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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…
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…
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,…
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…
By Marie Kennedy The most important thing we advocate planners did in the 1960s was to be explicit that planning served one or another set of interests. As a result, planning and other professional services were made available to those…
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 But to many students today, advocacy planning is a quaint and outdated notion,…
By Kenneth M. Reardon Shortly after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Gulf Coast , Cornell’s Department of City and Regional Planning received a request for planning assistance from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The leaders…
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.…
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.…
By Sujatha Fernandes The radical trajectory of President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela has been a highly controversial topic among Latin Americanists, democratization experts, policymakers and activists. Some lament what they see as Chávez’s disregard for the rule of law and…
Twenty-First Century Urban Renewal in Philadelphia: The Neighborhood Transformation Initiative and its Critics Domenic Vitiello 7th Generation – Planning the “Next Great American City:” Public Policy and Social Justice in Philadelphia and Camden Domenic Vitiello Keeping the Community in Community…
By Jonathan Thompson Progressive cities in the United States and elsewhere have been most commonly understood as dealing with neighborhood mobilization, citizen empowerment and other forms of grassroots political involvement. Using the language of “the grassroots” in the U.S. and…
By Pierre Clavel This collection of articles from Cornell students were stimulated by resources in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC), Cornell University Library. In 2005, the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell offered a short…
By Michael Nairn On June 14, 2006, the New York Times ran an article entitled “Antidevelopment Protesters Are Arrested at Farm Site in Los Angeles.” Featuring the arrest of actress, Daryl Hannah, the article describes the eviction of 350 families, “mostly Latino…
By Domenic Vitiello Author note: This article was initiated in collaboration with Rosemary Cubas. It is dedicated to her memory. Philadelphia is home to one of the most ambitious urban renewal programs in the United States . Mayor John Street…
FEATURES Resource Rights and Wrongs Nikhil Aziz 7th Generation – Israel’s War for Water Marie Kennedy Water is Life! Cochabamba, Bolivia against Privatization Don Leonard Urban Water Management in Mexico David Barkin A Bottom-Up Planning Model for a Safe and…
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…
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 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…
FEATURES America’s “Dietary Divide” Peter Zelchenko 7th Generation – Chicago 2006: From City Beautiful to Sustainable? Kara Heffernan Why The Midwest Needs Local and Organic Food Lynn Peemoeller Touring Sustainable Chicago Sarah Morton Where Are Poor People to Live? Transforming…
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…
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…
FEATURES Towards a Transformative View of Race john a.powell, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Daniel Newhart & Eric Stiens 7th Generation Tom Angotti And the Winner in the New Orleans Mayoral Race Is… Chester Hartman Katrina’s Race and Class Effects Were Planned…
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…
By Tom Angotti Racism. If there is one thing that explains the post-Katrina catastrophe, it’s race. We all know about the gross incompetence and insensitivity of FEMA and state and local government. We all know that the federal government has…
By john a. powell, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Daniel Newhart and Eric Stiens “You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals….so many of these people…are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise…
FEATURES Politics With Poetry: The Quest for a Legitimate Architecture of Housing Michael Pyatok 7th Generation Connie Chung and Ann Forsyth Community Engagement Ron Shiffman Diversity in Practice Kathy Dorgan Origins of Community Design Henry Sanoff Equity [or Not] by…
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 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,…
FEATURES Artists as Community Developers Ann Markusen 7th Generation Peter Marcuse Public Art and Wild Rice Karl Lorenz Art and the Politics of Public Housing Jacqueline Leavitt Artists Meet Community Development in the Bronx Joan Byron Culture as Community Connector…
By Norma M. Rantisi and M. Jason Blackman The City of Montreal recently drafted its first formal cultural policy. While the policy seeks to link culture with economic development, it uncritically embraces the role of business in the arts and…
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…
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…
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…
FEATURES Participatory Housing Cooperatives: An Argentinean Experiment Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly 7th Generation Ann Forsyth Vietnam Going Global without a Plan: Welcome to the Capitalist World Tom Angotti Good Design Alone Can’t Change Society Kimberly Libman, Lauren Tenney and…
