Hindsight 2021: Re-emergence Re-Imagined

Hindsight is an annual conference on urban planning through an equity lens, organized and run by the American Planning Association New York Metro Chapter’s Diversity Committee (DivComm). Each year, Hindsight selects a theme, often around a significant urban planning and equity-related milestone, to not only shed light on the discriminatory history of planning and its role in shaping today’s inequitable places, but also to highlight planning as a means of achieving more inclusive, just, and equitable communities. This year will be Hindsight’s fifth and final year.

The two day, virtual event will take place from November 4-5, 2021. Hindsight will focus on diversity and social equity not solely as a topic at a conference, but as a lens through which all planning and community development should be implemented.

Hindsight 2021: Re-Emergence Re-Imagined

As we slowly emerge from a global pandemic, 2021 continues to challenge us to balance the duality of gratitude and grief in the world. There has been greater hope inspired by community mutual aid and resourcefulness, new leadership, as well as the country’s reopening. However, economic recovery and access to vaccines remain unequal; police brutality and violence on Black, Brown, Asian, Trans, and Disabled lives continues; and militarization abroad persists. It has become undeniable that the experiences of oppressed peoples around the world are interconnected and rooted in white supremacy, racial capitalism, and U.S. imperialism. At this year’s conference, we acknowledge the collective resistance and ingenuity sprouted in the midst of grief and call to re-imagine our communities’ re-emergence.

Our liberation, self-determination, and autonomy are possible. In this fifth and final year of Hindsight™, let us create space to re-imagine what an equitable future truly for us and by us looks like, to guide our re-emergence. We call on planners and policy makers to shatter the failed systems that perpetuate racism and ableism, and, together with communities, build the foundation needed for us to collectively thrive. Like a seedling emerging between the cracks, let us root into the resistance and solidarity of our ancestors and manifest a future of our wildest dreams–where the impossible is possible.