Weitzman Faculty at Planning History Conference

This story was reported by Riddhi Batra, a second-year candidate for the Master of City Planning.
 

The 19th edition of the National Conference of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) was held in person after a 3-year hiatus necessitated by COVID-19 at the City College of New York in Harlem, Manhattan. Running from October 20 -22, the conference included in-person presentations and tours, virtual panels, and hybrid sessions. Among those presenting the work were faculty and PhD students from the Weitzman School’s Department of City & Regional Planning.

SACRPH was founded in 1986 by a group of planners searching for ways to represent dialogues on urban histories. Among the founding members was Weitzman’s Eugénie Birch, Lawrence C. Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research and Education and graduate group chair in city and regional planning, who got together with a group of students during her graduate studies at Columbia University to initiate conversations on the way plans of cities past could guide the profession’s future. The national conference attracts urban scholars and practitioners and is held in a different US city every other year.

Francesca Russello Ammon, an associate professor in the Department of City & Regional Planning and the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation who directs Weitzman’s newest PhD concentration, on the History of the Built Environment, served as co-chair of the program committee. She pointed out three new aspects of the conference this year: organizing virtual sessions for the first time; meeting in a university as opposed to a historic hotel; and extending tours to full-day events, this year around northern Manhattan and southern areas of the Bronx.

The conference was kicked off by Paul Farber, senior research scholar at Weitzman’s Center for Public Art & Space and artistic director and co-founder of Monument Lab, whose keynote offered an introduction to monumental histories, the subject of his forthcoming book, After Permanence. Farber questioned ideas embedded in monuments—symbols that are less static than we realize—that can perpetuate systems of power and misrepresent history. He highlighted that the vast majority of American monuments are dedicated to white, male landowners with records of enslavement—imprints that the public has begun to dismantle in Richmond and other cities with statues dedicated to Confederate leaders.

Chris Quattro, a PhD in City and Regional Planning candidate and Fontaine Fellow, presented research tracing histories of zoning equity over the twentieth century. Quattro described how urban design and the built environment were influenced by zoning regulations, particularly how segregation and redlining during “urban renewal” fostered an exclusionary urban framework. On the subject of racial justice, Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning Akira Drake Rodriguez, who has written and researched extensively on race, space, and participatory planning, was a discussant at a panel on “Race, Housing, and New Deal Liberalism.” Participating scholars spoke about different forms of infrastructure that are required for different types of housing, the failure of plans to account for racial equity, and they addressed issues of technocratic production techniques that can tend to ignore local contexts, such as prefabricated housing technologies in Detroit.

The conference organizers made a special effort to include graduate and PhD students through receptions, mentoring sessions, and travel funds. Domenic Vitiello, Associate Professor of City Planning and Urban Studies, was among those mentoring younger scholars. “It’s a session that a group of urban and planning history journal editors organize at almost every urban and planning history conferences,” says Vitiello. “We explain how our journals operate, give tips on how to write and revise strong academic articles, as well as other advice on publishing and its relation to various stages of people’s academic careers."

For PhD students Michael Brinley and Charles Starks, the support and direction given by the conference proved helpful to hone arguments for their dissertations. Brinley commented on the opportunity to learn from international presenters on technocratic post-war politics, including a Finnish scholar who studied the impact of urban renewal on the workers’ district of Kallio, Helsinki. Starks, who has compared the development and conservation of historic Chinatowns in Singapore and Vancouver, presented on the changing perceptions of Chinatown in Vancouver through a multi-generational story of a Chinese Canadian family who built a sense of agency from small business entrepreneurship to real-estate development for affordable housing and cultural preservation.

A century ago, planners such as Lewis Mumford, Alexander Bing, and Clarence Stein, among others, began to look at planning beyond the boundaries of cities in the vein of Patrick Geddes’ social and environmental frameworks for urban livelihoods, giving birth to garden communities where housing was clustered around cul-de-sacs with winding pedestrian paths and hierarchal street systems, such as Radburn, New Jersey. They founded the Regional Planning Association of America, which was the subject of a centennial reflection chaired by Birch, who spoke of the importance of regional planning for today’s urban conglomerations. 

SACRPH is known for its intentional facilitation of idea sharing from both academia and practice. The reflection of Americans’ diverse histories in the built environment, in the form of monuments among others, is pertinent to both spheres. In his plenary talk, Farber used the example of Philadelphia’s “President’s House,” a historic site on Independence Mall that acknowledges the enslaved peoples in George Washington’s household, to urge the audience to “engage in a holistic reckoning with monumental erasures and lies and move toward a monument landscape that acknowledges a fuller history of this country.”