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What is Planners Network? Planners Network is a coordinated network of individual members and of chapters based in cities, regions, and campuses around North America, also known as Turtle Island, and beyond. We publish the online magazine Progressive City, distribute…
by Ryan Walker Understanding and realizing the urban aspirations of Canada’s Aboriginal (Indigenous) peoples (i.e., First Nations, Métis and Inuit) is a fundamental part of planning for diversity. Aboriginal peoples constitute a significant proportion of the population in a number…
By Jacqueline Leavitt When the U.S. Conference of Mayors arrived in Providence, Rhode Island, this June, it faced an unexpected list of issues and demands from a national organization, the U.S. Right to the City (RTTC) Alliance. RTTC, which promotes…
By Marie Kennedy Gaza Under Siege As I drove northeast from Jabalia last March, all I could see in every direction was swaths of upturned concrete and twisted metal, what used to be factories and dairies in the industrial heartland…
By Regula Modlich “Havana Cuba: A New Master Plan” reads the flier for Julio César Pérez Hernández’ lecture in Toronto, Canada. What progressive planner wouldn’t do a double take? Havana, the “David” nation of approximately 2.2 million residents that fought,…
By Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires When the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 was being debated, Senator Walter Mondale famously stated that “the reach of the proposed law was to replace the ghettos with truly integrated and balanced…
By Tom Angotti Dubai, United Arab Emirates Part Two in a series on urban apartheids. Las Vegas, Walt Disney World and Miami rolled into one and then jacked up on steroids. That’s Dubai, the maximum enclave and theme park of…
By Emily P. Achtenberg Bolivia’s vice minister for housing, Ramiro Rivera, had been on the job only two weeks last March when his office was occupied by 100 angry members of Ponchos Rojos (Red Ponchos), a militant Aymara peasant group.…
By Ernesto Castañeda On 3 October 2007, a piece of street theater was unfolding on the sidewalks of Rue de la Banque, a street in downtown Paris close to the Euronext Paris Stock Exchange. Protestors, mostly legal immigrants, were camping…
By Jennifer Ridgley and Justin Steil In July of 2006, the city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, became a focus of national media attention when its city council approved the Illegal Immigration Relief Act Ordinance (IIRA) proposed by Mayor Lou Barletta. Allegedly…
By María-Teresa Vázquez-Castillo This is our land. This is our street. Get the hell out of here. –Joseph Turner, founder of Save our State (SOS) In the early twenty-first century, a new stage of the anti-immigrant city is in the…
By Tom Angotti East Jerusalem, Occupied Palestine Part One in a series on urban apartheids. It takes two hours every day for Palestinians to cross the military checkpoint from Bethlehem to Jerusalem so they can get to work. Bethlehem is…
by Shiri Pasternak and David Wachsmuth In Detroit, which is choking on tens of thousands of abandoned properties, the housing abandonment problem is easy to see but effective solutions are hard to imagine. In Toronto, the opposite is true. The…
by Ryan Hayes How can we, as residents of Toronto, transform Toronto City Hall—the city bureaucracy’s democratic core—into a youth-friendly space, one that comes to terms with historical practices of exclusion embedded in the site itself? On 24 March 2008,…
by Uzma Shakir A trip on Toronto Transit (known locally as the T.T.C.) draws a pretty picture of the city of Toronto and the image of diversity we wish to communicate to the world. Hijabclad young women going with their…
By Tom Angotti Many progressive planners continue to be hopeful that the Obama administration will usher in real change that we can believe in. But unless we ratchet up the organizing the prospects for change are not good. Obama can’t…
By Kelly Main MacArthur Park is one of downtown Los Angeles’ largest and most historic public spaces. Located just a few miles west of City Hall and the corporate centers on Bunker Hill, the neighborhood in which the park is…
By Susana Kaiser Since their irruption into the public sphere in 1977 in the midst of a military dictatorship, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (mothers of desaparecidos) pioneered the redefinition of the word public, which is at the…
By Clara Irazábal Public spaces are privileged sites for the enactment and contestation of various stances on democracy and citizenship in the public sphere. Indeed, the public sphere, as the intangible realm for the expression, reproduction and recreation of a…
By Michael Dudley As the United States was preparing for its military assault on Iraq in 2003, Planners Network issued a statement, “Urban Planners Oppose the War in Iraq” (Reprinted in PN 155). Among the considerations in this statement were…
