Recent ucb_crp_bpj items

Publics and Planning Academia: Translation, Interpretation, Resonance

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In March 2024, Berkeley Planning Journal editors Xixi Jiang and Nick Shatan facilitated a virtual roundtable on “Publics and Planning Academia” with five former editors or contributors to the Berkeley Planning Journal who earned PhDs from the Department of City and Regional Planning between five and fifteen years ago: Fernando Burga, Ricardo Cardoso, Jia-Ching Chen, Paavo Monkkonen, and Hayden Shelby. This informal conversation moved between multiple registers, from contemplations of the pub- lics and purposes of planning academia to personal reflections on writing, research, and career trajectories. Over the course of two hours, the discussion covered six major topics: Audience and voice; Resonance, relevance, and accountability; Working across linguistic publics; Planners as interpreters; Public teaching; and Doctoral reflections. This conversation has been edited for clarity.

Editors' Note

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Editors' Note

Planning from the Black Counterpublic

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Boston Black United Front (BBUF) was a large meta-organization that stands as a pivotal counterpublic institution in the annals of 20th-century community organizing. This study draws on archival documentation to explore the multifaceted strategies employed by the BBUF, highlighting their innovative use of print media, their dual focus on large and small pragmatic interventions, and their impact on the City of Boston. Central to its classification as a form of counterpublic work, I explore the BBUF’s capacity to hold, process, and engage in discourse around ideological diversity and contradiction. The organization came about during a tumultuous period in Boston’s history, before slowly fading out of existence as members pursued other endeavors, but not without making lasting material impact. Their confrontations with carceral violence, endeavors for economic justice, and efforts to foster community-centered alternatives to oppressive systems form the crux of their legacy....

Queer Spaces as Counterpublics

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper investigates how queer women and nonbinary people (referred to as non-males) find space within a heteronormative context that actively resists their existence. In their modes of formation, these spaces actively resist the straightening and commodification of queerness and empower the community in a subversion of patriarchal norms. Using Seattle’s context, the authors investigate historic queer non-male spaces along with two contemporary case studies using archival research, oral histories, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. The result is an identification and examination of two different forms of counterpublic spaces utilized by the queer non-male community to create locations of queer belonging: the exclusive/inclusive space, investigated through the case study of a local lesbian bar, and the non-exclusive/ inclusive space, represented through the case study of a women’s sports bar. Both serve as places of resistance and empowerment. While...

Climate Change Challenges to City and Regional Planning

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Climate Change Challenges to City and Regional Planning

From Public Housing to Public Choice: Jane Jacobs, Friedrich Hayek, and the Antinomies of Urban Liberalism

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

An internationally celebrated icon of community planning and grassroots activism, the late American urbanist Jane Jacobs is frequently reduced to a caricature of polite, all-purpose sentiments which obfuscate both the complexity and the political specificity of her work. In the first portion of this paper, I examine the popular representation of Jacobs by prominent urban nonprofits, as well as the ambiguity of her intellectual legacy in both urban scholarship and in recent media about her career. Highlighting Jacobs’s warm reception among libertarian thinkers, I devote the second portion of this paper to exploring the intellectual affinity between Jacobs and the famed Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. Demonstrating their key points of convergence on mat- ters of social policy, governance, and expertise in relation to watershed moments in planning history, I conclude with an analysis of Jacobs’s little-discussed writing on American public housing, noting the various parallels...

What’s a PhD for?

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What’s a PhD for?

Deconstructing the Density Discourse: Exploring the Densification, Construction, and Land-Use Triplex in Pakistan

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article explores how urban densification is defined, measured and conceptualised in the context of Lahore through the narratives of key policy stakeholders. A preliminary analysis of policy documents, and the recent changes in building regulations and land-use rules show that there is a commitment to increase density by discouraging urban sprawl and encouraging the growth of mixed-use, highrise buildings. By conducting an analysis of policy documents and the changes in building regulations and land-use rules through the narrative of key stakeholders in policy making, the research unveiled motivations which underpin policy makers’ commitment to higher densities, illustrating how urban densification is manifested in the realm of policymaking, the forms and typologies within which high densities are envisaged by stakeholders and how these have materialised on the ground, and the implications thereof.

