Bring Zoning Back Into the Planning Curricula

Zoning is central to the practice of planning, but planning programs rarely forefront zoning’s exclusionary history and its implications for inequities when teaching about it. We created a multi-campus course, Zoning for Equity, to explore how planners can end exclusionary zoning and use zoning to advance social justice. After 3 years of teaching the course, we share four principles for revising zoning education in planning curricula. Planning programs are responsible for educating new cohorts of planners who can guide contemporary zoning reforms with advancing equity as a core mission; this Viewpoint suggests guidelines for achieving such an objective.