By Noam Chomsky The US and its increasingly pathetic British lieutenant want the world to understand – and in particular want the people of the Middle East region to understand – that “What We Say Goes,” as Bush defined his…
By Paul Niebanck We are living at a time of huge new promise and opportunity for progressive planning. Long constrained by the rigidities associated with modernism, we are free now to help invent the future and construct the institutions that…
by Chris Baker, Annica Cooper, Sahyeh Fattahi, Paula Bingham Goldstein, Jimmy Gomez, Daniel Inlender, Jacqueline Leavitt, Erika Licon, and Paula Sirola Union organizing around housing is barely a blip on the radar screen of unions in Southern California. Striking gains…
By Leonie Sandercock Twenty something years ago I wrote a book (my first) called Cities for Sale, which opened with the following statement: “This book is about failure. City planning in Australia this century has failed to improve the welfare of…
Labor and Community Living wage, Live action Reprinted from The Nation by Robert Pollin Labor and community Not an Easy Marriage by Maryann Leshin Whither Planners Network? Are We Progressive Planners? by Ruth Yabes Promote International Networking and Local Action by…
by Tom Angotti Seems wherever we New Yorkers go these days we hear about the great job “our”mayor’s doing. They say that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has cleaned up the streets, cut the crime rate and pulled the city out of…
by Barbara Loevinger Rahder The value of Planners Network for me is the opportunity it provides for networking with progressive planners, academics, and activists in other places, and the support and ideas that these contacts offer my work locally. In…
by Ruth Yabes What should Planners Network and progressive planners be doing? How can I possibly answer that question since I don’t feel I am a true progressive planner. I am embarrassed to admit this, but I don’t think I…
by Maryann Leshin The prospect of bringing together labor and community at the PN 1999 Conference brings to mind several critical discrepancies between the agendas of these two groups. I see labor and community from the perspective of someone who…
by Robert Pollin This past summer, security workers at LAX airport in Los Angeles began their first-ever union organizing drive. They were motivated, labor activists say, by the city’s foot-dragging in implementing a living-wage ordinance that had passed the previous…
Columns and Opinion The Seventh Generation by Tom Angotti Collective Action by Patricia Nolan Feature Advocate for Progressive Planning Education by Cathy Klump Keep Networking by Gwen Urey Support Activists, Question Capitalism by Dick Platkin You Gotta Represent Dispersing Authority…
By John McCrory When we pause to consider what purpose Planners Network can usefully serve in the coming years, I think we must begin by recognizing the limits of a national organization such as ours. We must understand what PN…
By Dick Platkin First, PN should be a source of analysis and technical resources for community struggles, especially those involving public budgets. For the past generation public investment in most urban programs has shrunk. This trend was already obvious in…
By Gwen Urey Planners Network was in the vanguard by conceiving of itself as a “network” in 1975. We have evolved technologically, holding ourselves together through old newsletter technology and the new pn-net and Web page. As these vehicles and…
By Cathy Klump Most planners stumble into planning en route to their perceived destiny as lawyers, doctors, English professors, and business people. For a number of reasons, the career aspiration of a more mainstream job gets excused, and in its…
By Patricia Nolan “While we think and plan, we shouldn’t let thinking and planning get in the way of or substitute for doing.” When I decided to be a planner, a colleague and mentor of mine shared this thought with…
by Tom Angotti [half] In the last couple of issues, we asked PN members to give us their views on what Planners Network and progressive planners should be doing. We got a variety of answers, which are printed in this…
By Dick Platkin One of the most vexing problems facing progressive planners in the United States is the enduring poverty of America’s inner cities, made worse in recent years by the loss of jobs through technological change, downsizing, and capital…
Columns and Opinion The Seventh Generation: Special Issue on Feminism, Gender, and Planning by Ann Forsyth Do Equity Planners Care About Health Care ? by Patricia Nolan Feature Women Plan Toronto: Incorporating Gender Issues in Urban Planning by Barbara Loevinger Rahder…
by Wanda I. Mills Community building and development efforts need to take into account differences among groups within communities. I propose a model that looks at how class, race, ethnicity, nationality, colonial status, sexuality and gender produce diverse relationships among…