Editors' Note

Tue, 9 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Editors' Note

COVID-19 and the Future of Urban Life

Tue, 9 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unimaginable adversity, with nations across the globe devising ways to cope with the loss of life, economic productivity, and social fabric. Due to the agnostic nature of the virus, no facet of society, whether in the Global North or South, has been left untouched. As beacons of economic and social agglomeration, the pre-pandemic city, in particular, has seen a rapid transformation, in often unforeseen directions. Local businesses have shuttered, while large technology companies have thrived; offices have closed, while their adjacent streets have been opened for active mobility and social activities; apartment rents have decreased, while single-family home prices have increased; the underprivileged have been adversely affected by both the virus as well as the economic reality of the pandemic, while the affluent have been largely untouched in both health and economy. Responses to COVID-19 in various nations have only exacerbated existing socioeconomic...

Decolonising Myself: Navigating the Researcher-Activist Identity in the Urban South Pacific

Sat, 1 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This paper charts my path from observer to action researcher – and my ex post realisation that a transition had happened in my work. This transition happened on the fly, in the field, without me critically reflecting on it at the time, while I was studying evictions in Port Vila, Vanuatu, South Pacific. My ethics came into direct conflict with my research approach, and I chose to change my approach. I theorise my transformation in the modernity/coloniality literature and close by offering strategies to students and other researchers who are looking for ways to engage more deeply with, and give something back to, the communities they study.

How to Save Chinatown: Preserving affordability and community service through ethnic retail

Sat, 1 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Chinatowns in North America have been especially hit hard by COVID-19, a reality of anti-Asian racist and xenophobic sentiment exacerbated by the global pandemic. The factors contributing to increased business closures, commercial vacancy, and gentrification in Chinatowns have existed before the pandemic and have only been exacerbated. In order to preserve Chinatowns, municipalities have enacted historic preservation and small business support measures, such as historic designations, technical assistance for businesses, increased permit scrutiny, and legacy business programs. This study investigates the difference in retail changes across three Chinatowns in Vancouver, San Francisco and Los Angeles both prior and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Concurrently, this study also examines the impact of retaining a legacy business program and other preservation measures on the retail landscape. Interviews with city officials, organizers, community institutions, and members of the business...

Learning to Share: Outdoor Commercial Spaces on San Francisco's Valencia Street

Sat, 1 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of San Francisco sanctioned the use of public space on sidewalks and parking spaces for commercial use as part of their Shared Spaces initiative. Combined with streamlined permitting processes and an iterative rollout of design guidelines and inspections, the program facilitated a rapid and large-scale shift in the city’s streetscape. Using the Valencia Street commercial corridor in San Francisco’s Mission District as a case study area, we define and observe the “outdoor commercial spaces” (OCS) to present a preliminary typology based on degree of enclosure as a potential signifier of different patterns in use and perception of public space. We interview residents and other stakeholders to explore emerging themes in the perception of OCS, complemented by pedestrian path tracing along different sections of Valencia Street. Our findings indicate that differences in the degree of enclosure in OCS on Valencia Street partially...

Editors’ Note

Mon, 17 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Editors’ Note

Feudalism in the Age of Neoliberalism: A Century of Urban and Rural Co-dependency in Lebanon

Wed, 1 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The urban and rural co-dependency in Lebanon has been drastically transformed and further heightened since the joining of both territories with the Declaration of Greater Lebanon on September 1st, 1920. The lack of any formal planning during the past century has driven socio-political and economic forces to shape or disfigure the built environment. Historians, geographers, and urban planners have addressed Lebanon’s urban-rural divide by highlighting unequal development. Even still, a comprehensive overview of key historical moments that investigates migrations and the economic system is needed to understand the current co-dependent and conflicted relationship between both territories. Accordingly, this paper explores the urban and rural dynamics starting from the early nineteenth century to modern- day Lebanon, by juxtaposing the flow of migrations between Mount Lebanon and Beirut with the country’s neoliberal economic policies. This analysis is derived from historical books,...

Urban Bites and Agrarian Bytes: Digital Agriculture and Extended Urbanization

Wed, 1 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Capitalist agriculture faces a crisis. Plateauing yields and profits are driving up food prices, and the ability to continue the traditional practice of expanding into new, un-commodified territories appears to be waning. This crisis is due in large part to the accelerating biophysical contradictions of industrial agriculture, which systematically undermine the ecological conditions for its own success in pursuit of profit. We investigate how digital technologies are deployed as a potential data fix that does not solve the crisis but merely staves it off. We situate these technologies within the material context of capitalist urbanization, along the way arguing for bringing information back into the neo-Lefebvrian framework of “extended” or “planetary” urbanization. Digital agriculture technologies continue the centralization of economic knowledge and power as they facilitate the transformation of vast territories into “operational landscapes” that provide the material, energy,...

