JPER, Volume 17, Number 1, Fall 1997

Report from the Editors

The High Cost of Free Parking

Donald C. Shoup

Abstract

Urban planners typically set minimum parking requirements to meet the peak demand for parking at each land use, without considering either the price motorists pay for parking or the cost of providing the required parking spaces. By reducing the market price of parking, minimum parking requirements provide subsidies that inflate parking demand, and this inflated demand is then used to set minimum parking requirements. When considered as an impact fee, minimum parking requirements can increase development costs by more than 10 times the impact fees for all other public purposes combined. Eliminating minimum parking requirements would reduce the cost of urban development, improve urban design, reduce automobile dependency, and restrain urban sprawl.

Teaching Practice

Howell S. Baum

Abstract

Planning is a way of acting. People learn to plan by practicing planning. Yet university planning programs give predominant attention to classroom activity. A cultural division between "academic" and "practice" faculty and classes gives higher status and greater influence to academic courses emphasizing research and analysis. Thus university programs tacitly teach that planning is the same as research. Despite rhetoric about "integrating academics and practice," programs give little attention to that challenge. Reforming planning education to teach students to plan requires a change in the culture of planning programs that dissolves differences between "academic" and "practice" to focus on questions of practice.

A Ladder of Empowerment

Elizabeth M. Rocha

Abstract

Empowerment is often envisioned as a solution to poverty acceptable to both the political right and left. Yet the question that is rarely asked or answered is, What is empowerment? While the empowerment literature provides a rich array of techniques and goals through which individuals and groups seek to alter their circumstances, it is contradictory in assumptions and emphases and provides little coherence or structure with which to make informed decisions. This paper develops a typology, a ladder of empowerment, based on existing empowerment literature, so that planners and others may gain a clearer understanding of empowerment and its varied potential.

Instruction

Planning Support Systems: A New Perspective on Computer-Aided Planning

Richard E. Klosterman

Abstract

This article examines the changing views of planning and computer-based information that provide the foundations for a new perspective on computer-assisted planning. It begins by tracing the evolving view of planning as applied science in the 1960s, as politics in the 1970s, and then as communication in the 1980s. It then reviews the evolving concern of the information sciences with data in the 1960s, information in the 1970s, and knowledge in the 1980s. It concludes by suggesting that the increasingly popular topic of planning support systems (PSS) can be seen as continuing these trends to a include broader concern with intelligence and collective design.

Common Ground for Integrating Planning Theory and GIS Topics

Ann-Margaret Esnard and E. Bruce MacDougall

Abstract

The basic premise of this article is that planning theory and geographic information systems (GIS) course topics should be integrated in the planning curriculum. The increased use of GIS technology for informing planning and public policy decision making is discussed in the first section, followed by a summary of related technical and theoretical disparities. The concept of links is then introduced and used in the final section to demonstrate the contexts in which common themes can be identified for integrating planning norms (ethics, values, communicative rationality, planning process, and context) and GIS methods (data creation, analysis, and presentation).

HyperSpace: Communicating Ideas about the Quality of Urban Spaces

R. Varkki George

Abstract

Environmental designers must be spatially literate: They must be proficient in reading and interpreting spaces and articulating ideas about the quality of the experience of spaces. To promote spatial literacy among environmental designers, we need an effective medium for describing the experience of real-world spaces and for communicating ideas about such spatial experiences. HyperSpace, a computer-based tool, could function as such a medium. In this article, I first discuss the difficulties of communicating ideas about spaces and specify characteristics of an effective medium for communicating spatial ideas. Then, I describe HyperSpace: how it is used and how a simulation is created. After describing and evaluating its use in the classroom, I conclude with a discussion of other uses of HyperSpace in design and planning education and how it cannot be a completely effective medium for describing spaces.

Comment

Habitat II and the Globalization of Ideas