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by Ron Shiffman I really liked Marie Kennedy’s definition of transformative planning. From the very beginning in our work at the Pratt Center we learned from the communities that we worked with. We learned early on that it wasn’t just…

Categories: Spring 2007

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By Elizabeth Yeampierre It is not true that if the major environmental organizations had addressed the justice issue there would not be an environmental justice movement. Environmental justice not only speaks to the disparate impact of environmental burdens in our communities,…

Categories: Spring 2007

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By Romel Pasqual The future of advocacy and progressive planning is bound up with what we did in the immediate past and what we are doing now. We are making the future right now. It’s happening on the ground, in…

Categories: Spring 2007

Advocacy and Community Planning: Past, Present and Future

By Tom Angotti The term advocacy planning was coined by Paul Davidoff in his famous 1965 article and is today required reading in planning schools throughout the nation. But to many students today, advocacy planning is a quaint and outdated notion,…

Categories: Spring 2007

Rebuilding and the Right to Return

By Anna Livia Brand While Katrina has faded from major news coverage, at least half of New Orleans residents are still displaced. The struggles for their right to return to New Orleans highlight powerful issues of social and spatial justice.…

Categories: Spring 2007

Eighteen Months after Katrina

By Bill Quigley Each morning, Debra South Jones drives 120 miles into New Orleans to cook and serve over 300 hot free meals each day to people in New Orleans East, where she lived until Katrina took her home. Ms.…

Categories: Spring 2007

Water is Life! Cochabamba, Bolivia against Privatization

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 organized…

Categories: Fall 2006

Israel’s War for Water

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…

Categories: Fall 2006

Resource Rights and Wrongs

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…

Categories: Fall 2006

Urban Planning as a High School Theme in Brooklyn , New York

By Meredith Phillips The Academy of Urban Planning in Brooklyn taps into the curiosity of high school students about their environment, teaches skills needed for modern careers, and puts the students on a path aimed towards higher education. As a program…

Categories: Summer 2006

America ‘s “Dietary Divide”

By Peter Zelchenko I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. –Langston Hughes, “I, Too, Sing America ” Lately grassroots and higher-level activity…

Categories: Summer 2006

Femicide in Ciudad Juárez: What Can Planners Do?

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…

Categories: Spring 2006

Origins of Community Design

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…

Categories: Winter 2006

Diversity in Practice

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…

Categories: Winter 2006

Community Engagement

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…

Categories: Winter 2006

Culture and Community Development: Tough Questions, Creative Answers

By Caron Atlas What are the tough questions that public officials—mayors, planning commissioners and economic development experts—and private developers should address to incorporate issues of cultural planning in community development programs/projects? And what are the questions artists and arts organizations…

Categories: Fall 2005

Art and the Politics of Public Housing

By Jacqueline Leavitt We believe in a grassroots movement that puts into question the essential relationships on which the system is based. The focal point of these cultural campaigns is the evolution of political conviction into artistic actions and vice…

Categories: Fall 2005

Artists as Community Developers

By Ann Markusen Artists have been under-appreciated as participants in community and neighborhood development in cities around the world. On the one hand, they have been lumped into a “creative class” whose hedonistic preferences for residing in lively, diverse cities…

Categories: Fall 2005

Neoliberal Ideas and Social Housing Realities in Ontario

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…

Categories: Summer 2005

Participatory Housing Cooperatives: An Argentinean Experiment

By Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly In the shadow of the sparkling skyscrapers of Buenos Aires ‘s newly redeveloped Puerto Madero waterfront area, we picked our way along the muddy paths of a villa miseria, the Argentinean word for a squatter settlement.…

Categories: Summer 2005

Bush to Cities: “Drop Dead”

By Gregory D. Squires and Charis E. Kubrin The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) has generated trillions of dollars for urban and rural neighborhoods that had traditionally been redlined by financial institutions. But the Bush administration, with the help of…

Categories: Spring 2005

Fighting for Balanced Transportation in the Motor City

By Joe Grengs No other governmental program comes close to influencing the divided geographic patterns of our metropolitan regions like that of federal transportation. Yet most citizens would be hard-pressed to name who decides how and where transportation dollars are…

Categories: Spring 2005

Canadian Perspectives on the US Election

By R. Alan Walks “Morons Elect One of Their Own” was one of the more provocative headlines offered in the wake of the recent US election by commentators here in the Great White North. The phrase is in reference to…

Categories: Winter 2005

Golden Scam: Fantasy and Reality in the Olympics

By Christopher A. Shaw The artificial frenzy of the Athens Summer Olympics are now safely behind us and the media have returned to covering real news. Those locked to their TVs for the seventeen days of saturation advertising during the…

Categories: Fall 2004

New York City’s Olympic Bid—Why?

