Martin Meyerson

Preface

It was a beautiful fall day on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia and fifteen or so of us first-year master’s degree students crowded into a small seminar room in the old School of Fine Arts building to start our classes with “Planning Theory and Practice.” Ours was the first class in which students with social science-based undergraduate degrees outnumbered students whose degrees were rooted in the design professions. Ready to train and educate us were the Penn planning faculty, an all-star team although no one knew it at the time. We were excited and trying to hide it. The door opened.

A medium-sized, self possessed, quiet, rather shy teacher walked into the room, sat down at the head of the table, pulled out a pile of 5 × 7 index cards and, without looking up, said “My name is Martin Meyerson and we are here to understand how decisions are made in planning and how you make them …. And who are you?” He listened as we laboriously went through our names and previous affiliations, then he said something like (still not looking up), “write these words down: politics, planning and the public interest. When you can understand how these words and concepts relate to each other, when you can bring rational decision making, as identified in the publication, Planning, Politics and the Public Interest as ‘our standard of good planning’ into use in the discipline, you will have built a professional field as professional planners.” We were electrified and never looked back.

The Penn planning faculty was, by any standard, an all-star team:

Robert Mitchell, Chair (Transportation Research),

Meet Professor Martin Meyerson

This article will explore, with the assistance of some of the voices of those who participated with him, ¹ the academic activities of Professor Martin Meyerson, this extraordinary man, in the development of a fundamentally new teaching and professional education paradigm that bridged a crucial four decades of our field. ²

It speaks to the fundamental characteristics of a teacher, of an educator, passionately enamored of his discipline. His convictions about the value of social science research and the analytic use of the rational decision model were paramount in shaping the planning field. Meyerson was that rarity in the university world—an academic thinker whose intellectual approach solved academic problems and at the same time, a faculty member whose empathy and understanding of a professional’s work in the field provided clarity of thought and the potential to anticipate future scenarios. His strongly held belief in the positive impact of a balanced rational decision process on planning situations became a tenet of planning problem solving, and this tenet was at the heart of Meyerson’s intellectual influence. His ability to build close and lasting relationships with his former students and colleagues, based upon his balance, integrity, and intellectual curiosity, was at the core of his human impact. His positive vision of a school as a social community with a an open and equal society led Meyerson to become one of the very few planning academics of that era who encouraged women to apply to a doctoral program; he persuaded the schools in which he taught to accept these women thus initiating a normative change in the culture of academic departments.

Roots: 1922–1948

Martin Meyerson was born on November 14, 1922 in Brooklyn, New York, and enjoyed an urban childhood. He graduated from Columbia College in 1942 having immersed himself in the College’s well-known curriculum in contemporary civilization and humanities studies, which complimented his deeply inquiring mind. Descriptions of Professor Meyerson repeatedly portray him as “an unusually brilliant man of broad intellectual scope and breadth.” Vartan Gregorian, a close friend from his presidential years at the University of Pennsylvania, argued that “Martin was one of the most genuinely curious people I’ve ever met. Everything interested him: education, history, politics, architecture, art and philosophy.” One of his former students, Chester Hartman, now director of the D.C.-based Poverty and Race Research Action Council said that on his first meeting with Meyerson, “I was blown away by his intellect and his wealth of knowledge so much so that I became his Research Assistant at the Joint Center ….” Chester continued his story in the Introduction of his book, Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning (2002). “By the time I returned to Cambridge … I had decided to shift academically from the master’s degree program to the doctoral program. In large part, this was attributable to the presence of Martin Meyerson as my intellectual and professional role model who was newly arrived from the University of Pennsylvania. I transferred to the PhD planning program in the Graduate School of Arts and Science … where I was taught by luminaries like Meyerson.”

After they met in Chicago, Herbert Gans, a former student and now Robert S. Lynd Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Columbia University, noted “that Martin was one a small handful of polymaths that I had met in my so far fifty years in academic life.” Herbert Gans describes his first meeting with Meyerson, “I met him first when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, looking for a community in which I could study political participation …. Thereafter, he supervised my master’s thesis, encouraged me to become a planner, helped me establish myself in that profession and invited me to work with him on his studies of the planning process. Our association resulted from thinking alike about many things, but I sometimes wonder what topics I would have studied and written about in the last seventeen years had I not met him when I was looking for that community.”

