URBAN v.5 is.2 - Planning Critiques of the Urban Landscape

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY URBAN PLANNING PROGRAM NEWSLETTER

Planning Critiques of the Urban Landscape

vOL.5 + nO.2 + sPRING 2002

Planning Critiques of the Urban Landscape

FELLOW PLANNERS, In the months following September 11, the discussion in classrooms, workplaces, and neighborhood coffee shops has slowly shifted from whispered talks filled with fear to conversations chasing the persistent figurative and literal question, “How do we rebuild?” In the previous issue, the URBAN theme was Globalization, and it was the editors’ plan to have a subsequent issue about Localization, showcasing essays that analyzed planning issues related to New York City, or wherever one considers his or her own “local” site. Instead, we’ve been fortunate to receive several pieces that touch upon faceted perceptions and critiques of the postmodern urban landscape—the political space of the ghetto, the social structures of cities, and the invasion of automobiles on sidewalks. In order to rebuild responsibly, in New York or around the world, we need to understand the broad and detailed context in which we seek to create physical and social change. Planners are quite fortunate to do this for a living. Our education and profession are not simply about execution; it is also critical to understand why and how we form housing policy, rezone neighborhoods, and construct other impacting decisions.

Table of Contents

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Organizing the Image of the City [jAY sHUFFIELD]

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Penitentiary Urbanism + Evasion Tactics [mATIAS eCHANOVE]

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Cars, Sidewalks, and Laissez-Faire [jOSE rOBERTO vENTURA]

This Spring, the three first-year studios, profiled in this issue, revolve around the idea of rebuilding: Lower Manhattan; the regional New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut area; and seismic-sensitive Istanbul, Turkey. Each studio is performing the exhausting, yet provoking task of formulating physical and social analyses and ideas for each area in concern for urban loss and hope. Along with articles related to urban spatial perceptions, there are essays on the planning profession; interviews with visiting professor Dr. Susan Fainstein and Atsushi Miura, a sociologist in Tokyo; and profiles on several PhD students.

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An Aesthetic of Deregulation [kAROLINE bROMBACH]

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The Transformational Planner [mYRNA iTON]

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Japan Suburbs: The Age of Selection [ Interview with Atsushi Miura ] [aNN yAMAMOTO]

As new editors, we are proud of this issue and hope that it compels you, especially the current first-year and incoming students, to actively support and contribute to this Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation studentproduced publication. We’d like to thank the contributors for helping us make this issue possible, and we look forward to the Fall 2002 issue. The topic will be decided later, since we will count on your summer adventures and learning experiences to make that issue possible. Good luck to the graduating second-year and PhD students and to those who remain, see you in the Fall.

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The Gentleman Planner [cUZ pOTTER]

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Planner Interview— Dr. Susan Fainstein [bRENDA cHO]

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Local Studio—Lower Manhattan [eDDIE nELMS]

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Regional Studio—Dispersal of the Financial Sector [gRACE hAN]

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International Studio—Earthquake Hazard Planning in Istanbul [sUSAN gLADSTONE]

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PhD Happenings—A Beginning, an Ending... and Lots of Bits in the Middle [sHANE tAYLOR]

bRENDA + gRACE

URBAN STAFF bRENDA cHO + gRACE hAN [eDITORS] lISA fISHER [aRT dIRECTOR]

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sHANE tAYLOR

Organizing the Image of the City jAY sHUFFIELD The appearance of urban space can be described as a self-organizing system where characteristics emerge from lower-level interactions. The visual patterns that emerge result from the behavior of individuals and institutions through rules of interaction.

Hillier and Hanson [1984] demonstrated with computer modeling that urban form can self-assemble from a few simple rules, while others have noted that basic rules in Islamic Law established the form of traditional Muslim cities [Broadbent 1990]. While Hillier and Hanson reject the importance of visual appearance, passing it off as mere surface, the parallel example from Islamic Law, which is heavily invested in regulating appearances, implies that appearance has an important role. Willis [1995] noted that skyscrapers in New York and Chicago, and consequently the appearance of the skyline and the cities themselves, took their basic appearance from economic and zoning rules. Moreover, appearance is inseparable from space itself; Times Square is perhaps the best example, as the space itself only exists through the appearance created by its proliferation of signage.1

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Explaining the city as a self-organizing system seemingly raises the same problem as Park’s use of “human nature” by abstracting urban processes and ignoring the importance of social actions. <

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While it may seem easy to show that local rules can give rise to forms, including visual patterns, cities are dynamic social structures. The interactions that lead to the emergence of urban structures are complex and difficult to understand, in large part because they are influenced by the existing form of the structures that encompass them. Robert Park, the head sociologist of the Chicago School of Sociology, described this in 1925, stating: “The ground plan of most American cities […] is the checkerboard. […] This geometrical form suggests that the city is a purely artificial construction which might conceivably be taken apart and put together again, like a house of blocks.”

But this structure has its basis, nevertheless, in human nature, of which it is an expression. On the other hand, this vast organization which has arisen in response to the needs of its inhabitants, once formed, imposes itself upon them as a crude external fact, and forms them, in turn, in accordance with the design and interests which it incorporates.

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While there are several shortcomings in Park’s conception,2 he identified the importance of interactions between individuals in forming urban structures, and that those structures constrain and direct the actions of individuals.

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continued on page 3

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This Mexican street exemplifies the informal market giving rise to forms.

1

The area referred to as “Times Square” extends well beyond the public space bounded by the streets [which is actually shaped as a triangle] to encompass an area of several blocks unified by enormous billboards, animated signs, and television screens.

2

By accepting the existence of a “human nature” and a somewhat indiscriminant use of “morals,” as well as assuming that need, rather than desire, identity, or other social factors, was the building block of urban form, Park ignored the importance of socially constructed characteristics and normative behavior in shaping cities.

Organizing the Image of the City [ continued ] jAY sHUFFIELD Explaining the city as a self-organizing system seemingly raises the same problem as Park’s use of “human nature” by abstracting urban processes and ignoring the importance of social actions. Michael Sorkin raises this concern in his recent book: “We have grown skeptical of such totalizing solutions [as modernist architecture], if only formally. But, in place of activist politics, we now prefer neural and “bio-intuitive” models, the idea of self-organizing systems and managerial protocols, the fluid dynamics of capital flows, generative strategies based on formal extrapolations of statistical data: MBArchitecture. This search for a neofunctionalist, “objective” architecture is also part of the general abjection of agency [p. vii-viii].”

> . . .

“representation of space” will be an important task for planners who want to be effective in creating attractive places. <

Using a self-organizing framework, however, does not necessary mean blindly accepting social actions.

We can look at the rules that organize the system in ethical terms; if negative consequences emerge from the guiding rules we should be prepared to look for ways to change the rules to obtain more equitable results.

The local rules that influence urban structure can take one of three forms: legislation, economics, or social norms. Legislation such as zoning and building codes lay down invariable rules that allow certain types of spaces to be produced and prohibit others. Economics constrain the choices available to individuals, while allowing individual decisions. Social norms, while not entirely inflexible, play a strong role in conditioning aesthetic tastes, economic values, and ultimately the acceptability of legislation.

Planners have mostly worked through legislation, with some use of economics as well. Master plans created an image for entire districts or cities by trying to arrange every detail, while economic incentives have somewhat more flexibly asserted desired details in specific sites.

More recently, some planners have proposed using zoning codes or design guidelines to allow the character of an area to emerge from the independent development of individual projects. This use of zoning is one way that planners can rely on the possibility of emergent properties. It is not, however, the only approach that they can take. Social norms represent an overlooked workspace for planners. While some results can be obtained by directing areas through rules on the design and use of individual properties, much of the appearance of space will continue to be socially constructed. Furthermore, the ability of planners to alter legislation is dependent on public acceptance of the changes.

Attention to media and popular culture, to what Henri Lefebvre [1974] calls the “representation of space” will be an important task for planners who want to be effective in creating attractive places.

While many have shown, like Anthony Vidler [2000] did in depth, that the way space is represented influences social preferences and practices, our understanding of the transmission from media to social norms, which is complicated by existing social structures as Park noted, remains rather poor. Moreover, this transmission has not received attention in planning or architecture, and appears to have remained largely peripheral to sociology as well. While it is important that planners continue to deal with physical spaces and address concrete individual problems that arise, they should also proactively introduce new visions of the city into the media and popular culture and investigate how these take root in social practice.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Broadbent, Geoffrey. Emerging Concepts in Urban Space Design. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990.

Hillier, Bill and Hanson, Julienne. The Social Logic of Space. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Zoning and social norms work together to construct and design the appearance of space.

Penitentiary Urbanism + Evasion Tactics mATIAS eCHANOVE POLITICS OF SPACE IN THE GHETTO In many ways, American ghettos resemble prisons. On an aesthetic level first, the architecture often looks defensive and authoritarian: straight angles, windowless walls, raw bricks, high buildings, long stretches of identical houses, grids of streets, fenced windows, closed lots, barbwire, guard dogs, and surveillance cameras. Public buildings tend to look alike: prisons, police stations, hospitals, public services, schools, and residential housing all have similar architecture. In addition, ghettos are usually isolated geographically or at least out of sight. They are blind spots on the psycho-geographic map of the socially integrated population. Like a mental system, the city forgets what it does not want to know.

New York City ghettos tend to be disconnected from the rest of society, but are in no way autonomous. Police presence has increased in recent years and public buildings attest to the presence of the State. The omnipresence of the grid reminds residents that the space they inhabit is controlled by the State. Abandoned buildings usually fall into ruin and junk often piles up on the streets when informal constructions are not allowed to stand.

