Making Equity Planning Work

Book excerpt: From 1969 to 1979, Cleveland?s city planning staff under Norman Krumholz?s leadership conducted a unique experiment in equity oriented planning. Fighting to defend the public welfare while also assisting the city?s poorest citizens, these planners combined professional competence and political judgment to bring pressing urban issues to the public?s attention. Although frequently embroiled in controversy while serving three different mayors, the Cleveland planners not only survived, but accomplished impressive equity objectives. In this book, Norman Krumholz and John Forester provide the first detailed personal account of a sustained and effective equity-planning practice that influenced urban policy. Krumholz describes the pragmatic equity-planning agenda that his staff pursued during the mayoral administrations of Carl B. Stokes, Ralph J. Perk, and Dennis J. Kucinich. He presents case studies illuminated with rich personal experience, of the Euclid Beach development, the Clark Freeway, and the tax-delinquency and land-banking project that resulted in a change in the State of Ohio?s property law, among others. In the second part of the book, John Forester explores the implications of this experience and the lessons that can be drawn for planning, public management, and administrative practice more generally.