Journal of Planning Education and Research

The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been released. In it, several sections address climate change, mitigation, and adaptation in cities, with discussions of the crucial role of planning and governance in the same. This article offers a reflection on the urban elements of AR6, pointing to the prevalence of ideological elements in it, typologizing form over critical assessments of real conditions in developing cities. As much as AR6 emphasizes the carbon footprint of society, it ignores the social footprint of carbon and the potentially massive adjustments mitigation and adaptation will require of developing nations and their urban populations.

As urban planners increasingly use technological advances to generate and analyze new data, we must take care to overcome biases embedded in them. We survey American planning programs and find that very few spatial analysis syllabi explicitly raise this issue or include readings or exercises to train students about the limitations and opportunities for critically handling new data streams. We conclude with suggestions for curricular strategies to help fill this pedagogical gap by incorporating (1) groundtruthing and fieldwork exercises; (2) exercises of comparative urban contexts and spatial patterns; and (3) digital participation and public discourse.

Urban data science (UDS) is developing rapidly and starting to be widely adopted in urban planning research and curricula. However, economic development planners have been relatively slow in introducing UDS into their toolkits. This reality is a disservice to the subfield and students. This article discusses the motivation and current practices of UDS in economic development, identifies successes and challenges, and suggests actions moving forward. Professional training, curriculum innovation, and support from departments, institutions, and the broader academic and professional communities are called for.

The paper suggests a focused examination of the processes of drafting-based design and parametric design in urbanism. It discusses how spatial design’s settled cognition would differ by using algorithmic systems through the altered relationships between the basic operations in design. To reveal the commonalities and distinctions between the two design methods, the authors present the detailed documentation of the workshop series, which experimented with both techniques within similar design contexts. By the design analysis, the idea of “parametric thinking” is revisited in the specific context of urban design.

Urban design, as an academic discipline, was born in the 20th century in response to challenges related to the planning, design, and renewal of urbanized areas. Since then, there has been an ongoing debate about the scope, scientific basis, and teaching formula of the discipline. The aim of this article was to assess the formula for teaching urban design at an academic level in Poland, considering global trends in this field. The theoretical framework involved a review of contemporary scientific concepts, which provided the basis for extracting the most popular and well-recognized domains, definitions, and dimensions of urban design. The research results confirm that urban design has permanently taken its place between architecture and urban planning. In Poland, but not only, the elements of both the theory and practice of urban design are dispersed among various master’s degree courses. This is not conducive to strengthening the position of urban design as such, and in Poland, it may be one of the reasons for deepening spatial chaos.

The paper evaluates different teaching aids used in an introductory in-class course that focuses on planning theories. We examine the perceptions of students regarding specific teaching tools and how helpful they were in making the course more approachable and providing a better learning experience. The analysis covers 133 student responses over a period of four consecutive years. Findings show that certain instructional tools are regarded as more helpful in making the course material more intelligible. This suggests educators in planning theory courses should review and continuously monitor the didactic tools they use in class.

This project uses three years (2017–2020) of survey data and job announcements to analyze the alignment between doctoral education and the academic job market in Planning. Graduates are competitive, having teaching experience and published or publishable research. The primary job market (i.e., the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning [ACSP] Career Center) likely accommodates 50 to 60 percent of graduates finding academic employment (or about 25% of graduating cohorts), with a large share navigating the secondary job market. Survey data from program directors suggest approximately one-third of graduates do not aspire to academic careers. This paper illustrates realities of academic employment for recent graduates and includes recommendations for programs.

This article analyses a fieldtrip studio course in Indonesia, reflecting on its value and benefits for urban planning. The original contribution of the article is twofold. First, we show how the course contributes to the development of the skills and knowledge required by planning graduates. Second, in relation to the course’s learning activities, we reflect on the significance and challenges involved in building partnerships between academia and industry from the perspective of the key partners involved in the course.

Through this paper, we investigate the key characteristics of planning studios and how they relate to new demands in planning education. The research is conducted through an analytical framework that is applied to a highly transferable case study (iWater Summer Schools). Results confirm that the prototypical characteristics of planning studios can support the design of multidisciplinary, research-oriented, personalized, and intensive courses, and that all these demands can be simultaneously satisfied. In addition, results indicate that positive alignments and connections can be established between different pedagogical variables (e.g., learning methods, assessment methods, provided skills) and the educational demands mentioned above.

