Journal of Planning Education and Research

If planning is to matter for urban development and policy, it is not sufficient for plans to be implemented. Plans and planning must also have a causal role—they must lead to outcomes that would not be realized otherwise. In case studies of municipal climate action planning in California, I find little evidence for any causal impacts. Instead, cities are using climate plans to codify policies that were likely to happen anyway. The results call for a more nuanced view of when it makes sense to plan, what types of plans are most useful, and how to evaluate a plan’s effects.

The information and communication technology (or ICT) revolution adds new possibilities for providing information about places and communities that may be used in planning processes. In this article we introduce the practice of flânerie in the physical and virtual space as a method to produce representative images of contemporary social life. We suggest how planning may be instrumental in shaping a public good alternative in this emerging hybrid social space, where the practice of flânerie can stimulate engagement in deliberative planning practices. Finally, we discuss some of the trade-offs and design choices for eliciting information from citizens about their localities to understand how future development may lead to qualitative changes in community life.

This article explores the concept of “public commons” and its relationship with travel decisions under a unique setting: street cleaning in the New York City area. Using a natural experimental design, it investigates the impact of street cleaning on car usage for five hundred randomly selected households. Street cleaning encourages car usage for households without off-street parking and discourages car usage for households with off-street parking. The net effect is an increase of vehicle miles traveled by 7.1 percent, at least 27 percent of which is not a mere redistribution from non-street-cleaning days.

Greater safety is a primary benefit garnered by black public housing residents participating in housing mobility programs. Whether similar outcomes are arising from the recent exurbanization of nonsubsidized families is unclear. Using the migration of 130,000 African Americans into the Los Angeles exurbs as a case study, this research combines evidence from mover interviews and crime and census data to show that the region has enabled families’ safety over time—a finding that calls for planners’ consideration of racial equity in responding to urban sprawl.

Urban design plans offer a window into the values of the urban design profession, but we have little knowledge of how they have changed over time, and the implications for design practice. The study provides a critical evaluation of the vision, methods, and content of urban design plans in large North American cities and a comparison with earlier generations of plans. Contemporary plans display fewer types of methods, less analytical rigor, and less emphasis on participatory practices than previous generations of plans. They reveal a greater focus on sustainability, but less concern about diversity, equity, and economic development.

This study uses negative binomial regression models to understand how urban form may affect total and KSI (killed or seriously injured) crashes involving drivers and pedestrians aged seventy-five and older. Intersections, strip commercial establishments, big box stores, and arterial thoroughfares were associated with increases in crashes involving older motorists, while big box stores and arterials increased crashes for older pedestrians. Networks of lower-speed streets were associated with fewer crashes involving older motorists and pedestrians. This study concludes by detailing community design considerations that may enhance the safety of older motorists and pedestrians

Planning laws, planning governance systems, and even planning curricula in Anglophone Sub-Saharan Africa were strongly shaped by the colonial history of the subcontinent, and much of this imprint remains today. Yet demands on planners and planning systems have changed dramatically as African cities battle to cope with rapid growth, inequality, informality and environmental degradation. This article considers the issue of changing planning education in this region. It documents the efforts of the Association of African Planning Schools to forge a program of action on necessary new directions and themes for planning education in a context where adherence to older approaches remains strong.

Mitigation measures, especially municipal energy infrastructure transformation, have been the focus of Sweden’s climate change responses. Recently, adaptation measures have grown in priority and planners are challenged to integrate mitigation and adaptation. In our study, we observe how synergies and conflicts in adaptation, mitigation, and other social and economic dimensions of spatial planning are grappled with in municipalities. We draw primarily from interviews with municipal planners and regional agencies as well as a review of policy documents. Our conclusion is that municipalities could be assisted in their climate change planning by stronger regional and national involvement.