Arnold Eisen, Meyerson’s student liaison in the University of Pennsylvania Office of the President and now Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, found himself in what he described “as a two year tutorial in power and accountability.” Arnold said of Meyerson that “he never got angry or flustered. He was a real intellectual who could read knowledgeably in mathematics or sociology. He had a concept of comprehensiveness which emerged in programs he established for students and in the rehabilitation of West Philadelphia as an integral aspect of the University and Quad. He was a visionary and, for a shy person, very powerful; the power of his mind, his integrity and his ability to develop relationships.”

While others saw him as a teacher and advisor, Meyerson’s favorite conceit was to characterize himself as “an imperialist for city planning.” As he explained in his keynote speech in 1955, to the American Planning Association on the planners' “Middle Range Bridge,” we “are in the expansionist, imperialistic stage of professional behavior … and it is time to speak about expansion … increasing our numbers, multiplying our budgets, strengthening our effectiveness, expanding our functions and, of course, raising our salaries.”

University of Chicago: 1948–1952

Meyerson acted on his beliefs; when an eminent sociologist on the faculty of the University of Chicago, Dr. Louis Wirth and a few colleagues, decided to establish a new Program of Education and Research in Planning as told by Jean-Louis Sarbib in an unpublished paper given at the 1982 ACSP Conference, Meyerson who had just been appointed to the Chicago faculty as Assistant Professor of Social Science and Assistant Professor of Planning, helped to move the project forward. ³ At the time, the University of Chicago was reflective of the future of planning education. From 1947 to 1956, a group of people came together and in nine exciting years helped to establish the structure of planning education of which most of us are products. Given the prestige of the institution, it also defined the role planners would play in post–World War II America.

Another member of the faculty, Rexford Tugwell, was the official founder of the Program but was soon eclipsed by Harvey Perloff, who became its nationally known chair. As Donald Kruekleberg documented, “social science disentangled planning education from its architectural and design origins and articulated a model which fit the American brand of welfare state liberalism.”

The traditional sociology faculty decided that urban planning was a field of practical application with a little base of theory or conceptual framework. Consequently, they established planning as a program, not a department, and staffed it with new faculty that had strong resumes in practice and little training in theory or pedagogy. But at the beginning of the program (1947–1951), as Sarbib states, “The faculty proposed a daring and encompassing definition of planning as really reflective decision-making which was influenced by Tugwell’s—fourth power—The programs' faculty defined the uniqueness of planning as a discipline … a team of which was able to assemble and relate orderly material of political science, economics, sociology, engineering, architecture anthropology, engineering, by which it could project a composite future. Planning was a kind of an answer to the question, ‘Knowledge for what.’”

The answers for this faculty were found in the social sciences, where it was early on determined that traditional decision-making functions in a democracy are the basis of technical expertise. Tugwell was succeeded by Dean Harvey Perloff who “continued to argue for the uniqueness of planning as a discipline. However, other departments argued that if planning was so broadly defined as to include rational and deliberate action than social guidance was a more apt description. Planning integrated with social science limited planning to rational decision making. Banfield’s imagination was captured by the successful packaging of the rational action model and it was presented in the appendix of Meyerson and Banfield’s classic study of the Chicago Housing Authority. This rational decision-making model of planning was criticized by the University of Chicago policy faculty. Meyerson disagreed with this characterization and as a counterthrust, took on practice in planning, first at Michael Reese Hospital and then the Chicago Housing Authority, where he was the head of the planning department, both done simultaneous with his academic appointment.

Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod, member of the first class, a former Meyerson student at Chicago, and currently distinguished professor emeritus of the Sociology Department of the New School in New York remembers that “the planning program itself [was taught] through its small collective workshops [and] … the importance of team research and problem solving though combining the diverse talents, interests, and knowledge of group collaboration. I have tried to encourage my [own] students,” she added, “to benefit from the synergy by doing collective projects.”

