Tagged: Urban Planning

Selected Media

Did the Comprehensive Community Initiatives of the 1990s, early 2000s Bring About Change?

By Meir Rinde

Read the full article from Shelterforce here.

“While their methods and specific goals varied, the CCIs all sought to bring focused resources and the lessons of past revitalization initiatives to poor, urban neighborhoods in order to effect broad change at the individual, neighborhood, and systems levels. They aimed to help local groups organize their communities, develop leaders, improve the physical infrastructure, boost their economies, enhance access to human services, and strengthen social bonds.”

Selected Media

How Zoning Shapes our Lives

by Maya Brennan, Emily Peiffer, and Kimberly Burrowes

Read the full article from Housing Matters here.

“In the early 20th century, many communities explicitly used zoning ordinances to racially segregate neighborhoods. By the late 20th century, civil rights legislation outlawed overt housing discrimination. But those explicit racial barriers were quickly replaced by subtler methods. Even today, exclusionary zoning policies that restrict lower-cost or higher-density housing options—such as requirements for large minimum lot sizes and prohibitions of multifamily housing—limit racial and economic diversity and raise housing costs.”

Selected Media

The Just City Essays

Story by Toni Griffin, Ariella Cohen, and David Maddox

Read the essays on NextCity.org here.

“Over the past decade, there have been numerous conversations about the “livable city,” the “green city,” the “sustainable city” and, most recently, the “resilient city.” At the same time, today’s headlines—from Ferguson to Baltimore, Paris to Johannesburg—resound with the need for frank dialogue about the structures and processes that affect the quality of life and livelihoods of urban residents. Issues of equity, inclusion, race, participation, access and ownership remain unresolved in many communities around the world, even as we begin to address the challenges of affordability, climate change adaptation and resilience. The persistence of injustice in the world’s cities—dramatic inequality, unequal environmental burdens and risks, and uneven access to opportunity—demands a continued and reinvigorated search for ideas and solutions.”

Selected Media

Whose Streets? Black Streets

By Amina Yasin

Read the full article from *The Tyee, here.

“Today, Black people across North America are reclaiming their cities with calls of ‘Whose Streets,’ ‘George Floyd’ and, in Toronto, ‘Justice for Regis’ and ‘No justice, no peace.’ Urban planners need to interrogate whether the profession has value if it fails to protect the public interest by not analyzing the historic and current manifestations of racism, specifically anti-Black racism, that pervades it.”

Selected Media

Urban Planning and the Building of a New Society

By Henry Louis Taylor Jr.

“[Our] world was a deeply flawed one characterized by racism, classism, misogyny, homophobia, hyper-privatization and the maldistribution of wealth, needless poverty, unnecessary hardship, ghetto-slums, mass incarceration, premature death and injustice. The type of cities, suburbs and economy built for inhabitation played a critical role in shaping the differential existence that produce exclusivity, inequity, inequality and injustice among the people.”

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