By Clara Irazábal and Macarena Gómez-Barris This article is excerpted with permission from Clara Irazábal and Macarena Gómez-Barris. “Bounded Tourism: Immigrant Politics, Consumption, and Traditions at Plaza Mexico.” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 5 (3), 2007: 186-213. Conceived and…
By Regula Modlich Almost fifty years ago, Jane Jacobs shook the planning establishment with her bookThe Death and Life of Great American Cities. While neither explicitly feminist nor oriented to women, Jacobs’ perspectives were rooted in the life experiences, sensitivities…
By Beth Maclin At the entrance to the squatter camp sits a bright green chemical toilet, accented with a gray top and door. A narrow lane winds past it to a collapsing building where three young men lean against two…
By Tom Angotti City planning and military strategy are indistinguishable in the occupied territories of Palestine and Iraq, where together they rob Palestinians and Iraqis of basic human rights and freedoms. Yet city planners in the United States, the nation…
By Clara Irazábal and John Foley The December 2007 referendum proposing constitutional reforms in Venezuela, discussed in the Fall 2007 issue of Progressive Planning Magazine, was defeated by less than 2 percent of the vote. Some of these reforms would…
Note: With this profile of Jacqueline Leavitt, Progressive Planning Magazine starts what will be an ongoing series examining the work of progressive planners. Jacqueline Leavitt, a long-term Planners Network member, is professor of urban planning at the University of California,…
Por Alejandro Rofman Es bien conocida la trayectoria de la Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo en la Argentina. Actualicemos, brevemente, su historia. A mediados del año 1977–hace una década–en plena Dictadura Militar en la Argentina, un grupo de madres…
By Alejandro Rofman In 1977, in the midst of Argentina’s military dictatorship, a group of mothers of young people who were disappeared by the military began to raise their voices, demanding to know the whereabouts of their children and to…
By Jonathan Thompson In 1970, radical Chicano activists swept into office in Crystal City, Texas, taking control of almost all of the institutions of local government in the small South Texas town. Part of a sophisticated political project by Mexican…
By Dick Platkin American cities are entering a perfect storm of deepening urban crises despite—and in some cases because of—the hopes that many community activists hold for the Obama administration. Activists fully expect the new administration to effectively address a…
By Jackie Leavitt, Tony Roshan Samara and Marnie Brady In 2007, grassroots organizers in the United States formed the U.S. Right to the City (RTTC) Alliance as a means of taking their cities back from the coalitions of affluence that…
By Marie Kennedy In South Africa, residents of Soweto are smashing water meters and taking Johannesburg Water to court in protest against prepayment meters, which they claim are unconstitutional (the South African constitution guarantees water as a human right). In…
By James Perry Days after Hurricane Katrina swept ashore in 2005, the federal levees failed, filling New Orleans with water. The combination of the near miss of the Hurricane and the levee collapse proved to be one of the greatest…
Prepared for the 1996 Planners Network Conference, “Renewing Hope, Restoring Vision: Progressive Planning in Our Communities.” by Petr Stand, Magnusson Architects Yolanda Garcia, Nos Quedamos Eddie Bautista, New York Lawywers for the Public Interest Edited by Barbara Olshansky, Environmental Defense…
Prepared for the 1996 Planners Network Conference, “Renewing Hope, Restoring Vision: Progressive Planning in Our Communities.” by E. Perry Winston, R.A., Pratt Planning & Architectural Collaborative At the end of January 1995, 25 teams of architects, planners, artists, and landscape…
Prepared for the 1996 Planners Network Conference, “Renewing Hope, Restoring Vision: Progressive Planning in Our Communities.” by Tom Angotti Thinking global these days can make you gloomy. All the progress made empowering communities and making national governments more responsible is…
Prepared for the 1996 Planners Network Conference, “Renewing Hope, Restoring Vision: Progressive Planning in Our Communities.” by Marie Kennedy INTRODUCTION What is community development? I’m going to share some thoughts about some of the elements of effective planning for community…
Prepared for the 1996 Planners Network Conference, “Renewing Hope, Restoring Vision: Progressive Planning in Our Communities. by Peter Dreier For years, urban scholars and activists warned that our cities were ticking time bombs, waiting to explode. When the Los Angeles…
By Michael Pyatok Recent federal housing policy and conventional wisdom among a new generation of housing professionals assert that, to overcome problems of poverty in lower income communities, those communities must either be dispersed among higher income neighborhoods or injected…
By Kian Goh “The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationships to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire.” —David Harvey, “The Right to the City”…
