RECENT ARTICLES
Trash? Not to Us! Environmental Action in Rio Public Housing Complex Denounces Municipal Neglect and Proposes Waste Collection as a Source of Income
This year, International Workers’ Day took on a different meaning at the Haroldo de Andrade public housing complex, in the Rio de Janeiro North Zone neighborhood of Barros Filho. Bringing together around 30 people—men and women, adults and children, residents and participants from environmental movements and organizations—the “Trash? Not to Us!” collective action gathered fifteen 200-liter bags of solid waste and six bags of recyclable materials throughout the complex.
Bioremediation as an Equitable Approach to Brownfield Cleanup
Brownfields—abandoned or underutilized properties contaminated by industrial or commercial use—are a significant environmental and public health concern. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), there are over 450,000 brownfields across the country. These sites, often concentrated in low-income communities of color, pose a threat to air, water, and soil quality, limiting opportunities for redevelopment and community revitalization.
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Negotiating Identity in Pakistan’s Capital
Faisal Mosque is an iconic landmark for Islamabad residents, and Pakistan in general. Built in the 1980s, this mosque was a gift from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, a means of extending a relationship between the two Muslim countries.
Disappearing Disorder with the Whole World Watching
Throughout history, urban planning has demanded the exclusion or disappearance of segments of society we find intolerable – often prioritizing the needs of rich residents, white people, homeowners, automobiles, and upholding a “traditional family structure.”
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The California Wildfires and the Ecology of Fear: Once Again Zoning Trumps Indigenous Knowledge
Wildfires have destroyed parts of the Los Angeles area. Progressive planners need to challenge the dominant narratives that blame extreme weather and weak zoning regulations for the damage done.
Rental Housing Crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area: Causes and Solutions
The San Francisco Bay Area is an economically successful region with a growing population and a severe rental housing affordability crisis. The fundamental cause of this crisis is treating rental housing as a market commodity, meaning that it is produced for profit and rented to whoever pays the most.
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Review of Unit 29: Writing from Parchman Prison
In the context of the current cultural moment that is obsessed with so-called “true crime” podcasts, series, and documentaries, this collection of writings serves as an important counter-narrative of true incarceration. Unit 29: Writing from Parchman Prison is “a book told straight from the heart of this notorious unit from over 30 inmates.”
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Review of Creative Instigation: The Art & Strategy of Authentic Community Engagement
Urban planners and community advocates who reject rote formulas for engaging communities will find this book by Fern Tiger an inspiring alternative. It is filled with stories about the communities she has worked with in creative ways over long periods of time to develop community plans.
The destruction of Palestinian settlements, Western complicity and the need for global solidarity: A view from two urban refugee camps in the northern West Bank
We are now over a year into a genocide enacted by Israel against the besieged and occupied Palestinian people. The genocide is an extension of over seven decades of settler colonial dispossession and apartheid inflicted on the Palestinians.
Addressing Orphan Oil and Gas Wells: A Path Towards Environmental Restoration and Justice
Orphan oil and gas wells—abandoned wells with no known responsible party—present a significant challenge for communities across the U.S., particularly in regions with a history of oil and gas production.
Concrete Strategies for a More Radical Praxis
The following is an excerpt from A Student’s Guide to Radical Planning Praxis, a zine created by Allison Gable as a creative research project for the Spring 2024 Urban Studies and Planning Honors Thesis Seminar at UC San Diego.
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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Whose streets? Beyond planning for the “visitor class”
The resurgence of the tourism industry during the waning of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought a number of issues impacting cities around the world to the forefront of public discussion.
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Towards New Alliances: Planners and the Tenants Movement
In the US, the prevailing planning policy is to build, build, build, and where local planners are yet to buy in, politicians are happy to step in. In recent years, urban planning has seen the “real estate state” come into its own.
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Planners Network Disorientation Guide 2024
What does it mean to be a “progressive” or “radical” planner? And what kind of power do planners have to enact change?
Needa Bee on Decarcerating Spaces & Homelessness
The principles of transformative community planning and public policy design require us as planners and policy change advocates to center the experiences, voices, and power of frontline leaders who are directly impacted by the structural injustices we care about ending.
Continue Reading Needa Bee on Decarcerating Spaces & Homelessness
Remembering Arturo Ignacio Sanchez, a Fighter for Immigrant New York
Last month, New York lost a champion for the working-class immigrant city. Arturo Ignacio Sanchez passed away in assisted living in Queens, the borough he loved and fought for over the course of his 74-year life.
