Feminist Philosophy Commons^™

A Feminist Re-Imagining Of Participatory Planning, Elena Castellanos

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis presents the benefits of feminist epistemologies in exposing current unjust structures hindering spatial justice in the urban planning process. I explore three main questions: (1) how do urban planners’ and designers’ biases shape American neighborhoods’ physical and social landscape?, (2) why traditional government or private planning approaches historically chose not to encode community-making functions into their frameworks for community input?, and (3) does a substantively inclusive and equitable urban planning project require a rigorous context-based understanding of people?. Additionally, I investigate what a participatory planning process that embraces feminist epistemologies would look like, a practice that prioritizes epistemically …