The destruction of the Ark that an enlightened Newark resident built on a vacant lot exemplifies the spatial politics of the State. What artist Kea Tawana constructed to symbolize unity and hope

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Ghettos are blind spots on the psycho-geographic map of the socially integrated population. Like a mental system, the city forgets what it does not want to know. < was destroyed by order of the courts, along with her self-constructed house [Vergara: 1999, 159].

The fact that public space is defended against local intervention sends the clear message that the land does not belong to those who live on it, but to an other entity: the State. It posits the State as an exterior, supreme, and dominant entity.

Ghetto residents are by definition marginal. Had they been given the choice, they might have signed the “social contract” and integrated the cultural, ideological, social, and economic consensus. But, most were never given the choice to be part of it.

From the start they are deprived of many incentives and benefits given to all citizens. The social

tie is non-existent. The mechanism of reciprocity, whereby citizens playing by the rules of the game are materially rewarded for their subjection, appears to be broken in the ghetto. This fracture sociale delegitimizes the State and its institutions. Therefore, the State structure is not interiorized as a mental framework; as an organizing principle of thought and social behavior [Deleuze & Guattari: 1987, 464]. The institutions, rules, and norms of the State which constitute the platform upon which social and economic exchanges take place and upon which the social identity of the middle class gets constructed, are at best irrelevant to most of the ghetto population and at worst perceived as a repressive apparatus.

Hence, the ghetto is like a disjunctive social machine. What Foucault calls “positive” discipline only partially takes hold because it is not relayed at the individual and social levels by a set of values and norms. Instead, the more archaic form of “blockade” or “negative” discipline [Foucault: 1975, 244] infiltrates physical space. Defensive architecture, high police presence, and restrictive regulations

[for instance making difficult to open a bar] are all strategies aimed at “neutralizing danger, fixing useless or agitated populations, preventing excessive gathering” [Foucault: 1975, 245]. Where “positive” discipline does not penetrate the social fabric and individual minds, “negative” discipline intensifies.

When “increasing the possible utility of individuals” [Foucault: 1975, 245] is impossible, efforts concentrate. direct physical control, on “maintaining the street” [Virilio, quoted in Deleuze & Guattari: 1987, 479].

We could describe the spaces not controlled by “positive” or mental discipline as non-colonized, non-stratified, open, and smooth. Because the dominant institutions do not occupy that space, the social platform has to be reinvented. This does not mean that these spaces develop independently from the striated urban and social environment of the ghetto. On the contrary, it is only by climbing the wall or by finding the fault that prisoners escape the jail. The grid largely conditions continued on page 5

Penitentiary Urbanism & Evasion Tactics [ continued ]

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“It is no surprise if prisons resemble factories, schools, military buildings, hospitals, which all resemble prisons.”

–Michel Foucault: 1975, 264

the actualized form of the smooth, open space emerging within it. Moreover, the institutional, social, economic, and cultural pressure exercised on the ghetto increases the need for spaces of decompression. If it were not for the wall on which it stands the graffiti would not exist. However, once the code has been broken, once secret tunnels have been dug, once the graffiti has been adopted as a way of expression, it is almost unstoppable: use Japanese technology to make graffiti-proof subway trains and the windows will be scratched.

identity, which is more than the negative image of the dominant culture. It is a war machine creating a bounderless local culture; “deploying itself on a milieu without horizon” [Deleuze & Guattari: 1987, 469]; “a locality of the absolute or of the infinite” [Deleuze & Guattari: 1987, 602]. The taking-over and local remixing of hip-hop culture throughout the world seem to attest of its infinitude.

“When a State does not succeed in striating its interior or neighboring space, the flux that traverse it will necessarily take the appearance of a war machine directed against it” [Deleuze & Guattari: 1987, 480]. Indeed, much of the culture that was born in the ghetto has stemmed from an attitude of defiance towards established rules and norms.

It seems that the power of ghetto culture and potential of resistance is commensurable with the pressure imposed on it by the institutions of the State. Project housing produces high crime and good hip-hop. Hip-hop is to a large extent a culture of transgression. It has no moral and no limits.

From gansta-rap and the worshiping of the Uzi to marijuana-blunts and the canonization of crack dealers passing by sexually explicit lyrics and the cult of porn, hip-hop culture transgresses the values and beliefs of the establishment. Breaking the rules and resisting control and assimilation are more than evasion tactics, they are also cultural strategies allowing the permanent creation of an “other”

local and situational, fluid and dynamic, social and cultural self-organizing system. It is a social-cultural capital shared and created by the community over which no one has control. The ability to speak it tells where you come from; it makes you a part of a community. It serves as a collective space where values, meanings, and roles can emerge beyond the etiquette that has been put on the back of ghetto residents. In a hostile urban, social, and institutional environment, the creation of a language that is “other” and impenetrable creates a virtual space of freedom: a temporary autonomous zone where another reality can emerge.

The language of the ghetto [slang, code words, expressions, signs, body language, etc.] is also a

Indeed, essential to its autonomy is its inaccessibility by outsiders. It is kept as a secret or inherited knowledge. Various mechanisms prevent the outsider from grasping it. First, far from being only a collection of words that one could list and learn, it is also a body language, a know-how to speak, move, and behave. Secondly, and this is crucial, it is in constant movement. It permanently mutates

mATIAS eCHANOVE and reinvents itself. Maybe worst than not knowing the language of the street at all, is to know an outdated version of it: go to the school yard with expressions two years old and you will be an outsider. Because of their fast minds, creative spirits, and dense social networks, kids are often the inventors of new words and expressions. In this survival of the sleekest, the expressions of the brightest and most admired get imitated and spread out.

Sources of inspiration range from TV and hip-hop songs to foreign languages. Innovations are always

disappears, gets ruled out by a new transgression more in tune with the moment. And the second it gets ruled out, it does not exist anymore. It is dead; it does not have any relevance or legitimacy. Therefore, hierarchies or strata do emerge in the smooth space of street language, but only momentarily.

incremental, but the rate of change is extremely rapid, with new expressions disseminating at the speed of a virus, soon contaminating the entire community and spreading beyond it—and down to the mainstream via MTV.

to be places where collective identity and social roles get played out and actualized.

New expressions typically start being used almost unconsciously by members of the community. They create an invisible link between community members because they express a collective experience.

Therefore they are always totally relevant, simultaneously dominant, and ephemeral. The impermanence of ghetto expressions is their strength. That is why they are always challenged and never allowed to become permanent standards. The only rule is transgression; war and creation. And a good transgression, a totally relevant new expression that wipes out an older one, immediately becomes a standard, an institution that everyone respects, but always only temporarily. A new rule emerges out of the transgression of another. Then in a second it

Further research will help clarify how informal, smooth, rhizomatic cultures emerge even in the most stratified and controlled environment. In the context of the ghetto, smooth cultural spaces seem

Deleuze and Guattari warn us “never to believe that a smooth space suffices to save us” [Deleuze and Guattari: 1987, 625]. Nonetheless, they are the spaces of the possible, where new, local axiomatic can develop. It seems that it would only be fair for policy makers and urban planners to allow the ghetto to develop under its own terms. To actually let new institutions emerge from the local might be the only way to see marginal communities develop social patterns that are compatible with the State and able to interact with it on their own terms.

BIBLIORAPHY Bey, Hakim. TAZ: Temporary Autonomous Zone. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Edition de Minuit, 1987.

Donaldson, Greg. The Ville. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993.

Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et Punir. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.

Vergara, Camilo Jose. The New American Ghetto. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1999.

Cars, Sidewalks, and Laissez-Faire

LISBON’S UNCONTROLLABLE GROWTH Many of today’s cities face major concerns regarding the use and abuse of the automobile; ranging from heavy traffic congestion, to noise, air pollution, and safety.

The Portuguese capital city, Lisbon, is no different from many of these other cities, but it faces yet another issue: public sidewalks are being invaded by the automobile.

Lisbon: a view to the river

Lisbon’s occupation is largely determined by its natural conditions. Hills and slopes are the common view and the dominant lines of the terrain often coincide with the urban structural lines. The city’s growth patterns have been determined by its terrain, by defense standards adopted throughout history, and by spontaneous growth that occurred with each new culture’s occupation of Lisbon. The first major urban transformation in the city was the reconstruction of the downtown due to a violent earthquake in 1755. About 20,000 people were killed in a city of 250,000. This event triggered a new urbanization policy that followed until the early 20th century. The 20th century city’s growth is marked by an industrial character and migration into the city. Factory sites, workers housing, and public housing are mainstream in new developments, especially on the city’s periphery. The past years were marked by major transformations to the edge of the city, including several automobile circulation rings to ease the traffic congestion, a new bridge connecting to the South peninsula, and the transformation of the East end of the city from an industrial and warehouse site into a waterfront development of 340 hectares. The site was used during the Lisbon Expo98 World exhibit and, as initially conceived, was prepared for future growth of 25,000 new residents along with commerce, services, and recreational facilities.

During the last two decades the Portuguese economy grew at a fast pace, as did Lisbon.

Although the population benefited from the economic growth, the city suffered terrible consequences that are now being passed to its inhabitants. During the past 20 years, Lisbon has undergone a flurried and chaotic expansion, resulting from micro plans that ignore the large-scale context into which they are inserted. This has created a saturated city where infrastructure is obsolete, car traffic is annoying, transportation systems are insufficient, and there exists a general disrespect for public space.