Urban design and planning studios presented considerable challenges to teach remotely following the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. Planning is space-based and requires real-life experience, and existing virtual teaching platforms can hardly re-create the studio atmosphere. This paper presents an empirical study, via surveys and interviews, on how instructors in Greek universities, where online teaching carried on for three semesters, adjusted studio courses to remote teaching. Findings are organized into three rubrics: Resilience, Interaction, and Surprises. Results show that planning pedagogy needs to maintain problem-based methodologies, that existing platforms should be designed to better emulate the studio atmosphere, and that inviting guest speakers online is a practice that will remain post-pandemic.

Experiential learning has long been integral to planning education. For decades, the University of Oregon has offered a unique experiential model involving paying clients supported by nontenure track faculty. We utilize surveys and interviews to evaluate nine years of course delivery in relation to learning outcomes, work quality, and lessons learned. We found the model provides thorough professional training and excellent products due largely to client engagement and staffing support, but ongoing challenges include collaborative work programs, team dynamics, and integrating equity and inclusion. This model requires client and university investment, and we highlight transferable lessons for developing experiential learning programs.

This paper systematically reviews the use of podcasts in planning education. Podcasting is part of a broader expansion and diversification of digital technology in education, responding to its use in teaching approaches and research dissemination. The ability to gather and share information across time and space, alongside emphases on dialogue, participation, and voice, also means that podcasts may hold emancipatory potential. This systematic review highlights how podcasts may support active learning among students and create dialogues between students and communities under-represented in mainstream debate, and the extent to which they may enhance strategies of blended and active learning in planning curricula.

Studio courses are a common way to teach problem-based and applied skills in the field of urban and regional planning. In this article, we reflect on the experiences from a planning studio course that builds on the idea of gradually increasing student autonomy, peaking in the final phase of the course when the whole class self-organizes the content and delivery of a strategic plan. We term this approach “collaborative student-led learning,” arguing that it enables students to learn subject-related knowledge and skills related to communication, organization, and negotiation, while also supporting students’ personal and professional growth and identity development.

This article analyzes the results of a survey of planning theory course outlines conducted in 2020 parallel to four similar surveys that together provide a forty-year review of a central component of planning education. The article begins by briefly reviewing the major trends in planning theory over the past forty years. It then examines the course topics and required readings, authors, and texts for sixty-two master’s-level courses offered during the 2019–2020 academic years. The article concludes by evaluating the survey findings and the picture they paint of contemporary planning theory education.

This research examined social media’s role in understanding perceptions about the spaces in which individuals interact, what planners can learn from social media data, and how to use social media to inform urban regeneration efforts. Using Twitter data from 2010 to 2018 recorded in one U.S. shrinking city, Detroit, Michigan, this paper longitudinally investigated topics that people discuss, their emotions, and neighborhood conditions associated with these topics and sentiments. Findings demonstrate that neighborhood demographics, socioeconomic, and built environment conditions impact people’s sentiments.

This paper examines how national planning frameworks differ from each other and how those differences relate to patterns of urban development using an international cross section of metropolitan regions. We construct a composite index to measure institutional planning frameworks through objective criteria—restrictive versus permissive; binding versus nonbinding; nationally versus locally oriented—that enables comparison between (not within) countries. We also estimate a series of models to evaluate the relationship between institutional frameworks and patterns. The evidence suggests that a more centralized and coordinated planning framework produces more compact development, whereas a more decentralized and uncoordinated planning framework results in less compact development.

“Deathscapes” constitute a growing field of research, yet the topic remains widely neglected within urban planning. In this paper, we examine the adequacy of existing provision for death, remembrance, and the disposal of body remains for ethnic minority groups living in four British towns: Huddersfield, Newport, Northampton, and Swindon. We show how the needs of ethnic minority groups are routinely peripheralized through a lack of acknowledgment of diverse cultural and religious needs. The paper argues that the failure of contemporary planning policy and practice to address the intersections between death and ethnicity has contributed to ongoing forms of exclusion from the British society.