During his Chicago appointment, Meyerson wrote several articles which strongly influenced planning curriculum development at Chicago and elsewhere. In a 1946 publication article in the Proceedings of the American Society of Planning Officials, titled “What does a planner need to know,” the issue of physical versus social planning was already “hot.” Meyerson was committed to the view that “to plan a city, a planner must also understand its physical structure and also its operations … needs a very special kind of knowledge about these operations of cities.” He stressed that “urban planning in large part is physical but the required knowledge is not to be found through the other physical professions. The planner is most concerned with the relationship between them …. Planners must know cities and their functions and the relations between these functions. A planner must make the city he is working for his own ‘Middletown.’ He must know where to find his information and how to do research. Planning is predicated on change—orderly change. Planning is politics in part; to do so, a group (team) activity and planners must learn to work closely together. The ability to communicate is essential ….” In another article, titled “Clinic Training planners …. Forum for Professors and Students” (1954) he added the conceptual framework, which would guide Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest and that helped to shape a balanced master’s degree program in planning.

A total of 6 years after the founding of the Program at Chicago, the Free Press published Meyersons seminal book, Politics, Planning and the Public Interest (coauthored with Harvard political scientist Edward Banfield, 1955). This book was a prime force in turning urban planning from a subfield of design into a process and field analysis with direct ties to social science disciplines.

This publication, which was begun, in part, as a reaction against the highly touted classical long-range general policy plan of cities, became, as Gary Hack of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design recently asserted “the seminal work on the subject.” Herbert Gans added that Meyerson “was one of the leaders in the Program of City Planning.” Among his contributions, Gans went on, “was to integrate social science research and an understanding of economic markets with urban planning.” Gans contended that “Meyerson completely changed the field of urban planning.”

Meyerson and the other faculty from the University of Chicago’s new program of Planning and Policy Analysis shaped the first modern American cohorts of graduating academic planners. This cohort of graduates left Chicago to found professional degree programs throughout the country, including the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Rhode Island, and transformed other programs at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and the New School. Faculty and alumni such as Harvey Perloff, Rexford Tugwell, Edward Banfield, Jack Dyckman, Janet Abu-Lughod, Ira Robinson, Lowden Wingo, Shirley Wertheimer, Herbert Gans, and Britton Harris were responsible for creating the next wave of curriculum and pedagogy.

Social Action—Chicago Style

One little known aspect of this cohorts' commitment to fairness and access was identified through the research of June Manning Thomas, FAICP in a article presented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on May 8, 2008 entitled “Race, Ethnicity, Social Justice: Influences of an Era.” In a longitudinal study about the influence of the civil rights movement on the practice of planning, she examined articles of planners in the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA). Although Thomas found little evidence of an intersection between planning and civil rights, her research identified faculty who published JAPA articles on the subject of race, social justice, and civil right between 1954 and 1971. The eighteen authors included seven who were directly associated with Meyerson as students or colleagues: Hartman; Gans, Dyckman; Perloff; Wingo; Paul Davidoff; and Tom Reiner.

University of Pennsylvania: 1952–1957

Meyerson’s work with the Chicago graduate students was pathbreaking. The students admired his intellect, his abilities to think clearly and his concern for the community. When Meyerson left the University of Chicago for the University of Pennsylvania, several followed in order to continue their work with him. I can validate this feeling since I followed Meyerson from Penn to Harvard a little more than a decade after this first exodus.

At Chicago, Meyerson particularly admired the work of Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod, whom he advised and taught. She married and stayed briefly in Chicago working at American Society of Planning Officials (where Martin’s wife Margy worked), when the Meyersons left for Philadelphia. I was aware of his admiration for Abu-Lughod when I was worked with him at Penn. With almost every article I handed in, Meyerson would say “this is good but you should see some of the papers which my student in Chicago, Janet Abu-Lughod, submitted.” One of my colleagues at Harvard, Salah El-Shakhs, now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at Rutgers University had the same experience. When he was writing his master’s thesis on planning in Egypt, Meyerson referred him to Janet Abu-Lughod for advice. After almost half a century, I was able to convey to Abu-Lughod how much I admired and envied her for the respect Meyerson expressed for her work. As Janet shared with me, “I remember our first meeting in 1948: he a young and shy man who had just joined the then new Program in Planning at the University of Chicago; I, an even younger and shy-er would-be graduate student, seeking to transfer from the MA program in Sociology/Demography to what I hoped would combine my interests in architecture with human service and reform. Our turned down eyes never met. But I was encouraged to embark on an exciting but unknown path and was to benefit from his help literally, his support for decades to come.”

