The Organization of Progressive Planning
The Seventh Generation Whither Progressive Planning? by Tom Angotti and Marie Kennedy Articles The Fight for Foote Homes: A peoples’ struggle to save public housing in Memphis, TN by Ken Reardon and Antonio Raciti Getting Outside the Supermarket Box: Alternatives […]
The Seventh Generation Endless Bad Zoning Decisions: The Welcome Wagon to Climate Change and the Failure of COP 21 by Dick Platkin ACSP Conference Houston 2015 Advocacy, Planning, and Land: How Climate Justice Changes Everything by Tom Angotti Distinguished Planning […]
The Seventh Generation Development in Detroit: We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes by Lisa Berglund Detroit Race, Regionalism and Reconciliation: Detroit Planning Fails the Three Rs by Peter J. Hammer What’s on the Surface: Aesthetic […]
The Seventh Generation The Politics of Planning in Latin America and the Latino US by Samuel Stein, Clara Irazábal Latin Americas, North and South The Political Ecology Approach to Planning in a Global World: A Latin-American Perspective by Liliana Giraldo […]
The Seventh Generation Black Lives Don’t Matter in APA’s Colorblind Planning: APA Rejected Legislative Policy Guide on Criminal Justice (111 KB) by Jeffrey S. Lowe Prisons, Policing and Planning: Making the Connections Visible (322 KB) by Sheryl-Ann Simpson Prisons, Policing […]
The Seventh Generation Policing and Safe Streets Where are the Planners? by Sylvia Morse Articles The Urbanization of Fear: Notes from Kenya’s War on Terror [Members Only] by Zoltán Glück AIA Condones Torture and Killing: Proposal to Enforce Human Rights within AIA […]
The Seventh Generation Climate Change: Where are the Planners, Architects and Designers? by Tom Angotti Gaza: War and Displacement in the City The Wars on Gaza: Displacement, Discrimination, and Systematic Annihilation by Tayseer Arouri The People’s Climate March in New […]
The Seventh Generation Social Justice at the Borders by Tom Angotti Progressive Planning at the Border PN 2014 in Ciudad Juárez, México: Thank you for Joining Us at the Border by María Teresa Vázquez Castillo Progressive Planning at the Border by Peter […]
The Seventh Generation Transbordering Planning by Clara Irazábal Planning Across Borders Santa Fe: Mexico City’s Challenged Megaproject by María Moreno-Carranco Conservation and Inequalities in Tanzanian Maasailand by Mohammad Sarfaraz Gani Adnan, Barsha Chitrakar, Kartini Kasmuri and Genevieve Wasser Cusco: City […]
The Seventh Generation Don’t Believe the Hype about Mike – Oops, I Mean Bill by Tom Angotti New York City after Bloomberg The Monumental Myths of Michael Bloomberg by Dan Steinberg The Life and Death of Low-Income Co-ops in New […]
The Seventh Generation Can labor and community learn to dance together? by Marie Kennedy & Chris Tilly General Building Power: The Los Angeles Black Worker Center Turns Excluded Workers into Forces for Change by Yelizavetta Kofman Risk-Taking and Coalition Politics: Lessons […]
Conference Recap Bruce Dale: A Planner’s Life by Tony Schuman Orange, New Jersey: Making a Place by Margaux Simmons and Jamy Lasell Placemaking with the University of Orange by Molly Rose Kaufman, Rachel Bland, Mindy Fullilove, and Michele Racioppi Response to […]
Seventh Generation The South: The Race Culture Sustained by William M. Harris Lack of Diversity in Southern Academia: What Can progressive Planners Do? by Jeffrey S. Lowe The American South Progressive Planning in the American South by Pierre Clavel and […]
Seventh Generation New York City after Sandy: Who Benefits, Who Pays and Where’s the Long-Term Planning? by Tom Angotti New York Focus New York Neighborhoods Fight Land Grabs: Public Parks Going to Professional Teams by Donovan Finn Planners Network Conference Revisiting Equity: […]
Seventh Generation Is the AIA a Place for Design that Matters? By Kathleen Dorgan Design Focus Design for Regenerative Communities by Kyle D. Brown There’s a Whole Lot of Planning Goin’ On: Supporting Citizen Planners and Incorporating Community Vision in […]
Seventh Generation How Imperial Decline Contributes to Urban Decay in Los Angeles (644 KB) by Dick Platkin Focus on Los Angeles Here’s Why We’re Not Finding Real Solutions to Homelessness in LA by Steve Clare Learning from Los Angeles: People’s Planning […]
Seventh Generation Occupy Urban Planning! (221 KB) By Tom Angotti and Marie Kennedy Occupy Racism by Chester Hartman Occupy! The Tactic of Occupation and the Movement of the 99 Percent by Jonathan Matthew Smucker What Can We Do In Public? Lessons […]
Seventh Generation Sites Speak Louder than Words: Occupy Wall Street in New York City (471 KB) By Samuel Stein Manufacturing Introduction to the Special Issue on Manufacturing (410 KB) By Jennifer Clark and Pierre Clavel Planners and Manufacturing: An Uneasy Alliance (210 KB) […]
The Seventh Generation An Urban Need for a New Economic Public Policy Approach in Economic Development Practice (190 KB) by Fernando Centeno Feature Articles Public Transit’s Imperiled Future (153 KB) By Lisa Schweitzer Getting There: Putting Accessibility into Practice for Progressive Transportation […]