Challenging the Urban/Rural Divide: Implications for Contemporary Planning Theory and Practice

Wed, 1 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Defining the American urban form relies on a perceived division between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ areas. I trace the idea of the urban/rural divide through the evolution of human settlement patterns in the United States from the nineteenth century onwards. I argue that while a superficial distinction between urban and rural land was once relevant to characterizing city forms and metropolitan growth trends, in contemporary contexts there no longer exists an actual separation of lands based on their ‘natural’ character around cities. Thus, continuing to plan for urban/rural areas ignores how pressing planning concerns arise from greater socio-ecological processes, and places that extend beyond designated settlement boundaries. I explore how new conceptualizations of urbanization, including urban sustainability, urban resilience, and planetary urbanization, can inform a post-urban/rural divide planning paradigm.

Landscape Entanglements: Toward a Descriptive Project for Planning Research

Wed, 1 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The conceptual dyad of urban/rural has long formed the basis of the planner’s description of space. However, the terms themselves are increasingly insufficient to describe the world in which we live, presenting as overdetermined and reductive signifiers. In this photographic essay, we use Google Earth satellite images to examine a series of locations where descriptors such as ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ falter against manifold, shifting, and unstable landscape forms. We draw on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the abstract spaces of capitalism, globalization, and urbanization, which he argued are dialectically produced through their interaction with landscape. However, where Lefebvre contended that abstraction instantiates in more or less discrete typological forms, we argue that abstract space only becomes intelligible under conditions of ‘entanglement,’ where qualities such as ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ become momentarily comprehensible at the instant we observe or describe them. In the end,...

Transformative Practices within Mechanisms of Control: “Recognizing” Unrecognized Arab-Bedouin Villages in Israel

Wed, 1 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

“Seeing from the South” (Watson 2008) and “Re-engaging Planning Theory with South-Eastern Perspectives” (Yiftachel 2006) are essential calls for the development of planning theories and empirical research from the Global South. Such scholarship has interpreted the rationalities at play as informal settlements develop on the peripheries of rapidly globalizing cities and explored how they reflect the nature of state interventions. This article examines the utility of planning theories issued from the Global South and North in explaining a case of state planning for an indigenous, ethnic minority in Israel: the Negev/Naqab Arab-Bedouins. The researchers conducted 90 interviews with planners, engineers, Bedouin residents, government officials, academics, and employees of non-governmental organizations. Their aim was to understand how stakeholders comprehended, engaged with, and approached planning for the Abu-Basma Regional Council, a state initiative to plan and provide services...

Editors' Note

Wed, 10 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Editors' Note

African Futures: Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

African Futures: Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility

Gendered Technologies of Power: Experiencing and unmaking borderscapes in South Asia

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Across South Asia, women migrate for employment within their home countries, within the region, and to more distant destination countries. Despite regular and ongoing transit, they are subject to restrictions on their mobility. How do migrant women workers confront and resist these restrictions? This question calls for an analytical approach that considers both the nature of the restrictive forces they confront and the resistance strategies they bring to bear. Scholarship on governmentality traces how nation states, as sovereigns, deploy a dual system of thought and management to exert control over populations and the nations they inhabit. Gendered migration governance at the legal and policy level maps one of many forces that restrict women’s mobility across the region. Within South Asia, social control over women is informed by not only legal, but also political, cultural, and ideological discourses that are anchored in patriarchal social systems. Women workers migrate through...

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Housing is Essential: A Commonsense Paradigm Shift to Solve the Urban Displacement and Racial Injustice Crisis

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This article addresses one of the biggest tests of our society: the urban displacement and racial injustice crisis. Today’s urban displacement crisis has reached a social change tipping point, but most solutions being advanced fail to prevent immediate displacement. This article debunks the prevailing strategies focused on building more market rate or affordable housing units as being able to effectively prevent displacement. It examines the impacts of urban displacement on the collective self-interest to advance climate change and racial equity. Lastly, the article provides an alternative vision for a paradigm shift based upon an understanding that housing is essential to public goods like clean air, clean water, and K-12 education. California and Oakland, California are used as case studies since they are the epicenter of the national housing unaffordability crisis and because of the authors’ work as policy change practitioners designing and implementing...