The vast majority of the world’s land area is rural, yet rurality is routinely marginalized in planning. Urban bias is tacit and under-problematized, so the challenges facing rural areas and the importance of those challenges for society as a whole are not much reflected in planning scholarship or practice. We interrogate the urban bias and its implications for rural planning through the lens of planning cultures, using a content analysis of prominent and recent texts to shed light on the nature and implications of urban bias. Finally, we suggest ways to “bring the rural back” into twenty-first-century planning.

Rebuilding communities requires an actionable approach to explicitly translate the concept of resilience into postdisaster recovery planning. Through clustering analysis using project titles and project summary, 940 resilience projects are grouped into infrastructure prototypes, economic development prototypes, housing prototypes, and environmental prototypes among the Hurricane Matthew Resilient Redevelopment Plans. This research evaluated the characteristics of all prototypes based on the robustness-rapidity-inclusiveness framework. It also assessed the economic and environmental impacts, community involvement, and governance of identified prototypes. By posing a series of questions for practitioners, this research is a starting point for practitioners to build resilience in postdisaster recovery planning.

Professional planners working in the private sector intersect with a complex sphere of business interests. Management consultants have a growing influence in many organizations, including private sector planning firms. Using a mixed-method approach to examine the strategies and priorities of management consultants, I find that management consultants view the “value” of planning as opening the door to future contracts and selling firm services. This has implications for understanding how practitioners reconcile professional values (such as autonomy, neutrality, and protection of the public interest) with market imperatives, and for the profession as one driven by societal, rather than entrepreneurial goals.

The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program represents the largest subsidized housing program in the United States. While families with vouchers can, in theory, lease any housing of reasonable quality renting below a rent ceiling, the empirical evidence suggests that they rarely use their vouchers to move to lower poverty neighborhoods. This paper examines the question of how spatial boundaries impact the residential possibilities of HCV subsidized families, both the visible boundaries of Public Housing Authority (PHA) catchment areas and the invisible boundaries of racial and economic segregation. I use administrative data supplied by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which includes all moves by HCV families between 2005 and 2015 in the Baltimore, MD, Cleveland, OH, and Dallas, TX, metropolitan areas. Using a Louvain method of network cluster detection, I subdivide each metro into distinct mobility clusters—sets of census tracts within which voucher holders move but between which they rarely do. I find that the empirical mobility clusters at the metropolitan level are highly defined by PHA’s catchment areas. Even though families are technically allowed to “port” their voucher from one PHA catchment area to another, such behavior is rare. Within the PHA catchment areas, HCV mobility clusters are defined by patterns of race, income, and history. These findings suggest that patterns of racial and economic segregation seem to partially define the mobility clusters within PHA catchment areas, but not across them.

Continuous reform efforts in urban China have scaled back direct government intervention by introducing freer land market trials. Anecdotal evidence reveals, however, that the liberal approach has yielded little advantageous result in Shenzhen, where such experiments are pioneered. By building on new institutionalist concepts and analyzing primary and secondary data, this paper demonstrates that deficiencies of formal rules created a policy vacuum, while informal constraints increased project uncertainty. Understanding the interwoven formal and informal institutional deficiencies adds new insights to the literature in explaining project outcomes and urban policy innovations in China’s urban transformation.

How public interest is constituted in planning practice varies according to the local context. Using state-socialist and post-socialist cases in Belgrade, Serbia, we explore the shift in the realization of public interest as a basis for planning standards regarding provision of public land use and services. The research looks at trends for planning standards on two case studies, and reveals the underlying norms of this local interpretation of public interest via interviews with planning professionals and residents. The results suggest not only the persistence of the top-down unitary approach to public interest in planning but also a deterioration in prescribed standards.

This analysis examines the spatial relationships between historic districts and demolition permits in Philadelphia, a post-industrial city experiencing growth after decades of decline. We describe the spatial and temporal aspects of National Register and local historic districts, map the patterns of public and private sector demolition (2007–2021), and compare the demolition rates within and around historic districts. We find lower rates of demolitions within local historic districts as compared with the surrounding areas. However, this pattern does not hold among National Register districts, suggesting that stronger protections afforded by local ordinances are particularly important for places experiencing development pressure.

Heat is the deadliest weather-related hazard in the United States. This paper studies municipal heat adaptation using survey and planning data from California. We first analyze the characteristics of municipalities that innovate. Cities with heat-related policies have greater degrees of projected extreme heat, leadership support, environmental justice planning, and smaller Hispanic population shares. We then assess specific policy innovations of six large cities by plan type. Some strategies, including expanding tree canopies, have been widely adopted while others, such as cool walls, are rarely included. Findings suggest that planners can—and should—play a central role in heat adaptation planning.

