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Building Cities People Will Actually Live In: Why Social Planning Is Becoming Essential in the Age of Densification

May 3, 2026

4 mins

Cities are changing faster than most of the systems built to manage them.

In neighbourhoods across North America, the same pattern is repeating itself: housing demand rises, density increases, transit expands, and long-established communities find themselves in the middle of rapid transformation. From a technical standpoint, many of these projects make sense. They align with policy. They meet zoning requirements. They support housing goals that cities urgently need.

And yet, again and again, projects stall—not because they are impossible, but because something more difficult to measure breaks down: trust.

Public hearings become tense. Community meetings become polarized. Applications that seemed straightforward become delayed or rejected. Not because the engineering failed, but because the social system around the project did.

This is where social planning enters the picture.

The Missing Layer in How Cities are Built

Technically speaking, urban planning, as a discipline, has done what it was designed to do, by and for the people it was designed to serve.

It has helped cities structure land use, manage growth, and create frameworks for development that balance competing demands. Problem is, these cities were built for narrowly defined users—people assumed to have aligned interests, homogenous cultures, and face simplistic everyday constraints.

Now more than ever in urban settings, there’s multiculturalism interwoven into our neighbourhoods, but there’s also systemic dissonance. Dissonance across our ancestry and customs, the opportunities and resources afforded to us, and the resulting infrastructural support that underpin our ability to thrive.

Communications teams have also become essential, helping translate complex projects into public-facing narratives that are clearer and more accessible. But there is a third layer that is becoming increasingly necessary in today’s urban environment—especially in dense, diverse, and rapidly changing neighbourhoods.

That layer is social planning.

Social planning is not about branding or messaging. It is not about simply “engaging the community.” And it is not about checking consultation boxes. At its core, it is about understanding how people actually experience change before that change becomes locked into conflict.

It is the work of translating lived reality into planning intelligence.

Why This Has Never Mattered More Than Now

We are entering an era where most population growth is expected to concentrate in urban areas. That means cities will continue to intensify: more housing, more density, more redevelopment of existing neighbourhoods.

But densification does not land evenly. It lands in places where people already live, already have histories, already have attachments, and already carry experiences—sometimes positive, sometimes painful—of past development.

So when a new project arrives, it is never just a building proposal.

It is interpreted through memory:

• Who benefited last time change happened here?
• Who was displaced?
• What got promised and what was delivered?
• Who was heard, and who wasn’t?

This is why two technically similar projects can have completely different public outcomes in different neighbourhoods.

The difference is not design. It is context.

Where Projects Often Break Down Today 

A significant proportion of development conflict does not begin as organized opposition.

It begins quietly. Concerns that are not fully voiced. Mistrust that has not yet been articulated. Uncertainty about what change will mean day-to-day for their lives and routines.

If those signals are not surfaced early, they tend to harden and crystalize—get inherited and spread around by the community’s chosen kin and relatives.

They move from conversation → to narrative → to opposition → to political constraint.

By the time a public hearing becomes contentious, the system is already late in the process. At that stage, even well-designed projects can become difficult to approve—not because they are bad projects, but because the social conditions around them have shifted.

This is one of the most expensive inefficiencies in urban development today: late-stage social discovery.

The Role and Impact of Good Social Planning

Social planning intervenes earlier in this process. It works in the space where concerns are still fluid, where trust still matters, and where information has not yet solidified into political positions.

In practical terms, it helps teams:

• Understand what communities actually see as non-negotiable
• Identify local assets that are often invisible in formal planning processes
• Surface tensions before they become public conflict
• Translate lived experience into constraints that design and policy can respond to

In neighbourhoods undergoing rapid change—especially where residents are racialized, long-standing, or historically underserved—this work is even more critical.

Because in those contexts, the question is not just “what is being built,” but “who is being heard in the process of building it.”

Practitioners who are embedded in these communities often bring a level of access and trust that formal systems struggle to achieve on their own. That access is not symbolic. It changes what information is available at all.

Evolutionary Shift of How We Think About City Builders

It is important to be clear: social planning does not replace urban planning or communications strategy. It strengthens both.

Where urban planning ensures that cities are technically and legally coherent, and communications ensures that projects are clearly understood, social planning ensures that what is being planned and communicated actually aligns with how change will be experienced by the people living through it.

