Upskilling: Cultural Competency & Where to Get Started for Planners
By Amy Evans, AICP

One of the first things to understand about cultural competence is that it applies to both individuals and organizations. According to Georgetown University’s National Center for Cultural Competence, “cultural competence is a developmental process that evolves over an extended period. Both individuals and organizations are at various levels of awareness, knowledge, and skills along the cultural competence continuum.”

Culturally Competent Organizations
The National Center defines culturally competent organizations as ones that:

• Have a defined set of values and principles, and demonstrate behaviors, attitudes, policies, and structures that enable them to work effectively cross-culturally.
• Have the capacity to (1) value diversity, (2) conduct self-assessment, (3) manage the dynamics of difference, (4) acquire and institutionalize cultural knowledge, and (5) adapt to diversity and the cultural contexts of communities they serve.
• Incorporate the above in all aspects of policy-making, administration, practice and service delivery, systematically involve consumers, families and communities.

With much of the literature on cultural competence focused on the delivery of health and human services, it’s role in the planning profession is not always clear. For a brief grounding in how cultural competency can enhance our ability to serve the interest of the public, planners can refer to APA’s free-to-access Research KnowledgeBase article titled Implementing Cultural Competency in Urban Planning.

Culturally Competent Planners

Culturally competent planners understand and respect values, attitudes, and beliefs that differ across cultures. They consider and respond appropriately to these differences when engaging with the public, when creating plans and other documents for communities, and when implementing and evaluating their work. One of the key principles of cultural competence as it relates to planning is self-determination, or the moral mandate to empower communities and the people within them to identify their own needs and define the appropriate solution or path forward for themselves. Culturally competent planning values resident experiences, leverages natural informal community networks, shares decision-making power with community members, and results in reciprocal transfers of knowledge and skills between planners and the people they serve.

Culturally competent planners also turn a critical eye to the profession’s legacy of planning practices like urban renewal, practices that have harmed and continue to harm ethnically and racially diverse communities throughout the nation.

Cultural Competence in Planning Practice

Because cultural competence requires an ongoing commitment to learning, the first step on the road to cultural competence can be as simple as understanding the cultural makeup of the community you serve, learning about groups you are unfamiliar with, and checking your assumptions about groups you think you know. Look at all dimensions of diversity, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identify and expression, age, and belief systems. Focus on materials generated from within a community while taking care to not place undue emotional burden on community members if asking someone to share their perspective with you. Other practical strategies for cultural competence recommended by APA include a constant and intentional focus on valuing the knowledge that people have in relation to their community and a constant and intentional monitoring of implicit biases – both our own and when facilitating discussions with people whose actions and statements may be demonstrating their own implicit biases.

Lastly, culturally competent planning is trauma-informed planning. Being trauma-informed starts with understanding that planning practices have contributed to historic and community trauma and that healing may require the creation of emotionally and physically safe places for members of affected communities to express emotions like anger and grief. Trauma-informed planning also means linguistically and culturally accessible, user-friendly administrative procedures; offices that physically and mentally signal that all people are welcome; the incorporation of trauma-informed principles into policies and procedures, and the creation of plans – and ultimately, communities – that reflect the needs and desires of the people that live in them.

For additional PA-specific reading in this area, check out Betsy Logan’s March 2023 article on Equity and Planning, February 2023 looks at data and equity in planning and engaging underserved communities, our March 2022 review of Planning with Diverse Communities, and our February 2022 review of The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.