A Message from Multiple Cities

Friends from around the country and world,

We hope our message today finds you in good health. Wherever you may be, we hope your body, mind, heart, and soul is withstanding the battery that it is encountering in this time. We are seated across the continent from each other today writing this note to share that our hearts are, like yours, also shattered by the events of the past week and that we are holding ourselves accountable for the countless decisions we have or have not made in both our personal and professional lives to undo the disparities and deep roots of racism in the cities we live and work in.

As community planners trained at Pratt Institute, in a program that “emphasized practice over theory, participatory planning over top-down policy making, creativity over boilerplate, and advocacy over technocracy”, we know that we have had the privilege of having received:

a) a higher education;

b) a higher education that immersed us in New York City’s many communities, side by side with classmates from across the United States and globe; and,

c) a higher education that forced us, no less, to prioritize equity, sustainable development, and social change.

As a result, we want to prioritize the use of our knowledge and experiences to elevate the actions that we all need to take toward anti-racist city planning and policies. From having more intimate conversations with our families and friends to calling for action in our workplace, we are using our voices to amplify the lived experiences of our Black friends and colleagues and the Black community. 

Multiple Cities was always intended as a platform for us to stay in touch with each other and with friends who are engaged in good work. In the next few days, weeks, months, and years, we want to continue offering Multiple Cities as a platform to do exactly that. With your support, we want to educate ourselves and others, and share seminal experiences, on how to dismantle underlying systems of oppression and how to organize and support vital reforms for communities of color - whether through housing, education, employment, healthcare, arts and culture, commerce, transportation, and public space.

Of our past contributors, we highlight BlackSpace and the New York City Diversity Committee, whose members have long been active in creating equitable spaces and places, where Black people and culture can thrive.

In tandem with the statement by some of our friends at the first ever formed Diversity Committee in the American Planning Association, we acknowledge that we have a lot of work to do and that this cannot be a one-off response, but a dismantling of all the prior years of and current racist policy-making in city planning. We stand with our Black colleagues and support your efforts, reminding ourselves that our inability to relate to your perspective and opinion might be due to our own privileges and power. We will continue to inform ourselves on ways to support you.

Remember that self-care and caring for your family are also forms of taking action. Only by taking care of ourselves and others every step of the way can we continue to fight racism in the long haul.

If you’d like to share your knowledge and experiences with us, please connect directly with us via email.