By Gen Fujioka Transit-oriented development (TOD) has become a leading policy prescription for reversing America’s sprawling path of growth. The Obama administration, through its Sustainable Communities Initiative, state and local agencies and progressive think-tanks all emphasize TOD as a means…
By Richard A. Marcantonio Transportation has long been at the heart of our nation’s civil rights struggle. The struggle against Jim Crow transportation was more than half a century old when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to…
By Peter Marcuse “I used to joke with my colleagues about committing what I called ‘public housing heresy,’ because people would always say, ‘But, we’re public housing and we’re different.’ And I said, ‘It’s really the same.’ We’re public housing,…
By Salena Tramel Down south in Israel’s Negev Desert, the sounds of jets fill wide-open spaces. At least 80 percent of the land is used for military training purposes, including developing and testing weapons. The Negev also contains the largest…
In July 2010 the House Financial Services Committee, supported by the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats, passed an historic housing bill, which included proposals originally known as PETRA (Preservation, Enhancement and Transformation of Rental Assistance). The stated purpose of the…
By Jill Wigle and Lorena Zárate A new collective tool for social mobilization and democratic planning has been established in Mexico City. On July 13, 2010 Mayor Marcelo Ebrard of the Federal District of Mexico signed the Mexico City Charter…
By Brian Paul In 2003 Columbia University announced its plan for a new campus in West Harlem and promised a collaborative partnership with the local community. Looking back at Columbia’s troubled and racially charged relations with Harlem, Columbia University President…
By Theresa Williamson When Rio de Janeiro won the bid for the 2016 Olympics in 2009, only cries of approval were heard from Brazilians. The government threw a huge party on Copacabana beach, in Brazil’s densest neighborhood. According to Luiz…
By Omari Fuller and Edgar Beltran Night has fallen and you’re driving through a gritty urban center when you approach an intersection. Just as you turn right through the crosswalk a dark figure materializes before you. You slam on the…
By Tom Angotti Shortly after the Towards a Just Metropolis conference in the Bay Area, the U.S. Social Forum convened in Detroit. Between June 22 and 26 some 20,000 people got together there, nearly doubling the attendance at the first…
By Richard Platkin The Los Angeles Times (March 1 and March 14, 2010), Southern California’s rapidly shrinking, former newspaper of record, repeatedly complains that Los Angeles’s elected officials, primarily Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the fifteen members of the Los Angeles…
By Aaron McKeon Last September, Time began a year of coverage of Detroit. Judging by the coverage in the September issue and subsequent installations online, the magazine’s angle is to present the nation’s eleventh largest city as all but a…
By Peter Marcuse Two major world forums focused on urban issues—the U.N.-sponsored World Urban Forum (WUF) and a social-movement-sponsored Social Urban Forum (SUF)—took place in Rio de Janiero in the last week of March, 2010. The forums were extremely different,…
Date Published: 5/22/2010 Planners Network calls on planners to resist the odious Arizona Immigration Law As progressive planners who are committed to opposing social injustice and discrimination, we strongly condemn the Arizona immigration law (SB 1070). The law, which requires…
By Richard Pithouse It’s often assumed that the international reach of big multinational institutions like the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), along with many of the NGOs allied to them, needs to be matched by…
By Nikhil Aziz (A shorter version of this article was published by CommonDreams.org on March 16, 2010.) Some of the advice for how Haiti ought to rebuild after the earthquake sounds hauntingly familiar, echoing the same bad development advice that…
Reviewed by Pierre Clavel New York for Sale, winner of the Paul Davidoff Award for the “best book in planning” from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, is a landmark book, maybe a masterpiece, on progressive planning in the…
By Lynn Lewis Picture the Homeless is a decade-old grass roots membership organization of homeless New Yorkers, and a member of the coordinating committee of the New York City Right to the City Alliance. We have targeted the powerful Chase…
By Clara Irazábal and Susan Fainstein Peter Marcuse is known throughout the world as a leading scholar and practitioner of progressive planning, but he has also been an outstanding member of Planners Network since it was founded in 1975. Peter…
By Michela Zonta Open the newspaper on any day of the week and you will most likely come across a headline such as “U.S. Unemployment Rate at 26-Year High,” “Hundreds of Workers Laid Off,” or “Area Foreclosures Increase,” along with…
