Are planners prepared to address social justice and distributional equity?

Planners have stated their commitment and responsibility to assure fairness in community and regional planning activities. Evidencing this is an abundance of literature on the theoretical perspectives of social justice and planning ideals. But is this stated concern for social justice and equity reflected in the training that professional planners receive in US graduate planning programs? Unfortunately, it has not been translated into providing practical methods to measure and assess fairness that can be applied in the field. While such methods exist and have been researched by related disciplines, planning has fallen short of developing and incorporating them into curricula along with transportation, demographic and economic analysis methods.