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Rebuilding Common Purpose For The 21st Century With New Civic Infrastructure, Dowell Myers, Karen Trapenberg Frick May 2022

Rebuilding Common Purpose For The 21st Century With New Civic Infrastructure, Dowell Myers, Karen Trapenberg Frick

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

Increasing polarization and division are the greatest challenges to the U.S. today, because they prevent cooperation in decision making about growing problems of major consequence. The related long swing in rising individualism is assessed for how it undermines common purpose. We survey the ideological divide and how it intersects with preferred urban development patterns, negotiation styles (compromise or hard line), and diverse views on mitigations for stemming the COVID-19 pandemic. An especially potent factor was rapidly changing racial projections, the reckless framing of which led to exaggerated perceptions of “demographic threat” and a widened partisan divide. Renewed civic infrastructure is …

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Planning To A Larger Scale: Lessons From Trying To Save The World, John Randolph May 2022

Planning To A Larger Scale: Lessons From Trying To Save The World, John Randolph

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

Most urban planning efforts are focused on city, district, and neighborhood scales, but many of our problems require a larger perspective and grander solutions. The Covid-19 pandemic and climate change head the list of global problems in need of action, but many others loom at different scales. In recent decades, the principles of planning have been applied to broader issues. This essay reflects on one of those problems—climate change and the associated energy transition, and the lessons that efforts aimed at its resolution may provide for planning at such scale.

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Envisioning Health, Safety, And Welfare For All: Retrospect And Prospect, Frederick Steiner May 2022

Envisioning Health, Safety, And Welfare For All: Retrospect And Prospect, Frederick Steiner

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

This essay is a reflection on my academic career in community and regional planning as well as landscape architecture. That look back over five decades provides the basis about speculation for the future of planning and design. It addresses the major challenges of our time, including social justice and climate change, through the lens of design, ecology, and landscape.

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Is The Pandemic Causing A Return To Urban Sprawl?, Richard B. Peiser, Matt Hugel May 2022

Is The Pandemic Causing A Return To Urban Sprawl?, Richard B. Peiser, Matt Hugel

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

Urban sprawl is a catch-all term and a scapegoat for everything that is bad about urban growth today, such as congestion, blight, monotony, and ecological destruction. In recent decades, sprawl might have attenuated as America experienced a period of urban revival even as technology made working from home (WFH) and shopping from home possible nearly anywhere. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of infrastructures and forced firms to rethink the necessity of workplaces. Retailers have accelerated the pace of online sales and home deliveries by years if not decades. These and other advances have decoupled people …

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The Boldness Of Healthy Cities: A Tricky Challenge, Ann Forsyth May 2022

The Boldness Of Healthy Cities: A Tricky Challenge, Ann Forsyth

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

How can planning use health more fully to build more visibility, better alliances, and more substantial public support while focusing on important and meaningful change? Unfortunately, healthy cities and communities’ approaches are often on the margins of the planning field, not the center. While most people support making places that can promote health, this can be complicated at times of crisis or constraint when, for example, some may perceive economic health to be in tension with human health. At its best, however, the idea of making healthier places can meld together individual and collective goals. To make health more central, …

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Land-Use Planning And Urban Governance: Lessons From The Pandemic, Malcolm Grant May 2022

Land-Use Planning And Urban Governance: Lessons From The Pandemic, Malcolm Grant

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

It is a privilege to have been invited to contribute to this festschrift for a scholar whose work I have known and admired for decades. We have explored and debated together many aspects of land-use planning in our respective jurisdictions over that time, including a protracted effort in the 1990s to develop a model for impact fees for the UK planning system. Several other contributors to this festschrift were also part of that team, from which all of us learned a great deal. One is that complex systems of government develop deep resistance to change, and that it often takes …

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Planning After The Pandemic, Arthur C. Nelson May 2022