Department of City and Regional Planning

The Department of City and Regional Planning is more than fifty years old, and among its faculty are researchers of international repute. They are authors of landmark monographs, journal articles and working papers focused on several subfields especially community and economic development, transportation, environmental policy and growth management, and urban design and development.

 

 

 

Stuart Weitzman School of Design

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  • Publication
    Land Preservation in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania: Strategy, Funding, and Cooperation are Key
    (2005-12-02) Daniels, Thomas L.
    Land use planning in America has traditionally meant "planning for development." Over the past 25 years, hundreds of communities and several states have recognized the need to preserve land for farming, forestry, watershed protection, wildlife habitat, recreation areas, or open space. A common problem is that public planners have not clearly delineated certain lands for preservation. Meanwhile, non-profit organizations have not fully perceived themselves as land use planning agencies (Wright and Czerniak 2000); and have often pursued a piecemeal and reactive preservation strategy in response to weak local zoning and the swift pace of development (McQueen and McMahon 2003). Thus, in most places in America, including New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, privately owned open land seems to be at once for sale for development and available for preservation. The competition to preserve or develop land causes considerable friction between developers and land preservationists. Meanwhile, governments have a schizophrenic relationship to land: they want to see it developed so the tax base will increase and the economy will grow, yet they are also active in preserving land.
  • Publication
    Preserving Large Farming Landscapes: The Case of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
    (2017-05-01) Daniels, Thomas L.; Payne-Riley, Lauren
    Preserving large farming landscapes is one of the main goals of farmland preservation programs. Other goals include protecting highly productive soils, maintaining and enhancing the local farming economy, and promoting locally produced fresh food. Farmland preservation programs take time, however, because of the hefty funding requirements and the detailed process of preserving farmland through the acquisition of conservation easements by purchase or donation. The standard measures of dollars spent and farmland acres preserved do not give an accurate picture of the spatial outcomes of preservation and preservation effectiveness. Three other measures better reflect the spatial effectiveness of farmland preservation: acreage and percentage of preserved farm parcels located in agricultural zones, number and acreage of preserved farm parcels in large contiguous blocks, and number and acreage of preserved farm parcels along growth boundaries. Scattered preserved farms and preserved farms not located in agricultural zones are likely to face more nonfarm development nearby as well as problems with non- farm neighbors. The farmland preservation effort in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, provides an important case study of the pattern of farmland preservation over time. Other counties and land trusts can employ geographic information systems (GIS) methods in this study to monitor and evalu- ate the progress of their farmland preservation efforts.
  • Publication
    Plights of a Pandemic: The Disconnect Between Migration, Policy, and Practice in Kuwait
    (2021-05-01) Jafar, Nour
    Labor laws within the State of Kuwait are in need of reform. The country’s labor and residency policies create legal loopholes for exploitation, abuse, and human trafficking. The COVID-19 pandemic worsened living conditions for low-income migrant communities, exacerbating these and related problems. Lockdowns forced migrants to stay at home for long periods of time with no income, food shortages, constant threats of eviction from landlords, and higher infection rates. This research uses semi-structured interviews and policy analysis to trace how labor and residency policies within Kuwait impact migrant communities, particularly in the context of the pandemic. Interviews are conducted with experts from different governmental agencies, while policy examination highlights what discrepancies exist. What effects have policies and governance in Kuwait had on human rights relating to workforce development within migrant communities during the covid 19 pandemic? How does the kafala system function to provide basic social services to migrant workers? How do Kuwait’s policies influence the actions of labor brokers? How do labor policies function between the private and public sector? What social services has the government introduced to protect the migrant community during the pandemic? This paper identifies the flaws of labor policies that have allowed for visa trafficking and exploitation to occur, such as the lack of protection of private sector workers, as well as corruption leading to senior officials within different governmental entities engaging as visa traffickers.
  • Publication
    The Unsheltered Woman: Definition and Needs
    (1985) Birch, Eugenie L.
