Urban, Community and Regional Planning Commons^™

The Future Of The Comprehensive Plan, David Rouse

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

This article begins with a brief history of the comprehensive plan from its historic roots to the present day. It then considers contemporary comprehensive planning practice, using the Comprehensive Plan Standards for Sustaining Places developed by the American Planning Association (APA) as a benchmark. The article concludes by exploring how the comprehensive plan can and must evolve to address the major challenges of the 21st century. It draws on research and content from The Comprehensive Plan: Sustainable, Resilient and Equitable Communities for the 21st Century (Rouse and Piro 2022).

Advances In Planning Processes And Implementation, Arthur C. Nelson

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

Homeownership For The Long Run, Susan M. Wachter, Arthur Acolin

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

U.S. homeownership rates have largely recovered since the depths of the Great Recession, except for Black Americans. In 2019, 42 percent of Black households owned a home, compared to 73 percent of white households. Currently, about two thirds of households own their home, a rate of homeownership that has prevailed in the U.S. since mid-century. However, whether this rate can be sustained over the next decades is in question. Black and Hispanic/Latinx homeownership rates have remained far below that of the white non-Hispanic rate. In addition, the homeownership rate for younger households is now below its level prior to the …

Market Demand-Based Planning And Permitting: Special Case Of Affordable Housing, Robert Hibberd

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

Arthur C. Nelson has advanced the concept of market demand-based planning and permitting (MDBPP) as a way in which to balance the need for development within the limits of market capacity. Lacking MDBPP discipline, real estate markets are prone to over-development that can lead to economic downturns including notably the Great Recession of 2007-2009. This article will unpack the history and challenge of MDBPP and demonstrate its efficacy. Then, it will apply these principles to the specific wicked problem of housing affordability, which is both ongoing and emerging in nature. It will tie this problem to a call for MDBPP …

Affordable Housing: Three Roadblocks To Regulatory Reform, Dwight Merriam

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

This article focuses on techniques, initiatives, and regulatory reforms that may help improve affordability in housing, and thereby serve the need for economic, social, and racial equity. It focuses especially on three impediments standing in the way of affordability: the myth of Home Rule, limitations of the Fair Housing Act, and the pervasive use of private covenants and restrictions. Those roadblocks deserve the closest attention and concerted action and must be knocked down, once and for all, to get the housing we so desperately need.

The Enigma Of Housing Choice, Casey Dawkins

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

The U.S. faces a housing choice crisis. The growing shortage of affordable rental homes and looming mismatch between the homes offered for sale by baby boomers and the homes sought by the next generation of homeowners point to a need to fundamentally reshape the extent and diversity of the nation’s housing options. Housing and land-use policy experts have appealed to the aim of expanding housing choice to justify the removal of regulatory restrictions on certain housing types, the construction of affordable rental housing in transit-adjacent neighborhoods, the elimination of housing market discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity, and …

Housing Affordability And Homeownership, Arthur C. Nelson

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

Telos And Techne, Paul Knox

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

It seems reasonable to assert that the planning profession should be understood as serving society by providing vision, anticipation, innovation, and inspiration in the cause of human flourishing; that its telos is to create functional, efficient, and sustainable physical environments and to contribute to the material realization of societal aspirations of what it means to live well. But it is the techne—the appli¬cation of the field’s context-dependent armory of tactics, practices, concepts, approaches, and methods—that counts most in determining success in the cause of human flourishing. This article comments on the tensions between telos and techne in planning.

Planning The Opportunity Metropolis: An Agenda For An Era Of Intensifying Technology, Climate And Health Challenges, George Galster

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

Urban planners focus on the spatial arrangements of residences, businesses, institutions, infrastructure and human-built amenities, and the market- and government-driven processes that shape these arrangements. They start with the basic supposition that these arrangements strongly affect individuals’ health, prosperity, and happiness as well as the overall level of opportunity, solidarity, and satisfaction in society. Their recommendations about changing the built environment should be guided by the norms of efficiency and equity, with the latter being framed as creating disproportionate benefits to those who are least advantaged.

This essay begins with an overview of the metropolitan opportunity structure theory to frame …

Planning For An Aging Population: The Sustainability Conundrum, Sandi Rosenbloom

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

By 2030 more than one in four Americans will be 65 years of age or older. What role do city planning academics and practitioners play in planning for the inevitable and increasing aging of society? I examined original research and reviewed articles published in three major planning journals, reviewed the websites of ten Planning Accreditation Board (PAB) accredited planning programs, and evaluated the websites of the American Planning Association’s divisions and special interest groups to determine how each demonstrated or portrayed the value and importance of aging issues in planning scholarship, pedagogy, and practice. I found that these key pillars …

Do Planners Always Have To Make The Neighborhood "Better"? Rethinking The Disturbing Tensions Between Redevelopment And Equity, Don Elliott

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

America’s public sector planners are constantly trying to “make things better.” That has been true ever since planning became a profession. Planners are paid to think broadly about how emerging demographic, economic, environmental, and mobility trends will impact life in our communities, and then make recommendations and write regulations to respond to those trends in ways that make the city a better place. In fact, if planners were not doing that, it is not clear why cities should pay them. For the most part, the predominant focus by planners is making communities physically better through comprehensive, neighborhood, sector, and corridor …

The Influence Of Civil Rights And Anti-Discrimination Laws On Shaping Our Transportation System, Marc Brenman, Thomas W. Sanchez

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

Regarding the title of this paper, “The Influence of Civil Rights and Anti-Discrimination Laws on Shaping Our Transportation System”, the reverse is also true—the transportation system has helped shape the civil rights laws in the U.S. The way bus lines in the South used to be segregated is one example, and fighting this helped shape the modern Civil Rights Movement. This influence goes back to include famous cases involving segregated train cars in the 1880s. In this article, we address the numerous ways in which civil rights and anti-discrimination laws shape our transportation system. We offer a suite of approaches …

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 …

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 …