By Don Leonard Water is life! This was the battle cry for a coalition of labor unions, activists, cocaleros(coca producers), students, professionals, small farmers and community groups that gathered in the city of Cochabamba, Bolivia in January of 2000. They…
By Nikhil Aziz Water and other natural resources are at the center of conflicts worldwide, in large part due to their unequal distribution. These conflicts are both paradigmatic and traditional, involving a fundamental difference over whether water is a human…
Prepared for the 1996 Planners Network Conference, “Renewing Hope, Restoring Vision: Progressive Planning in Our Communities.” by Tom Angotti, Pratt Institute The Red Hook Plan was praised by the Chairman of the New York City Planning Commission and Red Hook’s…
By Kristin Day The US population is heavier than ever, with obesity and overweight reaching alarming levels. Inadequate physical activity explains at least part of this trend. As Thomas Halton explains elsewhere (see “Obesity Epidemic” in this issue), 22 percent…
By Eve Baron The year 2001 was a landmark one for electoral politics in New York City. Due to the first-time imposition of term limits, two-thirds of the City Council’s incumbent members would lose their seats, making room for the…
By Tom Angotti As the preeminent global center of capitalism, New York City thrives on the free flow of capital. But it’s not so liberal when it comes to the movement of people. More and more walls are going up…
By Alex Schafran New York City ’s planners are rezoning land left and right to make way for new housing. They refuse to adopt, however, a tried-and-true method of city planning to ensure that some of the new housing goes…
By Danielle Schami The majority of small-scale producers in Mexico contend with multiple pressures that impair their efforts to grow food. In addition to the everyday struggles related to poverty, these producers face a host of challenges resulting from agrarian…
By Heather Stouder A key (and often contradictory) challenge for local food system initiatives is to take a syst ematic approach to move beyond providing local flavor to a privileged few, while ensuring that farmers and food producers receive a…
By Mark Winne Food system planning is a relatively new concept that grows out of American society’s increasing concern for what it eats, where and how its food is produced and the inequities that exist in the distribution of…
By David C. Sloane for the African Americans Building a Legacy of Health Coalition /REACH 2010 Project What do planners have to do with food? Since 1999, community residents, community organizations and researchers in planning and health have been working…
Kevin J. Krizek, Assistant Professor There is considerable enthusiasm among individuals in research, advocacy and policy circles for the idea that “good” urban design will positively contribute to levels of physical activity. The enthusiasm demonstrated by such perspectives is refreshing;…
By Anne Lusk More people walk and bicycle in cities worldwide where destinations such as grocery stores, post offices or coffee shops are accessible by sidewalks, roads for bicycling and separated multi-use paths. Examples abound in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium…
From Citizen Planner: Planning and Physical Activity special issue. By Mark Fenton In recent months Americans have heard from the Surgeon General, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and no less than the President himself that this nation is…
By Lavinia Gordon For years Portland has received kudos for its innovative and successful transportation and land use policies. Portland boasts of a vital downtown, a nationally recognized urban growth boundary, an award-winning light rail and transit system and as…
By Ann Forsyth Theme Editor Anne Lusk Americans are getting fatter and exercising less. As Thomas Halton outlines in this issue, this has human costs; overweight and lack of exercise contribute to a variety of chronic diseases. Given the multi-billion…
By Marie Kennedy, Lorna Rivera and Chris Tilly Last January we sat with about thirty Cubans in a community arts center in Boyeros, on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba. The group included artists, teachers, social workers, government officials, architects, engineers…
The Planners Network 2004 Conference recognized the important role played by five people who for four decades have made outstanding contributions to progressive planning. They began their careers as advocate planners in the spirit of Paul Davidoff, who first made…
By Tom Angotti Some thirty years ago when Planners Network started, many progressive planners proposed or discussed socialist alternatives to capitalist urban development and planning. Central planning in the Soviet Union, China and the emerging socialist nations of Africa and…
By Renee Toback Progressives and socialists get very different press today than we did thirty years ago. What is unchanged from thirty years ago, however, is the status of “socialism” in the United States and the usefulness of Marxist analysis.…
