Toward a Restorative Planning Ethic: Race, History, and Food Planning in Albany, Georgia

Contemporary discussions of equity in planning for urban agriculture remains incomplete when decoupled from the history of racialized food systems in the United States. This chapter documents the decades-long experiences and practices of community-based food systems actors in the small southern city of Albany, Georgia. Through a case study of the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education. a nonprofit organization that focuses on food systems and community empowerment, we explore the practices of community actors against a complex history of racial dispossession and discrimination that they resist and strive to transform. Community food actors engage in transformative work in order to improve the city’s food system and promote self-determination. The experiences of community actors in Albany, Georgia offer insights into Black people in the United States as producers of food and makers of place. Additionally, the example of Albany examines the potential for urban agriculture as a tool for racial justice, and offers a paradigm for local government public policy to support racial healing in deeply divided communities. The longer history of community-led food planning presented here illuminates the thin line between the past and the present and surfaces a restorative planning ethic, a planning framework that is simultaneously future-oriented and historically-informed and demands that planners engage with and enhance the self-determination of communities that act as storehouses of history and memory in order to acknowledge and account for past harms and wrongs.