HISTORY AND THEORY OF URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING, IN THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE + PLANNING AT UTSA
Problem
San Antonians don't experience the effects of climate change equally and the SA Climate Ready, Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, therefore needs to address that fact to ensure a cleaner, greener, safer, and more equitable future. A recent article on the plan describes one of the ways San Antonio is already experiencing the effects of climate change; “for example, [in] June of [2022], San Antonio recorded above-average temperatures every day of the month…” (Office of Sustainability, 2022).
Historic racist policies such as redlining, housing, and highway acts, have led to racially segregated communities (Rothstein, 2018). These communities, starting in the 1900 have been systematically and severely underinvested in, becoming more vulnerable to the effects of climate change (Irazabal, 2012). One example of these effects are the higher temperatures experienced by these communities. That coupled with some of the lowest incomes in the city result in not being able to afford to cool their homes efficiently, if at all, as temperatures rise. “We know that our front-line communities — our communities of color and low-income residents — are going to experience the worst impacts” and “at the end of the day, it’s all about equity,” Doug Melnick, Office of Sustainability Director (Bruess, 2021).
If we continue to underinvest in our communities with the greatest need, our city will never adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change. The Climate Ready lays out strategies for our city to achieve this goal. It is time that our cities investment back it up and start with the hottest, most polluted parts of the city. Planning scholar, P. Davidoff states that “city planning is a means for determining policy” (Davidoff, 2011). So, if our plans call for investment in the most vulnerable communities, we can more easily create policy to ensure that happens. The SA Tomorrow Sustainability Plan maps below, highlight the overlap between our underserved communities’ social vulnerability and urban heat.
Those same hot spots can be seen on the San Antonio’s Equity Matrix map shown below as the combined score of race and income. Blue and purple indicate a high concentration of residents that are both people of color and low-income households in that census tract.
The same hot spots shown in the maps above, also correlate with other factors that culminate in adverse health outcomes. Below is a map of social determinants of health, from the SA Forward Plan, by the San Antonio Metropolitan Health. It shows percent of residents reporting that they have diabetes and no high school diploma by census tract in San Antonio. The blue, orange, and other dark colors indicated higher concentrations than the rest of the city.
Alternative
The city must act on the SA Climate Ready Plan with equity and environmental justice at the forefront of its goals and implementation strategies. The plan states that it will ensure equity in adaption by “preventing displacement, prioritizing vulnerable residents, acknowledging and understanding different perspectives and impacts, and an equitable distribution of resources…”, but it doesn’t say how (SA Climate Ready).
Veronica Soto, former Director of Neighborhoods and Housing Services at the City of San Antonio, spoke at this year’s American Planning Association Texas Chapter Conference about how to put equity at the front of an issue by budgeting to solve the issue. Her success in getting San Antonio to budget for affordable housing in never-before-seen amounts, led her to be called to serve in the Department of the Treasury. In Soto’s keynote address, she emotionally stated that “a zip code shouldn’t determine a child’s life expectancy” and that cities must invest in equity to change that (Soto, 2022).
“The equity advisory group [appointed in 2020] is tasked with ensuring marginalized individuals are included in planning and decision-making, as well as piloting a Climate Equity Screening Tool” (Bruess, 2021). This tool may have come too late improve equity in the recently adopted 2022 Bond since most of the funding has already been allocated. With bond cycles occurring every five years, additional city funds must be found to target areas like the greatest combined equity scores identified in the City's Equity Matrix (Office of Equity, 2022). The District Council representatives for these high equity score communities voiced a similar request to prioritize additional funding in their severely underserved, low-income, communities of color in the City Council Bond discussions.
One of the most effective ways to mitigate urban heat and adapt to climate change is by improving, adding, and connecting green spaces. The Climate Ready Plan identifies this mitigation strategy as promoting biodiversity and healthy ecosystems, with the goals “to reduce the impact of urban heat island, to capture stormwater, and to sequester carbon” because “by protecting [these ecosystems], we protect ourselves” (SA Climate Ready, 2019).
San Antonio can build on past successes with the Howard Peak Greenway trail system and parks within a 10-minute walk to continue to connect and create green corridors. Green corridors can bring resilience to a community by adding much needed green space and trees that connect people to parks and greenway networks for health, exercise, and commutes. These green corridors can also provide ecosystem services such as air and water pollution mitigation, heat island reduction, and ground water recharge. Communities must be involved in planning for these corridor enhancements and additions like they were in the SA Tomorrow planning process and bond committee hearings.
