Mihir Aranala

In October 2021, I attended a conference on Race, Ethnicity, and Place which was held in Baltimore. It, being a geography conference made me realize how there is no talking about planning without geography. This was one of ASU’s first conferences as the main sponsor, thanks to the efforts of the JEDI committee.   The reason why the conference was situated in Baltimore was that it allowed the researchers and academics to situate themselves in a city where the concepts that they studied play out in a clear and explicit way. In the few paragraphs below, I will be sharing with you all some key takeaways from the panel discussions and plenaries as it is closely related to most of the work we do in this course. For example, I did not know that redlining was being done in Baltimore, and I am sure in many other cities, to attract the immigrant demographic in an area called Highland, in a bid to prop up the property prices. Baltimore has a distinct and defined spatial representation of redl...

I moved to Phoenix from Tempe approximately three months ago to pursue my planning internship at AECOM. I was excited and over the moon to start, but there was a problem. The office was 17 miles from where I lived, and I did not have a car to commute to in a very car-dominant city. The transit option to commute to work was one and a half hours long one way, which made the daily commute excruciating to even think of. I could have worked from home, but it was just not my thing. Thus began my move to Phoenix and my biking journey.  The first week I walked to and from the office because I did not have my bike yet. The 30 minutes one-way walks would have been better if not for the sweltering 100 degrees heat in the open tree-less urbanscape of Phoenix and the uphill terrain. My routine was to get there early to avoid the heat and pat myself down before entering the office. I knew this was unsustainable, and I wanted to get out of it as soon as possible. I was scouring the internet ...