Urban planning and communications practitioners approach and consider what should or could be. Social planning validates, empowers, and challenges what is.  

More than this, it postures community members as more than just passive participants in their surrounding environments, but co-designers and co-builders of their backyards—with deeply valuable and increasingly necessary insights to contribute.

Without that layer, cities risk building projects that are technically sound but socially unstable.

At the Studio, we think of social planning as part of a broader shift in how cities are built.

Not as top-down systems imposed on neighbourhoods, but as negotiated environments where different forms of knowledge—technical, institutional, and lived—have to be brought into relationship with each other early enough to matter.

In practice, for some, this means working early—before conflict hardens, before positions calcify, and before projects lose flexibility. But we go further, focusing on the continual cycle of witnessing, learning, adjusting, and experiencing. It isn’t flat or linear; it’s round.

We recognize that cities are not just physical systems. They are social ones where infrastructure is designed so those in them can thrive. And when those systems are not aligned, even the best-designed projects struggle to move forward.

Food for Thought

The future of urban development will not be defined only by how well we design buildings or write policies. It will be defined by how well we understand the human systems those buildings and policies enter into.

Because cities are not only built. They are lived in. They are shared. And, as such, they must be negotiated. And the quality, strength, and honesty of that negotiation will always hold more weight than we know: the deciding factor of whether our cities thrive, or simply function.

Why I Built Holding Ground Studio: Leading from Difference, Reclaiming Space, and Rewriting Planning

April 30, 2026

8 mins

For most of my planning career, I’ve lived in a quiet, persistent contradiction. I’ve felt a tension that was both professional and deeply personal. I’ve believed deeply in the transformational potential of planning—the possibility of shaping cities into places of belonging, dignity, safety, and opportunity. Informing design choices in public spaces that could, in turn, elicit joy while also providing a safe refuge in deeply challenging moments of the human experience. But I’ve also understood, intimately, that the planning profession in its current form—the realms, contexts, discourse I routinely stepped into—was never designed to hold people like me.

As a black woman, as I became privy to a large variety of discussions happening at the table, discussions among developers and City staff—I learned early (and often) that the discipline’s foundations were shaped by exclusionary worldviews. Ones that privileged Eurocentric knowledge systems, erased Black presence, and reproduced spatial logics that marked predominantly black and brown bodies as out of place, out of sync, less worthy, or simply unwelcome. And, as such, our histories, our needs, our imaginations, and our right to thrive.

In many ways, Abigail Moriah’s reflections on black planners echos what I had felt for years but had rarely said aloud. The loneliness. The feeling of being the “only one.” The weight of carrying lived experience in spaces that privileged technical knowledge over community wisdom. The internal conflict of wanting to change a profession that was still reluctant to name its role in harming black and brown communities, let alone transform itself.

During my graduate research at York University, this realization sharpened. My major research, “Decolonizing Greenspace and the ‘Equitable City’ Paradigm,” exposed the deep misalignment between celebrated planning ideals—like “healthy cities,” “equitable urbanism,” and “universal greenspace access”—and the lived realities of black and brown communities. Concepts like greenspace were treated as inherently good, inherently neutral, inherently universal. But through interviews with residents and planners, community work, and the events unfolding during the 2020 underscoring of Black Lives Matter, I witnessed how deeply entrenched and colonism-induced subjectivity—our history, our trauma, our relationships to land, safety, policing, and public space—was not only ignored, but actively sterilized out of planning frameworks in times that rendered our experiences with these conditions essential or unavoidable.

I remember the evening I defended by research paper to a committee comprised of faculty members—being asked a question I couldn’t bring myself to answer honestly amidst this group of researchers and professionals I admired for fear, perhaps, of judgement, ridicule, or simply daring to be too divisive, too black. “This is provocative, illuminating, and necessary work. What do you plan to do with it?”

Those of us who enter this field from marginalized backgrounds often do so because we want to make our communities safer, more vibrant, more just. We imagine planning as a tool for liberation. But too often, the institutions we meet—municipal, consulting, and corporate—make that hope feel naïve.

When I sat in front of the camera on Zoom, I can say that was the moment I realized something that felt like an undeniable truth:

I didn’t want to just “work in planning.”
I wanted to rewrite what planning could be.