This study revealed the inequitable societal impacts of E-scooters on disadvantaged populations. The study conducted a population distribution analysis to compare the use opportunities and space intrusion burdens of E-scooter sharing on four vulnerable population groups in Austin, Texas. Nearly all minority population experienced fewer E-scooter use opportunities. Ten percent of the minority population waited for a disproportionately longer time before a disturbance could be resolved. Ten percent of the low-income population were in a disadvantaged position in high opportunities and moderate burdens. Twenty percent of the physically disabled population faced more moderate-level burdens. The result did not show significant inequitable outcomes for the elderly population.

Can self-organizing special districts created from the bottom up be a tool for community change and development? Focusing on community services districts in California, this study introduces the context in which communities opt out of a county service system to reshape their governing structure for better representation. The empirical part measures their effectiveness, using single-family home sale prices as an impact metric. Leveraging multi-level difference-in-difference hedonic regression methods, the analysis shows that district formation increases the prices annually up to 16 percent, compared to both the surrounding and distant county service areas, indicating their efficacy as a tool for community change and development.

Rental housing was historically a minimal feature of urban informality. Now it is surging amid municipal attempts to “upgrade” informal settlements in São Paulo, Brazil. Drawing upon a mixed-methodological study of two favelas on São Paulo’s east side, we analyze how cycles of upgrading shape informal rental housing at the urban, community, block, and parcel levels, providing detailed comparative data for 2010–2020. Our findings suggest that rental housing redevelopment can increase precarity in urban living, but is an important source of low-income housing in already built-up and “consolidated” settlements where access is declining. Our study emphasizes the need for scholars, policy makers, and planners to further explore the praxis of informal renting and rental housing, which can be effective conduits for channeling public investments across consolidated informal settlements and into individual dwellings.

Over the last twenty years, the greater Paris metropolitan region has seen a decline in vehicle trips per capita, and has invested in alternative modes. Understanding this transition requires looking beyond the formal planning process to the deliberative systems surrounding transportation in the city. Tim Marshall argues that those interested in participation, and even more so in the prospect of deliberation, should look to France and should broaden our vision beyond formal participation to the deliberative system. We take up Marshall’s call for deliberative systems research with a comparative analysis of two public deliberations around subway network extension and bus transit improvement, and use Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of participation as a set of evaluation criteria. Both involve engagement at multiple scales, and are embedded in ongoing deliberations that stretch beyond their formal consultation periods. We explore whether such deliberation led to a consensual, sustainable territorial project. We find that while the system as a whole ranks on the lower rungs of Arnstein’s ladder and does not reach its aspirational vision of inclusive community participation, moments where coalitions formed to shape the problem-solution nexus moved up the ladder from consultation to partnership, making the Paris system a good model to strengthen and replicate elsewhere.

We examined the impact of coffee shops on entrepreneurship. Matching Google Reviews for coffee shops posted from 2016 to 2018 with nearby establishments in the state of Maryland, we found that one mile closer to the nearest three coffee shops, an establishment is 10.1 percent more likely to be a startup than an incumbent company. Coffee shops with a higher proportion of reviews related to social interaction, and those with better space quality and locational accessibility are more likely to be surrounded by startups. We identified specific features of urban third places that planners can cultivate to encourage or attract entrepreneurship.

This paper examines equity’s incorporation into Climate Action Plans (CAPs), an increasingly important part of the urban sustainability planning landscape. We conduct a content analysis of 170 California CAPs and compare the plans’ treatment of equity to city characteristics such as size and income inequality. We find that equity language correlates with an increased presence of more systemic policy interventions, such as dense and/or affordable housing, in CAPs. However, the majority of CAPs “miss the housing for the trees,” with green policy agendas, such as trees and open space, remaining more dominant. We also find little association between local inequalities and how CAPs incorporate equity goals.

