Keeping the Your City Alive: Planning as Resistance and Imagination — This session draws inspiration from The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin to ask: what does it mean to defend the soul of a city? Through the lens of speculative fiction, we’ll explore how cultural erasure, displacement, and so-called “neutral” planning policies mirror the novel’s antagonist—an abstract, consuming force that seeks to flatten difference and displace identity. Participants will consider what it means to plan with, not for, those who are deeply embedded in the spirit of their neighborhoods, and leave with new frameworks for engaging cultural memory, power, and narrative in their practice. In a field that so often seeks to plan around community, we’ll instead ask: how can engaging community become an act of both resistance and radical imagination?