Cultural Humility: An Open Door for Planners to Locate Themselves and Decolonize Planning Theory, Education, and Practice

Abstract

Cultural humility can help planning faculty, students, and practitioners commit to ongoing self-reflection and critique of their social, cultural, racial, gendered, and other identities in an effort to identify how they are implicated in inequity, especially in relation to working in communities of color. While cultural competence has become an increasingly popular way to encourage more equitable relationships between professionals and communities, the author suggests that the colonial underpinnings of its logic make it not only less desirable than cultural humility but also a potential facilitator of inequity in planning work. Drawing from her experience as a planning theorist and faculty member, the author shows how the philosophical origins of Western colonial thinking have influenced planning. She also outlines concrete ways journal editors can relinquish their status as experts and gatekeepers of accepted knowledge, thereby decolonizing planning theory and the canon more generally. Finally, by describing two reflection activities—“What?/So What?/Now What?” and “Locating Oneself”—the author provides tools that planning educators can use to guide and reinforce reflection on students’ social, cultural, gendered, and racial identities, and to highlight injustices committed by planners. By injecting cultural humility, as opposed to cultural competency, into planning theory literature, and education, planning practice could be transformed, preventing the often-destructive history of planning practices in communities of color from being repeated.

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