Michael Hibbard: Regional Planning for Social Justice

Regional planning for social justice is the field to which Michael Hibbard, professor emeritus of planning and public policy at the University of Oregon, has devoted his career, with a thesis rare in an urban discipline: that rural regions and small communities bear the planning decisions designed for cities, and that fair development requires planning the interdependence between countryside and city rather than treating the countryside as a resource reserve or a landscape. His work, centred on the Pacific Northwest, on communities dependent on timber, fishing and mining and on Indigenous nations, proposes a community and regional planning that shares the benefits of development and not only its costs.

Natural resource communities: the timber crisis of the Northwest

Hibbard starts from the crisis of natural resource communities. In the 1980s and 1990s, the mechanisation of sawmills, the exhaustion of forests and the protection of the spotted owl, with the Northwest Forest Plan of 1994, sank timber employment in hundreds of towns in Oregon and Washington, and the reconversion policies designed from the capitals, training, incentives, tourism, rarely reached those who needed them. His studies showed that those communities were not backward but dependent on external decisions, and that planning had to give them capacity to decide their own future.

Community and Indigenous planning: deciding one's own future

His first contribution is community planning. Against plans drafted by technicians and adopted without local knowledge, Hibbard defends processes in which residents define the problems, choose priorities and control resources, with the planner as facilitator rather than author. In his work with Indigenous nations of the Northwest and of Australia he showed that planning can be an instrument of self-determination when communities use it to manage territory, culture and economy according to their own values, and an instrument of dispossession when it is imposed on them; that work has fed the emerging field of Indigenous planning.

Toward One Oregon: the interdependence of countryside and city

His second contribution is the regional scale. Hibbard argues that the problems of rural communities, depopulation, lack of infrastructure, dependence on a single sector, are not solved town by town but in regions that include the cities on which they depend and which depend on them. In Toward One Oregon (2011), co-edited with Ethan Seltzer, Bruce Weber and Beth Emshoff, he analysed the interdependence between the urban Oregon of Portland and rural Oregon, linked by water, energy, food, employment and the state planning system that since 1973 sets urban growth boundaries and protects farm and forest land, and showed that the political polarisation between the two worlds is also a planning failure.

Spatial justice and flexible planning

Spatial justice is the thread that joins both scales. Hibbard understands it as the equitable distribution of resources, services and opportunities across territory, so that no community is left out of the benefits of development because of its location, and warns that rigid policies designed for urban contexts and applied without regard to local dynamics worsen the inequalities they claim to correct. His proposal is a flexible, adaptive planning able to respond to economic, social and environmental change, judged by its effect on the communities with the least power.

Michael Hibbard's lesson is that just planning begins by recognising that the city and its region are a single system and that urban decisions have consequences hundreds of kilometres away. Giving voice and capacity to rural and Indigenous communities, planning regional interdependence and measuring every policy by what it does to the places that count least is the way for development not to be the prosperity of cities paid for by the rest of the territory.