Transforming Ideas

Transforming Ideas
Progressive Planning
Design and Physical Planning
The Analytical Tradition

International and Global Planning

Sources

 

Transforming Ideas

Divergent faculty interests, expertise, and engagement are held together by four common commitments that through faculty teaching and research over time, have transformed the department and its contributions to planning. Central among these is the department’s articulation of progressive planning practice, its understanding of physical planning as located within and acting on a broader social context, its close attention to various analytical traditions, and all this while acknowledging the diverse global contexts within which we live and work.

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Progressive Planning

Public policies and private initiatives like urban renewal, expressways, real estate developments of various kinds, and the environmental effects of certain private enterprises such as oil and coal extraction and heavy industry, created intense reactions starting in the 1960s. Planners were implicated in both the initiatives and the reactions. Cornell, like some other planning schools, responded and its curriculum saw several shifts from an early emphasis on “social planning” to “advocacy planning,” and finally, “progressive planning.” For a time, the department split, but in coming back together established a tradition where the social, political, and physical coexisted, however uneasily. A particular focus on redistributive policies, diversity, and participatory practices in coursework, accompanied by local interventions in the form of workshops, internships, research projects, and occasional involvement with local “progressive” governments, came to the forefront in Cornell's tradition of progressive planning. At Cornell a chronology of this tradition would include:

 

1965	Cornell Ph.D. graduate Salvador Padilla initiates the first graduate planning program at the University of Puerto Rico: John Reps, Kermit Parsons, William Goldsmith, Pierre Clavel, and other CRP faculty are involved to varying degrees, contributing to a broadening of the curriculum in Ithaca in the 1970s. Walter Thabit founds Planners for Equal Opportunity (PEO). Clavel and Goldsmith become members. Planners Network is PEO's successor organization.
1969	Janet Scheff appears in the first of several visiting lecturer appointments teaching “social planning” from a grassroots perspective, introducing new ideas into the curriculum.
1960s	Stuart Stein joins with Industrial Labor Relations Extension professor Christopher Lindley sponsoring interventions and studies in minority communities in Elmira and Geneva. Anne Clavel and others participate.
1970	Faculty member Bert Swift introduces extension-supported social planning initiatives, particularly focused on community health planning, with student projects in many upstate New York communities. Faculty Darrell Williams and Cary Hershey introduce policy analysis on urban social issues. Hershey writes the first HUD work-study grant proposal, making possible significant matriculation of graduate-level minority students.
1979	Nancy Gilgosch joins faculty and teaches courses on neighborhood planning with much student interest. Howard Hammerman teaches courses on neighborhood sociology.
1970s	Richard Schramm and Sandar Kelman teach courses on local economic development, health economics, and related topics as visitors or adjuncts. Dorothy Nelkin teaches courses on public policy decision-making processes, defining an area that she later refers to as “controversy studies.”
1978	John Forester joins faculty and teaches courses on participatory planning and begins important research and writing providing a theoretical underpinning for participatory planning practice. In the 1980s Forester was centrally involved in a Cornell-wide joint student-faculty led initiative, the Cornell Participatory Action Research Network, which had a global virtual presence.
1979	Clavel, Forester, and Goldsmith convene the third of three consecutive “Planning Theory” conferences at Annabel Taylor Hall. Beyond expectations, 300 people attend, mostly planning faculty and students. Proceedings published as Urban and Regional Planning in an Age of Austerity (1980).
1979 –83	Progressive Planning Summer School program brings in Bernie Sanders, Bert Gross, Marie Kennedy, Norm Krumholz, Chester Hartman, Bennett Harrison, Jackie Leavitt, and other luminaries. Cornell participation includes Forester, Schramm, Clavel, Goldsmith, and others.
1980	Goldsmith represents CRP on a Planners Network and public health tour of Cuba, observing planning in a new context.
1980s	Increasing student interest in “progressive planning” through the 1980s and 1990s exemplified by thesis and project work.
1987	Lourdes Beneria, a feminist economist, joins faculty and creates significant depth on women and work issues, especially in developing-world context.