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There are a number of cultural issues that exacerbate the problem. The recent economic expansion has increased accessibility to cars. Everybody has a car, everybody uses their

jOSE rOBERTO vENTURA car on a daily basis, and no one wants to stop using their car. This leads to the problem of parking; Lisbon is a city that is not automobile friendly and has a complicated urban structure. Although efforts have been made to minimize this problem, the solution lies still further. It is hard to find streets that do not have cars parked on the sidewalks, double parked, and even on pedestrian islands. The disrespect creates awful views of the streets, makes pedestrian circulation difficult and hazardous, and gives bad example for future generations. The last decade also saw the rise of a new “professional” career: informal parking place watchers; and it seems to be a highly lucrative one because the class doesn’t seem to be diminishing. The logical solution to this blatant disrespect would be applying the law: parking tickets and car towing. Unfortunately the laissez- faire philosophy, that seems to be dominant in government, law enforcement, and citizen thinking, has taken control. Everybody does it, why shouldn’t I do it? So let it be.

Although the mainstream is still the laissez-faire philosophy, there are some unhappy citizens. According to the last Portuguese census in 2001, Lisbon had a 16.1% population decrease in the last 10 years. These people are moving from the city core and dispersing into Greater Lisbon. Greater Lisbon has had a population increase of 2.3%. This transfer of population from the city center to peripheral settlements, especially towards zones with already implanted transportation systems, reflects a suburbanization phenomenon. Though the population is moving to the surrounding areas, economic activities are still concentrated in the city core. There has not been a corresponding increase of economic activity in the periphery. People who leave the city are probably seeking a better life for themselves and their families, away from the messy urban core. The problem in this suburban tale is the fact that people are still commuting by car instead of mass transit. They drive two hours to get to work and two more to get home. They could have stayed in the city and gotten rid of their cars instead.

There are no easy solutions to this problem. It is a matter of everybody getting involved and having strong leadership guiding the process. The citizens in Lisbon are urging for education in this matter, public conscience. There must be strong political will and power to deal with these concerns. The newly elected mayor of the city spoke on this matter and his words were strong and convincing, but it depends on his commitment to the city. With the political will and power in hand there are countless investments to be made in infrastructure, especially on transportation. There are the technical problems to be dealt with in creating a perfect transit system; the dense urban tissue, the narrow streets, and a lot of water in the soil is not easy to deal with. It is important however to recognize the efforts being made during the last years by city officials, but still they are not enough. United towards the larger goal, the people of Lisbon can make what is one of the most beautiful and interesting cities in Europe even more beautiful, and a better place to live.

An unfortunately common scene of blatant disrespect for public space

An Aesthetic of Deregulation

AN OP-ED ON DIRECTIVE PLANNING IN THE U.S. I am from Germany. Actually, I grew up in a quaint medieval town with small winding roads, cute little old houses, a big Catholic church, a castle, a city hall, a central marketplace, a school, a hospital, trees, pedestrian precincts, bike lanes, cobble-stone pavements, clean air, legal access to alcohol at the young age of 16, free education, and high taxes. I grew up picture perfect. I have been presented a hundred times as a good example of town planning. I grew up in the cliché of a European small town. Social

control was indeed intact; whenever I had a beer in the park, my mother would know the next day.

When I entered University, I moved into a bigger city in the south, well-known for its socalled “Kehrwoche”, a special kind of cleaning duty for tenants where every Saturday you had to sweep the staircase of your building, and every two weeks you included the backyard and the public sidewalks along the adjacent street. I can tell you, your feelings toward public space

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I am frightened by this tendency to turn “wasteland” into cute little planned communities with brick houses and community centers, which may be seen as artificial spaces...

I think what is lacking in contemporary urban planning in the US is some boldness and the acceptance of an existing American vernacular. < become very strong if you have to clean it under the eyes of your neighbors, hanging out of their windows watching you!

I was relieved to move to New York City where you can find— among other exciting things—a healthy proportion of garbage on the sidewalks.

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What is presented to me at Columbia in lectures and discussions on contemporary American urban design are examples of the “New Urbanism.” Even though they are discussed in controversy, I can see a common agreement that a certain human scale was successfully applied and that there

does not exist any other equivalent example to create relatively dense planned communities in the US. I can see all this and I can also see the fact that the history of urban planning [the dogmas of towers in the park and urban renewal, for instance] has done its part to the development of this opinion. But still, I am frightened by this tendency to turn “wasteland” into cute little planned communities with brick houses and community centers, which may be seen as artificial spaces.

In the 1940s, Edward Hopper found a way to express unique American culture in his paintings: gasoline stations at night, diners, and street scenes were his favored themes. Since the publishing of “Learning from Las Vegas” [Venturi/Izenour/Scott Brown] in 1972, advertisements and signage have been acknowledged as an aesthetic contribution to urban environments. Unfortunately, I cannot see a similar acknowledgement in urban planning and the designs of today. Since the City Beautiful Movement, American planners preferably rely on retro architectonic and aesthetic patterns imported from Europe.

I think what is lacking in contemporary urban planning in the US is some boldness and the acceptance of an existing American vernacular. Why is the established aesthetic of deregulation looked down upon so much?

Why don’t we develop, for example, more sophisticated attitudes towards ugly surroundings?

Being ugly does not mean that they are without function. I once witnessed a punk storing

kAROLINE bROMBACH a beer crate in a public sewer.

He just opened the cover and put it below. Why are contemporary urban design solutions never truly exciting, adventurous, and daring? Driving through L.A. at

Maybe this lack of enthusiasm is due to the fact that as planning students we do not really have time to walk around in New York City. Instead, we are sitting in the library and reading about it.

night can be a highly aesthetic experience—despite my knowledge about its environmental impacts. Garbage on the sidewalk can be terrific—even though rats are a problem.

Anyway, I am not old enough [and perhaps too German] to accept the fact that trees, public participation in the planning processes, human scale, winding roads, safety, security, and democratic values should necessarily lead to happiness. In my opinion, this can be a teenager’s hell as well as being stuck in a sprawling neighborhood without a driver’s license.

I cannot see much excitement about urban disorder reflected in the discussions I have had thus far. And this, in a city like New York City! Even worse, the events of 9-11 have increased the demand for control, safety, and security within urban settings.

Appreciating deregulation: Club Utopia in Las Vegas, Nevada

The Transformational Planner My decision to study Urban Planning was an evolutionary step in my career forged by over 15 years of work as a community organizer in poor urban neighborhoods. This career decision stemmed from a practical realization that I needed more refined skills to do more effectively what I have always done: work for social justice.

Growing up in El Salvador, Central America, in the 1970s shaped my understanding of the relationship between social movements and the spatial distribution of resources. For most of this century, El Salvador, like the rest of Central America, survived on an export-based economy best characterized as feudal agrarian. In a tiny country of 5.5 million people, 14 families owned 95% of the arable land, and the rest lived in poverty. With a growing wealth disparity, by the 1970s, social unrest exploded into one of the bloodiest civil wars on the American continent. I became politically conscious during a time of incredible violence and conflict, in a place where stark inequality in the distribution of resources led to a disintegration of everything I knew. I understood early that the poverty I saw all around me growing up had its roots in the untenable social structure created by the ruling class.

Like many other Salvadoreans escaping the war, my family immigrated to the United States in 1982. We landed in San Francisco, California, where we had a few relatives and friends. We lived in a poor, Latino neighborhood at the top of the hill off Mission Street, an area plagued with gangs and crime. My two sisters and I slept in the walk-in closet of a studio apartment that we shared with another family from El Salvador. My father worked two jobs, cleaning office buildings and delivering pizzas, while we attended our local public school, learning to be American.

mobilization of communities based on their anger over existing conditions, which then leads to a process of conflict and subsequent negotiation, with the goal of increasing the community’s standing in the power structure, and sometimes in the community’s share in the distribution of wealth. This process is transformative, according to Alinsky, because, as people win campaigns, they become aware of their own power. As I applied the Alinsky model to my organizing work, I became acutely aware of its shortcomings, namely, that the model is great for short-term victories, but deficient in the crucial process of community-building. One of the main criticisms of the Alinsky-inspired organizations is their tendency towards the self-interested rather than the socially just. The model invites this, because there is no room for self-reflection or education; it assumes that, as people gain a sense of their power, they will develop as leaders through the conflict/negotiation/win process. In reality, I found that this rarely happens. When the people I worked for took on the San Francisco Housing Authority, the Housing Authority signed an agreement to take steps to increase housing opportunities for Latino tenants, but we failed in the crucial task to build alliance and community with the neighboring African American tenants. Because many of the very-low income Latinos were undocumented, they were ineligible for public housing. Our contention was that the Housing Authority assumed that people with Latino backgrounds were undocumented and discriminated prior to giving out the application. The majority of the tenants in the public housing projects, were in fact African-American. Throughout the campaign, I heard the leaders of my organization continually making racist statements. They were unable to adequately articulate the root cause of our problem. The process of conflict/negotiation/win had as its sold goal: increasing affordable housing for “us”. Education and self-reflection are rarely a part of

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In college, I started working as a > The work of a planner who seeks to address tenant organizer for a Latino tenants’ union that helped people s o c i a l a n d e c o n o m i c i n e q u a l i t y s h o u l d f o l l o w organize renters’ unions and the transformational process of a worked to advance issues of popular educator. An effective educator is one tenants’ rights and affordable housing citywide. We operated w h o c a n t e a c h b e c a u s e s h e u n d e r s t a n d s a tenants’ rights clinic where whom she is teaching, and this requires as we helped people facing evicmuch learning as teaching. < tions, usurious rent increases, sub-standard living conditions, and other housing problems. I this process, and are allowed only when they directly serve the learned a lot about the technical issues of housing and rent control ultimate goal. For example, the members are educated about the rent during my time there, however, the most valuable thing I learned was control law if they are seeking to change it. Political education about the importance of popular political education in organizing. the structural causes of inequality, racism, and uneven distribution of resources, is superfluous and even discouraged in this very goal I spent the summer of 1990 in an “organizing boot camp.” The oriented model. This is crucial because ultimately solving the issue camp was based on the Saul Alinsky model which focuses on the of affordable housing, even incrementally, will require the power and coordinated strength of all tenants.

