ABSTRACT
This chapter illuminates constructive ways for city planners to talk about culture and to identify approaches to learn about the cultures of their communities. It reviews some different descriptions anthropologists and others have of culture and ways that culture is a force in different settings. Municipal decision-makers and city planners find themselves regularly and often unwittingly making choices and setting actionable policies based on their own cultural point of view and impacting the culture and cultures of their communities but with little to no awareness of its meaning or positive or negative implications or potentials. Lack of understanding of the various cultures and ways of life within a community and how they coexist and best function together results in policy choices and physical development patterns that institutionalize privilege for some while denying others access to resources and to fully exercise their ways of life.
