, the vegetative buffer along I-880, and a citywide greenway network.

Cities and climate

Cities both drive emissions (buildings, transportation, energy, consumption) and concentrate climate-health risks such as extreme heat and urban heat islands, air pollution, flooding, drought, and wildfire smoke. Those risks fall unequally (Siri and Indvik).

Mitigation vs. adaptation

Mitigation reduces greenhouse gas emissions (efficiency, renewables, electrification, reducing vehicle miles traveled, compact growth). Adaptation prepares for and reduces harm from climate impacts that are already happening (cooling centers, stormwater management, relocating sensitive infrastructure, protecting vulnerable populations).

Co-benefits

Additional health, economic, or social gains from climate action, such as cleaner air from fewer vehicle trips or cooler streets from tree planting. Planners should ask who gains access to them.