The Organization of Progressive Planning
The Seventh Generation Whither Progressive Planning? by Tom Angotti and Marie Kennedy Articles The Fight for Foote Homes: A peoples’ struggle to save public housing in Memphis, TN by Ken Reardon and Antonio Raciti Getting Outside the Supermarket Box: Alternatives […]
The Seventh Generation Endless Bad Zoning Decisions: The Welcome Wagon to Climate Change and the Failure of COP 21 by Dick Platkin ACSP Conference Houston 2015 Advocacy, Planning, and Land: How Climate Justice Changes Everything by Tom Angotti Distinguished Planning […]
The Seventh Generation Development in Detroit: We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes by Lisa Berglund Detroit Race, Regionalism and Reconciliation: Detroit Planning Fails the Three Rs by Peter J. Hammer What’s on the Surface: Aesthetic […]
The Seventh Generation The Politics of Planning in Latin America and the Latino US by Samuel Stein, Clara Irazábal Latin Americas, North and South The Political Ecology Approach to Planning in a Global World: A Latin-American Perspective by Liliana Giraldo […]
The Seventh Generation Black Lives Don’t Matter in APA’s Colorblind Planning: APA Rejected Legislative Policy Guide on Criminal Justice (111 KB) by Jeffrey S. Lowe Prisons, Policing and Planning: Making the Connections Visible (322 KB) by Sheryl-Ann Simpson Prisons, Policing […]
The Seventh Generation Policing and Safe Streets Where are the Planners? by Sylvia Morse Articles The Urbanization of Fear: Notes from Kenya’s War on Terror [Members Only] by Zoltán Glück AIA Condones Torture and Killing: Proposal to Enforce Human Rights within AIA […]
The Seventh Generation Climate Change: Where are the Planners, Architects and Designers? by Tom Angotti Gaza: War and Displacement in the City The Wars on Gaza: Displacement, Discrimination, and Systematic Annihilation by Tayseer Arouri The People’s Climate March in New […]
PLANNERS NETWORK (1975 – ?): ADVOCACY PLANNING AND BEYOND Saturday, November 1, 9:45am – 10:45am (4377/552) Co-Organizers: CLAVEL, Pierre [Cornell University] pc29@cornell.edu & JOJOLA, Ted [University of New Mexico] tjojola@unm.edu Moderator: ANGOTTI, Thomas [Hunter College] tangotti@hunter.cuny.edu Panel Participants: THOMPSON, J. Phillip [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] jt71@mit.edu […]
The Seventh Generation Social Justice at the Borders by Tom Angotti Progressive Planning at the Border PN 2014 in Ciudad Juárez, México: Thank you for Joining Us at the Border by María Teresa Vázquez Castillo Progressive Planning at the Border by Peter […]
The Seventh Generation Transbordering Planning by Clara Irazábal Planning Across Borders Santa Fe: Mexico City’s Challenged Megaproject by María Moreno-Carranco Conservation and Inequalities in Tanzanian Maasailand by Mohammad Sarfaraz Gani Adnan, Barsha Chitrakar, Kartini Kasmuri and Genevieve Wasser Cusco: City […]
The Seventh Generation Don’t Believe the Hype about Mike – Oops, I Mean Bill by Tom Angotti New York City after Bloomberg The Monumental Myths of Michael Bloomberg by Dan Steinberg The Life and Death of Low-Income Co-ops in New […]
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 […]
Conference Recap Bruce Dale: A Planner’s Life by Tony Schuman Orange, New Jersey: Making a Place by Margaux Simmons and Jamy Lasell Placemaking with the University of Orange by Molly Rose Kaufman, Rachel Bland, Mindy Fullilove, and Michele Racioppi Response to […]
Seventh Generation The South: The Race Culture Sustained by William M. Harris Lack of Diversity in Southern Academia: What Can progressive Planners Do? by Jeffrey S. Lowe The American South Progressive Planning in the American South by Pierre Clavel and […]
Seventh Generation New York City after Sandy: Who Benefits, Who Pays and Where’s the Long-Term Planning? by Tom Angotti New York Focus New York Neighborhoods Fight Land Grabs: Public Parks Going to Professional Teams by Donovan Finn Planners Network Conference Revisiting Equity: […]
Seventh Generation Is the AIA a Place for Design that Matters? By Kathleen Dorgan Design Focus Design for Regenerative Communities by Kyle D. Brown There’s a Whole Lot of Planning Goin’ On: Supporting Citizen Planners and Incorporating Community Vision in […]
Seventh Generation How Imperial Decline Contributes to Urban Decay in Los Angeles (644 KB) by Dick Platkin Focus on Los Angeles Here’s Why We’re Not Finding Real Solutions to Homelessness in LA by Steve Clare Learning from Los Angeles: People’s Planning […]
By Michael Pyatok Recent federal housing policy and conventional wisdom among a new generation of housing professionals assert that, to overcome problems of poverty in lower income communities, those communities must either be dispersed among higher income neighborhoods or injected with […]
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” […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
In July 2010 the House Financial Services Committee, supported by the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats, passed an historic housing bill, which included proposals originally known as PETRA (Preservation, Enhancement and Transformation of Rental Assistance). The stated purpose of the […]
By James Perry Days after Hurricane Katrina swept ashore in 2005, the federal levees failed, filling New Orleans with water. The combination of the near miss of the Hurricane and the levee collapse proved to be one of the greatest […]
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 […]
By Theresa Williamson When Rio de Janeiro won the bid for the 2016 Olympics in 2009, only cries of approval were heard from Brazilians. The government threw a huge party on Copacabana beach, in Brazil’s densest neighborhood. According to Luiz […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Richard Pithouse It’s often assumed that the international reach of big multinational institutions like the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), along with many of the NGOs allied to them, needs to be matched by a counter internationalism from below. […]