    One-third of the nation has a housing problem. Twenty-three millions households are ill-housed. They are a diverse group - the elderly, families with children and single people of all races. Most significantly, they tend to be women. More than 40 percent of the group - or 10 million - are female householders. Females head about 27 percent of all American households today; yet, they are disproportionately represented among those experiencing housing problems. In fact, numerically, they are the largest subgroup of the poorly sheltered population.
  • Publication
    Conflicts of Interest in the Structure of REITs
    (1996-06-01) Sagalyn, Lynne B
    When the surge of equity REIT initial public offerings (IPOs) came to market in 1993 and 1994, the quality as well as an obvious increase in the quantity of newly securitized real estate (approximately $15.1 billion in the first two years of this bull market), defined a new REIT marketplace. By the end of 1995, the implied market capitalization of equity REITs had reached $59 billion, fourfold its size in 1992, and these real estate companies controlled approximately $83 billion in real estate.
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    The High Cost of Free Highways
    (2007-01-01) Weinberger, Rachel
    It is widely but not universally held that more roads mean more traffic. In spite of this evidence we are continually seduced by the notion that we can zone for low density to preclude traffic from occurring, that we can move far away from traffic that we can avoid it, and/or that we can build our way out of traffic. This low density race to the edge results in the ill-defined but expensive condition of sprawl. In a counter vein, New Urbanists, Advocates of Transit Oriented Development (TOD), and smart growth advocates have embraced the notion that traffic has always been with us and is here to stay, but we can make the most of our activity spaces by concentrating development, arresting the creation of new roads, and investing wisely in high capacity transportation systems.
  • Publication
    Data-Based Urban Heritage Policy Assessment: Evaluating Tel Aviv’s Preservation Plan
    (2021-05-01) Feiglin, Ilil
    Urban heritage policies are rarely assessed on a regular or continuous basis. Formal indicator guidelines and scholarly work address some possible evaluation methods for urban heritage policies, but a gap exists between the generalized work and limited on-site implementation. Spatial and non-spatial datasets should contribute to our understanding and refinement of such policies. Yet, in practice, data and the proper assessment mechanisms are often lacking. This research presents Tel Aviv’s 2650b preservation plan as a case study to explore possible assessment methods of policy effectiveness. Tel Aviv is the second-largest city in Israel. In 2003 UNESCO declared the White City of Tel Aviv, the center-city area, a World Heritage Site (WHS). UNESCO based the designation on an outstanding synthesis of the Modern architecture movement and an outstanding example of new town planning of the 20th century. Municipal plan 2650b was enacted in 2008 and is linked to the WHS, protecting modern architecture and mainly focusing on the center-city area. The Plan classifies properties into two preservation levels and three architectural styles. The city’s online building archive facilitates analysis and evaluation of plan 2650b. The Plan has been in place for over a decade, during which no data-driven comprehensive evaluation or monitoring processes occurred. Relying upon Kitchin’s definition of effectiveness, in the context of urban indicators, as “whether goals and objectives are being met – doing the right things,” this research asks: what factors correlate with the effectiveness of Tel Aviv’s preservation plan? Three sub-questions lead the research: Are the Plan’s goals being met? Are they being met in the same way throughout the Plan area? And, how, if at all, are pre-existing characteristics of the properties addressed by the Plan? The study assesses the outlined goals and presents a roadmap for constructing indicators and spatial analysis for a specific policy. The study approach uses an author-created property-level database to assess proposed customized indicators and run spatial analysis. It finds that the prevalence of preservation varies across space, among architectural types, and between the two preservation-restriction levels. In particular, the Plan is relatively less effective at preserving Modernist buildings. These findings reveal the inconsistency of the Plan at protecting the Modernist architecture at the core of the global designation. The results stress the need for data collection, setting numeric objectives, monitoring plan outcomes, and potential future research to realign incentives with preservation goals.
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    Building in Good Jobs: Linking Workforce Development with Real Estate-Led Economic Development
    (2006-12-01) Wolf-Powers, Laura; Reiss, Jeremy; Stix, Margaret
    Municipal governments in the U.S. are increasingly devoting public resources to the redevelopment of abandoned, contaminated or underutilized land. Private sector appetite for new development opportunities and public sector creativity have combined to create "building booms" in a number of central cities that only a few decades ago were in seemingly irreversible decline. In the midst of this government-supported revitalization, however, both working poverty and chronic unemployment in central cities remain disturbingly high. Without explicit efforts to link property redevelopment with efforts to put un- or underemployed people to work at family-supporting wages, the negative impacts of growth (displacement, housing cost appreciation) often affect the historically disadvantaged far more profoundly than its positive impacts do.