by Claudia B. Isaac For some time, I have been thinking about the crossovers in my own practice and scholarship, where the distinct practices of “Gender and Development” and “Community Development” intersect. “Gender and Development” joins gender and economic development…
by Stacy Harwood Over a year ago, I began “surfing the Web” for anything related to the intersection of women, gender or feminist theory and urban planning, loosely defined. Although a frustrating and time consuming process, I managed to uncover…
by Amy Lind Many planners and development practitioners have recognized women’s work as an important source for community development and mobilization. A common message is, if a development project is to be successful, women must be involved. Yet it is…
by Marie Kennedy How can progressive planners work more effectively with low-income women to address urgent issues they face, such as the increasing risk and conditions of homelessness? What alternative models of needs analysis and policy planning lend themselves to…
by Barbara Loevinger Rahder Grassroots women can organize to change the way cities are planned and developed. Women Plan Toronto (WPT) is an example of how they can do it. WPT is a grassroots women’s organization that uses participatory methods to…
by Patricia A. Nolan I was standing in the lobby of the massive 918-bed Cook County Hospital complex in Chicago when it finally hit me. Here in the heart of one of the country’s largest public hospitals I was surrounded…
by Ann Forsyth, Guest Editor Contemporary US feminism emerged in the 1960s and 1970s at the end of a period of dramatic residential suburbanization and urban renewal. In this context, feminist work from the planning and design professions in the…
Column The Seventh Generation by Richard Milgrom Feature It’s Not Easy Being Green: Feminist Thoughts on Planning for Sustainability by Sherilyn MacGregor Sustainability is Not Enough by Peter Marcuse Sustaining Diversity: Participatory Design and Urban Space by Richard Milgrom Principles…
by Richard Platkin North American cities pay dearly for U.S. military policy in the Middle East. According to the July 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs, the cost of the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf is between $30 to…
by Sandra Rodriguez Communities of color have much to contribute to sustainability because of their front-line experiences in struggles against environmental degradation and health risks they face in their neighborhoods and workplaces. The environmental issues faced by communities of color…
by Jon Orcutt The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. October 24-27, 1991. Washington D.C. PREAMBLE WE, THE PEOPLE OF COLOR, gathered together at this multinational People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to begin to build a national…
by Richard Milgrom “Sustaining diversity” can be interpreted in two different ways. First, there is a need to sustain the human diversity present in urban environments. Diversity has allowed cities to embrace difference, an essential ingredient in the promotion of…
“Sustainability” as a goal for planning just doesn’t work. In the first place, sustainability is not a goal; it is a constraint on the achievement of other goals. No one who is interested in change wants to sustain things as…
by Sherilyn MacGregor Recent interest in “sustainability” has overshadowed issues of social justice in planning. There is an implicit assumption that, in the face of impending ecological destruction, we’re all in this together. But, as Peter Marcuse argues, we are…
by Richard Milgrom The term “sustainability” has become problematic. Some now argue that it is so overused as to be useless, co-opted by many for self-centered agendas. The four main articles in this issue of Planners Network attempt to come…
Columns The Seventh Generation: Regional Planning and Reason by Thomas Angotti Feature NEW YORK CITY: The First Regional Government Still Cries for Planning The Case of Waste Management by John McCrory New York: RACE, CLASS & SPACE: A Historical Comparison…
by Tasha Harmon The Portland Metro region is hailed all over as the mecca of growth management – a unique regional planning tool that limits suburban sprawl and central city disinvestment. But is growth management good for low-income people? Can…
by Dalila Hall Portland, Oregon’s Metro Metro is the only directly elected regional government in the United States. It serves more than 1.3 million residents in three counties, and 24 cities in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area. Established in 1979…
by Tony Schuman and Elliott Sclar The raw material of American planning history derives from two concerns: the physical problems associated with regional growth and the social ones connected to race and class. New York, because it is simultaneously one…