By Peter Marcuse Cities have pursued hosting the Olympic Games out of a variety of motivations, often more than one. Absent from these motivations in recent years has been the original purpose of the Games: to promote peace through the…

Categories: Fall 2004

Summer 2004 Conference

Building Bridges Eve Baron Sharing Indigenous Planning Ted Jojola Pioneers of Advocacy Planning Columbia’s Manhattanville Expansion Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Lourdes Hernandez-Cordero & Robert E.Fullilove Book Review: Root Shock Review Cynthia Golembeski From Disinvestment (Abandonment) to Reinvestment (Gentrification)  Ann Meyerson &…

How Planners Can Change Public Policy through Social Action

By Ayse Yonder Three long-time activist planners, during one of the main plenary sessions at the Planners Network 2004 Conference, talked about breaking down walls by building bridges at local, national and international levels. Jackie Leavitt, professor of urban planning…

Categories: Summer 2004

Pioneers of Advocacy Planning

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…

Categories: Summer 2004

Where Do We Go from Here?

y Gus Newport Following the recent presidential election, many concerned and free-thinking Americans began to wonder, “Where do we go from here?” We soon recovered and recognized that G.W. was inheriting a mess which he himself created. As we wondered…

Categories: Winter 2005

Food System Planning: Setting the Community’s Table

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…

Categories: Winter 2004

Designing the Active City: The Case for Multi-Use Paths

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…

Categories: Fall 2003

Engineering Physical Activity Back Into Americans’ Lives

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…

Categories: Fall 2003

Urban Planning For Active Living: Who Benefits?

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…

Categories: Fall 2003

The Socialist City, Still

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…

Categories: Summer 2003

On the Practical Relevance of Marxist Thought

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.…

Categories: Summer 2003

Over 160 US Cities for Peace

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…

Categories: Spring 2003

War and the Urban “Geopolitical Footprint”

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…

Categories: Spring 2003

Nation’s Planners Condemn Sen. Lott Remarks

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…

Categories: Winter 2003

Fuel Cell Futility

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…

Categories: Winter 2003

Imagine New York: Bringing Diverse Visions into View

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…

Categories: Winter 2003

PN Magazine At One

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…

Categories: Winter 2003

Planning at the Frontline: Notes From Israel

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…

Categories: Fall 2002

Following Rosa Parks: Montgomery Bus Riders Organize

By Eugene J. Patron People in Montgomery, Alabama will tell you that as much as the city likes to see itself as part of the “New” South, local politicians have been slow to give up their old, dirty tricks. For…

Categories: Fall 2002

Toronto: Car Culture Is Alive and Well

By Janice Etter In the last few years, Toronto’s newspapers have been full of references to “gridlock” as the city’s major transportation challenge. Letters to the editor–mainly from car drivers–rant about the amount of time it takes to travel around…

Categories: Fall 2002

Transportation Equity and Environmental Justice

By Rich Stolz West Harlem Environmental Action (WE ACT) has fought for years to mitigate the high concentration of bus depots in this New York City neighborhood. Diesel exhaust has been linked by researchers to asthma and cancer, and WE…

Categories: Fall 2002

The Costs of Auto Dependency

By Lisa Schreibman We are paying dearly for the American love affair with the car. We pay through taxes and out of our pockets. The environmental costs are staggering, and the toll in deaths and injuries is comparable to the…

Categories: Fall 2002

Diversity and the Planning Profession

By Leonardo Vazquez, PP/AICP A friend of mine, a terrific planner in the private sector, gets called in on jobs from public sector clients and private sector colleagues who want him to join their team. He is one of the…

Categories: Summer 2002