Author’s Note: I have rewritten this first post a few times and I have probably not improved upon it at all but I think it is import to post this as an initial attempt to get my thoughts out there. I hope to offer more coherent and streamlined thoughts in the future but for the moment, here is my first take.
I recently read the collection of essays: The Just City Essays, and I was inspired to evaluate if Columbus, OH one of the largest midwestern cities in the US, is built as Just City. Toni Griffin in the leadoff article, Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, gives us a framework for this evaluation, and while I am not a city planning academic I will do my best to identify traits and characteristics that make up a just or unjust city.
Three Urban Injustice Conditions
The three conditions are a ocio-economic division, concentration of poverty, and disinvestment crime an architecture of fear, and s. We will attempt to measure Columbus against these three frameworks first.
Socio-economic division: Columbus is very clearly divided geographically with socioeconomic standards in mind with poorer classes living east of I-71 and south of downtown. It is interesting how the highways in and around Columbus act as a true barrier against connectivity.
Concentrated poverty in Columbus is a little harder to spot because the city does do a pretty good job of hiding it, but it is there and it follows the same physical boundaries of the socio-economic divisions (i.e. the highways).
Disinvestment is hard to measure in the short term but easy to identify in the long term. Areas just outside of German and Italian Village show clear signs of decay but is this due to targeted divestment or failed planning? One could argue that failed planning is targeted divestment. In either case, the result is an architecture of fear. What funding is available for areas with concentrated poverty is often so inadequate that we come up with a result that lacks any warmth, and thus gives rise to structures that feel harmful. This result of “planning” forces the neighborhood to be fearful.
Currently on the scale of urban injustice Columbus is meeting a lot of these criteria, the slight (somewhat horrifying) comfort is that most cities in America are also planned similarly, and as a result we as Americans are all trying to tackle similar issues. How do we address physical barriers like highways dividing cities into the have and have-nots? How do we allocate resources to avoid disinvestment and curtail a rise of concentrations of poverty? These are big picture issues that most city planners spend their entire careers trying to solve. My view as a community member is to start with the smallest problem I can solve, get involved and get informed. If Columbus is built unjustly, what does a Just City look like?
Values for a Just City
The values for a Just City according to Griffin are Equity, Choice, Access, Connectivity, Ownership, Diversity, Participation, Inclusion, Beauty, and Creativity. All of these values are tightly interconnected and affect each other, lets dive in to how Columbus measure up against these values.
Equity – Currently there is a lack of equity throughout the city. This is due to large number of factors like how we structure our funding for public works (roads, schools, housing developments, water treatment, parks etc). The majority of the these are decentralized from the city government and instead are based on income taxes so more affluent areas technically have more funding for works because of the concentration of tax dollars while the reverse is true for concentrations of poverty.
Choice – Choice is difficult to measure for most public goods other than education. In education there is very little choice because it is also tied to tax structure. Choice in housing is also limited to the whims of the market which recently post-COVID has exploded and the city government does very little to limit speculation and gentrification in an effort to support the market. This may be the most difficult value to attain for a city given how much is limited based on free market economic factors, and how difficult it would be to place restrictions on any sort of barriers to choice. City wide rent control would be a restriction that would allow people to choose to live in better areas, but would limit the economic freedoms of landlords. I would argue that some landlords treat the current market like a joke with how high rent is for a one bedroom in the city but I am attempting to paint a fair picture of a city for all including landlords. Limits on land speculation are desperately needed however, or there will be no more single family homes available for the middle class in 20 years, instead we will be insulated in midsize buildings of grey and black vinyl siding that lack soul and cost a whole paycheck to live in. I would also argue perhaps in a very progressive move to limit the number of single family homes a person or entity can own. I have watched my own neighborhood get bought up by flippers but instead of selling the property again, these people rip out the architectural heart of these homes in favor of renting bland grey houses for double their worth. This shrinks the housing market and drives up the demand, which in turn drives up the cost. Choice in Columbus could be its own deep dive into each area of public works but we will move on for now.
Access – Access and choice are tied together in Columbus. If you do not posses the means to choose then you do not have access. Access is going to be one of the biggest factors in planning transit throughout the city. The new COTA funding for the LinkUs lines have already demonstrated careful access planning because they link areas that are concentrations of poverty to parts of the city that offer choices. Better public transit would offer better access.
Connectivity – Circling back to the new COTA lines coming out in the next few years, if they follow the proposed structure then we are looking at a new level of connectivity in Columbus that we have no seen since the last train left Columbus in the 1970s. This would offer more access and choice to poorer residents which in turn could change the landscape of our city socio-economically.
