The Strength of Street Knowledge: Embedded Planning as Community-Based Praxis
This talk introduces a new method of urban planning called Embedded Planning Praxis. Embedded Planning revolutionizes practice by emphasizing street-level planning within the community rather than traditional desk-based methods. Developed by Jonathan Pacheco Bell in South Central LA as an outgrowth of code enforcement work, Embedded Planning has evolved into a community-based praxis that seeks to rebuild trust and foster meaningful relationships with marginalized communities historically harmed by inequitable planning.
Embedded Planning is working directly from community spaces and places. Embedded planners engage residents in everyday environments, evolving practice from desk-based policy formation to on-the-ground collaboration in and from the neighborhood. This immersive approach helps planners gain a deeper understanding of local needs and aspirations, ensuring that community voices and needs significantly shape planning decisions. Embedded Planning is a timely evolution in the field that aligns with growing calls for more equity-centered, place-based, participatory practices. By embedding themselves into neighborhoods, planners build strong and authentic relationships, moving beyond one-off, transactional consultations to create lasting and impactful partnerships.
Using a reflective practitioner framework, Jonathan will illustrate what Embedded Planning looks like, explain its role as his motivating throughline, highlight embedded planners implementing these inclusive methods coast to coast, while highlighting the challenges and benefits of this praxis. Attendees will learn how this emerging movement represents a crucial shift towards centering planning as an active and continuous process from within the community and represents the future of planning.
Embedded Planning Praxis Workshop: From Concept to Practice in Los Angeles
This interactive workshop builds on the themes introduced in last year’s USC Price talk, “The Strength of Street Knowledge: Embedded Planning as Community-Based Praxis.” Diving deeper, this event is a hands-on exploration of Embedded Planning Praxis itself. Designed as a participatory space, the workshop invites students to collaboratively explore how Embedded Planning can be implemented in LA’s unique contexts.
Embedded Planning calls for planners to work from spaces and places of the communities they serve, centering lived experience, co-creation, and long-term partnerships over top-down, technocratic approaches. This workshop asks: “What does it mean for planners to be embedded? How can we practice this approach in our communities? What are the challenges and possibilities?”
Participants will engage in interactive discussions and scenarios focused on local conditions and place-based strategies to apply Embedded Planning Praxis. The workshop also provides a supportive space for us to reflect on professional roles, institutional barriers, and opportunities for transformative planning practices. Whether you’re an experienced planner or new to participatory approaches, this workshop will jumpstart the development of practical steps to apply Embedded Planning in our communities.
Speaker Bio
Jonathan Pacheco Bell (@c1typlann3r) is a Los Angeles-based urban planner with two decades of experience across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. For 14 years, he worked on the ground as a Los Angeles County Zoning Enforcement Planner in South Central LA’s Florence-Firestone community. Witnessing the harms of inequitable zoning inspired him to create a new form of street-level planning advocacy called Embedded Planning Praxis. His street-level praxis has since become a movement spreading across the US and internationally. Today, Jonathan serves as Co-President of the nonprofit Florence-Firestone Community Organization – in the community where Embedded Planning was born.
Full circle moment at Careers, Capstones, and Conversation 2026, the annual UCLA Luskin MURP poster session.
Three students — Jordan, Diego, and Tanner — from my 2022 Pitzer College course “Community Based Planning Praxis” are now pursuing MURPs at UCLA Urban Planning, my alma mater. Mission accomplished 10X!
I’m encouraging all my fellow planners to talk up urban planning as a career every chance you get and build pipelines to planning practice.
Congrats Jordan James, Diego Tamayo, and Tanner Vandenbosch on this next chapter!
Planners + Community: Zena Al-Beitawi is doing an urban planning senior project examining how public spaces can be designed for inclusivity, safety, and enjoyment versus Hostile Architecture in Pomona, CA.
UCLA network in action! Jordan Grimaldi (MURP ‘26) is doing a master’s client project for City Fabrick analyzing utility right-of-ways in LA.
CF’s Alexander Jung, AICP (MURP ‘15) connected Jordan and me (MAUP ‘05) for deep background on the East 92nd Street utility right-of-way in Florence-Firestone.
Jordan interviewed me at the Florence-Firestone Community Organization office and then we visited the site, which is now the home of the future 92nd Street Linear Park via Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation!
I then connected Jordan with Yanel Sáenz (MPH ‘22) of the Friends of Washington and 92nd Street Park for additional community interviews about transforming this utility right-of-way into a park.
We will continue supporting Jordan’s community-based research and recommendations well after graduation.
