Urban, Community and Regional Planning Commons^™

A Policy Agenda For Addressing The Homeless Problem, David A. Johnson

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

While the past 40 years has ushered in a period of improved urban real estate development and values, it has also been a time of decreased housing affordability and increased homelessness. The Agenda for Building a Changing World Responsibly needs to include improved housing assistance and affordability policies. This article outlines an agenda for housing assistance and affordability policies at both the federal and local urban jurisdiction levels. Their implementation will collectively help build a changing world responsibly.

Planning As If People Mattered, Arthur C. Nelson

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

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 …

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.

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.

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 …

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, …

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 …

Planning After The Pandemic, Arthur C. Nelson

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

Foreword, Earl Blumenauer

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

Introduction, Karen Johnston

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Karen Johnston

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

How An Environmental Crisis Catalyzed Community-Led Planning To Address Racial Inequities: A Case Study Of Shingle Mountain, In Southern Dallas, Evelyn Mayo

Planning Masters Professional Reports - Archive

Equity is one of the “Four E’s” representing the core values for planning at the City of Dallas, Texas (City of Dallas, Core Values). However, many neighborhoods in Southern Dallas endure environmental injustices partly because land use planning ignores or disregards the needs of low-income communities of color. This report examines the Shingle Mountain environmental justice crisis in Southern Dallas to illuminate the environmental injustices that the community of Floral Farms has endured partly due to misguided planning and the neglect of the city of Dallas.The study focuses on examining how the grassroots, community-led land use plan developed by residents …

Nycha & Arcscholars: Senior Center, Naomi Langer-Voss, Tylee Rivera

Publications and Research

Who are we?

We are a diverse group of scholars ranging in age, gender, and background from all over New York City. We share a common interest in solving our urban challenges through studying and proposing improvements to the built environment. From professors at CUNY CITY TECH to NYCHA Design & Implementation specialists and NYCHA residents, we encompass a group of scholars united by this common purpose.

What are we here to accomplish?

This team of ARCscholars is working collaboratively, sharing lived experiences, creatively thinking & planning and applying our research discoveries to the proposed design interventions. We seek to …

An Empirical Exploration Of Southeast Asian American Residential Patterns In The San Francisco Bay Area (2000–2019), Minh Q. Nguyen

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

This paper explores three methods of reporting residential patterns: (1) concentration profiles, (2) density maps, and (3) proximity profiles. I analyze U.S. Census data to map and evaluate the residential patterns for Southeast Asian Americans in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. Drawing from the field of urban planning, I report two measures of segregation and concentration (a) dissimilarity indices and (b) spatial proximity indices, and I discuss their limitations. Since mapping and spatial statistics are essential to understanding the histories, development, and advancement of Southeast Asian American communities, it is important to promote their broad usage. …

Borderline Re-Order: Negotiating The Edge Between City And Greenspace, Jeremy Taylor Morgan

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Does development of urban areas naturally lies at odds with maintaining any memory of their historic character, e.g. historic artifacts, structures, land? If so, such a perspective may have warrant. The Atlanta area serves as an easy example: the Loew’s Grand was conveniently burned down by arsonists after it received historic status and protection; the Fox Theatre was almost redeveloped into a parking deck, and; the placard for the site of Leo Frank’s lynching was moved across the street to make room for an entrance ramp to a toll freeway.

But this single perspective, or prejudice rather, despite warrant, is …

Radicalization Of The Spectacle: Fostering Free Artistic Expression Through Architecture, Mackenzie Lubin

Architecture Senior Theses

My thesis, entitled Radicalization of the Spectacle, explores the intersection between the urban conditions of New York City, Times Square, and the notion of radicalization. The term ‘radicalization’ refers to an extreme change in worldly affairs. This term is critical in understanding my view of architecture, as it suggests architecture must formatively react to changes in culture, climate, politics, etc. Moreover, the term ‘radical’ is aggressively progressive and favors social reform performance, adding an urgency for new ideas to form. Secondly, the term ‘Spectacle’ refers to a visually and spatially arresting event that is dramatic in occurrence. The act of …

Young Adults In A Costly World: Can Accessory Dwelling Units Serve As An Alternative Form Of Accommodation For Recent College Graduates Amidst The Rising Cost Of Housing And A College Education?, Aaron Schlosser

Landscape Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Over the past few years, young adults have been put in a rather tough situation concerning personal finances. As college tuition has risen, so has student debt accrual, leaving many recent college graduates near-crippled financially. Along with this issue, which is large in and of itself, is the fact that housing prices have risen in many of the metropolitan areas in the United States. Both of these problems, when coupled, lead to a decrease in quality of life for most young adults, and people in general. Because of this, the approach of this thesis is to find an affordable form …

Design Is A Social Process: A Survey On Inclusive Practice, Gabriel De Souza Silva

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This inquiry pivots the discussion on design practice toward process, and seeks to elucidate how inclusivity is achieved in it, and by what means it is maintained. The design process is interrogated through a series of case studies on contemporary practitioners that either describe themselves or are recognized by the wider design community as inclusive of gender, race, sexual orientation, ability level, and are sensitive to history of place. The case studies are selected to demonstrate a diversity of project types, management structures, and design tools, and they comprise the practices of LA Más, Assemble, and Bryony Roberts. The product …

The Evolution Of Place And Neighborhood Identity In Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, Isai Castaneda

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This research paper examines the relationship between place and identity by looking at the evolution of both in the specificity of the neighborhood of Boyle Heights, in Los Angeles, California. The role of the built environment and its evolution is tied to socio-cultural evolution in Boyle Heights in a narrative that emphasizes the systems of power and control that emerge through the lenses of dwelling and transportation infrastructure. Historical review of secondary sources, images, and graphics (like maps) serve to support the arguments made. The research paper focuses on Boyle Heights and Los Angeles during its interwar years, primarily examining …