The Seventh Generation The Austerity Scam by Peter Marcuse Feature Articles Planning in an Age of Austerity—1979 and 2011 by Pierre Clavel MLK Assassination: 1968 Sanitation Strike Reminds Us What’s at Stake Today by Chad Johnson The Right Fit for […]
The Seventh Generation Why Unions Matter: Defending the Great Equalizer by Chris Tilly Feature Articles From and Toward a Queer Urbanism by Kian Goh Challenging the Mixed-Income Housing Paradigm: Preserving Low-Income Communities through Non-Profit Development Initiatives by Michael Pyatok Growing […]
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 with […]
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” […]
The Seventh Generation The Heresies in HUD’s Public Housing Policy by Peter Marcuse Feature Articles Just Transportation Planning: Lessons from California by Richard A. Marcantonio The Ongoing Debate Over Privatization of Public Housing: National Association of HUD Tenants Comments on […]
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, […]
The Seventh Generation Demanding Our Right to the City by Cuz Potter Fixing Unequal Cities by William W. Goldsmith and Edward J. Blakely Feature Articles “The Road Home” Is a Road to Nowhere for Black New Orleanians by James Perry […]
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 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 […]
The Seventh Generation Beyond Networking, Left Alternatives by Tom Angotti Feature Articles The Invisible Cyclists of Los Angeles by Omari Fuller and Edgar Beltran The 2016 Olympics in Rio: A Community Plays Against the Real Estate Game by Theresa Williamson […]
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 for […]
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 forum in […]
The Seventh Generation Haiti’s Fault Lines: Made in the U.S.A. by Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly Planning by Transnational Institutions: Can Big Be Beautiful? Planning by Transnational Institutions: Can Big Be Beautiful? by Clara Irazábal Feeding Dependency, Starving Democracy…Still by […]
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 City Council, do not […]
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 lost cause. Naturally, there is a lot of heart and […]
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, almost existing in two different worlds, but they tolerated each other; the contrasts and similarities […]
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 a counter internationalism from below. […]
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 Haiti has received […]
From the Homeownership Trap to Alternative Forms of Tenure and Financing by Michela Zonta Peter Marcuse and Critical Planning Peter Marcuse at 80: His Extraordinary Contributions to Progressive Planning by Clara Irazábal and Susan Fainstein What We Can Learn from […]
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 United […]
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 is […]
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 news about business […]
Mobilizing Hope and Obama by Tom Angotti The Right to the City Alliance: Time to Democratize Urban Governance by Jacqueline Leavitt, Tony Roshan Samara, Marnie Brady Sticking It to the Banks and Keeping Residents in Their Homes by City Life/Vida […]
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 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 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 […]
Bengaluru Goes from Garden City to Nano Land by Tom Angotti Feature Articles Israel’s Ongoing War Against the Palestinians of Gaza by Marie Kennedy Playas Para Todos: The Struggle for Puerto Rico’s Coast by Katherine T. McCaffrey Urban Prospects Under […]
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 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 of […]
The Apartheid Bubble in the Desert by Tom Angotti Feature Articles Integration Exhaustion, Race Fatigue and the American Dream by Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires Participatory Planning in Binghamton, New York by Sean Bennett Master Plan for Havana: An […]
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, won and still struggles to build an alternative […]
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 living patterns.” But the nation has had a long, […]
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 global capitalism. Its monumental malls, skyscrapers and millionaire condos loudly announce this brash newcomer to the global […]
Immigration Palestine’s Problems: Checkpoints, Walls, Gates and Urban Planners by Tom Angotti Immigration Racialized Regulation: Planning in the Face of Anti- Immigrant Sentiment by Stacy Anne Harwood Anti-Immigrant, Sanctuary and Repentance Cities by María-Teresa Vázquez-Castillo Controlling Immigrants by Controlling Space: […]
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. Three weeks […]
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 […]
