• DOI:10.1080/14649350500497471
• Corpus ID: 143540226

Spirituality and the Urban Professions: The Paradox at the Heart of Planning

@article{Sandercock2006SpiritualityAT,
  title={Spirituality and the Urban Professions: The Paradox at the Heart of Planning},
  author={Leonie Sandercock},
  journal={Planning Theory \& Practice},
  year={2006},
  volume={7},
  pages={65 - 97}
}

• L. Sandercock
• Published 1 March 2006
• Political Science
• Planning Theory & Practice

When I was a child I was told that there were three things we never discuss in public: politics, religion, and money. As a young adult, groping for meaning in life and for meaningful work, I gravitated to the urban/city-building professions as a way of working for social justice, and found myself talking about nothing but politics and money for the next 25 years, since that’s what most urban conflicts seemed to be about. My first book, in 1975, was tellingly titled Cities for Sale, and subtitled Property, Politics and Urban Planning. Religion, on the other hand, never seemed relevant, except in so far as it motivated some individuals—myself not included—to do this social justice work. (My motivation came, and still does, from a secular humanism.) Looking back now, it’s surprising how little I knew about the faith backgrounds, or motivations, of those I’ve worked with or who’ve inspired me. It shows perhaps how well-trained we all were in keeping these matters of faith strictly in the realm of the private. And there were, or seemed to be, good reasons for this. In secular nation states, religion has been viewed as potentially divisive and thus as something that must be kept out of the realm of public policy and governance discourse. But at least in my corner of public policy—cities, urban planning, social policy—this results in an extraordinary paradox. The work of urban, social, community, environmental, and even land-use planning is fundamentally a work of hope, the work of organizing hope (Baum, 1997). And this work often takes place in the face of despair, as Adrienne Rich’s poem tells us. But where does this hope come from, if not from some kind of faith? Hence I must ask myself, and my profession: are we not missing something important by not talking about this thing at the heart of planning that marks us all as at least closet utopians? The faith at the heart of planning is very simple. It’s our faith in humanity, in ourselves as social beings, in the presence of the human spirit and the possibility of realizing/bringing into being the best of what it means to be human. (Thus when Adrienne Rich asks what would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 7, No. 1, 65–97, March 2006