by John McCrory Proponents of regional governance as a means of correcting disparities between central cities and their suburbs can find a real-world test of their theories in New York City, which became the nation’s first major regional government one…
by Tom Angotti So you’re a planner? That’s just what we need. Ever hear that before? Why is it some people think planning can set things right? If cities are a mess, they think planning will bring order to chaos,…
Columns The Seventh Generation: Street Life and a Connection to the Land by Tom Angotti Feature Planners Can Plan to Plant by Ellen Kirby Commentary Two Corners of the Same Tent: A Response to Tom Angotti by Timothy Ross Review…
by Timothy Ross It is possible to support public housing as part of a broader progressive strategy — two corners of the same tent. However, Tom Angotti makes at least three mistakes in his response to my article. He suggests…
by Ellen Kirby New York City has the largest urban parks system in the United States. Covering some 26,000 acres, these parks serve a constituency of almost 9 million people, and provide park space equivalent to an eleven-foot-square plot for…
by Tom Angotti HANOI, VIETNAM — If you love livable cities, hurry up to Hanoi. This city missed generations of “urban renewal” and, like Havana, lives in its history. I say hurry up because megaprojects from the global marketplace —…
by Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-New York City) In 1890, Jacob Riis’ groundbreaking book How the Other Half Lives chronicled the lives of thousands of families living in squalor in New York City. A horrified public cried out for reform, and the…
by Victor Bach and Sara Hovde In New York City, public housing tenants stopped a privatization proposal in an unprecedented mobilization effort. But without continuing vigilance and technical support, public housing tenants will find themselves left out of decisions that…
by Tom Angotti A Response to Timothy Ross It’s not the housing, Mr. Ross, it’s the people. They don’t care what kind of housing poor people live in. They just don’t like them if they’re poor and not white. If…
by Jacqueline Leavitt In New Zealand, there is no nonprofit third sector between public housing and the market. Tenants are organizing to keep rents down, limit privatization and create new “third-stream” alternatives. The Labour Party: The Unlikely Handmaiden In 1984,…
By Timothy Ross Progressives face a dilemma in thinking about public housing. Many progressives support public housing because it helps low income people who are otherwise disadvantaged in a capitalist economy. Indeed, over a million people live in public housing…
Column The Seventh Generation: GOP Aims to Shut Out Poor by Rep. Nydia Velazquez Feature Public Housing Tenants Confront Degegulation Strengthening Resident Capacity in New York City by Victor Bach and Sara Hovde Lessons from New Zealand by Jacqueline Leavitt…
Asphalt Nation How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take it Back by Jane Holtz Kay New York: Random House, 1997.US $32.95 Review by James Miraglia Imagine if 120 or so people died in a horrendous plane…
by Patricia Nolan In 1993, St. Louis launched its 18-mile regional light rail system, named MetroLink, which has since become a tremendous success. MetroLink’s 31-vehicle fleet transports as many as 100,000 people per day to and from all of the…
by John Anner “What this fight is really about,” James Morris says suddenly, in the middle of a discussion about transportation policy in Milwaukee, “is a city-versus-suburb thing. What the central city needs and what the suburbs want are two…
by Lisa Schreibman Federal rules require public involvement in transportation planning. So far, it looks like we have another participation game and the big decisions are still made in a closet. The 1991 amendments to the federal surface transportation program,…
Eight Myths of Traffic Planning by Roger Baker A growing number of planning experts realize that current trends in transportation are unsustainable. Like an addictive drug, a transportation policy oriented around the private automobile dictates urban policies in a way…
by Jon Orcutt The transportation system most South Africans face today is a mixture of patched-up, third-rate public transport inherited from apartheid and a chaotic, unregulated minibus-taxi system that is a source of swelling public complaint. But political transformation in…
The Seventh Generation by Thomas Angotti On Saturday, July 12th of this year, I was performing my daily jogging ritual in Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s great green space, when I came across a biker laid out on the park roadway. She…
Column The Seventh Generation by Thomas Angotti Feature Transportation Struggles in the Post-Apartheid City by Jon Orcutt Eight Myths of Traffic Planning by Roger Baker Are We There Yet? Is There REAL Public Participation Under ISTEA? by Lisa Schreibman Making…