The Right to Remain in the City: How One Community Has Used Legal Rights and Rights Talk to Stay Put in Bangkok

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In this exploratory piece, I present a case study of the complex machinations of one community in Bangkok in their 13-year struggle to stay on their land. I ask how legal rights, rights talk, and political maneuvering figure into their strategies, as well as how their involvement with a larger social movement has shaped their efforts. The non-traditional form of the piece allows me to walk step-by-step through the community and the processes at play while considering multiple framings that may help us better understand the community’s situation.

The Racial Contours of YIMBY/NIMBY Bay Area Gentrification

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, we trace the emergence of the false YIMBY/NIMBY dialectic now dominant in San Francisco housing rights discourse, studying its constitution and material effects. Specifically, we investigate how racial capitalism is constitutive of both YIMBYism and NIMBYism, drawing upon Cedric Robinson’s argument that racialization has always been constitutive of capitalism, and racism is requisite for capitalism’s endurance. We make our argument by drawing upon empirical research conducted by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), a data analysis, oral history, and critical cartography collective of which we are both a part. We also draw upon collaborative research between AEMP and community-based housing rights nonprofits and local housing justice organizing efforts, as well as literary and cultural analysis. Such a methodological approach facilitates the unearthing of the racial logics undergirding YIMBYism, pointing to the need for alternative analytics to theorize...

Foreword

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Foreword

2016–17 Doctoral Dissertations, Master’s Theses, Professional, And Client Reports

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

2016–17 Doctoral Dissertations, Master’s Theses, Professional, And Client Reports

The Enduring Influence of Informality in Istanbul: Legalization of Informal Settlements and Urban Transformation

Fri, 16 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The phenomenon of urban informality has coincided with rapid urbanization in Turkey from the 1950s onward. By the urban transformation act that was presented in 2012, formal developments and activities have increased in informal areas. Although recent activities are legal/formal, they have caused the reproduction of informality in these areas. With focusing on this spontaneous collaboration of formal and informal activities, this article seeks to understand the new urban fabric that was created by formal and informal builders who are both rule-breakers and rule-makers. The research was carried out in the Güzeltepe neighborhood, a complex neighborhood with a mix of squatter houses and renewal areas. The field study was conducted from 2014 to 2017 with site visits, photo analysis, and archival research. We will reveal and discuss legalization and upgrading processes, and the effects of this transformation. We will then analyze how informality operates as a logic of urban life.

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Integrating Home-Based Enterprises in Urban Planning: A Case for Providing Economic Succour for Women of Global South

Sun, 11 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A major challenge of urbanization in the global South has been the unemployment-led informal economy that has grown beyond the capacity of African governments in general and urban planners in particular. The socio-cultural status of women, and other inequalities in largely patriarchal African societies, have caused them to resort to the most invisible and adaptable sub-sector of the informal economy: Home-based enterprises (HBEs). This study examines the contributions and challenges for women in HBEs using empirical evidence from Enugu, Nigeria. The study employed mixed methods and made use of both primary and secondary data. The study findings confirm that HBEs provide economic succour to women excluded by the formal sector. Among the benefits of HBEs are income provision, supplementary household income, provision of goods and services, skill acquisition, social value and self-esteem, and the ability to look after sick family members. The challenges of HBEs were inconsistency...

A Granny Flat of One’s Own? The Households that Build Accessory-Dwelling Units in Seattle’s King County

Thu, 8 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This paper inserts itself in current debates about the legalization of Accessory-Dwelling Units (ADUs), by casting a new light on the profiles of households filing ADU permits in the unincorporated areas of Seattle’s King County. Correlations between the concentration of minority households and the permitting of ADUs might call into question preconceived notions that such legalizations benefit suburban, older, white middle-class households in the first place. We seek to address the relationship between legalizing ADUs in King County, the major county of the Seattle metropolitan area, and general characteristics of households who build ADUs, based on age, race, and income. Findings underline premises for further evidence about the fact that minority homeowners benefit from the local permitting of ADUs. These findings could be the translation of a particular adequacy between ADU legalization and the long-term projects of local homeowners to transform their residential space.

