10.1177/0885412205283104 ARTICLE Journal of Planning Literature Design That Enables Diversity Design That Enables Diversity: The Complications of a Planning Ideal Emily Talen This article reviews the literature on place diversity and the quest to use design to promote social and economic mix in human settlements. The article fits together a large literature on the subject of the interrelationship between diversity and place and explores how diversity could be enabled within the context of the city-planning profession. It argues that the linkage between city planning—defined in its traditional sense as a profession concerned with the design of cities—and place diversity is understudied. Four distinct though inter- related theoretical bases for diversity are discussed: place vitality, economic health, social equity, and sustainability. The article argues that the promotion of place diversity re- quires focused effort on the part of planners, and that design- based strategies are an appropriate part of that effort. Keywords: mixed-income housing; social diversity Human settlements, planners say, should be socially and economically diverse—mixed in income, mixed in use, and actively supportive of places that commingle people of different races, ethnicities, genders, ages, occupations, and households. New Urbanists, smart- growth advocates, creative-class adherents, sustain- ability theorists—all have espoused the fundamental goal of what could be called place diversity as the corner- stone of their prescriptions for urban reform: that a diversity of people and functions should be spatially mixed. While most recognize the inevitability of differ- entiation and segregation of the kind Park, Burgess, and McKenzie identified eighty years ago—proclaiming that “competition forces associational groupings” (1925, 79)—it is now understood that planning must try to counterbalance these tendencies by promoting some kind of workable place diversity. Yet in discussions about how to address segregation— in many ways the antithesis of place diversity—American city planning, in its capacity as a profession that plans and designs cities, has been relatively withdrawn. Peter Hall (2002) observed that the problems of inner-city dis- investment, white flight, and segregation—the most potent manifestations of nondiversity—are problems that, “almost unbelievably,” city planning has not been called upon to answer. Unlike citizens in other coun- tries, “Americans are capable of separating problems of social pathology from any discussion of design solutions,” focusing instead on “a bundle of policies” (461)—often only weakly related to city planning. While the concepts of “place,” “neighborhood struc- ture,” and “spatial pattern” have made their way into the prescriptive debate over what to do about residen- tial segregation and lack of place diversity, the plan- ner’s unique contribution to this debate seems to be EMILY TALEN is an associate professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois–Urbana- Champaign. Her research focuses on new urbanism and the design of the built environment. Journal of Planning Literature, Vol. 20, No. 3 (February 2006). DOI: 10.1177/0885412205283104 Copyright © 2006 by Sage Publications