Stakeholder participation for the value assessment of Indian architectural heritage, especially the temple architecture, is rare due to the lack of published methodologies. Therefore, considering Odishan Temple Architecture as a case study, this research focuses on stakeholders’ perceptions while assessing the value of architectural heritage. This study identified five groups of stakeholders for evaluating parameters. Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney U tests were used to derive the results. Sixteen parameters showed discrepancies in opinions; the opinions of the current decision-makers differed significantly from other groups. However, this study identified the scope for involving the opinions of all stakeholders for an unbiased and robust decision-making process.

Metropolitan public transportation systems vary in their performance and governance, and evidence suggests linkages between these. However, such linkages remain largely untested due to the complexity of governance and the absence of reliable and valid measures of it. We develop a conceptual framework for understanding metropolitan public transportation system governance using the familiar concepts of polycentricity and fragmentation. We introduce the novel concept of governance topology to parse the complexity of the many organizational arrangements and interorganizational relationships that comprise metropolitan governance. We then propose a method of measurement using a concentration index, and apply it to the Chicagoland region.

Research evidence from cognitive science documents how everyday thought actively composes imaginary blends of possible actions. These include plans that inform intentions and infer meaning about causes, norms, and effects. Recognizing the pragmatic functional features of imagination can help scholars and professional planners better understand their own practice. I explore how this evidence supports the insights of scholars like Myers and Forester who study what planners do and how plans work. Planning educators should treat spatial planning as more craft than science, more practical than precise, and more collaborative than solitary.

We examine local and state government responses to anti-Asian hate during the initial months of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in the United States. Formal state and municipal government statements and websites were examined for fifty states and 104 of the largest municipalities using critical discourse analysis and racial formation theory to understand how government agencies racialized Asian Americans and reacted to their responsibility to address racism. We develop a typology of racist, race-neutral, and anti-racism to categorize the responses. Government statements are important for planners because they affect resident safety and willingness to report hate crimes.

As part of their efforts to reverse the effects of twentieth-century downtown disinvestment and automobile-oriented development, stakeholders in small towns across the United States look for viable means of restoring the vitality and character of their historic business districts. In this paper, I evaluate a widely adopted downtown revitalization strategy—the Main Street Program—by measuring its influence on the local housing market. I find that home sale prices are higher for residential properties sold in program-participating communities, and I observe an additional sale price premium for homes located in closer proximity to downtown districts with an active Main Street Program.

Food asset mapping conducted by planners and policymakers usually consists of an online map identifying the locations of food-related sites in cities. However, food asset mapping may be limited in its consideration for ecological and cultural assets critical for community food security. Furthermore, what are considered “assets” may not reflect the everyday lived experiences of marginalized communities. This study applied a “citizen science” photovoice food asset mapping involving diverse participants in the City of Vancouver. In applying a citizen science photovoice approach, this study surfaced “hidden” contexts, food assets, and stories to integrate diverse community perspectives in food system planning.

Opportunity assessments have served as crucial tools for advocacy and policy-based action to address variability in spatially distributed urban opportunity. However, despite the vast body of theoretical and normative frameworks for discerning the effects of space, the current practices of opportunity mapping do not provide grounded assessments of differences that disproportionately affect the poor and racial minorities. We analyze seventeen opportunity assessments from the last twenty years and find issues of construct validity, implicit racial bias, and limited interpretability of outputs. More importantly, symptomatic outcomes of historical marginalization are conflated with problems of material access in poor and minority neighborhoods.

The 2006 eldercare facility ordinance of Los Angeles was designed to streamline permitting of senior housing development in the jurisdiction. Using California State Department of Social Services residential care and census place data, this study compares the pre and post effect of the ordinance on the number of large residential care facilities developed in Los Angeles with a comparison group using synthetic control analysis. In posttreatment, Los Angeles shows up to 33 percent more facilities per ten thousand older adults per year more than the synthetic control, underscoring the importance of such ordinances in increasing senior housing development in Los Angeles.

