Journal of Planning Education and Research

What is the connection among the moral, social, and physical aspects of the community? To explore this question, this article reviews three approaches: communitarianism, social capital, and new urbanism and smart growth. They are linked by a conceptual mapping along two dimensions: geographical scale (local to global) and strength of community (strong to weak). The approaches meld at local and regional geographical scales. Since the strong community in all three is susceptible to community determinism, I privilege the weak community. The approaches put a renewed emphasis on public and civic spaces, which are moral, social, and physical spaces for the weak community.

This article analyzes the evolution of built landscapes in six U.S. metropolitan regions using historic maps, aerial photographs, and GIS software. The analysis identifies seven main historic patterns of urban form and nine types created in the 1980-2005 period. This recent period was characterized by a proliferation and fragmentation of built landscape types, rapid spatial expansion, and falling densities. These trends raise the question of whether the public sector should more proactively shape urban form. Rural sprawl accounts for much of the land now being urbanized, representing a new planning challenge. The Portland Urban Growth Boundary is found to be effective at limiting this type of development. The New Urbanist neighborhood form is still extremely rare.

Projections of future populations are integral to many planning applications, yet are often poorly understood. This analysis focuses on the implications of the choices planners make when they construct projections. Specifically, it examines the impact of length of base period, analyzes the error structure of projection techniques for counties in the aggregate and by size and growth rates, investigates the role of averaging, and compares the performance of trend extrapolation and cohort—component methods. The article concludes by discussing forecast complexity, data quality, the role of assumptions, and other considerations of forecasting in a planning context.

Regional planning agencies often project future income at the neighborhood level to determine future needs for transportation, jobs, social services, and amenities. Despite a decade of methodological advances regarding the importance of spatial autocorrelation in altering or reducing the reliability of regression estimates, few forecasters have tried to include such spatial relationships in their neighborhood-level projections. Part of the reason is that controlling for spatial autocorrelation is complex and can require expensive software. The authors use a free and user-friendly software package to estimate spatial effects in forecasting and then show how to develop and utilize proxy variables that can mitigate such autocorrelation. They illustrate how the failure to include such controls in Southern California could lead to overestimates of income in poor areas and hence a tendency to underserve needy areas.

Visualization tools such as maps, models, and computer images are used increasingly as means of involving people more effectively. We examine how a visualization tool in the form of a map-based model may shape the knowledge local people bring to the planning table. The analysis was guided by the concept of mediated action as it has been developed in sociocultural theory. We found that local knowledge was conditioned by a complexity of factors, including the dynamic of actions that develop around the tool and the way of looking imposed by map-based representation. The suggestion being made is that visualization tools, although bringing people closer to the planning process, also disconnect them from their local knowledge base.

Research documenting the social and organizational benefits of collaborative planning has afforded collaborative planning an increasingly broader role in environmental policy and management. However, the bias toward evaluating the process and its social outcomes has resulted in a gap in knowledge of the impact collaborative environmental planning and management has on changing environmental conditions. This article attempts to reduce this gap by presenting a new performance evaluation framework that assesses collaborative environmental planning outputs and outcomes: both social and environmental. The case study of the Habitat Workgroup of the New York—New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program highlights the utility of this evaluation framework in assessing the quality of key outputs; the presence of outcomes (i.e., changes in social and environmental conditions); and observed relationships between process, outputs, and outcomes.

Given the emerging focus on improving food environments and food systems through planning, this article investigates racial disparities in neighborhood food environments. An empirical case of Erie County, New York tests the hypothesis that people belonging to different racial groups have access to different neighborhood food destinations. Using multiple methods—Gini coefficients and Poisson regression—we show that contrary to studies elsewhere in the country there are no food deserts in Erie County. However, like other studies, we find an absence of supermarkets in neighborhoods of color when compared to white neighborhoods. Nonetheless, our study reveals an extensive network of small grocery stores in neighborhoods of color. Rather than soliciting supermarkets, supporting small, high-quality grocery stores may be a more efficient strategy for ensuring access to healthful foods in minority neighborhoods.

Macroeconomic transformations of the late 1990s resulted in a new economy full of employment opportunities and financial rewards leading many to assume that race was less significant and anyone with adequate skills and knowledge could prosper. This research uses interviews with new economy employees in the San Francisco region to understand why during the economic boom period, rewards between highly qualified blacks and whites remained differentiated particularly in the most promising economic sectors. I argue that structural economic changes have resulted in new rules for achievement that intersect with traditional pipeline barriers in a way that produces unequal outcomes for African Americans. This article highlights the importance of understanding the social implications of regional growth patterns.

During the past twenty years, two themes have emerged in higher education. One theme has been an increased attention to the service mission of universities, a matter of special importance to planning programs. The other has been an increased emphasis on accountability and performance assessment, an emphasis that has attracted much attention in ACSP in recent years. This article offers some starting points for grappling with the difficult task of assessing performance in the area of public service. The article reviews the history of these converging themes—nationally and within the planning academy—and draws upon the assessment literature to offer a framework and tool for conducting performance assessment of service activities at both the individual and program level.

What are some strategies for involving urban planning, social work, and public health faculty members in the civic renewal of the research university? At a time when citizens have “disengaged from democracy,” and universities have deemphasized their civic mission, this article examines ways in which these faculty members might join together and formulate strategies which complement their shared professional and public purposes on campus and in the community.