So often the Black community’s health is considered last by urban planners when making changes to their neighborhoods—but one group of Black women are working to put an end to this.
While racist planning has caused Black people to suffer disproportionately from environmental hazards and have less access to health resources, Thrivance Group is seeking to bring justice into public policy, urban planning, and community development.
The for-profit socially responsible planning firm recently hosted its third annual Unurbanist Assembly to imagine “spacial reparations,” or “what it would look like to prioritize joy, healing, and atonement” when building or further developing communities.
“In general, we recognize the harm of poverty and the disenfranchisement and how cities and municipalities and our federal government, in addition to corporate interest, have continued to actively disinvest, actively disenfranchise, actively exclude us—our communities—from their plans and that there health consequences to that,” speaker Kelli McIntyre said during a session on public health and spacial reparations.