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 […]
Reviewed by Pierre Clavel New York for Sale, winner of the Paul Davidoff Award for the “best book in planning” from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, is a landmark book, maybe a masterpiece, on progressive planning in the United […]
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 […]
By Clara Irazábal and Susan Fainstein Peter Marcuse is known throughout the world as a leading scholar and practitioner of progressive planning, but he has also been an outstanding member of Planners Network since it was founded in 1975. Peter is […]
By Michela Zonta Open the newspaper on any day of the week and you will most likely come across a headline such as “U.S. Unemployment Rate at 26-Year High,” “Hundreds of Workers Laid Off,” or “Area Foreclosures Increase,” along with news about business […]
By Brian Paul In 2003 Columbia University announced its plan for a new campus in West Harlem and promised a collaborative partnership with the local community. Looking back at Columbia’s troubled and racially charged relations with Harlem, Columbia University President […]
By Jackie Leavitt, Tony Roshan Samara and Marnie Brady In 2007, grassroots organizers in the United States formed the U.S. Right to the City (RTTC) Alliance as a means of taking their cities back from the coalitions of affluence that […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Ernesto Castañeda On 3 October 2007, a piece of street theater was unfolding on the sidewalks of Rue de la Banque, a street in downtown Paris close to the Euronext Paris Stock Exchange. Protestors, mostly legal immigrants, were camping […]
By Jennifer Ridgley and Justin Steil In July of 2006, the city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, became a focus of national media attention when its city council approved the Illegal Immigration Relief Act Ordinance (IIRA) proposed by Mayor Lou Barletta. Allegedly […]
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 […]
By Tom Angotti East Jerusalem, Occupied Palestine Part One in a series on urban apartheids. It takes two hours every day for Palestinians to cross the military checkpoint from Bethlehem to Jerusalem so they can get to work. Bethlehem is […]
by Shiri Pasternak and David Wachsmuth In Detroit, which is choking on tens of thousands of abandoned properties, the housing abandonment problem is easy to see but effective solutions are hard to imagine. In Toronto, the opposite is true. The […]
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, […]
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 […]
by Uzma Shakir A trip on Toronto Transit (known locally as the T.T.C.) draws a pretty picture of the city of Toronto and the image of diversity we wish to communicate to the world. Hijabclad young women going with their […]
By Kelly Main MacArthur Park is one of downtown Los Angeles’ largest and most historic public spaces. Located just a few miles west of City Hall and the corporate centers on Bunker Hill, the neighborhood in which the park is […]
By Susana Kaiser Since their irruption into the public sphere in 1977 in the midst of a military dictatorship, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (mothers of desaparecidos) pioneered the redefinition of the word public, which is at the core […]
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 […]
By Michael Dudley As the United States was preparing for its military assault on Iraq in 2003, Planners Network issued a statement, “Urban Planners Oppose the War in Iraq” (Reprinted in PN 155). Among the considerations in this statement were […]
By Luis Aponte-Parés Tourism is one of the largest industries in the world today. Its impact on the environment, national economies, technology, social mores, health, culture and an array of other areas is very large and difficult to capture. In […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Tom Angotti City planning and military strategy are indistinguishable in the occupied territories of Palestine and Iraq, where together they rob Palestinians and Iraqis of basic human rights and freedoms. Yet city planners in the United States, the nation […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Por Alejandro Rofman Es bien conocida la trayectoria de la Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo en la Argentina. Actualicemos, brevemente, su historia. A mediados del año 1977–hace una década–en plena Dictadura Militar en la Argentina, un grupo de madres […]
By Alejandro Rofman In 1977, in the midst of Argentina’s military dictatorship, a group of mothers of young people who were disappeared by the military began to raise their voices, demanding to know the whereabouts of their children and to […]
By Jonathan Thompson In 1970, radical Chicano activists swept into office in Crystal City, Texas, taking control of almost all of the institutions of local government in the small South Texas town. Part of a sophisticated political project by Mexican American […]
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. […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Emily Achtenberg Visitors to La Paz in August 2004 experienced a rare event: a day without car horns, gasoline fumes and traffic congestion. A strike by transportation workers protesting an increase in gasoline prices sparked a series of road […]
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 […]
By Peter Marcuse This is intended by the author as a framework for discussion, and it should be stated at the outset that, if limits to what has been accomplished emerge, that is in no way a reflection on the […]
By Jason Neville and Clara Irazábal Weeks have turned to months and months to years as New Orleanians—both those living in the city and those yet to return—have waited in vain for leadership and resources from local, state and federal […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]