Fall 2013: Community and Labor: Synergies, Frictions, and Innovations

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…

From and Toward a Queer Urbanism

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”…

Categories: Spring 2011

Transit-Oriented Development and Communities of Color: A Field Report

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…

Categories: Winter 2011

Just Transportation Planning: Lessons from California

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…

Categories: Winter 2011

The Heresies in HUD’s Public Housing Policy

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,…

Categories: Winter 2011

The Forgotten Struggle of the Negev Bedouin

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…

Categories: Fall 2010

Mexico City Creates Charter for the Right to the City

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…

Categories: Summer 2010

The Invisible Cyclists of Los Angeles

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…

Categories: Summer 2010

Beyond Networking, Left Alternatives

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…

Categories: Summer 2010

Los Angeles Throws its General Plan Overboard as the Ship Goes Down

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…

Categories: Spring 2010

Smart Decline and Planning Ideology

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…

Categories: Spring 2010

Two World Urban Forums, Two Worlds Apart

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…

Categories: Spring 2010

Arizona Immigration Law

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…

Categories: Spring 2010, Statements

Feeding Dependency, Starving Democracy…Still

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…

Categories: Spring 2010

Picture the Homeless Chases Chase

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…

Categories: Winter 2010

SEVENTH GENERATION OPINION: Mobilizing Hope and Obama

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…

Categories: Fall 2009

Urban Prospects in the Age of Obama

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…

Categories: Summer 2009

Right to the City Builds Alliance, Confronts Mayors

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…

Categories: Summer 2009

Israel’s Ongoing War Against the Palestinians of Gaza

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…

Categories: Summer 2009

Master Plan for Havana: An Encounter with Julio César Pérez Hernández

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…

Categories: Spring 2009

Integration Exhaustion, Race Fatigue and the American Dream

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,…

Categories: Spring 2009

The Apartheid Bubble in the Desert

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…

Categories: Spring 2009

Social Housing in Bolivia: Challenges and Contradictions

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…

Categories: Winter 2009

Anti-Immigrant, Sanctuary and Repentance Cities

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…

Categories: Winter 2009

Citizen Hall: Reclaiming City Hall for the People

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,…

Categories: Fall 2008

Indigeneity: A Cornerstone of Diversity Planning in Canadian Cities

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…

Categories: Fall 2008

Citizenship, Democracy and Public Space

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…

Categories: Summer 2008

Bounded Tourism: Plaza Mexico in California

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…

Categories: Spring 2008

Gender and Urban Planning: Time for Another Look

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…

Categories: Spring 2008

A Housing Tour in South Africa

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…

Categories: Winter 2008

Venezuela’s Communal Councils and the Role of Planners

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…

Categories: Winter 2008

Progressive Planning Profile: Jacqueline Leavitt

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…

Categories: Winter 2008

The U.S. Social Forum: Major Success for Networking

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.…

Categories: Fall 2007

Israel’s Wall in Palestine: Control, not Security

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.…

Categories: Fall 2007

Civic Duty: From Neighborhood Watch to ‘USAOnWatch’

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…

Categories: Fall 2007

Networked Security in the City: A Call to Action for Planners

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…

Categories: Fall 2007

Planning and Neoliberalism: The Challenge for Radical Planners

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…

Categories: Summer 2007

Developing Sustainable Housing: Moving Beyond Green

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…

Categories: Summer 2007