1987	Susan Christopherson joins faculty. Courses on industrial structure add depth to economic development offerings.
1987	Margaret Wilder joins faculty, teaches courses adding depth to inner city issues.
1989	Beneria produces Cortland impact study, a significant community development outreach effort.
1998	Ann-Margaret Esnard joins faculty, brings an environmental and social justice perspective using GIS methodologies and is instrumental in setting up the GEDDeS Lab with support from Dean Porus Olpadwala, Steve Catechi (M.R.P. ’96), and Robert Abrams.
1998	Rolf Pendall joins faculty, brings progressive perspectives to courses and research in land-use planning and regulation, affordable housing, and planning methods.
1998	Mildred Warner joins as the first tenure-track faculty member funded by Cornell Cooperative Extension to expand CRP’s outreach efforts in economic development and local government policy at the local, state, and national levels.
1999	Ken Reardon visits while on sabbatical leave; eventually stays as faculty member, does community development outreach in Ithaca, Rochester, Liberty, and later, New Orleans.
2001	Neema Kudva joins faculty, brings a teaching, research, and outreach focus on nongovernmental organizations and decentralized participatory planning practices in international contexts.
2005	Clement Lai and Arturo Sanchez join faculty. Both have joint appointments with ethnic studies programs (Lai with Asian American Studies, Sanchez with Latino Studies). They bring depth to courses on race, ethnicity, migration, and local economic development issues. David Driskell, U.N. chair of Growing Up in Cities (a UNESCO-supported program), joins CRP.
2007	Ann Forsyth joins faculty; brings Planners Network office to Cornell, coedits Progressive Planning Magazine until 2009, when Clavel goes on the editorial board.

• Progressive Cities and Neighborhood Planning Project

• Planners Network

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Design and Physical Planning
The Physical Planning Tradition at Cornell

Physical planning has been taught continuously at Cornell since the very start of the City and Regional Planning program. As other dimensions emerged over the years, it shared space with these approaches, briefly separating to become a department for a short period in the 1970s. Throughout, Cornell’s tradition of physical planning, as exemplified in Stuart Stein’s position, has always emphasized the broader contexts within which physical planning takes place. By the 1990s however, Roger Trancik’s courses jointly listed in CRP and landscape architecture, and the historic preservation planning program had become the mainstay for physical planning interests at CRP.

What Physical Planners and Designers Do
Physical planners and designers create new forms that take both material and institutional modes. Their practices — as land use planners, urban designers, and environmental planners — encompass activities whose technical and practical, social and environmental, aesthetic and ethical aspects enable more useful and socially responsive results. As important is the emphasis on implementation. By deploying design processes and planning tools, implementation approaches, and institutional innovations, physical planning brings uniquely integrative capacities.

The Past Decade of Physical Planning
Physical planning at Cornell was enhanced starting in 1998 with the appointments of Rolf Pendall and Ann-Margaret Esnard. While Pendall brought a renewed focus on land use planning and equity into the program, Esnard did the same through the lens of an environmental planner skilled in GIS technologies. Neema Kudva, trained as an architect and planner and arriving at CRP in 2001, brought a spatial sensibility to her teaching and advising. Stephan Schmidt, a landscape architect and environmental planner, joining in 2006, brought additional depth, as did a series of joint workshops with architecture and landscape under the Growing Up in Cities program in Nairobi, and the Panama Program. Jeff Chusid's appointment in Historic Preservation Planning also opened up engagement with other Cornell departments and worldwide sites. A series of visiting appointments, Rob Young, George Frantz, Ole Amundsen, and since 2009, Katia Balassiano, kept physical planning vibrant. With the appointment of urban designer and planner Ann Forsyth in 2007, physical planning and design once again became a central piece of CRP's planning vocabulary.

Distinguishing Cornell: Physical Planning and Social Engagement
Planners in the Cornell program have a strong history of using physical planning tools while engaging the problem of differential effects on vulnerable populations, locally and globally. It is this focus on social equity as well as environmental concerns and design quality, which distinguishes Cornell’s approach to physical planning.

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The Analytical Tradition
The Barclay Jones Legacy: Planning Analysis
The Department of City and Regional Planning is justly known for its teaching and research in planning analysis. The arrival of Barclay Jones in 1961 marked the beginning of the period of greatest activity. Jones developed a course in methods of planning analysis that fast became a signature element of every Cornell planning student’s professional education. The course was based on Walter Isard’s classic handbook, Methods of Regional Analysis, and Jones’s own exhaustive survey of analytical methods as applied to municipal and regional data sets. This course was soon complemented by others on project management, impact and industrial-complex analysis, econometrics and statistics, simulation modeling, optimization techniques in planning, and game theory, all taught regularly by Jones and other CRP faculty — Isard, Stan Czamanski, Sidney Saltzman, David Lewis, and Thomas Vietorisz. Similar courses were later offered by Matt Drennan and José Lobo and continue to be taught by Iwan Azis, Susan Christopherson, Kieran Donaghy, Rolf Pendall, and Nancy Brooks. These faculty, along with David Lewis, have also taught workshops that teach students to use modeling skills to address economic development policy and regional planning challenges. Several projects have won state and national awards. In the late 1970s, Richard Booth developed what was to be one of the first courses in environmental impact analysis taught anywhere.

