The fourth and final installment of San Jose State’s Mineta Transportation Institute’s webinar series highlighted the short film “Voices of Impact,” an oral history project focused on identifying how planning practices have impacted communities of color.
Miguel Angel Vazquez, President of California Planning Roundtable and event speaker, is one of the first urban planners hired by a public health department in the nation.
His role is to strengthen the integration of planning and health through collaborations with non-traditional partners.
Urban planners develop programs for land use that help create communities, adjust to population growth and replace or repurpose infrastructure.
Founded in 1981, the California Planning Roundtable “advances planning practice and influences policy through innovation and leadership to create healthy, prosperous and equitable communities,” according to its website.
Partnering with the Mineta Transportation Institute, the California Planning Roundtable crafted the short film to give voice to people impacted, raise public awareness and suggest how planning professionals and policy makers can change their practices in response.
“We began this project as a result of the racial unrest that was happening soon after the pandemic – starting with the killing of George Floyd and others – at the hands of police,” Vazquez said.
He said some of the aspects they wanted to explore with the film included how community members are affected by systemic discrimination and land planning, and how communities can use planning as a tool to mitigate and prevent gentrification.
He said he and his team were looking for stories in communities of color that can help planning organizations understand how their rule affects said communities.
The film features the stories of six people who have been impacted by housing and land use policies enacted by federal, state and local governments. The film also shared solutions to improve the quality of life for communities who have suffered from those policies.
In the webinar, Vazquez shared the process of how the film project was initially developed and transformed over the course of a year.
He said his team developed guidelines regarding who the team will interview, film strategy and how the collection of stories will come together.
The team avoided the use of jargon, interviewed individuals in a quiet area, gave the interviewees a script of questions to be transparent and shared the protocols the team wanted to adhere to.
“The purpose of our guidelines was, from the get-go, to make sure we developed this film to [be] educational in nature,” Vazquez said.
Vazquez interviewed two subjects for the project, a different interaction from his usual meetings with community members.
“It gave me a very focused charge on what I wanted to learn,” Vazquez said. “I just listened.”
Maria Cortez currently serves as the community outreach assistant City Heights Community Development Corporation in San Diego.
City Heights Community Development Corporation works to enhance the quality of life for residents in community heights by creating and sustaining quality affordable housing and livable neighborhoods and by fostering economic self-sufficiency according to Live Well San Diego’s website.
“We, the community, are not bad and don’t have anything against the developers,” Cortez said. “It’s just that sometimes, developers don’t see the same visions that we have.”
Vazquez and the “Voices of Impact” project hopes to bridge the gap between developers and communities.
“I’d like to take this moment to invite the developers to come out to the community,” Cortez said. “Invite the community to these [meetings so] that you can see how we can work with you because this is the community that we live in – you guys work for the community, but you don’t live in the community.”