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VIDEO: The Transactive Theory of Urban Planning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biX_oCRj_xo Josh is a practicing urban planner in the Mid Atlantic. For the past nine years, Josh has served as a land use and transportation planner with a career focus in public engagement. Since the onset of the pandemic, Josh has…
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The making of “illegal” citizens and detention camps in India
As an ethno-nationalist project, Hindutva aims to create Hindu Rashtra—a Hindu nation— through the exclusion of other ethnicities in India. India’s right wing political mainstream demonstrates its support of this ideological project in a number of ways
Continue Reading The making of “illegal” citizens and detention camps in India
Black Planning in Action
About seven years ago, feeling disillusioned, I began to reflect on my career in planning and development as well as the tensions I was experiencing. Self-doubt emerged, and I started to question my role in planning and if I was the right ‘fit.’
Against Carcerality: Planning, Strategizing, and Organizing for Decarceral Spaces
The utilization of the planning process to support marginalized communities has been a contested issue in planning activism and planning theory. Planning is both critiqued for reinscribing the dominant (racial) capitalist mode of production and viewed as a means of equitable decision-making through community participation.
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VIDEO: Equity Planning Theory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftBbnLXjuss Josh is a practicing urban planner in the Mid Atlantic. For the past nine years, Josh has served as a land use and transportation planner with a career focus in public engagement. Since the onset of the pandemic, Josh has…
Reimagining Safety, Advancing Visions for a Decarceral City: Dispatches from Community Organizers
Beyond spaces of policing and prisons, the expansion of carcerality in the city appears in places often associated with care.
Violence and Profit – Gentrification from Louisville to Salt Lake
Following the murder of Breonna Taylor by Louisville police, Taylor’s mother filed a lawsuit against the police officers involved. The lawsuit ties the police raid against Taylor’s home to an ongoing urban renewal project led by the city of Louisville, calling it an act of gentrification.
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Challenging the Transnational Carceral Apparatus of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand
1973 saw the formalization of a bilateral migration pipeline between Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) through the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement, which grants citizens from each country indefinite work and travel authorization in the other upon arrival.
Settler Colonial Planning and Gaza: As Captured in Visualizing Palestine’s Stories
For 75 years, Palestinians have been subject to Israel’s settler colonial practices of dispossession and displacement. Today, internationally recognized human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and B’Tselem, acknowledge that Israel’s current system of domination and oppression over Palestinians constitutes apartheid.
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VIDEO: Radical Advice for Early Career Planners
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjQUlg_cSZc Josh is a practicing urban planner in the Mid Atlantic. For the past nine years, Josh has served as a land use and transportation planner with a career focus in public engagement. Since the onset of the pandemic, Josh…
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Climate Justice Viewed by Rio de Janeiro’s Sustainable Favela Network
The world is experiencing increasingly frequent extreme climatic events. Growing temperatures have altered the climate, producing intensified rain showers or record-breaking heat waves in many regions.
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Call for Submissions – Planning for Decarceral Spaces for Collective Action
Following the protest movements of 2020, an honest reckoning with the carceral state seemed possible.
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REVIEW: Zoned Out
Nearly 110 years ago, in 1916, New York City became an early adherent to the municipal zoning code, seeking to address technological developments like the steel-frame building and the Otis elevator that enabled buildings to shoot up into the sky.
Will “Critical Race Theory” Attacks Hurt Urban Planning Education?
Laws meant to restrict professors from discussing how race has shaped public policy could target the factual discussion of housing policy and its history—but professors say they don’t intend to go along.
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Community Mobilization against Eviction in 1970s San Francisco & the contribution of Chester Hartman
As a young student in 1966, I was struck by the efforts of the City of San Francisco to destroy the neighborhoods of African Americans. Most disturbing were the mass evictions that took place in the process of redevelopment.
VIDEO: Community Gardens and the Conquest of Land
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v4ptMeiQ38 Josh is a practicing urban planner in the Mid Atlantic. For the past nine years, Josh has served as a land use and transportation planner with a career focus in public engagement. Since the onset of the pandemic, Josh…
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REVIEW: Justice at Work – the Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities
Doussard and Schrock propose a new approach to urban theory and practice. Rather than focus on elites— casting resistance as ill-informed and futile—they look at resistance first, finding new support for concepts that seek racial or distributive justice.
VIDEO: How to Build a Gayborhood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLRA-gIiRhA Josh is a practicing urban planner in the Mid Atlantic. For the past nine years, Josh has served as a land use and transportation planner with a career focus in public engagement. Since the onset of the pandemic, Josh…
A Mensch With a Mission: Chester Hartman (1936-2023)
In 1960, Chester Hartman, then a graduate student in city planning at Harvard, received a notice from his draft board informing him that he had lost his student deferment and was reclassified 1-A…
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Mel King’s life, and life lessons for planners
Mel King, the preeminent Boston Black community leader of his generation, passed away in late March 2023 at the age of 94.
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The Mel King Universe, From a Disciple
There is a Mel King Universe (Multiverse, Cosmos…) that you enter when you go to one of his meetings or Sunday brunches.