This relationship demonstrates the intense loyalty which Meyerson inspired in his students. Included in the group of colleagues and students who moved to the University of Pennsylvania with him, he gathered around him new students and young colleagues. Together with the faculty, they redesigned the Penn master’s degree planning program. Meyerson’s view in “Building the Middle Range Bridge” was “that we train students for the responsible posts they will hold, not only this year but ten years from now. I recognize that most city planners in the future may not work for what we regard as city planning agencies. This does not mean that they should not be trained as city planners.” A prescient observation.

Although Meyerson did a great deal to reshape the master’s degree program, much of his academic emphasis was on the PhD program, which he substantially created. His doctoral candidate advisees were the first PhDs in planning to apply social science research methods including the rational decision-making paradigm to urban and regional problems. As Gary Hack noted in a New York Times tribute, “he was an early proponent of first addressing political, economic and social concerns in communities where planners hoped to build major projects. It seems obvious today.” Yet, as Hack continued, “in the 1950s it wasn’t the common way of thinking …. Making the plan was to be inherently a process that organizes public and political support.” For the doctoral candidates, Meyerson advised measuring the extent of citizen and community participation involved in the problem situation. Although the topics and content area differed, a selection of dissertation titles of his advisees who were among the first PhD graduates at Penn, show the scope of the application of this new methodology:

Herbert J. Gans 1957 Recreation Planning for Leisure Behavior: a Goal Oriented Approach

Harvard University 1957–1963

At the age of 34, in 1957, Meyerson was invited to occupy the newly endowed Frank Backus William Chair in the Department of City Planning of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. According to Bill Doebele, the subsequent appointee to the Frank Backus Williams Chair at the Graduate School of Design, “Upon Meyerson’s arrival in Cambridge, he formulated two larger objectives in addition to his teaching. The first was to strengthen immediately the Department’s faculty. The second was to continue the strategy developed previously to use the prestige of Harvard University to make urban studies a legitimate specialization in the relationship among the academic fields of sociology, government, history, social studies and the humanities generally.”

As Doebele observed, “He achieved the first objective in 1958 by bringing to the Graduate School of Design three promising young scholars from Penn: William Alonso (urban economist, regional scientist and future acting Director of the Joint Center), William Nash (housing specialist and future Chair of Harvard Planning Department), and William Doebele (expert in land use, zoning and housing law and future appointee of the Frank Backus Williams Chair). At the Graduate School of Design they were known collectively as “the three Bills.”

Doebele continued: “He implemented the second objective by obtaining a major grant from the Ford Foundation to establish an interdepartmental center of urban studies, The Joint Center. Its purpose originally would be to stimulate research in all interested departments at Harvard and in particular to give critical support the best PhD students interested in this specialization. To do so it was necessary to convince the dominant senior faculty in these diverse departments that urban studies were indeed appropriate topics for advanced scholarship.” Doebele concludes that “Meyerson’s efforts had considerable success. The Center has been described by Bill and others as ‘not so much a conventional research center as an elaborate strategy to introduce urban studies to higher education.’”

Despite his new University responsibilities, Professor Meyerson still thought of himself primarily as a teacher. He was closest with the doctorial candidates, advising and mentoring them. This was a particularly important part of his teaching and was an important role especially to the influx of international students. Egyptian Salah El Shakhs, who was Meyerson’s advisee from 1959 to 1961, said “Meyerson was able to restore my confidence. He was an incredible calming influence on me. As a foreign student of Architecture, educated in Egypt and overwhelmed by a new language and an alien social science approach, I was ready to cut my losses and go back to Cairo. He showed an incredible sensitivity to the challenges facing foreign students and an exceptional knowledge of their planning contexts. Such understanding and encouragement helped me survive through my PhD at Harvard. I worked with his student Bill Alonso after Professor Meyerson left for Berkeley. Martin Meyerson was ‘Planning’; his ideas and theories, especially in the theory and structure of the urban community, strongly influenced my future work.”