Without a focus on equity and environmental justice, the divide will continue to grow and continue to impact our entire City. Ban Ki-moon said “saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth…these are one and the same fight; we must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food security, and women’s empowerment. Solutions to one problem must be solutions for all.”
Implementation
One way to start, is to determine what bond funding hasn’t been allocated to specific projects. Examples include allocations for districts’ failing or f-streets, general park improvements, and drainage. These general funds would go toward making projects more multi-purpose to mitigate the effects of climate change. Using best practices like green stormwater infrastructure, trees, and sidewalks along streets instead of traditional gray infrastructure and short-term fixes, would improve the urban environment as well as walkability and connections to public transportation, parks, local businesses, etc.
The City could go even further and reallocating funding that is currently broken into districts, and instead reallocate those funds based on the equity matrix hot spots. This would mean that not all districts would receive funding. Going forward, more funding from the City’s Bond, Propositions, and other programs must also continue to put climate equity first and allocate funds appropriately. By focusing on these areas and building a budget around addressing environmental justice, San Antonio can finally start righting past social injustices and get on the path to being more equitable and climate resilient.
San Antonio will likely continue to face opposition when implementing the SA Climate Ready Plan. To be successful, planners must “connect climate change impacts to everyday concerns…emphasize…benefits provided by nature, especially related to health; and use community engagement to refine these frames” (Lieberknect, 2021). For example, when relating the impacts of climate change to San Antonio, refer to what people experience locally, like increasing urban temperatures. Lieberknect suggests “that planners can accelerate climate planning by following the lead of other disciplines that emphasize human health impacts of the climate crisis” (Lieberknect, 2021). One of the major health related impacts is the increasing number of extreme heat-related deaths. We as “planners [must] strengthen climate planning by extending environmental planning’s use of local knowledge from environmental health, urban heat planning, and climate-related land use planning to climate planning more broadly” (Lieberknect, 2021).
Communities must be involved in planning for these corridor enhancements like they were in the SA Tomorrow planning process and bond committee hearings. By ensuring they are brought to the table to create, review, and determine the plans, budgets, and policy updates for their neighborhoods, effective change can begin to take place. The City must also take into account that “many Latinos are not actively engaged in planning processes [and] as a result, they are less likely to support planning initiatives” (Gisuti, et. al, 2012). This finding reiterates the importance of connecting the issues to everyday problems the community faces; it also highlights the fact that there is a disconnect between the needs of Latino communities and the planning regulations that govern them. There is an opportunity to bridge this disconnect, by ensuring their concerns are heard and that they are part of finding solutions. Planners must be careful to avoid the early criticisms of this type of advocacy planning, being called “colonialist, elitest, self-serving, top-down and repressive” and “politically naïve” (Brooks, p.114, 2017).
Future Scenario
Unfortunately, as Octavia E. Butler predicted in the Parable of the Sower, mitigation and adaptation strategies were not taken, and all city’s suffered the same fate as San Antonio becoming too hot, dry, and expensive to sustain our modern way of life. The exodus from modern civilization has led to the seven-generation model, practiced by the first peoples, coming back into existence. As Jojola documented in Indigenous Planning, knowledge of how to live on the land was gained by the generations that left the city and passed on to their descendants, further being developed and adapted by their descendants. Their common goal was to live sustainably off the land to avoid the destruction that led to them moving out of the city. This way of life led to people starting over in a sense, eventually in 2200, growing in populations large enough to form something a-kin to a city but unlike any we’d recognize today. It seemed like humankind was destined to repeat this pattern of environmental destruction. But at least planners have finally learned how to bring out the planner in their community. This resulted in the lessons learned from antient civilizations to modern city collapse were used to live with nature once again. Living like the first peoples did, with the land and the planet’s safe operating boundaries communities were prospering.