mYRNA iTON Because of my experience with the public housing campaign, I looked to incorporate education into the organizing model, and discovered the work on popular education of Paolo Freire, Myles Horton, Julius Nyerere, and Antonio Gramsci. Popular educators begin the process of education at the point of oppression by exploring the possible strategies for change. The method begins with the lived experiences of the learners and then explores and validates them through dialogue. The participants then progress to a collective discussion about action, to the possibilities of transforming the oppressive elements of their experiences. In this respect, popular education shares a respect for language and communication with the communicative model put forth by Jürgen Habermas. One fundamental difference is that the Popular Education model is predicated on building consciousness among the learners of the power structure inherent in the system with the objective of transforming it: “Man’s consciousness is developed in the process of thinking, and deciding and of acting. His capacity is developed in the process of doing things. But doing things means co-operating with others…education for liberation is therefore also education for co-operation with others…. In the sense that it has to be a personal experience, but it is also an activity of great social significance, because the man whom education liberates is a man in society, and his society will be affected by the change which education creates in him.”

ress

one as

The popular educator is a facilitator who learns as much from the participants as they learn from her. The participants begin thinking about what they know, they reflect, discuss, reflect and then new knowledge is incorporated. Although the driving force behind popular education is the need to change power relations and to transform socio-economic systems, the goal is really the transformation of the individual through the process of self-reflection, education and action. Viewed in this light, then, the campaign for affordable housing has as its goal not only to get more housing, but also to educate and transform community individuals, and ultimately the community as a whole.

Although I find the Marxist analysis of planning of David Harvey and Manuel Castells essentially correct, their theory of what a planner should be lacks any practical application in real life. I understand the causes of poverty and unequal distribution of resources to be structural; but short of revolution, it is impossible to formulate a work plan. “Philosophy and Theory,” wrote Gramsci, “are only useful as guides to practical action.”

In their essay, “City Planning and Political Values,” Susan and Norman Fainstein trace the model and process of the various accepted

planning theories to established paradigms in Political Science. The Fainsteins follow the roots of incremental planning to liberalism, equity and advocacy planning to democratic socialism, and traditional planning to the technocratic rule. A planning process based on a Marxist understanding of the structural causes of the unequal distribution of wealth has not yet been formulated.

Saul Alinsky saw the structure of the community organization as replacing the structure of government on the local level. This approach is radical, according to Alinsky, because it is based on a Jeffersonian understanding of local power, decision making and accountability. It allows for community decision making and accountability and eventually, when a critical mass of organized, mobilized communities is reached, a structural change in the government that shifts power from the elite to the local communities. The inherent danger in this scenario is that, lacking political and popular education, the ensuing policy devolution may result in warring communities, each fighting for their own self-interest. Thus, what I call a “Transformational Planner” is one who works to achieve economic and social justice on a local level with a theoretical understanding of the structural causes of inequity inherent in the capitalist system, which she seeks to subvert through popular education, organizing, and planning.

Until now, the progressive movement within the planning profession has adopted the “advocacy planning” process articulated by Davidoff.

The very word, advocate, means “acting on behalf of ” or “representing or speaking for.” This is intrinsically opposed to the foundations of popular education. “The advocate planner would be responsible to his client and would seek to express his client’s views” says Davidoff.

Education for Davidoff means “informing other groups, including public agencies, of the conditions, problems, outlook of the group he or she represents.” Davidoff even concedes that much of what he describes as advocacy planning is being done by community organizers. The implication, however, is that a planner, because of her special technical training is better qualified for this representative/advocate role than the people themselves. This is contrary to everything I know from working in social movements. The work of a planner who seeks to address social and economic inequality should follow the transformational process of a popular educator. An effective educator is one who can teach because she understands whom she is teaching, and this requires as much learning as teaching. The role of the transformational planner is not to speak for or represent, but rather to both effectively absorb and transfer knowledge so that those being taught can use it strategically for action and change. In this way, local urban space and eventually the dominant political paradigm is changed through the process of popular political education, planning, and organizing action.

“Japan Suburbs: The Age of Selection”

INTERVIEW WITH ATSUSHI MIURA “Owners’ Hill Shin-Yurigaoka” is a small development nestled in an unassuming suburban neighborhood outside Tokyo, distinguished from its neighbors through uniform and impeccable landscaping, lighting fixtures, and paving, as well as by the “do not enter, residents only” signs posted at each entrance. While not a gated community in the strict definition of the term, Owners’ Hill uses similar design and security techniques to create value through exclusivity. Such developments offer a preview of the challenges that are likely to face suburbs in Japan in the upcoming decades.

I spoke with Atsushi Miura about the significance of developments like Owners’ Hill and the future of Japan’s suburbs. Mr. Miura, based in Tokyo, is a lecturer at Shinshu University in marketing research and sociology, and has written extensively about youth culture, families, and the development of suburbs. His publications include My Homeless Child [2001: Clubhouse, Japanese], The Rise and Fall of Suburbs [1999: Kodansha, Japanese], and The Sociology of Family and Suburbs [1995: PHP, Japanese].

How many gated communities are there in Japan?

Misawa Homes, the developer of “Owners’ Hill”, has built only a handful so far. There aren’t that many. In the United States there are several thousand. In Japan security is still good, so there isn’t the same necessity. Although if security gets worse, things could change.

What is the significance of suburban developments like Owners’ Hill?

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I think that the demand for high quality urban design and landscaping has increased recently in Japan. People want to live in a good environment. We Japanese historically appreciate the landscape—nature, the change of seasons, gardening, bonsai, etc.

But we have been in the age of industrialization and massproduction. Therefore, we have not focused on design and landscaping. Owners’ Hill and the like demonstrate that the age of urban design and landscaping has come in Japan. At the same time, young Japanese people in particular are now interested in the design of furniture, interior design, housing, etc. The demand for urban design is expanding.

How do developments like Owners’ Hill relate to recent changes in the pattern of suburbanization in Japan?

The important point is Japan has an aging population. The number of wealthy older people is increasing and they want to protect their assets. Thus, the demand for gated communities has increased. At the same time, the Japanese population is shrinking and so developers need to find a new market for housing.

It’s the so-called “happy retire market.” Owners’ Hill is not so gorgeous, but compared with average houses in Tokyo, it is very well planned. Marketing is the most important point.

What do gated communities mean for the future of suburbs in Japan?

The difference between rich and poor suburbs will become more clear in the next ten or twenty years. The suburbanization of Tokyo was linked to the economic growth of Japan. In the 1960s and 70s many young people, including baby boomers, rushed to Tokyo, Osaka, and some other big industrial cities, married very early, and had two or three children. They were a big market for the Japanese

economy. The next generation, who are now in their 30s, didn’t get married until later. The twenty-somethings have not married at all. So the number of standard family households is decreasing, and the strong demand for suburban housing has been disappearing since the 1990s. Of course, good suburbs will remain good. But the poor suburbs will get poorer, and some suburbs will become vacant. This is the age of selection. Now people can choose between living

A gated community in Japan

aNN yAMAMOTO in the city or suburbs, and between rich suburbs or standard suburbs. Until the 1980s people did not have a choice, but now people can select where to live.

Does this also mean we’ll see more division between the wealthy and the poor in Japan, and that this will be realized spatially?

Not necessarily.

Young people tend to be single. Why? Because they don’t want to become poor. They know if they get married and have children, their standard of living will go down. They don’t want that kind of life. Rather than being divided into poor and rich, young people decide not to have children in order to avoid living a poor lifestyle. Or they decide to have just one child instead of two or three. Probably there won’t be a big split between the rich and poor.

Instead of a system based on class, people decide not to have children in order to maintain their status.

What are the factors that determine the successful versus unsuccessful suburbs?

It’s the attitude of developers.

For example, the Tokyu Group, one of the largest railway and

development companies, developed the Tokyu Den-en-Toshi [that means ‘garden city’ in Japanese] and built the Den-en Toshi train line from Shibuya in Tokyo to the suburbs of Kanagawa prefecture. The Den-en Toshi train line is the most popular line in Tokyo. The lifestyle of the Den-en-Toshi line is the symbol of the baby boomer housewife’s dream, just like the town of Springfield in Father Knows Best. People who live there are very satisfied with their circumstances. Houses there have value.

But for example Chiba New Town, which is one hour from Asakusa in Tokyo, is developed by the Japanese Housing Company [Jutaku Kodan], Japan’s public housing development agency.

Chiba New Town was really developed from the1980s, which was late for suburbanization. It had already ended. The demand for suburbanization had already decreased, but the Japanese government still poured money into housing. It was a needless suburb that appeared in Chiba. I think that new suburbs in Chiba will be unsuccessful.

Is it possible to generalize that private sector created more successful suburbs, and the unsuccessful ones are by the public sector?

Not entirely. Tokyu Group is the best company. In the Osaka area, Hankyu is the oldest and best. And other companies, like Odakyu and Keio, are not as good as Tokyu or Hankyu.

But every developer wants to develop a successful suburb…

But previously, even if the developers didn’t try very hard, people still came. There was no need to plan. Tokyu Group’s development was well-planned because it was aimed for a higher price market. The public sector made some well planned suburbs, but they are very boring.