Planning Analysis in the U.S. and the World
This impressive development in planning analytic curricula was complemented by a full research program led by faculty and graduate students that addressed such topics as regional development in Puerto Rico, Canada, South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, as well as rural poverty in Appalachia; land use patterns in Wichita, Kansas; urban regeneration in Baltimore, Maryland; industrial clustering across the U.S.; and capacity and pricing in the utility industry of New York State, to list only a few.

Progressive Planning, Political Economy, and Other Applications in the World
In parallel, came developments in planning theory, many in the area of progressive planning. John Forester, arriving in 1978, worked on a series of projects on planning in the face of power, and was a key developer of the influential communicative approach to planning theory. Political economy perspectives were evident in the work of such faculty as William Goldsmith, Lourdes Beneria, and Porus Olpadwala. Starting in the 1980s, Goldsmith, Beneria, Christopherson, Ann Forsyth, Mildred Warner, Neema Kudva, Clement Lai, and Arturo Sanchez made important theoretical contributions to work on poverty, gender, and diversity. While workshop courses taught by a range of faculty remain central to teaching analytical methods in planning, an ethics course by Donaghy and revamped courses on qualitative methods by Forester and Kudva are important recent additions.

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International and Global Planning
Land Grant University to the World
Cornell views itself as the land grant university to the world. Its international reputation is strong and growing, and CRP benefits from this. It has always had international students, but its deep engagement with international planning began in the early 1960s with initiatives in Yugoslavia and later, Puerto Rico. Faculty and students’ exposure to planning in the midst of extremes of poverty and inequality and the brush with ‘difference’ made possible an early opening to a different set of ideas. Pierre Clavel and Susan Christopherson credit the International Studies in Planning program’s focus on both mainstream institutions and those outside them, as well as its consideration of the implications of planning for people’s lives and livelihoods in diverse contexts with further strengthening Cornell’s progressive tradition.

International Studies in Planning Program
The International Studies in Planning (ISP) program, started in the 1970s, remains a center for international and global planning work at Cornell. ISP is able to mobilize additional funds for student travel and research through its joint location at CRP and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Affairs. Its weekly Friday afternoon seminar series once served as a meeting place for leftist academics, researchers, student-activists, and international development practitioners from across campus. The seminar, now run partly with the Polson Institute for Development based in the Department of Development Sociology, remains the longest continuously running lecture series at Cornell, bringing in speakers on international issues. Early ISP faculty Porus Olpadwala, William Goldsmith, David Lewis, Barbara Lynch, and Lourdes Beneria headed various programs across campus including the Institute for African Development (Lewis), the Gender and Global Change program (Beneria), and the Latin American Studies Program (Beneria, Goldsmith, Lynch). Current faculty (Neema Kudva, Abdurazack Karriem, Marcela Rivas, Katia Balassiano), who include among them a vibrant group of visitors, continue to maintain strong affiliations with programs focused on those parts of the world where they work.

Global Concerns Beyond ISP
International and global planning at CRP is however, more than ISP. Several faculty do comparative work in international contexts (Christopherson, Jeff Chusid, Kieran Donaghy, Ann Forsyth, Rolf Pendall, Stephan Schmidt, Michael Tomlan, and Mildred Warner, to name a few). Conversely, faculty most strongly associated with ISP maintain a primary interest in teaching and research practice in the global south, even as most of them also work in northern contexts. As important, is the push to include international contexts and comparative cases within the core planning curricula for all M.R.P. students, making their education truly global.

 

History of Visitors
International and global planning at Cornell has benefitted greatly from the presence of visiting faculty and practitioners both on short-term visits, and with long-term commitments. Thomas Vietorisz, a Professor Emeritus of the New School of Social Research, has been associated with ISP/CRP for 40 years, offering seminars on a range of topics, most recently on sustainability. An early advocate of international planning, regional science, and social change, he worked as a Ph.D. student with Walter Isard; later taught at the United Nations graduate faculty in Santiago, Chile; and advised the Ministry of Economics for the revolutionary government of Cuba in 1960, before joining the faculty of the New School. Another long-term visiting faculty member is Iwan Azis, a highly reputed international economist known for his consulting and research work on financial economics, economic modeling, and the linkages between macrofinancial policy and social issues, mostly in South East and East Asia. At Cornell, Azis holds joint appointments in CRP/RS, the Business School, and the Department of Economics.

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Sources:

Drafted by P. Clavel, J. Forester, A. Forsyth, N. Kudva, and K. Donaghy.
Additional information:
P. Clavel and S. Christopherson, 2002. Academic Review. Department of City and Regional Planning (Ithaca, NY).
“History of the Department,” Sibley Survival Guide 2009–10. Department of City and Regional Planning (Ithaca, NY).
Additional comments from various faculty.

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