The planner awoke to realize that it was just a dream. The climate didn’t pass the tipping point because the next generation of planners didn’t let it. They saw what inaction was leading to and decided to make a change. They ran for office, passed legislation that halted fossil fuel production and mandated clean energy. Historically underserved, low income, communities of color were brought up to the standards the rest of the city. They worked with communities to add green infrastructure and improve natural spaces; understanding their importance they invested heavily in them, and as a result significantly cooled the urban environment and improving its water and air quality. Laws were put into place that enabled families living in those areas to stay. Government bought housing stock from people that wanted to move reserving and selling it to low-income people of color at affordable rates. This ensured that developers couldn’t buy it up and redevelop, ensuring gentrification was a thing of the past. Places that were seen as undesirable were now the most desirable. Lifting areas of our cities out of poverty, turned the tide on inequity and environmental injustice. As a result, San Antonio is cooler, greener, healthier, equitable, and our community and economy are thriving. San Antonio, like other cities around the world that implemented similar policy changed the trajectory of our future avoiding the planners’ worst nightmares.
As planners we must do better, by taking a stand to right past wrongs, and training “a future generation of planners to go well beyond us” (Davidoff, 2011). We can start by ensuring plans like “the CAAP’s [and its] goals go beyond reducing emissions; …[and] that the entire community benefits from its initiatives and is prepared for what’s coming” (Bruess, 2021). To ensure our future is healthier and equitable for all, planners must continue to connect the dots between and advocate for “the best ways we can promote the common good for people living right now and for our posterity” (MacAskill, 2022).
References
Brooks, M. P. (2002). Planning Theory for Practitioners. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351179454
Brooks, M. P. (2017). Planning theory for practitioners. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351179454
Bruess, E. (2021, November 14). After slow start, San Antonio's climate change plan may finally be gaining traction. News. Retrieved October 26, 2022, from https://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/San-Antonio-climate-change-plan-16617149.php
Butler, O. E. (2019). Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing.
City of San Antonio Metropolitan Health District. (n.d.). Social Determinants of Health - Why They Matter. SA Forward: Leading the Way to a Healthier Community. Retrieved November 29, 2022, from https://dashboards.mysidewalk.com/city-of-san-antonio-strategic-health-plan-dashboard-5bbc32e941c7/social-determinants-of-health
Davidoff, P. (2011). Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning. In R. T. LeGates & F. Stout (Eds.), The City Reader (7th ed., pp. 435–445). Routledge.
Gisuti, C., & Olivares, M. (2012). Latinos and Incremental Construction: A case study of Texas colonias. In Diálogos: Placemaking in Latino Communities. Routledge.
Grande, E. J. (n.d.). My City's trees. My City's Trees. Retrieved October 26, 2022, from https://mct.tfs.tamu.edu/
Irazábal, C., & Farhat, R. (2012). Historical Overview of Latinos and Planning in the Southwest: 1900 to the present. In Diálogos: Placemaking in Latino Communities (pp. 23–35).
Jojola, T. (2013). Indigenous Planning: Towards a Seven Generations Model. In David C. Natcher, Ryan
Christopher Walker, & Theodore S. Jojola (Eds.), Reclaiming Indigenous planning. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Lieberknecht, K. (2022). Community-Centered Climate Planning: Using Local Knowledge and Communication Frames to Catalyze Climate Planning in Texas. Journal of the American Planning Association, 88(1), 97–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2021.1896974
MacAskill, W. (2022, August 5). The Case for Longtermism. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/opinion/the-case-for-longtermism.html
Rothstein, R. (2018). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America (First published as a Liveright paperback 2018). Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company.
Office of Equity. The City of San Antonio - Official City Website. (n.d.). Retrieved October 26, 2022, from https://www.sanantonio.gov/Equity/Initiatives/Atlas
SA Climate Ready: Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. SA Climate Ready. (n.d.). Retrieved October 26, 2022, from https://www.sasustainability.com/action-plan
Silva, K. (2022, July 15). How San Antonio is preparing for climate change. San Antonio Report. Retrieved October 26, 2022, from https://sanantonioreport.org/san-antonio-preparing-for-climate-change-sponsored/
Soto, V. (2022, October 20) 2022 American Planning Association Texas Conference, APATX22. In Keynote Address Plenary Session: Brining Equity and Inclusion in Transportation Networks, Place. El Paso, TX.
The City of San Antonio - official city website > home. (n.d.). Retrieved November 30, 2022, from https://www.sanantonio.gov/Portals/0/Files/Sustainability/SATomorrowSustainabilityPlan.pdf
Watson, V. (2014). Co-production and collaboration in planning – The difference. Planning Theory & Practice, 15(1), 62–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2013.866266
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