Revisiting Equity in Urban Operations Management 50 Years Later: What do City Planners Have to Say?

The article focuses on the historical and contemporary relationship between urban operations management and urban planning, emphasizing their potential collaboration to address persistent racial and class inequities in American cities. It traces how operations management and planning were closely linked from the 1950s to the 1970s under the rational planning doctrine, which prioritized efficiency but often overlooked equity, leading to a divergence of the fields by 1980. The author argues that modern urban operations management can benefit from reengaging with planning, especially its recent equity-oriented and community-focused approaches, to develop empirical, distributive, and reparative research agendas that better serve disadvantaged communities. Key urban policy issues highlighted include equitable facility siting, gig worker protections, community paramedicine, housing equity, and food access, where operations analysis can provide practical insights. This renewed collaboration offers an opportunity to clarify how urban systems reproduce inequality and how they might be transformed to promote justice and livability for all residents.