Ownership – This value can be measured in two different ways, does a community have ownership over its space and are their pathways for people to attain literal ownership. I would say Columbus is in dire need of better community involvement in public housing, transit, and education projects to say that it is a city that values ownership. Furthermore, with the current housing market conditions and no limits on speculation and gentrification literal home ownership is rapidly becoming more and more unattainable. The US Census Bureau says that the median income in the Columbus Metro area is $77,000 a year, the average cost of a starter level home is $352,854. No matter how the math comes out unless the buyer has help from someone with existing capital, Columbus residents are being priced out of the American Dream.
Diversity – For the moment, we can look at the numbers for how diverse Columbus is. Columbus has a population of 1.32M people as of 2025. Within that figure, 59% are white, 22% are black, 7% are Hispanic, and 5% are Asian, and the remaining 7% identify as more than one race. While it is clear there is a larger proportion of white people in Columbus than any other group, there is a clear diversity of people in Columbus. Are we incorporating diverse ideas within our city in terms of planning? While difficult to gage a measurement for this exact question, we can look at representation at the City Council level to identify if we are proportionally representing the city’s diversity. After looking through the City Council’s Member Directory the majority of the city council is not white, and follows the City of Columbus’ demographic data closely as of 2025.
Participation – This is difficult to measure because participation is varied. Forms of participation vary from community action planning, attending city council meetings, participating in petition signing, voting, protesting, etc. Some of these are less measurable than others, but let’s hit the highlights. Voter turnout in Ohio for the last 6 years (2024-2018) has averaged out to 60.674%, obviously with much higher spikes for the 2020 and 2024 election years.
Inclusion – I am not sure if we have an actionable way to measure this currently. Inclusion and diversity are so tightly interwoven that I suspect as I do more research into how diversity and city planning in Columbus are intertwined this will become more apparent. For the moment our City Council seems to include representatives that accurately depict Columbus as a whole.
Beauty – Downtown areas and parks are beautiful so are metro parks, but they need to be planned in conjunction with housing. The Columbus Metro Housing Authority is actively moving forward with several housing projects as of 2025. The majority of these housing projects appear to be funded in tandem with private housing companies that help to offset the cost of building and maintenance. However, the introduction of these private companies puts limits on the planning ability of the city. on projects not affiliated with a known third party, it still seems that there is a lack of vision within the Housing Authority for planning. The majority of these proposed projects all follow similar new trends for large apartment builds with black or gray exteriors and drab interiors. The city is also not considering the surrounding area or the idea of making the apartment a community for its residents. All of these proposed plans lack details of any walkable areas, greenspaces, or common areas. These decisions make sense when placed in context that the CMHA is in debt, and they need cashflow to pay off that debt, but we are sacrificing the comfort of the people who need beautiful and livable spaces for relatively short-term gains.
On the other hand the Columbus Parks and Recreation Department is knocking beauty out of the park. Offering 422 parks, 14,069 acres of land, 230 miles of trails, 171 playgrounds, and 25 nature preserves CPRD is fulfilling its promise to keep Columbus beautiful. It also has 20 different capital improvement projects in the works as of Fall 2025. I will be doing a deep dive to do a cross-sectional analysis of parks and demographics of the area they serve to see if CPRD is meeting the needs of ALL its residents in a future post.
Creativity – Another value that is difficult to measure. I would argue that there certainly is creativity within the communities in Columbus but from a city planning perspective I think there is currently a lack of creativity. I think we need to be more bold with the number of public works we attempt to create to really let the creativity of Columbus City Planners shine. Looking at the current planning in the CMHA it seems like there is room for improvement. I also believe that their should be better coordination between city departments to plan better, more beautiful spaces for residents to live.
So Now What?
Is Columbus built as a Just City? – No but I would argue most mid-size cities throughout the US are built very similarly to Columbus in a way that reflected the values of the times in which they were built. I think going forward it is the job of residents of Columbus to demand that we carry the values of a Just City moving forward. We have to demand equity, choice, and access by participating in city planning discussions. The more disengaged we get from the civic process the more our city becomes unjustly “planned.” If we do not engage with city councils, local forums, and community projects the more likely it is that these public options will be comes private ones. The result of that will be a rise of gentrification and speculation. Columbus is set to be one of the foremost cities in the Midwest if we take advantage of the opportunity and plan what we want our city to look like going forward.
Midwestern Trains 