Seeking Spatial Justice Through County and Community Planning
Seminar: CITY420 Seeking Spatial Justice
Faculty Advisor: Lauren Restrepo
Community Partner: Montgomery County Planning Commission
Praxis Site Supervisor: Stephen Zbyszinski
Praxis Poster:
6 Judy_Xie_Praxis Poster (1)
Further Context:
This semester, I had the amazing opportunity of interning at the Montgomery County Planning Commission (MCPC), based out of Norristown, PA. MCPC, a sub-division of Montgomery County, has over 40 full-time planning staff who work on county-wide and municipal-level planning projects. Examples of their work include writing comprehensive plans, creating future land use and inventory maps, and publishing resources on planning topics.
MCPC’s planning staff work in a range of departments: community, county, design, environmental, GIS, open space and trails, transportation. During my internship, I mainly worked on county and community planning projects. For county planning, I prepared materials for future housing publications aimed at helping municipalities implement policies that address residents’ struggles with housing affordability. I wrote a series of white papers, each one focused on a less traditional housing typology that can helpexpand the county’s housing stock. I wrote about tiny homes, missing middle housing, and residential adaptive reuse conversions. These short papers provided definitions of each type, along with benefits, considerations for constructions, local examples, and additional sources. Initially, I knew very little about the housing types I wrote about. However, as I scoured the web and sifted through MCPC’s drive to do research for these papers, I learned about the ways these housing types can be incorporated into existing communities and the types of housing needs they can meet. For community planning, a major project I worked on was assisting with the Parks and Open Spaces section of an updated comprehensive plan for the Central Perkiomen Valley Region. My main task was updating a collection of charts showing the names, classifications, acreages, and amenities of all the publicly-owned open space facilities in each of the region’s municipalities. I did this by using county GIS data, reaching out to community planners assigned to each municipality, and looking through municipal websites and open space plans.
My internship with MCPC was a wonderful experience for which I will forever be grateful. The staff I met were kind, passionate, and supportive, and the experience gave me insight into the daily work lives of planners, the kinds of issues they aim to address, and the constraints their work faces. It reaffirmed my desire to pursue a career in planning and left me with important questions to ponder as I continue my education and work in this field. I wonder how governments and developers can best balance their fiscal constraints with provision of high-quality affordable housing and other necessary resources. I also want to learn more about public participation processes and how they can be made more inclusive.