This paper investigates the potential of human development theory to provide alternatives to long-standing practical and conceptual problems in traditional economic development. We show that the capabilities approach developed by Sen and Nussbaum provides new solutions to four long-standing problems that define economic development activities focused on industrial recruitment and highly skilled professionals: (1) competition for scarce material resources, (2) connection to other planning specializations, (3) cities’ limited control over economies, and (4) coordinating the unmanageable networks that oversee plans. We demonstrate that these benefits are actual, rather than aspirational, by documenting the growth and diffusion of three types of urban economic policies that enact human development ideas: employment standards, reduced-cost education, and universal public programs

Communities create a variety of plans that collectively shape future development patterns. Methodological approaches to analyze multiple plans and their relationships have been underdeveloped. We compare four complementary methodological approaches to study the relationships between plans: (1) cross-referencing, (2) plan quality evaluation, (3) plan integration for resilience scorecard, and (4) social network analysis. We apply each approach to Boston’s network of plans to understand how the city’s plans together address current and future flooding. We find relatively strong integration of plans in Boston. When combined, these four approaches provide a more comprehensive framework for understanding networks of plans.

Everyday urbanism, a bottom-up planning approach, exemplifies the discourse in current planning practice through the lens of critical urbanism. This study uses morphological mapping, observation, and open- and closed-ended questionnaire responses to identify factors that facilitate everyday urbanism in a neighborhood in Abu Dhabi and offer an action plan for putting everyday urbanism into practice. Findings indicate that everyday urbanism is facilitated by both formal planning and bottom-up interventions. Planning education and practice should teach, train, and encourage people-centered planning in a context-sensitive way that adapts to the social and cultural needs of the community.

The concept of location efficiency is used in academic and gray literature relating to urban form, household location, and associated transportation costs. This paper analyzes the history of this usage of location efficiency and how it evolved into divergent constructs; it then defines three concepts distinguished by scale—household, neighborhood, and municipal location efficiency. These related yet distinct concepts provide clarity use of the term in existing literature and provide a conceptual framework for those looking to employ the concept of location efficiency at every level of research and analysis in academia, applied planning, and municipal policy.

We surveyed transportation students and the U.S. public to explore consensus and divergence in policy preferences. We find considerable agreement among planning students, which may be a strength—it is easier to pursue shared goals—or a weakness—too much consensus can lead to echo chambers and disconnection. Engineering students and the public shared some planner-preferred views (like expanding transit) but disagreed with planning students about the role of transportation and appropriate policy tools, especially road widening. Our results suggest that diverging policy preferences are, at least in part, a reflection of planning’s signature pedagogy.

Using interview data with civic environmental stewardship groups in New York City (n = 26), we identify strategies through which civic stewards engage in transboundary environmental governance and urban climate adaptation planning. Our findings articulate the diverse ways that civic stewards engage with planning in urban socio-ecological systems, as they (1) shape physical spaces, (2) broker partnerships, (3) disrupt the status quo, (4) build civic capacity, and (5) envision new futures. We contribute to the literature by embedding civic stewardship within urban planning discourse, suggesting partnerships between civic stewards and government planners that facilitate the co-production of innovative urban climate governance efforts.

This research examines the impact of light rail stations on housing market by analyzing the 1993–2013 single-family home sale transactions in the City of Los Angeles, California. The study period was divided into seven 3-year periods, and the area was divided into three different groups by income level: low-, middle-, and high-income. The result shows that the opening of light railways increased property values in general. It also revealed the differentiated impacts by neighborhood income levels.

This paper examines the shift to remote participation in planning board hearings during the outbreak of COVID-19. Using the results of an exploratory survey among 182 planners, public officials, and stakeholders, we explore perceptions about this transition, compare online and face-to-face engagements, and discuss the benefits and pitfalls of video-conference meetings. The findings indicate that video conferencing in planning merits future use, yet it also highlights key limitations of virtual meetings. Regardless of the findings here, the long-term effects of video conferencing and online decision-making remain to be seen.

Planning scholars have identified economic, safety, and social benefits of converting one-way streets to two-way. Less is known about how conversions could impact vehicular distances traveled—of growing relevance in an era of fleet automation, electrification, and ride-hailing. We simulate such a conversion in San Francisco, California. We find that its current street network’s average intra-city trip is ~1.7 percent longer than it would be with all two-way streets, corresponding to 27 million kilometers of annual surplus travel. As transportation technologies evolve, planners must consider different facets of network efficiency to align local policy and street design with sustainability and other societal goals.

The set of place-based strategies known as placemaking and creative placemaking has become ubiquitously used by local leaders to revitalize downtowns and neighborhoods. The ultimate goal of placemaking is to create thriving, active places that people want to visit and live and work in, without pricing out current residents or making them feel unwelcome, and without losing the individuality of the place. In this study of sixty-four municipal arts and cultural plans, we find that plans show an appreciation for the first part of that goal but an incomplete awareness of what it would take to achieve the second part.

