Radical Planning: Decolonizing Extractivism in Alberta and the Democratic Republic of Congo

This research has been conducted with the intention of introducing and connecting concepts of decolonization to the eld of urban & regional planning. It argues that planning as a study and discipline has been historically subjected to and utilised by colonial and imperial processes and that states like Canada are implicated in natural resource exploitation across various communities both at a domestic level and at an international stage. In this paper, I argue this Western driven mining has intersected with planning and colonial history in several major ways, with both Indigenous peoples in the Wood Bufalo Region and several cities in the Democratic Republic of Congo experiencing a form of Canadian mining hegemony in respect to its mining policies and practices. Such practices I argue has resulted in a displacement within the urban and rural form which has had oten catastrophic consequences for subsistence living and city development alike.