This year’s conference called for planners and policy-makers to channel our public health roots and re-center environmental justice. Each year, Hindsight Conference commemorates a relevant anniversary that planners can look back to in order to understand present and future practice. This year’s theme was Our Health, Our Future, a call to remember 50 years since the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose mission is to protect human health and the environment. While communities of color, especially indigenous groups, have deeply understood the interconnectivity of the earth and human livelihood, the mandate of the EPA marked the federal government’s recognition of its relevance—however effective. 

Hindsight Conference 2020 called on planners to question our structural understanding of health and the environment as planners, beyond Active Design or “going green,” and centralize racial justice. It asked us to see inequitable access to: clean air, water, and soil; education and economic opportunity; and safe, quality accessible public spaces, as integral to the immense racial disparities in life outcomes. It asked us to recognize these inequalities as manifestations of the same system: White Supremacy. Hindsight asked us to reevaluate our role as planners, that have historically and continuously been complicit in programming these inequities,  who have the power and responsibility to dismantle it.

Sessions included 60-minute panels/workshops, 7-minute flash sessions, an in-person walking tour hosted in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and captivating digital exhibits. Here are some examples of session topics:

• In De-Centering Whiteness in Planning: Applying Racial Equity Tools, participants designed an affordable housing development while exploring how employing a Racial Equity Impact Analysis could promote BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) community power and ownership, and contribute to more anti-capitalist and equitable development that centers BIPOC communities, and acknowledges and reckons with history.⠀

• Reckoning with Trauma and Rebuilding Trust for Healing and Health explored New York City’s health equity roadmap and how a critical pathway to healthier neighborhoods and public health is building trust and accountability.

• Capping Robert Moses: South Bronx Health Justice focused on the Cross-Bronx Expressway (CBE) and how its construction fragmented close-knit communities, cut off residents from social capital, and resulted in unprecedented levels of pollution. Panelists shared their understanding of the CBE from the perspectives of public health, environmental justice, infrastructure, and community building in a collective effort to determine a plan forward.

• Sessions such as Practicing as Whole Humans focused on practitioners themselves in planning and design. The session tackled the myth that practitioners should be objective professionals by having an honest and vulnerable conversation on how we carry our own baggage, joys, anxieties and strengths into work.

• Jose Richard Aviles in Healing the Built Environment shared how we can better facilitate design in cities to heal rather than oppress. Participants explored the ways in which Planners can shift their practice to a practice that centers people and uplifts community stories. 

• Health, Gendered Jobs & Justice in the Care Economy addressed emerging practices for improving the conditions for essential workers and the communities they serve, in particular during the COVID-19 pandemic. The session highlighted the importance of the care economy for society’s survival and how care workers are primarily women and people of color who are underpaid and lack benefits and other protections.

• In Don’t Forget The Night: Cultural Movement Building, BIPOC-led, -owned and -managed venues, party collectives and City officials discuss how nightlife is critical to building cultural movements and civic engagement. The session illuminated the harsh impacts the COVID-19 pandemic has had on nightlife culture in NYC and, consequently, those who find support, stability, and community within it.

• A mobile museum, place-based storytelling project, the Listening House: Stories of Belonging, Blackness, and the Buildings we call ‘Home’ workshop provided a unique opportunity for participants of all ages, to explore family history through art-making, storytelling, and the collective act of building cultures of understanding and belonging.

• Approaches to Creating Trans & Gender-Nonconforming Inclusive Housing discussed the barriers TGNC people face in finding housing and various strategies used to overcome these barriers. The speakers shared their experiences as non-profit developers of TGNC-inclusive housing in NYC.

“Health or healthiness is more than just clean air, or access to good foods or quality places to live. Health is also the ability to exist. To thrive, to live freely, to have joy, and not to exist only under threat of harm or trauma or fear.” - Makeda, DivComm Member

These were just a few of the many inspiring sessions hosted at the conference. The chat functions were used enthusiastically, with participants sharing their mutual excitement, agreement, questions and insights. Between sessions and during breaks, participants were invited to stretch and walk, explore the digital exhibits hosted online, and even network with other participants through the digital platform’s randomized meeting function. 

For the closing of Day 1, participants were guided through a reflection and invited participants to mourn and honor the losses from the year through a digital memorial. Following the closing, participants were invited to join a Safe Space hour with other participants in smaller groups. During opening of Day 2, Eve Ewing’s poem Affirmation to youth living in prison after Assata Shakur was read aloud to center our intentions. For the closing of Day 2, participants were invited to a happy hour and virtual dance party, where participants took the music and sounds of DJ Tara and shared their locations from across the country in a group video chat.

“Do we burn the institution [of planning] to the ground?” - Diana Fernandez, Panelist from “Practicing as Whole Humans” 

Many of the sessions this year focused as much about process as it did about knowledge sharing. Large themes in discussions, conversations and chat include reflection, healing from history, and vulnerability – everything that we have also experienced collectively during a sometimes isolating pandemic. Beyond this, many sessions also focused on implementation and solutions, pathways and mandates for planners to take into their practice.

The Hindsight Conference is only made possible by its volunteers and tremendous leadership from DivComm members. The conference planning committee for Hindsight has had to make the same changes while facing the same struggles as others during the pandemic. At the end of Day 2, DivComm Co-chair Tiffany-Ann Taylor, felt that it was important to share how challenging it was at times to plan for this event. She explained during her closing remarks that “We are just like you, we have full time jobs, volunteer commitments, personal obligations, struggles. This year, we have been furloughed, lost our jobs, had our immigration status challenged, protested, stood in long lines to vote, moved across the country, and lost our loved ones.” We acknowledge this because hosting Hindsight is hard work, but it is important work that we believe in even in our times of distress, trauma and loss. We bring our full, vulnerable, emotional selves to organize this conference because we love this community and know that, like us, its existence is an act of resistance in a field not designed for it. 

“Raw emotion is okay. Tears on the job is okay....caring about something is a superpower. Don’t let anyone make you feel less than because you feel this emotion.” - Tiffany-Ann Taylor, DivComm Co-Chair

Hindsight Conference has grown beyond what was ever expected, which tells us that there is a demand in our field for centering justice, diversity, social and racial equity. The year 2020 has peeled back the curtain of inequality, pushing more people to acknowledge how our systems leave the most vulnerable behind. It has been stressful, lonely, and frustrating – yet it has also seen resistance, hard work and community. The lessons we take with us are reflected in this year’s Hindsight Conference, a mandate for Black, Indigenous, People of Color, LGBTQ+, and People with Disabilities to find resistance in their own joy, creativity and healing. Hindsight Conference will continue to build off this year, to shape history for future generations in building a future where our connections to our ancestral struggles, our historic and present-day movements, and one another are stronger, in order to create a just and healthy future.