Seeking Justice and Showing Communities Love Through Planning

When social justice planner Monique López, AICP, MCRP, MA, talks
about her anti-racist, values-driven participatory planning and
design firm called Pueblo Planning, she describes its work in no
uncertain terms: “I still very much see this as an experiment in
love … an experiment in justice. … And coming in with that
particular mindset allows me to be flexible, allows me to be
open-minded and open-hearted when I am held accountable by
community members, when I am held accountable by, by
social-justice movements that maybe say, You know, that planning
process that we engaged in? It should have been done this way.”


Pueblo Planning has done work with people who are unhoused, earn
lower incomes, do not claim English as their first language, are
senior, and are part of the LGBTQ community. Monique tells host
Courtney Kashima, AICP, stories from some of Pueblo’s projects,
merging anecdotes with the wisdom they brought her to create
poignant takeaways for listeners. From divulging her planning
“origin story” (in her early twenties, fighting a sewage sludge
treatment plant that was threatening to come into her
neighborhood), to musing on why Sherry Arnstein’s 1969 JAPA
article on citizen participation is still relevant today, to
revealing why Pueblo Planning couldn’t run headlong to the Zoom
platform when the pandemic hit, Monique displays a passion for
social justice that will inspire planners working in every
sector.