What is the role of public policy for the future development of suburbs?

I think the public sector could continue to develop rental houses for low-income people, but there is absolutely no need to develop houses for sale, whether in the city or suburbs. In the 1950s and 1960s housing quality in Japan was not so excellent. The housing industry was a latecomer, compared with cars or electric products. It was very meaningful for the public sector to develop housing at that time. But from the 1980s until now, it has been meaningless.

At Owners’ Hill there is a very clear difference between the public amenities in the private development as opposed to the amenities offered by the city. If suburbs are competing for residents, should they be competing to offer better amenities?

Until now, the Japanese public sector was not so interested in landscape or design. Their job was infrastructure, such as pavement, water, gas, and sewage.

Maybe gas lines arrived in suburbs like Shin-Yurigaoka [where Owners’ Hill is located] only twelve years ago, and until then they used propane gas. And maybe they didn’t have sewage lines until relatively recently.

Suburbanization happened too quickly, and infrastructure didn’t keep up. So the public sector was focused on getting infrastructure up to par. They didn’t pay attention to the cityscape. In the bubble age, in the late 1980s, there was room to start focusing on urban design. But now things are pretty tight, so it isn’t clear if that will happen.

But there will be many people who will prefer the environment of Owners’ Hill created by Misawa Homes, for people who have the money. The public sector is beginning to spend money on design, but otherwise, people who aren’t willing to pay will live in poorer environments.

Personally, I think that there is greater potential in the kind of community that can be created with NGOs, citizen participation, etc, rather than just having Misawa Homes spend money to create a community. People want to have a commitment to something. Not only regarding cities, but people want to be committed to things. That’s my own theory. [ Atsushi Miura’s Web site: www.culturestudies.com ]

The Gentleman Planner There are three things constantly on the lips of the gentleman, none of which I have succeeded in following: “A man of benevolence never worries; a man of wisdom is never in two minds; a man of courage is never afraid.”

–Confucius, The Analects, XIV.28.

Traveling back 2500 years, past the bourgeois armchair intellectuals of the last century, we come upon Confucius and his moral ideal of the Gentleman. As the quote above indicates, the Gentleman possesses three primary virtues: benevolence, wisdom, and courage.

These are complemented by two further virtues: hsin [reliability in word] and ching [reverence]. I believe that the ideal planner also possesses these five virtues. I believe that a fundamental morality takes precedence over any particular theory of planning, as any given theory can be used to pursue any given end. And I believe that, though Confucius has been much maligned [at least in the West], somewhat more practical guidelines for striving toward the just city can be built upon them and Confucius’s application of them to government. In this paper, after first arguing for the precedence of morality over theory, I shall attempt to describe the core elements of these virtues and demonstrate how they can be incorporated into planning in the form of benevolent autocracy.

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Five models of planning can be readily twisted to serve private interests: the rational model, the incremental model, the communicative model, new urbanism, and advocacy planning. All of these can become vehicles for any individual or group’s agenda and can readily ignore the public interest. The rational model, an application of scientific principles to comprehensive planning, can be corrupted by those that set the goals to be achieved. The incremental model, essentially a more practical version of the rational model that reduces the number of options considered and recognizes the complexity and impossibility of coordinating the vast array of stakeholders involved in any given public decision and who instead continuously “muddle through” to a solution, is captive to the varying strengths and interests of those individuals or groups struggling to advance their own agenda. The communicative model, which strives to forge a consensus among differing viewpoints, can in practice fall under the sway of the strongest voices or the democratic majority, who may not have in mind or even understand the interests of the community as a whole. It is debatable whether or not the design criteria employed by the New Urbanists to engender social and economic diversity that coheres into a sense of community serves the developer or those with enough economic clout to move into such communities. Advocacy planning, clearly, is employed to further the ends of the planner’s client and is entirely contingent on the moral fiber of the planner and her client.

The just city alone depends on morality as an underpinning for achieving its aims. I am inclined toward Susan Fainstein’s political economic view of the just city, which advocates “an entrepreneurial state that not only provides welfare but also generates increased wealth” and incorporates participation in public decision making.

To date however, proponents of the just city have been limited to what I have called “utopian polemics”; theorists like Fainstein and Harvey have been limited for the most part to delineating the desirable elements of a just city without providing guidelines for the planner in the field.

2500 years ago, Confucius put forth the ideal of the just kingdom by considering the basic function of government to be providing for the welfare of the people, first by meeting their material needs and second by supplying arms and training. “The Confucians…praised the ancient rulers for acting ‘as if they were tending a new-born babe’.” This phrase is meant to indicate that the ancient rulers cared for the populace as if they were their own children, seeking their current and future health and wealth. He argued that this type of just government could only be obtained under the leadership of just men, whom he called Gentlemen, who were possessed of benevolence, wisdom, courage, reliability, and reverence. Fainstein believes that such benevolent authoritarianism is “unlikely” and so advocates democratic participation. While I agree that benevolent authoritarianism is unlikely, I firmly believe that public participation is, for the most part, inherently self-interested [e.g., NIMBYism] and therefore also unlikely to be “benevolent”. In as much as the people are inclined to pursue only their own interest, the Confucian belief that the common people were limited in moral capacity holds true.

Though I disagree with the basic Confucian view that the common people are also limited in intellectual capacity that in turn restricts their ability to participate in government, I do believe that there is a compelling parallel in contemporary society. Physical constraints on the populace that limit the amount of time and energy they can devote to being properly informed on current issues and techniques for addressing them. To do so efficiently, we have adopted representative democracy in America; we elect officials who [in theory] represent the interests of their constituents and focus all of their professional energies on addressing current issues on our behalf; and we have the power to hire and fire those individuals-in this case planners. To properly fulfill this capacity, the planner must possess ching, or reverence.

cUZ pOTTER Ching is not the awe-filled reverence a religious person holds for some supreme being or the admiration a nature-lover exudes when they view some scene of natural splendor. Ching “is born of the awareness of the immensity of one’s responsibility to promote the welfare of the common people. It is a combination of the fear of failing in the responsibility one is charged with and the solemn single-mindedness directed towards the satisfactory discharging of that responsibility.”

This amounts to a humble acceptance of and dedication to the burden of serving the public interest. How does one determine the public interest? Benevolence and wisdom.

Fan Ch’ih asked about benevolence. The Master said, ‘Love your fellow men.’ –Confucius, The Analects, XII.22 Benevolence has two components: shu and chung. Shu is “the method of discovering what others wish or do not wish done to them” by “taking oneself…as an analogy and asking oneself what one would like or dislike were one in the position of the person at the receiving end.” This is, of course, the teaching that would enter the Christian canon some six or seven hundred years later as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Chung is doing one’s best and it is through chung that one puts into effect what one has learned through shu.

The planner must at all times do his or her best to empathize with the stakeholders in each planning situation, understand the needs and desires of each of them, and then step back to assess [to the best of her ability] how those needs and desires fit into the broader needs of the community. To understand the stakeholders’ positions, the planner must communicate with them directly and regularly and imagine herself in their shoes, which also contributes directly to her storehouse of wisdom. A planner, then, must learn to listen, as John Forester suggested. Listening alone, however, is not enough. To understand the needs of the community at large, the planner must look to more academic assessments of the community by applying the tools of the social sciences, especially economics and sociology, to available information, as objectively as possible, before employing intuition based on wisdom. The planner must balance the information gained from descriptive and prescriptive assessments based on the rational model with an intuitive “reflection in action” [Schon].

[Fan Ch’ih] asked about wisdom. The Master said, ‘Know your fellow men.’ –Confucius, The Analects, XII.22 For Confucius, wisdom entailed knowledge of one’s fellow men, an ability to judge character. He, as other Chinese, considered the unpredictability of human behavior to be the most problematic aspect of predicting future events, a necessary component of good government. Confucius also asserted that a wise man is never in two minds about right and wrong; the wise person is always fully aware of the right in any given situation.

Wisdom is the embodiment of “reflection in action”. On the one hand, it provides a direct sense of the morally correct choice in a particular situation [i.e. a choice that fosters the well-being of the general population]. On the other, it entails an understanding of one’s fellow men that allows one to understand their motivations and probable course of action.

Wisdom is a component of the trust that is the core of the planner’s claim to legitimacy. Wisdom constitutes a moral foundation in which the populace can place its trust. Once, when Confucius was asked about government, he responded that if given enough food and enough arms, the people would have trust in the ruler. Asked which one of the three could be sacrificed, Confucius unsurprisingly replied arms. Pushed further, he said that food should be given up before trust because death has always been with us, but without trust, the common people have nothing to rely on [XII.7]. If the people know that their ruler/planner is doing his best to meet their needs, then economic difficulties [to put it in a modern context] can be shouldered.

Without trust, there will be unrest.

Where does wisdom come from?

Confucius held out the possibility of innate wisdom, but he claimed never to have witnessed it. In its place, a person could, indeed must, strive toward wisdom only through tireless, lifelong learning, which was commonly referred to as cultivation of oneself. In the first place, this requires honesty with oneself about one’s knowledge. Confucius once said to a student, “Yu, shall I tell you what it is to know? To say you know when you know, and to say you don’t know when you do not, that is knowledge.” Recognizing the limits of her knowledge and the immensity of her responsibility [ching], the planner has no alternative but to seek greater knowledge and understanding throughout her life. However, far more important in establishing trust between the governor and the governed is hsin. continued on page 17

The Gentleman Planner [ continued ] cUZ pOTTER The Gentleman is ashamed of his word outstripping his deed. –Confucius, The Analects, XIV.27 Hsin, a word that cannot be directly translated into English, means essentially reliability in word. This does not merely refer to keeping one’s promise; it also refers to carrying out resolutions about one’s future conduct, one’s past deeds, and plain statements of facts. Hsin is a sort of brutal honesty that breaches no exaggeration in speech, in knowledge, or even one’s own estimation of one’s actions and accomplishments. For this reason, the Gentleman is “loathe to speak” and worries that he may not be able to live up to his words.

