Written by Nadia Kim (2026.07.09)

I began studying the intersection of urban planning and education around 2020, when I started my master’s program. That means I have now spent nearly seven years thinking about this topic. Because planning and education are often treated as distinct fields, each with its own professional boundaries, institutional cultures, and policy languages, it has not always been easy to find people who are thinking across the same divide.

Still, every so often, I meet someone who shares this concern. Those moments are rare and encouraging. I have also had conversations where people say something like, “I have always thought that issue was important, but I never quite imagined turning it into a research project. I’m glad you are doing it.” Comments like that have made this intellectual path feel less lonely.

My work sits at the intersection of economic development and education policy. I am drawn to this intersection because both fields, at least in principle, are concerned with improving collective well-being. Yet they do not always speak to each other. They also compete for public attention, administrative capacity, and, most importantly, public money.

The tension can sometimes feel like a chicken-and-egg problem. One side argues that cities, regions, and governments need economic growth before they can adequately fund public goods. The other side argues that people, especially children and future generations, need meaningful public investment before communities can truly prosper. So, I came to question whether there is a “better” middle ground.

In some ways, the policy tools I study in my dissertation appear to offer that middle ground. They are often framed as innovative reforms that can connect development, public revenue, and community benefit. But when examined more closely, the picture becomes more complicated. In practice, the dominant logic still often seems to be that communities must first pursue development, and only later invest more fully in education, care, and public welfare.

That sequencing raises important questions. If a community delays investment in the current generation until after development is “complete,” will the children who eventually benefit be the same children who experienced the earlier period of underinvestment? At what point does a city, neighborhood, or region decide that it is now sufficiently developed, sufficiently prosperous, or sufficiently fiscally secure to prioritize public well-being more directly? These questions do not have simple answers, but they matter.

Looking at economic development policy alongside public education policy also reveals an irony. Economic development is often justified in the name of local prosperity, but it does not always directly engage with the everyday lives of existing residents. There may be formal opportunities for review, participation, or social infrastructure investment. There may also be legal mechanisms through which community benefits could be considered. Yet direct reinvestment in the lives of current residents, especially through schools, care, and other forms of social infrastructure, is often limited or secondary.

This is where I find social reproduction theory especially useful. Any economy depends on people. Businesses need workers, families, caregivers, students, and communities. If people are not able to live well, learn, care for one another, and remain in place, then what exactly is being developed? Unless the implicit goal of economic development is displacement or demographic replacement, rather than shared prosperity, it seems necessary to ask how economic development policies affect the people already living in the places being developed.

When I raise these questions, I sometimes hear a reasonable response: economic development policy is, after all, about “economic” “development.” Why should it be expected to address education, care, children, or residents’ everyday lives? Why criticize a policy for not doing something it was not designed to do?

My answer is: why not?

Why should economic development and human development be treated as separate domains? Why should we assume that building the tax base and investing in people must be competing priorities? Why do we so often frame the issue as whether money should come before people, or people before money?

Human development is concerned with expanding people’s real freedoms and capacities to live lives they value. That concern necessarily directs attention to those with the fewest resources and the least institutional power. In policy debates, however, when the choice is framed as “people versus money,” money often wins.

So I ask: why not think these things together?

I hope there will be a time when this question no longer feels unusual, marginal, or overly ambitious. I hope it becomes ordinary to ask how economic development policies shape human development, and how public investments in education, care, and social infrastructure should be understood as central to development itself.

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© 2026 Ji Hyun “Nadia” Kim. All rights reserved.

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