Who Benefits From Smart Growth?

By Faisal Roble Politicians all over are hawking smart growth as a formula for enlightened urban development. They include everyone from President Clinton and Vice-President Gore to Mayors in Oregon and Texas. The smart growth movement endorses development strategies that…

Oregon: Where’s the Growth Control?

by Kevin Adams In September of 1998 I had a wonderful opportunity to serve another year in AmeriCorps National Service (“domestic Peace Corps”). The Resource Assistance for Rural Environments (RARE) Program provided me a great opportunity to work as an…

How Smarth Growth Can Save Growth

By Tom Angotti I saw Lewis Mumford the other day. He was the beneficiary of a technological revolution in embalming (how ironic, he so distrusted technological revolutions). He said he heard all the chatter about Smart Growth and Growth Control and…

Building New Identities: Book Review

By Catherine Diaz Possible Urban Worlds: Urban Strategies at the End of the 20th Century Edited by Richard Wolff, Andreas Schneider, Christian Schmid, Philip Klaus, Andreas Hofer, and Hansruedi Hitz. 1998. Available from Birkhauser Verlag, PO Box 133, CH-40010, Basel,…

Profit Drives the Growth Machine

By Rodney D. Green Profit maximization is at the heart of the Growth Machine. But the Growth Machine isn’t strictly a local or regional phenomenon, as suggested by urban planners who rely on the Growth Machine model. It operates according…

The Auto Drives the Growth Machine

By Aaron Golub Nothing defines and shapes post-war urban transportation in the United States more than the automobile. The strong links between transportation, land use, and urban development affect nearly every aspect of the urban environment. Planners now find that…

Alternatives to the Growth Machine

By Dick Platkin and Ben Rosenbloom, Guest Editors This issue of Planners Network is on the Urban Growth Machine, a popular model for understanding the development of land under capitalism. As presented by William Fulton in The Reluctant Metropolis, the growth machine…

The Growth Machine Goes to the Inner City

By Dwayne Wyatt The Growth Machine that gave us suburban sprawl is going to the inner city. But the benefits of the new urban megaprojects are bypassing most central city residents. And the costs are falling on urban taxpayers, making…

PN99 At Lowell: Labor and Community Meet

By Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly “WHO’S IN THE HOUSE?” Participants at the Planners Network 1999 conference got used to hearing conference co-coordinator Ty DePass calling out this invitation to stand up and be counted. At this first-ever PN meeting…

Categories: July/August 1999

Transnationalism not Assimilation

By Arturo Sanchez The contemporary urban landscape is rapidly being transformed by massive waves of non-European immigration. This movement of Third World peoples to the “American City” is viewed by many influential decisionmakers as problematic. In the popular mind, large-scale…

Categories: July/August 1999

The Uncertain Future Of Worker Ownership: Two Decades Of Lessons

By Len Krimerman Worker-owned enterprises, sometimes called “worker cooperatives,” have a long history, even in the United States. But they face an uncertain future. In May, 1791, Philadelphia’s Journeyman Carpenters started the nation’s first working-class cooperative. A century or so…

Categories: May/June 1999

Employee Stock Ownership — ESOPS

By Corey Rosen If you’ve worn Gore-Tex lately or flown on United Airlines, you’ve patronized a company most of whose stock is owned widely by its workers, through employee stock ownership plans, or ESOPs. During the last decade, the number…

Categories: May/June 1999

Worker Coops

By Chitra Somayaji Cooperatives come in several types: producer-owned, consumer-owned, and worker-owned, the last being our focus here. Unlike ESOPs, pure worker coops are 100% controlled by the worker-owners, normally on a one-person one-vote basis (although some coops have hired…

Categories: May/June 1999

Organizing A Childcare Union In Philadelphia

By Peter Pitegoff “What an awesome gathering!” Kim Cook, a union organizer from Seattle, smiled as she looked around the meeting room of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees in Philadelphia in mid-June. Just one month earlier,…

Categories: May/June 1999

Which Labor, Which Community?

On May 12, the largest union demonstration in years hit New York City streets. Workers from the public sector, services, and construction trades came together to demand that city and state surpluses go to raise worker pay instead of tax…

Categories: May/June 1999

Multicultural Planning Lessons from Papakolea

By Karen Umemoto There is a lot of talk about multiculturalism in planning. Planning programs and agencies often stress the need for planning staff to be able to work in “diverse communities.” Sometimes this simply means placing planners of certain…

Categories: March/April 1999

The Invasion of Aztlšn and Struggles for Land

by Teresa CÜrdova The historical memory and contemporary reality of Chicanos from Aztlšn are of people taking our space. In Aztlšn (the part of the Southwest that the U.S. took through its war with Mexico), there is evidence of the…

Categories: March/April 1999

Restricting Occupancy, Hurting Families

by Ellen Pader While much has been written about federal legislation designed to dismantle public housing, relatively little has been written about legislation designed to eviscerate the Fair Housing Act (FHA), which gives legal protections against discrimination in housing choice.…

Categories: March/April 1999

Racism and Planning, Still Around

by Marie Kennedy Racism continues to present the thorniest of challenges to progressive community development planners. The problems that were on the front burner for decades – residential and school segregation, housing and job discrimination – remain unsolved, and what…

Categories: March/April 1999

Privatization and Planning

  [quote] “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” -From the Great Law of the Iriquois Confederacy [/quote] Privatization and Planning The Fall/Winter New York Planners Network Forum featured three…

Categories: January/February 1999

Iraq Bombing : Another Lie

By Howard Zinn [Immediately after President Clinton announced the bombing of Iraq, Mother Joneswww.mojones.com called Boston University historian Howard Zinn and asked for his take. After a few minutes, he sent this forceful accusation.] President Clinton has just told another lie,…

Categories: January/February 1999

Apocalypse Now

By Edward W. Said It would be a mistake, I think, to reduce what is happening between Iraq and the United States simply to an assertion of Arab will and sovereignty on the one hand versus American imperialism, which undoubtedly…

Categories: January/February 1999

The Bombing of Iraq: U.S. War Crime

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…

Categories: January/February 1999

The Postmodern Opportunity for Planning

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…

Categories: January/February 1999

Putting Housing on the Unions’ Agenda

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…

Categories: January/February 1999