Watch Out! It’s Giuliani Time!

by Tom Angotti Seems wherever we New Yorkers go these days we hear about the great job “our”mayor’s doing. They say that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has cleaned up the streets, cut the crime rate and pulled the city out of…

Promote International Networking and Local Action

by Barbara Loevinger Rahder The value of Planners Network for me is the opportunity it provides for networking with progressive planners, academics, and activists in other places, and the support and ideas that these contacts offer my work locally. In…

Are We Progressive Planners?

by Ruth Yabes What should Planners Network and progressive planners be doing? How can I possibly answer that question since I don’t feel I am a true  progressive planner. I am embarrassed to admit this, but I don’t think I…

Labor and Community: Not an Easy Marriage

by Maryann Leshin The prospect of bringing together labor and community at the PN 1999 Conference brings to mind several critical discrepancies between the agendas of these two groups. I see labor and community from the perspective of someone who…

Labor and Community: Living Wage, Live Action

by Robert Pollin This past summer, security workers at LAX airport in Los Angeles began their first-ever union organizing drive. They were motivated, labor activists say, by the city’s foot-dragging in implementing a living-wage ordinance that had passed the previous…

Support Activists, Question Capitalism

By Dick Platkin First, PN should be a source of analysis and technical resources for community struggles, especially those involving public budgets. For the past generation public investment in most urban programs has shrunk. This trend was already obvious in…

Keep Networking

By Gwen Urey Planners Network was in the vanguard by conceiving of itself as a “network” in 1975. We have evolved technologically, holding ourselves together through old newsletter technology and the new pn-net and Web page. As these vehicles and…

Advocate for Progressive Planning Education

By Cathy Klump Most planners stumble into planning en route to their perceived destiny as lawyers, doctors, English professors, and business people. For a number of reasons, the career aspiration of a more mainstream job gets excused, and in its…

Collective Action

By Patricia Nolan “While we think and plan, we shouldn’t let thinking and planning get in the way of or substitute for doing.” When I decided to be a planner, a colleague and mentor of mine shared this thought with…

From Whence and Whither PN?

by Tom Angotti [half] In the last couple of issues, we asked PN members to give us their views on what Planners Network and progressive planners should be doing. We got a variety of answers, which are printed in this…

Review: William J. Wilson’s When Work Disappears

By Dick Platkin One of the most vexing problems facing progressive planners in the United States is the enduring poverty of America’s inner cities, made worse in recent years by the loss of jobs through technological change, downsizing, and capital…

Categories: January/February 1998

The Complexity of Gender A Caribbean Perspective

by Wanda I. Mills Community building and development efforts need to take into account differences among groups within communities. I propose a model that looks at how class, race, ethnicity, nationality, colonial status, sexuality and gender produce diverse relationships among…

Categories: July/August 1998

Subscribing to Gender Internet Resources for Planners

by Stacy Harwood Over a year ago, I began “surfing the Web” for anything related to the intersection of women, gender or feminist theory and urban planning, loosely defined. Although a frustrating and time consuming process, I managed to uncover…

Categories: July/August 1998

Engendering Neoliberal Reform

by Amy Lind Many planners and development practitioners have recognized women’s work as an important source for community development and mobilization. A common message is, if a development project is to be successful, women must be involved. Yet it is…

Categories: July/August 1998

Do Equity Planners Care About Health Care?

by Patricia A. Nolan I was standing in the lobby of the massive 918-bed Cook County Hospital complex in Chicago when it finally hit me. Here in the heart of one of the country’s largest public hospitals I was surrounded…

Categories: July/August 1998

Special Issue on Feminism, Gender, and Planning

by Ann Forsyth, Guest Editor Contemporary US feminism emerged in the 1960s and 1970s at the end of a period of dramatic residential suburbanization and urban renewal. In this context, feminist work from the planning and design professions in the…

Categories: July/August 1998

MIDDLE EAST MILITARY DOLLARS AND OUR CITIES

by Richard Platkin North American cities pay dearly for U.S. military policy in the Middle East. According to the July 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs, the cost of the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf is between $30 to…

Categories: May/June 1998

Sustainable and Environmentally Just Societies

by Sandra Rodriguez Communities of color have much to contribute to sustainability because of their front-line experiences in struggles against environmental degradation and health risks they face in their neighborhoods and workplaces. The environmental issues faced by communities of color…

Categories: May/June 1998

PRINCIPLES OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

by Jon Orcutt The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. October 24-27, 1991. Washington D.C. PREAMBLE WE, THE PEOPLE OF COLOR, gathered together at this multinational People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to begin to build a national…

Categories: May/June 1998

Sustaining Diversity Participatory Design and Urban Space

by Richard Milgrom “Sustaining diversity” can be interpreted in two different ways. First, there is a need to sustain the human diversity present in urban environments. Diversity has allowed cities to embrace difference, an essential ingredient in the promotion of…

Categories: May/June 1998

Sustainability is Not Enough

“Sustainability” as a goal for planning just doesn’t work. In the first place, sustainability is not a goal; it is a constraint on the achievement of other goals. No one who is interested in change wants to sustain things as…

Categories: May/June 1998

Sustainability: Who Benefits?

by Richard Milgrom The term “sustainability” has become problematic. Some now argue that it is so overused as to be useless, co-opted by many for self-centered agendas. The four main articles in this issue of Planners Network attempt to come…

Categories: May/June 1998

Regional Planning and Reason

by Tom Angotti So you’re a planner? That’s just what we need. Ever hear that before? Why is it some people think planning can set things right? If cities are a mess, they think planning will bring order to chaos,…

Categories: March/April 1998