Thanks to everyone who attended our Central Avenue Vacant Lot Activation on January 17th, MLK Weekend. Big shout out to our Second District Supervisor Holly J. Mitchell and our Assemblymember Sade Elhawary for joining us! Much love to all the vendors and performers, especially the Compton Riot dance crew from Kipp Compton Community School.
Florence-Firestone community members will decide the future of this vacant lot.
We have one more activation in February, come through.
I’m on the Host Committee planning the February 7th annual fundraiser for the nonprofit Architecture + Advocacy. This year’s topic is: “Deconstructing “Engagement: A Conversation about Community-Led Design.”
Community leaders, architects, policymakers, developers, and all people who care about the future of our city, will explore ways community engagement can go beyond “checking a box” and empower residents as decision makers. You can look forward to:
Meeting other people who care about ending neighborhood inequality
Participating in an intergenerational discussion about community-led design
Eating delicious food from local chef, The Aisha Life
Bidding on (and maybe winning) a wine tasting, task chair, and more!
Listening to good tunes
Date: Saturday, Feb 7, 2026 Time: 5:00 – 8:00pm Location: Western Office Showroom, 515 S. Figueroa Street, Suite 101 Los Angeles, CA 90071 Early Bird Tickets: $40 Early Bird ticket sales end January 22nd! After that, the price increases to $50. Get yours now! Tickets: https://architectureandadvocacy.org/en/events/p/architecture-advocacys-annual-fundraiser
Architect Frank Gehry passed away on December 5, 2025 in Santa Monica. He was 96. I wrote about Frank Gehry’s influence on me as a 90s architecture student at East Los Angeles College and SCI-Arc.
Excerpt:
Thirty years later, Gehry’s ideas challenging form, challenging materiality, challenging function, challenging convention, challenging orthodoxy, challenging the architecture establishment, challenging one’s own profession, remain with me as an urban planner.
Gehry was a driving inspiration in my early development. I’m taking time to reflect on his impact and work. Meantime, check out my 1996 three bedroom residence designed in the spirit of Frank Gehry.
The Florence-Firestone Community Organization recently hosted friends from SELA and South Central LA to discuss a range of urban planning issues. We covered the Gateway Cities Regional Climate Collaborative, the origins and spread of Embedded Planning praxis, emerging on-the-ground partnerships, community advocacy in these tense times, and much more. That 95-degree heat wave underscored the urgency of community preparedness for climate change.
The Strength of Street Knowledge: Embedded Planning as Community-Based Praxis
Jonathan Pacheco Bell, MAUP, MLIS
Speaker bio:
Jonathan Pacheco Bell is an urban planner with 20 years of experience across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors of design and planning. He’s a former graffiti writer and West Coast Hip Hop kid, who learned to navigate urban space crisscrossing 1990s LA tagging and doing graffiti murals. These early street-level experiences would inspire Jonathan in college to switch from architecture to urban planning.
Jonathan earned a Master’s in Urban Planning at UCLA in 2005 and began his career as an LA County Zoning Enforcement Planner, building partnerships in communities like Florence-Firestone in South Central LA. During this time, he witnessed the harms of inequitable zoning, inspiring him to create new forms of street-level planning advocacy – what we now call Embedded Planning Praxis!
He has lectured on Embedded Planning across the U.S., with guest talks at Columbia University, Duke, Ohio State, USC Architecture, & Stanford Engineering, and presentations at APA Conferences in California, Washington, Indiana, Louisiana, and Iowa.
Jonathan currently serves as Co-President of the nonprofit Florence-Firestone Community Organization, in the neighborhood where Embedded Planning was born. From 2021 to 2025, he was an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Cal Poly Pomona and remains a mentor to emerging Bronco Planners.
The Biltmore Los Angeles in Downtown LA, October 9-12, 2025
Cities of Quartz: How Mike Davis Transformed Urban Studies (Roundtable)
Saturday, October 11, 2025 | 1:15-2:45pm
Abstract:
In this roundtable discussion, a group of writers, academics, and urban planners will discuss the life and work of Mike Davis. With books like City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, and Planet of Slums, Davis played an irreplaceable role in pushing urban scholars to foreground questions of equity, justice, and sustainability in their work. Each of Davis’ books and articles was grounded in a clear-eyed assessment of the power dynamics that create unequal societies, and throughout his life he remained a forceful advocate for the moral necessity that poor and working-class communities — whatever their ethnic or racial makeup — have the same chance at opportunity as the ruling class.
To illuminate Davis’ legacy, our discussion will begin with the impact he had on how the city of Los Angeles understands itself, before we open our inquiry into applying his method to cities everywhere and incorporating his ethos into future urban plans.