Exploring the Dangerous Disconnect Between Perspectives, Planning, Policy, and Practice Towards Informal Traders in Durban, South Africa

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

While cities pursue recognition on the global scale, low-income populations are often negatively impacted by urban growth. Informal workers in Durban, South Africa have fallen victim to this trend, as the municipality’s focus shifts to drawing international investment and cleaning up the city. In this article, I explore the question: How do municipal employee perspectives, current planning and policy documents, and current practice in the city align regarding treatment of informal traders in Durban, South Africa? I find a disconnect between current well-intended perspectives and planning with policy and its enforcement in practice. This disconnect must be addressed to protect informal traders in Durban.

Engaging Informality in the New Urban Agenda

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The New Urban Agenda, the outcome document of the United Nations Habitat III conference in 2016, was adopted by consensus by all 193 member states of the United Nations. The Habitat III leadership has proclaimed that the document represents a “new paradigm” in urban planning, reversing the “over-determined” model of 20th century Western-dominated planning, and embracing more locally-determined forms of informality. This paper examines the intellectual history of the document, and compares it to its antecedents, thereby evaluating the claim that it represents a new paradigm. The conclusion assesses implications for future planning practice, particularly as we confront an age of rapid urbanization in many parts of the globe.

Design Dichotomy: Impact of Design Intervention on the Recreational Open Spaces of Urban India—A Photo Essay

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Well performing recreational open spaces (ROSs) are essential amenities that improve the quality of urban life in the context of rapid urbanization prevalent in developing nations. In Indian cities, the quantity and quality of recreational amenities like parks and playgrounds do not compare well with global standards. Design interventions that are undertaken while developing ROSs significantly impact their value in terms of attractiveness, accessibility, and usability. To evaluate this impact, an empirical survey of select ROSs was conducted in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai. The analysis revealed the dichotomous nature of design interventions. Multiple interventions or ‘too much design’ resulted in the open space losing its ‘openness’ and allowed only an orchestrated use of space. Whereas the lack of any intentional intervention or ‘too little design’ resulted in informality, which made the open space susceptible to encroachment. Using photographic evidence, this essay illustrates...

Power Imbalances in Favela-Upgrading Practices in São Paulo, Brazil

Wed, 10 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Favelas in São Paulo, Brazil have been undergoing major transformations since the 1980s with the rise of upgrading programs. These programs are widely seen as ways of alleviating urban vulnerability. However, the fact that they change the political structure of favelas, causing power imbalances, goes often untold. This article discusses the outcomes of upgrading efforts in Favela do Sapé, placing a special emphasis on the social actors involved in the upgrading. Characters such as favela dwellers, governments, and parallel powers are assessed through a power planning lens. The present analysis also focuses on the social actors’ relational possibilities that are aimed at changing the power scenarios of favelas.

Back cover

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Back cover

Inside Cover

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Inside Cover

Theses and Dissertations

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Theses and Dissertations

Credits and Contents

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Credits and contents

THE VALUE AND DYNAMICS OF COMMUNITY-BASED STUDIO PROJECTS IN PLANNING EDUCATION IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Tue, 7 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Urbanisation is growing in the global South, but urban planning is not keeping up to ad- dress the problem of urban growth. Many planning schools in Africa still promote ideas transferred from the global North. (The master plan of Lusaka in Zambia, for instance, was based on the concept of the Garden City, but Garden City for whom?) Most planning schools fail to adequately prepare planning students for the problems they will later en- counter in African cities. In order to confront the urbanisation pressures on the continent in all its unique dimensions, fundamental shifts are needed in the way planning schools on the continent prepare planners. Responding to this challenge, the University of Zambia (UNZA) launched a Master of Science degree in Spatial Planning in 2013. Informality and studio-based teaching and learning are major components of the programme. In an effort to raise some of the inherent challenges and benefits of running community-based studio projects in Africa,...

SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY AND “LEGACY LANDSCAPES”

Tue, 7 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This piece pays tribute to a great scholar and urbanist, Sir Peter Hall, who was concerned with the social and economic vitality of neighborhoods. In his 1988 book, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, Hall writes about the Garden City, exploring both the original vision as imagined by Ebenezer Howard and the global di- aspora of Howard’s ideas. Hall also discusses the theoretical contribution of Garden Cities today, especially with regard to issues of social equity and so- cial sustainability. This piece critically re-examines the Garden City concept, including its utopian social origins, its implementation on a global scale, and its impact on current planning theory and practice. I illustrate how Hall and others have affected the canonical garden cities literature, and have created a “legacy landscape” concept that is still relevant today in new sustainable development.

