Urban Planning and Heterodox Economics in the United States: Progressive Partners to Reduce Inequalities

As humanity becomes ever more urbanized, the urban environment is an ever more effective area in which to intervene in order to reduce inequalities. However, many of the urban policy interventions with the intended result of reducing inequalities are paradoxically perpetuating them. We discuss how this is the case in the context of US housing policy—particularly as it pertains to the role of underlying racial-ethnic and socio-spatial inequality in generating uneven housing outcomes—where the very policies claiming to be progressive expand existing group-based and place-based inequalities. We explore methods of overcoming this paradox by illustrating how heterodox economics and urban planning in practice could synergistically reinforce their respective disciplinary aspirations to speed up a transition to a more equitable world. In doing so, we highlight how calls for a Jobs Guarantee program, derived from heterodox economics, together with the support of locally based planning initiatives and a Homes Guarantee program, could bring us much further than we have come before toward reducing inequalities.