By Katja Simons Will the US-led invasion of Iraq make Baghdad into another Beirut? How will the battle to reconstruct Iraq develop? Despite obvious differences, a look at the history of the Lebanese war, where external forces played no small…
By Eugene J. Patron More than 160 city and county councils in the US have passed resolutions opposing a preemptive or unilateral war in Iraq. This groundswell of local civic expression runs directly counter to claims by the Bush administration…
By Michael Dudley Mushroom clouds blossoming over dense cityscapes. Thousands of gun emplacements throughout Baghdad promising fierce resistance. Civilians killed by the hundreds in open marketplaces, in cars, in their homes. Brutal building-by-building urban warfare, with heritage sites thousands of…
December 13, 2002 WASHINGTON, DC In an unusual move, the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) today condemned the remarks made by Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi on December 5 suggesting that the United States “wouldn’t have had…
By Adrian Blackwell and Kanishka Goonewardena, for Planning Action On September 24, 2002 the Toronto media reported two events under two separate headlines. The smaller headline was about the unveiling of the new official plan of the city of Toronto.…
By Jeff Halper In Israel’s thirty-six-year occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, planning has been perfected as a tool of political control. Nowhere in the world is planning used with such sophistication to such a single-minded purpose.…
By Chip Haynes Hey, big news: the federal government has stopped trying to get the American auto industry to build fuel-efficient gas cars and instead has hung its hat onto hydrogen fuel cells (HFCs). Yeah, well, it’s not like that…
By Penelope Duda and Eva Hanhardt The tragic events of September 11, 2001 profoundly affected us all. Within days property owners, politicians, the press and some planning and architecture professionals began to propose how the city and region should quickly…
By the Editors Tom Angotti, Eve Baron, Ann Forsyth, Kara Heffernan, Norma Rantisi This time last year, we produced the first issue of Planners Network Magazine. Instead of uncorking champagne or baking a birthday cake, we’d like you to join…
By Peter Marcuse Nine proposals by teams of internationally-renowned architects were unveiled by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) in December, 2002. They made the front pages of every New York newspaper, and have been subject to extensive comment…
By Oren Yiftachel There are few societies in which urban and regional planning has been so central to nation-building and state policy as Israel. Over the years, Israeli planning has been a pivotal activity for reshaping the landscape according to…
By Eugene J. Patron Just a stone’s throw from Manhattan ’s famed Theatre District, the curtain has risen on one of the city’s major urban redevelopment dramas. The line of community and civic groups opposing the massive Hudson Yards plan…
By Ann Meyerson and Tony Schuman In March 1974, 200 housing and community activists attended a conference in New York City to confront the systematic destruction of low-rent housing caused by government urban renewal programs and expanding private institutions. An…
By Henry Sanoff Community design stands for an alternative style of practice, based on the idea that professional technical knowledge is often inadequate in the resolution of social problems. It is an umbrella term covering community planning, community architecture, social…
By Jason Hackworth A Return to the Halcyon Days or Just Another Empty Promise? On April 29, 2005, officials from Ontario and the Canadian federal government announced what was deemed by one senior provincial official as “the largest affordable housing…
By Kathy Dorgan Each community design center (CDC) has a unique and winning personality. The character of these participatory public interest professional design practices are shaped by the communities they serve, their funders and, perhaps most importantly, their leadership. Centers…
By Ron Shiffman Though the practice of community design has a history that includes over four decades of accomplishments, its contribution to the practice of architecture and its role in the rebuilding of communities, neighborhoods and cities is still often…
By Michael Pyatok Individual vs. Collective In the early 1960s, some planners and architects began to question the obvious and not-so-obvious fusion between their professions’ interests and belief systems on the one hand, and those of private capital and/or governments,…
By María Teresa Vázquez-Castillo Femicide is a word whose definition women in Ciudad Juárez can explain very well. They learned and appropriated the word in the process of trying to make sense of the more than 400 murders of women…
By Chris Tilly and Marie Kennedy In January of 1994, the ski-masked Maya rebels of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rocked Mexico by rising up in arms in Mexico ‘s southernmost state, Chiapas. Twelve years later, the Zapatista…