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 Kym Liebman, Lauren Tenney and Susan Saegert In 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered, the nation’s cities and campuses were torn by riots and all the conventional approaches to cities were being questioned. Every modern approach to social reform,…
By Tom Angotti In the Jan/Feb 1998 issue of the Planners Network newsletter (the forerunner ofProgressive Planning Magazine ), I wrote, “If you love livable cities, hurry up to Hanoi ” because new development “threatens the city’s greatest asset, its street…
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.…
FEATURES Fighting for Balanced Transportation in the Motor City by Joe Grengs 7th Generation by Tom Angotti Sprawl and Justice by Thad Williamson Strategies to End Domestic Violence and Promote Community Sustainability by Jessica Dexter Community Development as Improvised Performance…
By Kyle D. Brown and Todd Jennings Excerpted with minor revisions from Brown, K.D. and T. J. Jennings. Social Consciousness in Landscape Architecture Education: Toward a Conceptual Framework. Landscape Journal. Volume 22, No. 2. Copyright 2003. Reprinted by permission of…
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…
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…
FEATURES Electoral Politics by Itself Doesn’t Work for the Left by Frances Fox Piven 7th Generation by Chester Hartman and Tom Angotti Back to Basics for Progressive Planners by Peter Marcuse Act Locally: Strategies for Cities and Activists under Siege…
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…
By Frances Fox Piven A good many liberals and progressives are shocked at George Bush’s victory. Republican gains in the Senate and House only make it worse. It is not that we were unaware of the Republican advantages. We knew…
New York City’s Olympic Bid -Why? Peter Marcuse Integrating Visions and Ethics: A Feat of Olympian Proportions Richard Milgrom 2004 Athens Olympic Games Bring Misery to Roma Communities in Greece COHRE Atlanta’s Olympic Legacy Anita Beaty Declining City, Big Ambitions:…
By Peter Dreier On April 29, 2002, the tenth anniversary of the civil unrest, George W. Bush came to Los Angeles to speak at a church-sponsored community development center at the 1992 riot’s epicenter, South Los Angeles. Given the occasion,…
By Stephen Goldsmith Honorable men envisioned a Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City in 1960, almost forty years before the Games were actually staged in our oasis on the edge of a desert. These men believed that long- and…
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…
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…
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 &…
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…
By Deborah Cowen A lot has been written about urban neoliberalism but much less about activist responses to it. Planning Action is a group of activists that has been organizing to combat neoliberal policies in Toronto. By sharing our tactics,…
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…
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…
City Planners Realize Windfalls for Developers and Oppose Inclusionary Zoning Alex Schafran Planning in New York City : Walls that Divide, Bridges that Unite Tom Angotti Planning for All New Yorkers: The Campaign for Community-Based Planning Eve Baron Olympic Glory…
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 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…
Bad Meat and Brown Bananas By David C. Sloane 7th Generation By Katherine Crewe Philadelphia’s Food Trust and Supermarket Access By Hannah Burton Inner City Grocery Retail: What Planners Can Do By Kami Pothukuchi Food System Planning:Setting the Community’s Table …
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…
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…
Urban Planning For Active Living: Who Benefits? By Kristen Day Seventh Generation: The Environment’s Role in Physical Activity: Necessary but not Sufficient By Ann Forsyth The Key to Good Health is Not in the Ignition By Lavinia Gordon America’s Obesity…
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 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…
On the Practical Relevance of Marxist Thought By Renee Toback Seventh Generation By Tom Angotti Participatory Planning in Cuba By Marie Kennedy, Lorna Rivera and Chris Tilly Sound Theory and Political Savvy By Morris Zeitlin Socialists and Cities By Joan…
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…
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.…
War and the Urban ‘Geopolitical Footprint’ By Michael Dudley Seventh Generation By Tom Angotti Over 160 US Cities for Peace By Eugene Patron Dividing and Rebuilding Beirut By Katja Simons Vieques: El Impacto del Bombardeo en las Poblaciones Civiles Plan…
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…
Post 9/11 Section: The Ground Zero Architectural Competition By Peter Marcuse Seventh Generation By PN Editors Imagine New York By Penelope Duda and Eva Hanhardt Post-9/11 Planning By Tom Angotti From Pruitt-Igoe to the World Trade Center By Clara Irazabal…
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…
Special Issue on Transportation The Costs of Auto Dependency By Lisa Schreibman Seventh Generation By Tom Angotti Transportation Equity and Environmental Justice By Rich Stolz Toronto Car Culture Is Alive and Well By Janice Etter Toronto Cyclists Fight for Respect…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
Special Issue on 2002 PN Conference Bridging Divides, Building Futures: A Puerto Rican Perspective By Agustin Lao-montes Seventh Generation By Eve Baron Bridging Divides, Building Futures: Conference Planning as Cross-Cultural Dialogue By Kiara L. Nagel 2002 Planners Network Conference Summary…
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…