The roundtable will be moderated by Mike Sonksen, a poet and former Woodbury University professor who was mentored by Mike Davis and remained friends with him for over two decades.
The Strength of Street Knowledge: Embedded Planning as Community-Based Praxis
This talk introduces a new method of urban planning called Embedded Planning Praxis. Embedded Planning revolutionizes practice by emphasizing street-level planning within the community rather than traditional desk-based methods. Developed by Jonathan Pacheco Bell in South Central LA as an outgrowth of code enforcement work, Embedded Planning has evolved into a community-based praxis that seeks to rebuild trust and foster meaningful relationships with marginalized communities historically harmed by inequitable planning.
Embedded Planning is working directly from community spaces and places. Embedded planners engage residents in everyday environments, evolving practice from desk-based policy formation to on-the-ground collaboration in and from the neighborhood. This immersive approach helps planners gain a deeper understanding of local needs and aspirations, ensuring that community voices and needs significantly shape planning decisions. Embedded Planning is a timely evolution in the field that aligns with growing calls for more equity-centered, place-based, participatory practices. By embedding themselves into neighborhoods, planners build strong and authentic relationships, moving beyond one-off, transactional consultations to create lasting and impactful partnerships.
Using a reflective practitioner framework, Jonathan will illustrate what Embedded Planning looks like, explain its role as his motivating throughline, highlight embedded planners implementing these inclusive methods coast to coast, while highlighting the challenges and benefits of this praxis. Attendees will learn how this emerging movement represents a crucial shift towards centering planning as an active and continuous process from within the community and represents the future of planning.
Speaker:
Jonathan Pacheco Bell is an urban planner with two decades of experience in California working across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. For 14 years, he served as a Los Angeles Zoning Enforcement Officer building partnerships on the ground in communities of color. During this time, he witnessed the harms of inequitable zoning, inspiring him to create new forms of street-level planning advocacy —what he calls Embedded Planning Praxis.
Jonathan is the VP of Policy and Programs at Casita Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for middle housing solutions. In addition to full-time practice, he volunteers as an Executive Board Member of the nonprofit Florence-Firestone Community Organization in South Central Los Angeles and was an Adjunct Professor at Cal Poly Pomona Department of Urban and Regional Planning from 2021-2025.
Jonathan has guest lectured nationally on Embedded Planning, with speaking engagements at Columbia University, Duke, Ohio State, University of Utah, Pratt Institute, Stanford Engineering, and UCLA; state and national APA Conferences in California, Iowa, Louisiana, and Indiana; and public forums such as AARP Livable Communities and the San Francisco Urban Film Fest.
A leader in the American Planning Association for over a decade, Jonathan is a member of the Latinos and Planning Division and is published in APA’s practitioner magazine, Planning. He previously served as APA Los Angeles section’s Social Media Director and was the Southern California representative on the APA National Social Equity Task Force.
Jonathan’s dedication to advocacy has earned him industry accolades, including the Planning Advocate Award of Excellence from APA Los Angeles and Planning Pioneer Award of Excellence from APA Inland Empire in 2024. He holds an MA in Urban Planning from UCLA Luskin and additional degrees in architecture, political science, and information science.
The Biltmore Los Angeles in Downtown LA, October 9-12, 2025
Cities of Quartz: How Mike Davis Transformed Urban Studies (Roundtable)
Saturday, October 11, 2025 | 1:15-2:45pm
Abstract:
In this roundtable discussion, a group of writers, academics, and urban planners will discuss the life and work of Mike Davis. With books like City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, and Planet of Slums, Davis played an irreplaceable role in pushing urban scholars to foreground questions of equity, justice, and sustainability in their work. Each of Davis’ books and articles was grounded in a clear-eyed assessment of the power dynamics that create unequal societies, and throughout his life he remained a forceful advocate for the moral necessity that poor and working-class communities — whatever their ethnic or racial makeup — have the same chance at opportunity as the ruling class.
To illuminate Davis’ legacy, our discussion will begin with the impact he had on how the city of Los Angeles understands itself, before we open our inquiry into applying his method to cities everywhere and incorporating his ethos into future urban plans.
The roundtable will be moderated by Mike Sonksen, a poet and former Woodbury University professor who was mentored by Mike Davis and remained friends with him for over two decades.
This Saturday 9/27 the Florence-Firestone Community Organization hosted the annual community walk in Florence-Firestone with the 1st year MURP cohort at Cal Poly Pomona College of Environmental Design. MURP students learned about urban planning through storytelling, social history, and immersive Embedded Planning with our community members. This is a mutually beneficial long term partnership! Shout out to professors and students for spending an afternoon with us in South Central LA.
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