When Diversity Lost the Beat

Since the 1960s, African Americans have advocated to be systematically represented and addressed in planning education and practice. Despite burgeoning diversity work, it is unclear how specifically planning scholars have listened. Using a bibliometric and content analysis of the 21 oldest and most-cited planning journals, I analyzed the presence of race, diversity, and African Americans in 19,645 peer-reviewed research articles published between 1990 and 2020. Of these articles, only 4.8% focused explicitly on racial diversity in the abstracts, titles, keywords, or within their main text. Within these 944 U.S. diversity articles, nearly one-fourth (24.47%, n = 231) focused on African Americans. Overall, just 1.17% of the total U.S.-focused planning research in these journals focused on African Americans in this 3-decade period. Of these Black urbanism research articles, an evolving set of 34 themes and 105 story beats built on each other in six story arcs: a) Black housing, segregation, and gentrification; b) Black entrepreneurship and employment; c) Black ecology and environmentalism; d) Black arts, culture, and politics; and e) Black intersectionality. In addition to offering the first quantitative study on Black urbanism since 1990, two main analytical insights are that Black urbanism is a small literature, and specific contours exist to grow Black urbanism beyond its small canon in planning. Limitations to these findings include the small literature size, the lack of engagement with Black urbanism in a broader context than planning, technological barriers for mining older articles from archived databases, and understanding Black urbanism beyond a provincial focus on the United States. I offer two suggestions for planning scholars and practitioners: Avoid race-neutral diversity language when practicing in or publishing about Black contexts and recognize that a canon of Black urbanism exists.