Planners and researchers need instruments for assessing the construction of future images. We propose an argumentative model for assessing instrumental and constitutional images in plans, supported by three master criteria—consistency, coherence, and plausibility—that encompass alternative argumentation strategies and image-building processes. We applied it to an assessment of planning documents in the metropolitan area of Granada, identifying main argumentation backgrounds (metropolitan/urban reforms, transport corridor design, and integration) and fields (demand- and capacity-based) in the formation of the image of Light Rail Transit as an integrated metropolitan system and as urban access system.

The World Health Organization (WHO) calls dementia the leading cause of dependency and disability among older adults. People living with dementia (PLWD) are more likely to reside in community, and often within suburban areas. This research examines mobility barriers and supports for PLWD within suburban neighborhoods in Waterloo, Canada. We conducted thirteen participatory go-along interviews with seven PLWD, identifying supports/barriers relating to land-use and transportation, urban design, and wayfinding. While this research highlighted mobility barriers for participants, suburban neighborhoods were also perceived as enabling environments, highlighting the need for a more nuanced understanding of life in suburban settings.

The eviction crisis has attracted significant scholarly attention, but less is known about the links between evictions and policies that promote or impede housing supply. This research uses data from a large time-series, cross-sectional sample of U.S. counties to address this research gap. The results from several linear regression models suggest that restrictive land use regulations increase eviction filing rates, whereas elastic housing supply and inclusionary zoning reduce eviction filing rates. Controls for housing supply constraints also reduce the effect of median rents on eviction filings. Pro-renter state landlord–tenant laws have no effect on eviction filing rates.

This study aims to provide insights in the relation between neighborhood walkability and place attachment and the mediating role of (satisfaction with) social interaction. Both objective and perceived walkability are tested. To analyze these relations, two structural equation models are estimated on data collected among 251 residents of different neighborhoods across the Netherlands. The results show that perceived neighborhood walkability is a stronger predictor of place attachment than objective walkability. Perceived walkability has both a positive direct effect on place attachment and an indirect effect, via neighborhood-based social interaction. Objective walkability only has a positive direct effect on place attachment.

This study is the first to examine detailed faculty demographics and impacts of elite hiring networks in the planning academy. Institutional prestige significantly shapes faculty placements. Nearly half of planning faculty graduated from Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Cornell, and University of North Carolina (UNC)-Chapel Hill. Faculty are predominantly hired in similar or lower ranking programs with little upward mobility, after accounting for demographics and program factors. While race and gender did not have a significant relationship to placements, the findings demonstrate how status-based inequities are perpetuated through elite programs and constrain faculty representation.

This study uses data from a comprehensive travel survey in Mexico City to explore the relationship between the jobs-housing ratio and self-contained commute at the TAZ (Traffic Analysis Zone) level. A hierarchical clustering approach identified job-rich and housing-rich areas. Gravity regression models explored the determinants of work trips to job-rich and from housing-rich communities separately. Results indicate jobs-housing ratio had a modest positive association with locally employed residents but not with self-containment. Housing prices in the workplace were highly positively associated with work trips, and therefore it is suggested as a barrier to the co-location process.

Contrasting cases in Toronto, New York, and Vancouver, we identify benefits and drawbacks associated with the publicly owned variety of community land trust, which we call a public land trust (PLT). Public ownership can obviate the need to finance a land sale, and enable sustained access to ongoing technical assistance and professional expertise, thereby reducing burdens on community capacity. While a degree of community control can also be maintained with public ownership, it may nonetheless be at greater risk when political winds change. In as much as PLTs secure affordable tenure and community control, they may warrant greater policy/planning consideration.

More than 500,000 people experience homelessness in the United States, and many turn to transit vehicles, stops, and stations for shelter. We present findings from a survey of 115 U.S. and Canadian transit operators that inquired about homelessness on transit systems. We find that homelessness is broadly present, though more concentrated on central hotspots, and worsened during the pandemic. In response, transit agencies often initiate a combination of punitive and outreach strategies. Based on our findings, we argue for better data collection, establishment of policies and protocols, engagement in outreach strategies, and partnering with service providers.