By employing hsin, the planner builds that trust that is essential to legitimacy. Legitimacy is a subjective decision on the part of each individual assessing the planner. I believe that in contemporary terms the prime source of legitimacy is transparency. Despite the opposition that may arise through transparency, I believe it is absolutely essential to openly share progress and developments on an issue with the community through the media and direct communication.

In this sense, the planner embraces the frank, honest speech of the communicative model in an effort to further her own understanding of the issue and to build the community’s trust that she has the public interest in mind.

Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage. –Confucius, The Analects, XII.22 Confucius recognized that doing right was sometimes a difficult task that required courage. In many of the stories told by Hoch and by those planners I have met, planners are often placed in positions where their moral beliefs contradict the actions being demanded of them by their superiors, their colleagues, their clients, or their constituents. Planners are sometimes faced with choosing between their moral integrity and their livelihood, and choosing to risk one’s livelihood for moral integrity is certainly an act of courage.

Confucianism offers some practical guidelines for making decisions in these situations.

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Confucius’s statements about participating in unjust governments are not contradictory but certainly seem so. At times he commends those individuals who only serve their government when that government is just and allow themselves “to be furled and put away safely” [XV.7] when it is not. At other times, he advocated participating as an advisor in unjust governments so as to present an example of upright behavior in the hope of inducing the ruler to reform himself.

How much of this, in practice, was due to Confucius’s immediate financial considerations is, I believe, open to speculation. Even so, another comment of his lends some consistency. He states that one should provide advice when there is some hope of it leading to just action [XII.23].

This opens the role of planner as internal reformist. Rather that being compelled to leave an office because one’s superiors or colleagues are unjust, the Gentleman planner can elect to retain her position in the hope of inducing her colleagues to engage in just planning.

This approach is further bolstered by Confucius’s statement that, “The Gentleman is devoted to principle but not inflexible in small matters” [XV.37]. Provided that the planner’s colleagues are pursuing just government or that their actions are leading toward a just distribution of resources, the Gentleman planner can allow latitude in small matters and need not leave a position over minor infractions.

That said, the planner must also have courage to risk her livelihood in the pursuit of the just city when there is no hope of inducing internal reform. And in this regard, I believe that it is inappropriate for planners to subscribe solely to one particular model of planning. There is an incredible flexibility in the roles that planners can and do play, from transit engineer to equity activist to developer. Each of these roles incorporates a variety of approaches…and incorporates them at different times. There are situations where incrementalism is the best one can hope for given the structure of the institutions and stakeholders involved. There are situations with technical considerations that can best be resolved through a careful application of the rational model. And there are situations that involve inequities which can only be addressed through advocacy. A planner should have the courage to adopt the model and approach that is most appropriate at a given time and in a given climate to achieve just results.

Use your ears widely but leave out what is doubtful; repeat the rest with caution and you will make few mistakes. Use your eyes widely and leave out what is hazardous; put the rest into practice with caution and you will have few regrets. When in your speech you make few mistakes and in your action you have few regrets, an official career will follow as a matter of course.

–Confucius, The Analects, II.18 Though I have used my ears and eyes widely, I doubt that I have spoken with caution and not made mistakes. And I know I have regretted putting some things I have seen into practice. Perhaps an official career does not await me. But if it does, I will strive to fulfill my ideal of the Gentleman planner by possessing the five virtues: benevolence, wisdom, reverence, reliability, and courage. I will do my best to understand the needs of my fellows, to love them. I will continue my efforts to educate myself ever more deeply, so as to understand my fellows more thoroughly, to become wise. I will be reverent in comprehending the immensity of the burden that is upon the shoulders of those who would lead the people. I will make every effort to ensure that I am reliable in deed and in word. And I pray that I will have the courage to embrace the planning paradigm appropriate in a given situation for meeting the needs of all people and improving the welfare of the people as a whole.

Planner Interview—Dr. Susan Fainstein bRENDA cHO VISITING PROFESSOR Professor Susan Fainstein is a visiting professor at Columbia University for the Spring 2002 semester, who teaches Planning Theory, Advanced History, and Theory Seminar.

She is a Professor of Urban Planning and Policy Development at Rutgers University, and it was a privilege to ask her questions and to learn more about our program’s distinguished guest.

How did you become interested in planning?

As an undergrad, I attended Harvard, actually at Radcliffe. Radcliffe, which doesn’t exist anymore, wasn’t a separate institution as Barnard. Classes were joint with Harvard. I majored in Political Science, or as it was called there, Government. I was particularly interested in political theory—that was mainly what I studied as an undergraduate. I did my Masters degree in African Studies at Boston University and was really quite interested in issues of developing countries and of Africa. Following my MA, I worked as editor at a journal and then became pregnant. At that time, women did not work when they had small children, so I quit my job. After a couple of years, I decided to go back to graduate school to get a PhD but I realized that researching developing countries with two young children was not really feasible. Although I went to MIT for my PhD in political science, at that time, urban politics was just becoming a field. It didn’t really exist as a field up until then, state and local government did, but that was really public administration. The person who taught urban politics was a man named Allan Altshuler who then was my thesis advisor. Allen’s first book was called The City Planning Process, which studied city planning in Minneapolis. When I was in the job market, people identified me with him, so even though I had not in fact studied planning per se, in his courses, I had studied issues of redevelopment in part. I wrote my thesis on the movement of community control schools in New York so my interests really were in urban change and how it came about. I was interested in it from both the point of view of how people at the grassroots brought about change, which was really the topic of my thesis, but also in terms of what would be good public policy for cities. While I was working on my thesis, I was working at Queens College for Marilyn Gittell who’s a professor at CUNY, known in the field of Urban Politics. Another woman was working there as well named Marcia Feld who now teaches planning at the University of Rhode Island, but at that time was teaching planning at Rutgers.

She said to me, “Are you interested in teaching planning?” I said that I never thought about it, and that I’m certainly not trained as a planner. She said planning is really changing right now and that it’s

no longer a matter of teaching technical expertise, but that it’s a matter of understanding the political, economic, and social context in which planning operates. She encouraged me to enter the field and so I said well, OK, why not? This was before Title Nine so that when jobs were available, it wasn’t as if they were advertised and anybody did a search.

Rather, she took my CV, and she handed it to the chair of the department who invited me to Rutgers. To my recollection, I didn’t give any public presentation. I met with the members of the faculty and they offered me a job—that was the only job interview I ever had actually.

What year was this?

This was in 1970. It was my first job and I’ve taught at Rutgers in the planning department ever since. I guess you would say on the one hand that it was accidental and on another hand it was a subject I had always been interested in. While being in a planning department, I committed myself to learning what I needed to know in order to make what I did relevant to planners. People in political science don’t study political science in order to tell politicians how to do politics or administrators how to administer things—they study it purely from an academic standpoint. I thought it was important to use what I knew to help people who were actually in the field and working. In fact, that’s what attracts me about planning compared to political science; is that planning is oriented to solving problems rather than towards developing the discipline.

That actually segues into my next question about the education of planning. I know that you’re trying to cover as much as possible in your planning theory class for the first year students, but if you had to choose one or two important issues topics in planning, what would you choose to emphasize?

Besides just topics, let me just say beforehand that surveys taken of what planners find they need to know always stress writing. So one of the things is simply writing skills. Being able to talk about urban phenomena in a coherent manner I think is also important, so I do think writing papers is in itself important. In terms of topics, the history of planning has a lot of mistakes in it. Planners have made some really terrible mistakes, mistakes which continued on page 19

Planner Interview—Dr. Susan Fainstein [ continued ]

have caused people enormous hardship. I guess if I was going to say the single most important thing that I would like people to learn from my courses is what not to do, to avoid the kinds of arrogance that causes harm. The second is to always analyze a planning problem in terms of who benefits, and that there’s no issue which benefits people uniformly so the question becomes what is the distribution of benefits from any particular policy.

This fits in with my background as a political scientist because this is a question that political scientists do ask—what are the interests involved?

Who gets what? Asking who gets what is important. Then, I think it’s useful to simply know the kinds of strategies that planners have used and not just the disasters they’ve had, but also the successes they’ve had and what are the elements of planning success. One element has to do with strategic thinking and setting priorities. A course that I teach at Rutgers is in redevelopment policy. In that course, I go through various strategies, ranging from neighborhood revitalization to office-led development to tourism, that planners have used, and evaluate them and the reasons why they’ve succeeded or failed.

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Broadly, what’s been the progression of the planning profession since you started teaching in terms of practice?

There have been substantial changes since I started teaching. Part of the reason that planning broadened out and began to include people like me on their faculty was because of the 60s, because of the social movements of that period, because of the critiques that had been made of urban renewal. Many people came into planning who had never thought of it as a profession before, who were socially committed. Many of my first students were people who had worked in various poverty programs in terms of employment training programs and model cities.

It was a very different group of students. Some were older, some had been working and then felt they needed to come back to get further training.

For the first six or seven years, maybe more, that I taught, the students I had were really concerned about inner-city issues, but not all by any means, since there were always people who were suburban

land use planners, but there was fair contingent.

