polis: a collective blog about cities worldwide

God’s Plan: A Podcast on Faith and City Planning

by Alexa Mills

Podcast: God's Plan
Khirki Masjid in New Delhi, India. Source: Aditi Mehta

The connections between faith and city planning are undeniable. Faith-based groups rebuild areas after disasters, they develop affordable housing plans, and they help the poor. Additionally, social movements that have profoundly changed society, like the civil rights movement, were guided by faith.

Yet planning education generally does not deal with faith. “It’s this whole realm, and we come up against it all the time, but we keep ignoring it,” said Annette Kim, an urban planning professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This podcast is a conversation between Kim and her colleague, Professor Phil Thompson, on the relationship between faith and planning. Should the study of faith traditions and values be part of a planning education?



Alexa Mills is founding director of MIT CoLab Radio. The recording is part of a collection of podcasts developed by Polis and CoLab.