Buyouts mitigate the impacts of flood hazards and climate change. Previous research finds buyouts are concentrated in socially vulnerable areas nationally, and in the Houston area, buyouts have contributed to white flight to the suburbs. The effect of buyouts on equity in urban development is understudied. Existing literature overlooks the fact that buyouts are used strategically and may only nominally be a response to risk. This paper examines buyout inequity in the Houston area by mapping the geographical distribution of buyouts against demographic data and by developing a buyout displacement index to reveal the impact of buyouts in high-risk watersheds.

Using Singapore as an example, we find that the opening of new rail transit lines can boost retail property values in areas not only along the new lines (local effect) but also along the existing lines (network effect) due to the increase in network size. We also show the local effect of a new rail line changes over time at different development stages. Ignoring the time-varying local effect and the network effect could lead to biased estimates of the value-added of rail transit and misguide policy formation in rail transit investment, land value capture, and transit-oriented development.

Growth may have a logic of its own that results in the unplanned appearance of development at the urban fringe. We summarize the challenges of planning for growth at the urban periphery in terms of the uncertainty, irreversibility, interrelatedness, and indivisibilities surrounding development decisions. Drawing on original research, we illustrate the growing pains of metropolitan Melbourne. We underline the challenges to public planning’s spatial logic of placemaking and sequencing but also the innovation apparent in the face of contemporary growth of new speed and spatial extent.

This research addresses how the COVID-19 pandemic affected neighborhood engagement by exploring the use of streets, sidewalks, and driveways as sociable spaces for informal and uncoordinated creative expression. We assessed practices occurring in three diverse City of Phoenix neighborhoods before and during the pandemic through visual analysis. We show that residents used these spaces in novel and more intensive ways during the pandemic, including for self-care and care of others, celebrations, children’s play, and property-spanning games and communication. These findings reveal the importance of these interstitial spaces in helping neighbors to cope and connect during societal disruptions.

Is the compact city more likely to materialize if development is guided by the “invisible hand” of the market or the government’s “iron fist”? This article explores this question in the context of Shiraz, a medium-sized, medium-density city in south-central Iran. Through a series of longitudinal analyses, we examine the roles of the market and planning along thirty years, from the mid-1980s through the mid-2010s. The study reveals that since the mid-2000s, market forces have superseded government planning in guiding urban development in Shiraz. The government has reduced its interventions in the market: it no longer issues public land for housing development. Combined with natural constraints and sociodemographic pressures, this new planning/market balance has produced a denser and more compact city than ever before. Shiraz has been transformed from a city of villas, nightingales, and gardens into one dominated by mid- and high-rise apartment towers. The direction and intensity of development have not followed the recommendations of local planners and plans. Rather, they have been driven primarily by developers and residents. Regardless, density and compactness are generally positive—as long as housing and infrastructure quality are sustained, and residents have good access to parks, open spaces, and natural sunlight.

We introduced a research framework for the economic impact assessment of smart city investment using a computable general equilibrium model. Smart Columbus, the first smart city initiative funded by the U.S. federal government to improve urban mobility in central Ohio, was adopted as a case study. The analysis shows that smart city investment has varying effects on the local economy during the construction and operational phases. In addition, the results of distributional impacts on household income suggest that social equity should be given more attention in future planning and decision-making on smart city development, both in Columbus and beyond.

Nonprofits are key in local community development and often work in tandem with or against municipal governments in neighborhood planning. We focus on a unique case of a local government that largely contracts neighborhood planning processes to a nonprofit in Oklahoma City. Using thirty-nine interviews with municipal staff, nonprofit employees, and stakeholders, we examine the benefits and consequences of this contracting relationship on participatory processes. The findings reveal that the nonprofit excels at grassroots resident engagement but also faces constraints due to contract benchmarks. The findings offer implications on co-creating subcontractor goals and disparate neighborhood planning service outcomes.

Recent research has documented the prevalence of informal housing across urban and suburban contexts in the United States. While there have been some efforts to theorize across cases, there has been little to no work to connect theory to on-the-ground occurrences to offer clear lessons for planners. This article begins to fill this gap. Analyzing across existing research, we create a typology of informal housing in the United States: infill, subdivision, repurposing of private property, and occupation of public space. Then, we identify five common features that drive their production, use, and conditions. Finally, we offer important takeaways for planners and practitioners.