Planning for Diversity in Canada Planning for Diversity in Canada: From Rhetoric to Action by Amy Siciliano and Norma Rantisi An Alternative Tale of the City: Toronto and the Alternative Planning Group by Uzma Shakir Indigeneity: A Cornerstone of Diversity […]
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 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 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 […]
Feature Articles An Attack on Iran Would Be a Global Disaster: Why Urban Planners Once Again Need to Reject Unprovoked War by Michael Dudley Democratizing Tourism, Illuminating Power: A People’s Guide to Los Angeles by Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng. […]
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 core […]
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 society’s […]
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 […]
Feature Articles Gaza and the Green Zone: Urban Apartheid and Occupied Territories by Tom Angotti State Support for Social Production of Housing? Mexico’s New Housing Law Exposes Planning Contradictions and Challenges by Jill Wigle and Lorena Zárate A Housing Tour […]
By Luis Aponte-Parés Tourism is one of the largest industries in the world today. Its impact on the environment, national economies, technology, social mores, health, culture and an array of other areas is very large and difficult to capture. In […]
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 owned by Korean […]
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 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 […]
Contextualizing Radical Planning: The 1970s Chicano Takeover in Crystal City, Texas by Jonathan Thompson Supporting Resident-Led Revitalization in Librino, Italy by Kenneth Reardon, Filippo Gravagno, and Laura Saija Accommodating Social Diversity in the Gentrified City: Making Space for Families by […]
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 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 have […]
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, Los Angeles […]
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 American […]
Security and Planning After 9-11 by Amy Siciliano and Norma Rantisi Networked Security in the City: A Call to Action for Planners by Matt Hidek Civic Duty: From Neighborhood Watch to ‘USAOnWatch’ by Marilena Liguori Israel’s Wall in Palestine: Control, […]
By Peter Marcuse The U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta this July was a major success. There were some 10,000 people in attendance, 951 workshops and four plenaries, along with lots of culture, tents, networking and solidarity. It was amazingly grassroots. […]
By Gary Fields In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and soon after that South African apartheid crumbled. At the time it appeared that such systems, with their landscapes of walls and practices of separation, would be consigned to historical memory. […]
By Marilena Liguori On November 8, 2001 and in the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush called on all Americans “to serve by bettering our communities and, thereby, defy and defeat the terrorists.” During the State of the Union […]
By Matt Hidek Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States government has developed defensive strategies to protect its cities through a complex web of networked security initiatives. As part of the “Global War on Terror,” the Department of Homeland […]
Grassroots Disaster Recovery Planning: New Orleans and Beyond Jason Neville and Clara Irazábal Social Justice in New Orleans: Planning after Katrina Peter Marcuse Transforming Top-Down to Bottom-Up Planning in Post-Katrina Mississippi Jennifer Evans-Cowley and Meghan Z. Gough Involving Students in […]
By Kanishka Goonewardena The “real” planner must be a radical planner, planning for social justice and social change. In order to do this type of planning today, the hegemony of neoliberalism must be contested and defeated. What is neoliberalism? Neoliberalism […]
By Emily Achtenberg Visitors to La Paz in August 2004 experienced a rare event: a day without car horns, gasoline fumes and traffic congestion. A strike by transportation workers protesting an increase in gasoline prices sparked a series of road […]
By David A. Turcotte The United States has almost 90 million residential structures. While few have been built in a sustainable manner, we are nevertheless beginning to see more interest in green or environmentally sustainable housing. Most discussions of sustainable […]
By Peter Marcuse This is intended by the author as a framework for discussion, and it should be stated at the outset that, if limits to what has been accomplished emerge, that is in no way a reflection on the […]
By Jason Neville and Clara Irazábal Weeks have turned to months and months to years as New Orleanians—both those living in the city and those yet to return—have waited in vain for leadership and resources from local, state and federal […]
A View From the Barrios Sujatha Fernandes NEW ORLEANS: RACE, CLASS AND RECOVERY New Orleans After 18 Months: A Disaster Bill Quigley The Right to Return Anna Livia Brand The People’s Plan Kenneth M. Reardon ADVOCACY AND COMMUNITY PLANNING: PAST, […]