And I knew I could not do it alone. But another question arose in its discovery, unanswered and lingering in my mind years later.  What happens when the profession you chose to transform keeps trying to transform you instead?

The Places I Never Belonged

Early in my career, I cycled through every major planning environment, searching for a place where my full self—and my full politics—could coexist with my work.

Municipal government was my first training ground—a place where I hoped to bring lived experience into policy design. But instead, I found myself constrained by rigid workflows and standardized procedures that prioritized consistency over creativity, precedent over truth, and technical expertise over community wisdom. Like a cog in a machine that ran too smoothly to question itself, I often felt invisible, or worse, muted. Each day, I confronted the quiet violence of bureaucracy: practices that appeared neutral on paper but perpetuated harm implicitly in black and brown neighbourhoods through land-use decisions, zoning patterns, service gaps, and long-ignored infrastructural inequities due to gaps in epistemic access (knowledge that comes from lived experience and positionality) among decision makers.

Without this very critical knowledge, many of the nuanced, complex disparities continued to slip through the cracks, unaddressed due to ignorance. The workflows were efficient, the templates immaculate, the procedures tried and true. And yet the outcomes were depressingly predictable. I feared I would always be a box checker in a system that resisted radical reimagination made me feel complicit in maintaining the very inequities I wanted to dismantle.

During interviews with other black planners for my 2020 research, these sentiments echoed back to me. Many spoke of feeling like “diversity tokens” in institutions unwilling to confront the racialized impact of their decisions or the weight of our “double consciousness” as black people and planning professionals, aware of its seemingly unavoidable constraints. Everyone had a story about being dismissed when raising concerns that challenged dominant planning narratives. The loneliness was not imagined. It was structural.

Working for developers, I carried a different kind of weight. Walking into community consultations, I felt the eyes of people who looked like me—eyes that questioned why I was standing on that side of the table. They sensed, as I did, the extractive nature of development processes that framed harm as “secondary impacts” and displacement as a regrettable but unavoidable outcome. I knew what those projects would cost communities, because I had grown up in those communities. And yet, I was tasked with convincing them to support the project vision. Our interactions were often transactional, extractive, or simply indifferent to their histories. They could see through the script. So could I.

In consulting, the dissonance grew louder. Meetings focused obsessively on revenue, potential, and speed, while the human consequences of displacement were treated as unfortunate side notes—risks to be managed, not lives to be considered. Deliverables, outputs, profitability, timelines—these were the key performance indicators. Rarely justice. Rarely truth. Rarely on the long-term wellbeing of the communities whose stories we collected, repackaged, and handed back to institutions uninterested in transformation.

Sitting across boardroom tables, watching decision-makers evaluate neighbourhoods through metrics that obscured lived experience—crime statistics, green ratios, walkability indices—became a reminder that the profession remained committed to a narrow, sanitized definition of expertise.

What’s more, it became clear that the communities we were planning in were rarely the communities we were planning for.

Across all these spaces, I never found a place where I could fully reconcile my identity, my ethics, and my purpose. But I knew I wasn’t alone. Amidst my tokenized experiences, it gave me a sense of belonging to know many black, Indigenous, and racialized planners were experiencing these same tensions—just in isolation, believing the struggle was individual rather than systemic.

Through all of this, I realized: It wasn’t that I didn’t fit into planning.
It was that planning wasn’t built to fit people like me. And this was not a malfunction of myself nor the profession—not really. Planning was actually working, just as it was designed. 

The Missing Space We Were Promised

During my master’s program, I had been surrounded by brilliant minds, diverse perspectives, and bold ideas. We debated real problems, imagined radical solutions, and designed planning models shaped by empathy, justice, and creativity. We dared to dream.

The most vibrant, imaginative, intellectually electrifying planning conversations I ever had were in my master’s program. My peers and I grappled with injustice, imagined alternate futures, and critiqued planning’s colonial roots with honesty and urgency. We drew on theories of black and brown geographies, disability justice, human rights, trauma-informed design, and relational understandings of land. We designed planning models shaped by empathy, justice, and creativity. We dared to dream.

We believed planning could be an emancipatory tool. And we had the vigor, the scrappiness, the imagination, and the courage to design cities accordingly.

I didn’t know it then, but in those sessions I had been surrounded by some of the most brilliant minds, diverse perspectives, and radical go-getters I have yet to encounter.