Then the students who were committed to some ideal shifted towards environmentalism. So environmentalism came to the fore, and then as the various federal and local programs for poverty reduction disappeared under the Nixon and Reagan administrations, there was just a much greater emphasis on issues of regional planning and of environmental planning. Planning students’ interests often follow the money. When there was a lot of money for poverty reduction, then the planning students were there planning those kinds of programs. When environmental policy became funded, then they were doing that, learning to write EIS’s [environmental impact statements]. Then when a lot of money came into transportation, but had requirements for transportation planning, there was a move towards transportation planning.

And that’s why I don’t think I can characterize students as being any single thing with the multiplicity and various interests.

How much have you seen the planning profession change in terms of demographics, especially the representation of women in school and the profession at large?

When I first started teaching, there were virtually no women doctoral students, but a fair number of women masters students. Women have advanced a lot since those early days in terms of positions in planning agencies and there are lot more women directors around, and more women planning consultants, but still all the top positions continue to be dominated by men. In terms of faculty, I think that Columbia is somewhat in an extreme, that most places certainly have female faculty. If you go to the meetings of ACSP [Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning] there’s an organization for women in planning and there are a lot of women faculty. But, still they’re outnumbered by male faculty but it’s nothing like when I first started teaching, when I would be the only woman in a room. I was the only woman [in my department] for many, many years. When Rutgers had its hiring process this year, all the finalists were women—that does represent a shift, I think. Where you haven’t

bRENDA cHO seen much change at all is in terms of minority faculty—which I don’t think has gotten any better in 30 years in terms of representation of minorities.

Do you think it’s because a lot of minorities are not exposed to planning or just see it as purely academic field and not as a profession?

ACSP and APA every once in a while do a public relations effort where they try to introduce the field to undergraduates but it’s just not very well known.

Many of the people who get into planning schools become acquainted with it through having been on suburban planning boards. I’ve had many students whose parents have been on planning boards and who themselves were. And then there are others who get involved in various real estate ventures. So those roots pretty much aren’t there for minority students. HUD has sponsored a minority fellowship program for a number of years, an internship program really, and that’s how at Rutgers we’ve recruited a number of our minority students. I guess it’s a matter of publicity—and planners aren’t free professionals in the way that doctors, lawyers or engineers are, so that they’re kind of embedded in civil service hierarchy so that people aren’t that aware of them.

You’ve done extensive research and writing on European cities and the comparison between American and European cities. Are there any leading examples of cities that actively incorporate “responsible” planning?

I always use Amsterdam as my best example, and I have a couple of articles about Amsterdam. I first learned about Amsterdam when I did my first comparative work which was in the 1970s. I was going to look at London and Paris, but I had a student who was Dutch who pressed me to go to Amsterdam. I had no mental picture of it as a social and political entity, and I had never been there. I visited and stayed with the student’s parents, and his father happened to write travel books about Amsterdam. They took me around, and set up interviews for me with many of the aldermen.

I was terribly impressed. Amsterdam is a city that is extremely diverse, which is environmentally and extraordinarily attractive which has a very long history of planning. One might argue that if you’re an environmental determinist, they had to keep the water out and so they had to plan; but other places just don’t keep the water out and they did. And it’s a society which is very committed to having an equitable, decent society—they have very good politics, so they’ve managed to create what I think is the best outcome I can identify from any European city. There are of course problems, such as prejudice, and it’s not utopia. But there are very substantial efforts towards assimilation. In particular, they’ve

> I would like people to learn from my courses is what not to do, to avoid the kinds of arrogance that causes harm. < had a very far-sighted and rather noble housing policy so that the majority of housing is subsidized. And it’s very mixed, that is, poor people and well-to-do people live next door to each other.

Well-to-do people are willing to put up with stuff that Americans aren’t as willing. Because they want to live in Amsterdam, they’re willing to live in cramped quarters, to not have much privacy, and to depend more on public space and less on private space. And the Amsterdam city council has been very committed to equity, which means that they have not allowed substantial gentrification to take place. On the other hand, there are problems such as there’s always a shortage of housing which makes it hard for newcomers. On the whole, I’d guess I’d say it’s pretty wonderful. And the reason I did comparative work really was to try and find those places which did things better, than American cities because the issue is that I think we’re going to have capitalism for a long time. So if you’re going to have capitalism, are you going to say that well, all capitalist places are alike and there’s nothing anyone can do, or can you say that there’s flexibility within it and that within the constraints of a capitalist society, that nonetheless one can have a more socially equitable outcome.

Local Studio: World Trade Center and Lower Manhattan eDDIE nELMS INSTRUCTORS: PABLO VENGOECHEA AND DOUGLAS WOODWARD TA: JAY SHUFFIELD CLIENT: COMMUNITY BOARD 1 The Local Studio, in cooperation with Community Board 1, is working to closely examine the physical and social impacts that the destruction of the World Trade Center, and its surrounding subway stations and streets, has had on the surrounding community, residents, and businesses of Lower Manhattan.

In the end, we will present a final report to our client, which analyzes the current situation, makes recommendations for the rebuilding The World Trade Center clean-up efforts

process downtown, and includes the communityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s needs, which have thus far been overlooked in the dialogues about September 11.

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While the studio will focus much of its efforts on the immediate area surrounding the World Trade Center site, we will also be formulating a comprehensive vision for all of Lower Manhattan, with hopes of facilitating a vibrant, mixed-use, 24-hour community for both residents and businesses.

Specifically, the studio will study and make recommendations for improvements in the following areas: residential community development, corporate and small business retention, transportation into and around Lower Manhattan, sense of place, pedestrian circulation, East/West connectivity, tourism, and development of a thoughtful and beneficial balance of land uses on the sixteen acres of the World Trade Center site.

An aerial view of the current World Trade Center site

Regional Studio: Balancing the Dispersal of the Financial Sector gRACE hAN INSTRUCTOR: RICHARD BASS TA: KAJA KUEHL CLIENT: REGIONAL PLAN ASSOCIATION

The crossroads of Manhattan [top] and our site visit to Jersey City [bottom]

The Regional Studio is examining the dispersion of the financial sector into the region, both before and after September 11th.

Since September 11th, much of the RPAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s [Regional Planning Association] goals of continued expansion into New Jersey, the Boroughs, and Connecticut were set aside. Free from political constraints, we are encouraging the continued dispersal of the financial sector into the region through controlled and guided development.

Although the region is interconnected, the individual areas often compete with each other, thus harming the overall economy of the region. Lower Manhattan was directly impacted from September 11th, but New Jersey

State also expects a 3 billion dollar deficit as a result of the terrorist attacks. Including Lower Manhattan, we are proposing 24/7 communities in Northern New Jersey, Westchester County, and Connecticut that collaborate with New York City rather than compete. To achieve this goal, we are examining revenue-sharing models, the establishment of a regional transportation network, and overall governance policies to help create a more balanced and prosperous region.

The New York City Region, encompassing New Jersey, Connecticut, and the burroughs

International Studio: Earthquake Hazard Planning in Istanbul sUSAN gLADSTONE INSTRUCTORS: SIGURD GRAVA AND KLAUS JACOB COORDINATOR/CO-INSTRUCTOR: EBRU GENCER COLLABORATIONS: CENTER FOR HAZARDS AND RISK RESEARCH AT LAMONT-DOHERTY EARTH INSTITUTE COLUMBIA CENTER FOR NEW MEDIA TEACHING AND LEARNING [CENDIM] CENTER FOR DISASTER MANAGEMENT AT BOSPHORUS UNIVERSITY, ISTANBUL This year’s International Studio focuses on natural disaster/hazard planning in Istanbul, Turkey. The studio is a collaborative work [as listed above] with the student group consisting of eight first-year planning students and one student from each civil engineering, environmental journalism/earth sciences, and seismology. Also, student partners from Bosphorus [Bogaziçi] University in Istanbul are working with us, in designated disciplines, to define our collective understanding of Istanbuls’ structure and threats from natural disasters, mainly earthquakes.

Historically, Turkey has experienced many catastrophic earthquakes—most recently in 1999, in Istanbul’s neighboring city of Izmit, 20,000 people were killed. It has been predicted that within the next 30 years, there is a 65% chance that the stress of the Antaloian fault line will continue westward toward Istanbul and hit the city with a major earthquake, estimated to cause 40-50,000 fatalities.

To prepare for our challenging tasks, the studio traveled to Istanbul in early February for nine days.

We were briefed by professors from Bosphorus University, the Department of Urban Planning at Mimar Sinan University, and scientists at Kandilli Observatory, the major research station for Turkey’s seismic activity. We also met with various government agencies within the Greater Istanbul Municipality, as well as the Mayor of Büyükçekmece. A highlight

A close-in view showing both the European side [Old City and Golden Horn] and the Asian side— the Bosphorus Strait runs North-South.

A view over the Asian side, across the Bosphorus, to the European side.

was our group photo appearing in the daily newspaper, following a visit with a local neighborhood leader [muhtar].

The final product of the studio consists of two major efforts and goals. First, the creation of an overall master plan for the metropolitan area of Istanbul [expected to grow from 10 million to 12 million in the next 10 years] and secondly, the development of specific earthquake preparedness strategies based on the close examination of four neighborhoods, varied in their topography, social conditions, and vulnerability to earthquake damage.

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Common housing stock: old/historic/fragile, illegal squatter dwellings [geçekondus], and newer high-rises.

PhD Happenings [ A Beginning, an Ending... and Lots of Bits in the Middle ] sHANE tAYLOR

A BEGINNING...