Michael Brooks, another Meyerson advisee, and now Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at Virginia Commonwealth University, reported that he chose Harvard’s Masters of City Planning program because he had read Politics, Planning and the Public Interest and wanted to study with Meyerson. Upon arriving, he was thrilled to learn that Meyerson would be his advisor. As Mike then said in our interview, “subsequent to his graduation, he only had two advisee meetings with Meyerson. The first, occurring early in the first year, was scheduled for 2:10 pm: only later did I learn that I was seeing Meyerson right after his 2:05 appointment and immediately before his 2:15.” As Mike concluded “one learned to be highly efficient in using one’s time with him!” The second meeting occurred just before Mike’s graduation. Meyerson told Mike that he would help him acquire any of three positions: “one, to be in charge of social planning for a new town in Venezuela; or to serve as the planning director for the Ford Foundation’s Grey area program in Boston; or to teach in Yale’s new planning program.” Mike added: “You felt his confidence in you.”

According to Brooks, Meyerson was his chief academic role model during the early years of his career. He particularly admired Meyerson’s combination of good scholarship with accomplishments in the realm of public affairs. “Taking Meyerson’s theory course was similar to the experience of law school students; you never knew when you would be called upon to respond to one of Meyerson’s in-depth questions and you prepared accordingly.” As for the impact of his thinking, Meyerson was extremely important to the profession in his (and Banfield’s) articulation of the rational planning model. “I suspect Meyerson himself ultimately had doubts about this model” Mike summarized, “but for many years there existed no better statement of the role of rationality in the planning process.”

My own favorite remembrance of Meyerson as my advisor at Penn was not his words or a particular time but a place. He was so busy in his teaching years at Penn that we often met at the 30th Street Train Station in Philadelphia to review my work. We would walk down the street together toward the University of Pennsylvania discussing my current assignments.

Although he was primarily involved with doctoral candidates, at the request of Harvard President Nathan Pusey, he taught a freshman seminar in urban studies. One of his former freshman students recalled experiences of this class. “Meyerson took a completely naive freshman into a political/urban seminar and made it both a haven of warmth and a focal point of discovery. He was a gentle, wise and welcoming teacher and thanks to him, I not only survived freshman year but also explored the city of Cambridge as a microcosm of planning and politics.” After all these years, Penny Hollander Feldman, a Radcliffe student taking courses at Harvard still remembered the class and its setting. “He taught the class at the Harvard Faculty Club and women were not allowed to enter by the front door. I had to use the basement entrance in the rear but it was worth it to reach the welcoming professor on the second floor. It was safe to ask questions and do any project concerning the city. Professor Meyerson pointed us to available resources and put us in touch with his graduate students some of whom became mentors and lifelong friends.”

Meyersons' responsibilities expanded at Harvard. Doebele describes how in 1958 Meyerson attended a Tokyo conference on Metropolitan Planning sponsored by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). There he met Ernest Weissman, the energetic Yugoslav head of the urban activities of the UNDP. Weissman complained of the inefficiency of sending persons from developing countries to study city planning in the United States, the United Kingdom, or European destinations. Not only was each student very expensive but also the training being received in western planning problems was mostly irrelevant to conditions of poor developing countries in the 1950s. To resolve this problem, Doebele said, “Meyerson proposed that the UNDP should sponsor professional programs at a leading university in a developing country in several regions of the world, based on groupings of developing countries that shared similar problems.” A senior faculty member of the Bandung Institute of Technology (in Indonesia) who was present at once volunteered as a permanent host for a planning school for all of Southeast Asia. Weissman committed the UNDP to pay for seven years of high-level advisors. Meyerson committed Harvard to provide the seven faculty required for this effort. The plan was carried out, and the Department of “Planologi” (as it is called in Indonesian) still flourishes.

In 1963, Meyerson was selected by the University of California at Berkeley to be Dean of the College of Environmental Design and subsequently acting Chancellor. It was the end of his sustained time for teaching although he continued his consultation with his former doctoral students throughout his administrative career.

An Appraisal of Meyerson’s Impact on Planning

What did the academic planning world receive through the work of Martin Meyerson? There are three primary strategic impacts suggested by this assessment by his peers and students. They are as follows:

Defining city planning through a new paradigm redirects the curriculum and the pedagogy, shapes practice, and eventually prepares a new style of practitioner for the field. From the mid-fifties to the mid-eighties, the rational decision making and comprehensive paradigm held sway in the Meyersoniantheory classroom. This time period roughly corresponds to the post–World War II remaking of urban and metropolitan America. This suggests that the practitioners used Meyerson’s redefinition of planning decision making. In fact, in building the post–World War II landscape, his rational paradigm contained the concepts central to the reconstruction of the downtown and the metropolitan areas.