UNDERSTANDING CITIES THROUGH NETWORK AND FLOWS

Tue, 7 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A review of The New Science of Cities by Michael Batty

Editor's Note

Tue, 7 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Editor's Note

INNOVATION, THE AGRICULTURAL BELT, AND THE EARLY GARDEN CITY

Tue, 7 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The emergence of the Garden City movement, inspired by Ebenezer Howard’s book To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), subsequently published as Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902), would have an enormous impact on future urban development and town- planning worldwide (e.g., Parsons and Schuyler 2002, 78; Ward 1992; Cooke 1978). Lewis Mumford claimed that the two most important inventions of the early twentieth century were the airplane and the Garden City (Mumford 1960). The Garden City model in many ways represents the antithesis to the historic city, as a model derived from smaller rural communities with a defined size, low densities, and a wealth of green space. Many subsequent urban models have expanded upon, altered, and diverged from Howard’s ideas. The Gar- den City has radically challenged the expectation that a city is a dense, vibrant, and largely hard-landscaped environment. In fact, urban environments developed over the last half-century have in many cases...

A FRAMEWORK FOR EQUITABLE INVESTMENT

Tue, 7 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Since 2012, California has generated billions of dollars from its market-based green- house gas emissions reduction program, commonly known as Cap-and-Trade. These rev- enues, deposited in the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), must be invest- ed in projects that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions while maximizing benefits for disadvantaged communities and households. SB 535 (de León 2012), as amended by AB 1550 (Gomez 2016), requires at least thirty-five percent of these revenues to be invested in projects that benefit disadvantaged community residents and low-income households and communities. Implementing these statutory requirements has been the work of a coalition of policy-advocacy and organizing groups, who have too often seen public in- vestment in environmental justice communities fail to meet the needs of low-income residents of color—or worse yet, actually harm them. This article presents the“ disad- vantaged community benefits” framework that this...

LETCHWORTH

Tue, 7 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This paper traces the development and evolution of Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire, England, the first and most comprehensive attempt to actualize the amalgam of anarchist and utopian ideals on which Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement is based. Letchworth’s social and economic elements of integrated industry, agriculture, and cooperative land owner- ship eroded fairly quickly, leaving architectural and aesthetic concerns to dominate the Garden City’s legacy. This legacy resounds in contemporary discussions of property rights and New Urbanism, suggesting its pertinence to issues of place and community has endured across widely different con- texts and time periods. With the erosion of the Garden City model’s founding ideologies, Letchworth demonstrates the tenacity of structural market and economic forces in guiding the implementation of planning projects.

A MODIFIED AGENT-BASED MODEL OF SLUM FORMATION

Tue, 7 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This paper investigates how the inclusion of political lifecycles and unrestricted housing development by private developers will impact the spatial arrangement and density of slums in a virtual urban environment. To do this, I build on the agent based model (ABM) entitled “Slumulation” developed by Crooks, Koizumi and Patel (2012). The intention of this is to generate conversation around the ways individual action impact the urban en- vironment, and also how other stakeholders in the city create conditions that motivate the emergence of certain spatial arrangements over time. Through the addition of code into the original model, I am able to augment the actions of two actors in particular: politicians and developers. Borrowing from literature, I include local political cycles that minimize the interaction between urban dwellers and politicians throughout most of the simulation, except for in the case of election times where special consideration is made that allows for lower...

ASSESSING LOCAL POLICY EXPERIMENTS TO COMBAT CLIMATE CHANGE

Tue, 7 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A review of An Urban Politics of Climate Change: Experimentation and the Governing of Socio-Technical Transitions by Harriet Bulkeley, Vanesa Casatan, and Gareth A.S. Edwards

HYBRID GOVERNANCE AND THE HUMAN RIGHT TO WATER

Tue, 7 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Identifying how and to what extent the poor and most vulnerable in society are able to demand and access safe water as they define it is the practical realization of the human right to water. The explicit international recognition of the right to water and sanitation in 2010 is significant in that it obligates nations to recognize safe water for human consumption primarily as a social good, a significant point of contention after decades of global water politics. However, there remains a large gap between the international human right to water and on-the-ground determinants of water access and reliability. How can the right to water turn from being an abstract legal principle into policies and interventions that can be implemented and measured? This paper con- tributes to the considerable literature on the right to water and basic services delivery by assessing three critical mechanisms that inhibit the ability of the urban poor to exercise their right to water. Of particular...

The "Mortgage Consensus” and the Housing Bubble: Revisiting the Post-Fordism Debate