But the moment I graduated, that door closed. I went from imagining what planning could be to being told—implicitly and explicitly—to accept what planning has always been.

Stepping into the profession felt like stepping into a cold room where imagination was unwelcome and critique was seen as naïve. The field’s formulaic structure—this thing that makes planning appear reliable—was both its safety rail and its greatest limitation. It kept the system stable but stagnated. Predictable but unresponsive. Comfortable for institutions but harmful for communities living at the margins.

Suddenly, the gap between theory and practice was not an academic problem. It was a moral one.

My thesis revealed how “equitable city” frameworks often reproduce oppression by ignoring trauma, policing, surveillance, and the embodied realities of Black people in space. For Black communities, “greenspace” is not just a park. It’s a site where you navigate the world’s assumptions of your place in the world, your right to resources and wellbeing, and combat environmental racism. Public space? Where you must dare to claim and take up room not designed for you, with eyes watching you, profiling and criminalizing you for having the audacity to be black and breathing, while in public.

Planning discourse treats these components of the built form as universally-accessible resources—a one-size-fits-all metric divorced from subjectivity and historical context. It forgets that they are both our liberator for prosperity and wellbeing and our captor for fear and violence.

This dissonance mirrored the disillusionment I felt in practice. How could a field claim the language of equity while refusing to confront the roots of inequality?

It became clear that the planning profession is comfortable with diversity, but deeply uncomfortable with difference.

Today’s planning challenges—climate crisis, economic inequity, rapid technological change, political instability, and persistent racialized disparities—cannot be solved with yesterday’s frameworks. The field needs new minds, new voices, and new ways of knowing. It needs people who are willing to take big bites out of big problems, not people trained to color inside antiquated lines.

And yet, the pathways into planning remain narrow and uninviting for Black and Brown young people who could be the profession’s greatest asset.

This is where the idea for Holding Ground Studio began.

A Holding Ground for What Planning Could Be

When the 2020 uprisings unfolded, many institutions scrambled to release statements condemning anti-black racism. But inside the profession, black planners were asking deeper questions:

• Why were we still the only ones in the room?
• Why did planning schools erase the histories of Africville, Hogan’s Alley, and Black displacement across Canada?
• Why were our communities still treated as “engagement targets” rather than co-architects of their futures?
• Why did “innovation” never include dismantling the colonial logics embedded in planning systems?

My interviews during this period revealed a shared truth: black planners were exhausted—but they were also ready. Ready to build new spaces, new networks, new ways of practicing. Ready to stop asking for permission.

Holding Ground Studio is an answer to that call. The idea was born from a simple but urgent need: To create a space where Black and Brown planners can enter the profession without having to abandon their identities, silence their lived experiences, or shrink their imaginations.

A “holding ground” is a place where ships can anchor—a safe, stable point where you can pause, breathe, recalibrate, and gather the strength to continue your journey.

That’s the metaphor. That’s the mission.

At the Studio, young planners and interdisciplinary practitioners can build their craft in a space that values what they already carry: empathy, lived experience, cultural knowledge, and critical thought. These are not add-ons. They are competencies. They are essential.

Instead of asking newcomers to assimilate into a profession that has long excluded them, we ask the profession itself to expand—to make room for their brilliance.

Today’s challenges—climate destabilization, racialized displacement, public health inequities, technological restructuring, and the erosion of social infrastructure—are far too complex for siloed approaches. Planning alone cannot solve them.

That is why the Studio is deliberately, unapologetically multidisciplinary.

Our team brings together:

• Planners
• Designers
• Community Engagement Specialists
• Public Health Advocates
• Housing Strategists
• Environmental Thinkers
• Communications and Social Impact Practitioners
• Trauma- and Equity-informed researchers

We do this because the communities most impacted by planning deserve solutions shaped by expansive thinking. Because our problems are “sticky,” interconnected, and rooted in centuries of oppression—and our solutions must be just as layered, adaptive, and imaginative.

We are not afraid to think big.
We are not afraid to disrupt norms.
We are not afraid to build something entirely different.

Holding Ground Studio exists because this moment demands it, and because black and brown planners deserve more than survival within the profession.
We deserve a place to anchor, a place to create, and a place to lead from our deep understanding and appreciation of the very difference traditional planning circumvents.