For planners developing an interest in ethical and equitable planning, moving into actual planning practice and coming up against the pragmatism of context and implementation, and the gap between what should be done and what can be done, can be disheartening. At the same time, retaining that end-goal perspective of having equity and justice as ideal values is important to hedge against a conservative bias towards maintaining status quo that may come with a full-on realist approach.

In our studio project for the City of Kelowna, Eanimi Agube, Marco Sotres and I drew from the concept of pragmatic idealism, which has its theoretical basis in philosophy and political theory, to inform our recommendations for the City’s future equity work. Working closely with City staff, our team used the lens of pragmatic idealism to identify approaches to develop the City’s equity policy objectives, as set out in their recent Official Community Plan (OCP), into implementable actions, without losing sight of the broader goal of planning equity and justice. This section of the report expands on the concept of pragmatic idealism and how we used this to guide our project.