A new face, that of Jay Deputy, has just joined us in the program this term, and here he tells us a little of his background. The scoop goes to Simone Buechler for finishing off her doctoral work with a great defense and a distinction and she provides us with a summary of her research. The in-residence students have been examining interdisciplinary scholarship on the idea of ‘civil society’ and its implications for planning research, meanwhile, in the outside world, several doctoral candidates share with us their topics of research. [ jAY dEPUTY ] I’m joining the planning program at Columbia having commenced doctoral studies in Urban Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Delaware. I earned my Master’s Degree in Urban Planning from the University of Michigan with an emphasis on economic development, and subsequently completed a variety of masters courses in interior design, landscape architecture, horticulture, art history, and architectural history at the University of Minnesota. I was president of JTI Properties, Inc. from 1986-1998, and I have been active in real estate development of historic districts, primarily in Saint Paul. One of these included the restoration of my home at 285 Summit Avenue, Saint Paul for which I received the Minnesota State AIA Chapter’s award for historic restoration and preservation for this project. I was also active in philanthropic and arts-related organizations throughout the Twin Cities.

I was involved in an on-going series of design charettes which examined the urban design characteristics and planning issues related to Saint Paul’s central business core and its historic neighborhoods. The restoration and public art re-commission of Cochran Park and the re-development of Saint Paul’s historic and industrial Lowertown neighborhood into shops, artist lofts and gallery/

work space, restaurants, and the farmer’s market have been other urban planning commitments. My areas of interest in urban planning include the role aesthetics has in the identity and special characteristics of urban space, historic neighborhood redevelopment and urban gentrification topics. My hobbies include the tuba, landscape watercolor painting, agriculture and horticulture, and rowing.

THE COLLOQUIUM - URBAN PLANNING RESEARCH FOR A CIVIL SOCIETY Guided by Elliott and Tom, the Fall PhD colloquium for the in-residence PhD students focused on the idea of a civil society and its implications for planners and for research in the field. We started the term with readings on the background of the legal system and the neo-institutional perspective of the political economy and then discussed the biological background to human society. In our study of Damasio’s “The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness” and Sober and Wilson’s “Unto Others: Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior,” we discussed the implications for society of the key concepts of altruism and it proved to be a timely study given the rescue and recovery efforts that were taking place at the southernmost end of our street.

By November we had launched into some of the writings of several key civil society theorists— Putnam, Barber, Salomon et al, and Katznelson and finished the year with a look at Bobrick’s “Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution it Inspired” where for some of us, the key issue of translation—who does it, for what purposes, and what parts of a text or story are privileged over others—serves as a example of how documents and their wording are laden with layers of meaning, and in planning, reflects the larger structures of power which produce or reproduce them. continued on page 25

PhD Students [ continued ]

So after 10 interesting books and 12 busy weeks, the colloquium this Spring will see the spotlight placed on us as we explore and define our own areas of interest for research. We will be frequently returning to the readings of the Fall as we work through our own presentations and our understanding of our role as researchers in urban planning has been enriched by our engagement of civil society issues. We are also together in Susan Fainstein’s Advanced Theory class this Spring, so by the next issue of URBAN we should be ready to give an update on where our research topics will be taking us.

[ pATRICIA hOUSER ] I am in my second year as a full time member of the faculty at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, CT, teaching courses on geography, including one involving urban environmental issues. For my PhD studies I have been researching

OUT AND ABOUT In their own words, here is an update on the diverse topics that some of the candidates are currently working on. [ hILARY bOTEIN ] My dissertation will examine the role of labor unions in producing, preserving, and advocating for decent and affordable housing, with a focus on unions’ activities in New York City after 1945.

The dissertation’s overarching question is why labor unions no longer are engaged in the housing problems facing their members and other working-class and low income Americans, and whether their previous involvement can be reconstructed. To answer this question, I will gather and analyze evidence that looks backward, at labor’s historical involvement in housing; and forward, at the tools and opportunities available to the labor movement today. I hope to suggest how labor and housing leaders might formulate a “housing movement” from a broad-based constituency, with simultaneous representation of grassroots and structural interests, and how such a model could create sensible and lasting public policies that represent a balance between individual and institutional needs.

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[ nEIL pOGORELSKY ] I’m a third year PhD candidate writing a dissertation on: “Understanding the Public-Private Divide: A Reevaluation of the Benefits of the Public-Private Partnership for Local Economic Development.” I am primarily interested in developing a definition for, and typologies of, public-private partnerships and understanding the organizational imperatives that cause these partnerships to produce beneficial or negative outcomes for the public sector. Towards this goal, I’m conducting a case study of New York City’s National Tennis Center deal, as well as reviewing material on several other New York City partnerships. I’m expecting to complete my PhD in 2003.

environmental planning issues and keeping tabs on developments in New York City’s Croton Watershed. Some of my most important research on drinking water issues as a teacher and a student has been in the form of telephone interviews with public health officials, town government personnel, and the New York State DEC. It is a necessary complement to library research. Ultimately, my work as both a doctoral student and a teacher will influence public education in environmental planning so that people in places like Mahopac, New York—where the downtown wells have now become permanently tainted with perchloroethylene [see www.thejournalnews.com]—will no longer ask, “How did that happen?” [ jOSHUA sCHANK ] My dissertation looks at the problem of airside airport congestion, more commonly known as airplane delays. The prevailing theory, promoted by economists, holds that pricing runways at marginal cost is the best way to deal with the airport congestion problem. Suspecting that this is a poor solution, given its lack of success and/or implementation, I looked at three cases where peak pricing has been implemented in some form at an airport [Boston, New York, and London]. These cases showed why airports are reluctant to pursue peak pricing as a strategy for congestion relief, and why peak pricing has not been successful in relieving congestion when it has been implemented. I recommended that peak pricing theory be augmented to include an administrative element to counter the effects of the free market. [ mARK wALKER ] I will be preparing my dissertation proposal in the near future. My topic concerns the relationship of destination land uses to a priority transit system

Left to right: Simone, Ligia, Ebru, Leticia, and Milena.

and the effect of that relationship on metropolitan travel patterns and transit usage. Destination land uses include most everything except residential, such as employment, shopping, entertainment, and educational facilities. In simplistic terms, the premise is that increasing the percentage of a metropolitan area’s destinations that are accessible by priority transit increases transit usage exponentially rather than linearly. I originally planned [in 1995] to use Census Transportation Planning Package [CTPP] data from the 2000 Census, but the release of this data has been delayed, so I will likely rely on sample surveys of travel in selected cities combined with alternate travel related census data. [ yOKA kATASE ] My research is basically three-fold: [1] to illustrate the tendency for women to create new environments at the small scale; [2] to identify some cases where women are moving into innovation efforts at the larger urban scale; and [3] to find further efforts to link these small-scale innovations with the changes required in environmental decisionmaking institutions, which would possibly produce radical restructuring in the power relations between the sexes. The diverse experiences of groups at different stages of the development within the battered women’s movement in Japan will make a dynamic analysis possible. The study will be based mainly on participant observation research, in-depth interviews with local group founders and members, and a review of documents from local battered women’s movement organizations as well as nationwide movement publications.

AND THE HAPPY ENDING… All in the program extend congratulations to Simone for successfully undertaking the defense of her dissertation. We wish her the very best for all the future holds. From 466 pages down to these three paragraphs—here’s what she has found. [ sIMONE bUECHLER ] My dissertation addresses the special nature and theoretical implications of global economic restructuring and its impact on the labor market for lowincome women in São Paulo, Brazil. I focus on the micro level: squatter settlements, households, and low-income women. Although I argue that there is a strong link between global dynamics and the increasing precarious nature of the labor market, I contend that global, national and local dynamics are all intermeshed, not always distinguishable and work together in creating the conditions for

the rise in unemployment and unregistered and self-employed work. Temporal and spatial reorganization of production has led to a new level of competition that in turn has resulted in plant closings and the flexibilization of production.

Informalization, however, is not just an effect of global capitalism, but one of its main tenants. Through the voices of my informants and detailed descriptions of firms, household economic strategies, and self-employment and unregistered work for firms, I begin to fill a vacuum in the literature on globalization.

I am able to portray a world of complexity by uncovering the richness and subtle nuances of industrial and labor market restructuring. By focusing on women, I am demonstrating how gender identities of my informants are heard by means of literal extractions from the transcribed interviews. I contend that their perceptions of globalization and the economic crisis are important in understanding the strategies that different actors use to survive in a global economy. I ultimately argue that there are actors at all levels, such as labor union activists and community leaders as well as regional and international coalitions that can at least alter the way the neo-liberal model of economic development is enacted in a city, if not actually propose and implement a new model of people-centered development. Social movements are finding new spaces for protest and organization.

I generally conclude that there needs to be both a dialogue between, as well as a theoretical and methodological integration of, globalization theories and ethnography and feminist theories.

In this dissertation, I have integrated feminist and global analyses by situating the local particulars in the broader political-economic context of the global economy, and vice versa. Theoretically, I deconstruct a series of dyads including global/local dichotomies, the informal/formal economic sector, and Fordist/Post-Fordist industrial processes. I conclude by beginning to construct a theory for the understanding of global urban phenomena that I call the “Myth of Exclusion.” In my dissertation I have shown that neither São Paulo, nor the workers in the so-called informal sector, nor low-income women, are situated outside of the global economic system, but they are integral to it.

Left to right: Luc, Vincent, Mzwanele, Andy, Ann Forsythe [visiting professor], and Sabrina

Contact Us URBAN NEWSLETTER 413 Avery Hall, GSAP Urban Planning Program 1172 Amsterdam Avenue Columbia University New York, NY 10027

[email] upnewsletter@columbia.edu [web] http://www/arch.columbia.edu/UP/ To learn more about the graduate program in Urban Planning at Columbia, visit our Web site or call 212.854.3513.