Mel King, my friend, my teacher, my collaborator
My practice as a teacher and practitioner of what I term transformative community planning owes a great deal to Mel King, Paolo Freire, and Myles Horton.
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VIDEO: How landlords work together to keep rents high
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfLAkxV1fhc Josh is a practicing urban planner in the Mid Atlantic. For the past nine years, Josh has served as a land use and transportation planner with a career focus in public engagement. Since the onset of the pandemic, Josh…
Continue Reading VIDEO: How landlords work together to keep rents high
The Politics and Economy of Mixed-Use Planning
The consensus of planners is in, mixed-use is the name of the game! Every apartment building must have space for shops on the first floor and every redevelopment must contribute to building a denser city!
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The Negotiation of Colonial Legacies in the Planning of Islamabad, Pakistan
The planning of Islamabad, the capital city of Pakistan, presents a fascinating case through which neocolonial power can be understood.
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“It took us 50 Fucking Years”: a Review of Rabble Rousers
If you’ve been around housing movements in New York City, or the U.S., or maybe anywhere, you have probably heard about a place called Cooper Square, where the people did the impossible…
Continue Reading “It took us 50 Fucking Years”: a Review of Rabble Rousers
Review of The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice
This review of Melissa Checker’s book “The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice” closes out Progressive City’s latest series: Planning for Environmental Justice.
Review of University City: History, Race, and Community in the Era of the Innovation District
When I was a doctoral student studying innovation districts, Professor Robert Fishman, my dissertation supervisor and internationally recognized expert in urban history, pointedly asked: “What is the difference between the city as locus of innovation versus the innovation that occurs within the delineated boundary of an innovation district?”
REVIEW: Community Matters
Community land trusts (CLTs) have emerged in many parts of the Americas and Europe as a means for securing community control of land and insuring that it is used to meet the long-term needs of communities, particularly the many whose needs are not met by the land and housing markets.
Pandemic Responses and Mutual Aid Are Building Climate Resilience and Justice
In early 2020, GreenRoots, an environmental justice group in Chelsea, Massachusetts, was organizing residents to challenge a proposed electrical substation that would add yet another threat among the multiple environmental hazards already in this predominantly working-class Latinx community.
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Mobility Efforts in Mexico City
Latin America’s incredible urban growth has outpaced city planning and infrastructure. As a result, close to one-fourth of the urban population lives in informal housing.
Meeting the Challenge of Municipal Disinvestment
Redlining and gentrification by banks and insurance companies are familiar themes in the planning literature, but little recognition is given to cities engaged in the same tactics.
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Popular Transportation: Where Planning For Environmental Justice Hits the Pavement
To “plan for environmental justice” we must reckon with the historic and ongoing damage wrought by colonialism and neocolonial approaches to planning.
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PANEL: Housing Justice, Racial Equity and Economic Democracy
Toronto has seen remarkable growth of community land trusts (CLTs) in the last 10 years. These CLTs have been established as community-led alternatives to address issues of eviction, displacement, structural racism and speculation.
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This Island is Hot
Many planners learn about the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect in university, but even if we had not we all still would have known about it by now.
Climate-displaced labor, waste work, and environmental (in)justice in Tiruppur, India
“I came to Tamil Nadu just before the duṣkāḷa,” recalled Rani in Marathi when I asked her when she migrated.
Greenlining: Environmental Infrastructure and Racial Capitalism in 3 U.S. Cities
From creating urban forests to curbing the heat-island effect to implementing stormwater swales that can capture and remove contaminants from runoff, cities worldwide are readily investing in ecological infrastructure to address climate change vulnerabilities while beautifying urban space.
Continue Reading Greenlining: Environmental Infrastructure and Racial Capitalism in 3 U.S. Cities
‘Cultural Districts’ in San Francisco Exacerbate Issues of Displacement and Affordability
In 2018, San Francisco put the Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District on its official map, designating about ten blocks of the central South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood as culturally significant to the queer kink community.
Confronting non-profit co-optation through an anti-racist feminist practice
Immigrant women confront numerous difficulties securing stable employment. In addition to lacking professional networks or recognized work experience, they confront multiple intersecting inequalities, including gender, racial and familial oppression.
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Planning For Environmental Justice in the Age of Climate Disasters: Energy Justice
“关灯!” (guan deng) was a phrase I often heard yelled from my first generation Chinese mother growing up. This Mandarin phrase translates directly into “close the lights.” This was my first lesson in energy conservation.
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Black Dispossession and the Making of Downtown Flushing
The New York City Council vote to approve the highly controversial Special Flushing Waterfront District (SFWD) in December 2020 marked the culmination of more than two decades of planning and rezonings by the Department of City Planning and NYC Economic Development Corporation (NYC EDC) to transform and elevate downtown Flushing, a regional economic center in northeast Queens.
Continue Reading Black Dispossession and the Making of Downtown Flushing