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News from the Schools: May-June 2002

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University of New Orleans

Alan F.J. Artibise has been named Dean of the College of Urban and Public Affairs at University of New Orleans after an extensive three-year search. Dr. Artibise comes to New Orleans from the University of Missouri - St. Louis (UMSL) where he served as the Executive Director of the Public Policy Research Center and the E. Des Lee Endowed Professor of Community Collaboration and Public Policy. Previously he served as Professor of Planning and Director of the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia. He has taught history and urban studies at the Universities of Manitoba, Winnipeg and Victoria, and served as Director of the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg from 1983-1988. Dr. Artibise also managed a successful consulting firm - the Cascadia Planning Group - that specialized in urban and regional planning; transportation planning and public policy; governance issues; community visioning, planning, and implementation; corporate and community development and revitalization; and all aspects of tourism and resort planning and development. He has served as President of the International Council for Canadian Studies; Chair of the National Capital Commission Committee on Marketing and Programming; Vice-President of the Pacific Rim Council on Urban Development; and President of the Social Science Federation of Canada, the Canadian Regional Science Association, and Lambda Alpha International (Vancouver Chapter). He is past-President of the Metropolitan St. Louis section of the American Planning Association and served as Vice-President-Central of Lambda Alpha International. Dr. Artibise was a member of the Canadian Delectation to the Group on Urban Affairs, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (Paris). He assumes his role as Dean in June 2002.

CUPA Professor Nick Spitzer will be the feature of a Nightline story. Producers from Nightline have been trailing the folklorist/anthropologist/radio host for weeks as he produces his weekly public radio show American Routes to document his work with traditional musicians and artists. The 30-minute piece was filmed in three segments and covers Spitzer conducting interviews with musicians Ray Charles, Doc Watson and Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas and with New Orleans craftsmen. The show will air in early July.

CUPA interim dean Robert Whelan and research associate Steve Villavaso have recently completed Alianza Louisiana, a study of business licensing procedures in Honduras. Whelan and Villavaso traveled to Honduras on several occasions to study the streamline of licenses and registration procedures. This project was funded by USAID. Additional benchmarking trips were made to El Salvador and Costa Rica to study their practices as well.

The 18th Annual International Program for Port Planning and Management (IPPPM) will be held from May 13th to May 24th, 2002. Thirty maritime officers from around the world will take part in an intensive two-week training program designed to help maritime executives sharpen practical skills and strengthen conceptual understanding of the unique demands and challenges of the industry. Co-Sponsors of the program are the Board of Commissioners of Port of New Orleans and the World Trade Center of New Orleans and the University of New Orleans’ National Ports and Waterways Institute

CUPA’s newly minted Merritt C. Becker Jr. Intermodal Transportation and Implementation Policy Center (ITPIC) is already operating in full swing. The Center served as facilitator for New Orleans Mayor-Elect Ray Nagin’s Airport and Intermodal Transportation Task Force. Aviation, Freight rail, Ports and Waterways, Roads/Highways/ Trucking and Surface passenger were all elements of the study. Jim Amdal, Director of ITPIC, was the facilitator for the task force and co-subcommittee chairman on freight rail.

In other areas, ITPIC has recently completed an inventory of transportation related academic and professional offerings for the South with special emphasis on Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama.

National Ports and Waterways Institute has partnered with ITPIC to complete a strategic plan for the Port of Lake Charles.

CUPA research associate Steve Villavaso acted as one of several facilitators for the Zoning and Master plan task force for Mayor-Elect Nagin. Villavaso was also Chairman of the Master Planning Process.

Villavaso is involved in several Brownfield projects, including an international video explaining all aspects of Brownfields and research and study regarding institutional controls on Brownfield’s. This led to the establishment of a new research institute, aptly named the Center for Brownfield Initiatives. Currently the program is applying for federal funding under new Brownfield legislation signed by President Bush.

CUPA’s two-year land use study of the City of Kenner has been completed. CUPA surveyed the City of Kenner and have a comprehensive and detailed land use survey of every parcel in the city. CUPA has also reviewed previous land use studies that have been completed for the City of Kenner in the past fifty years. CUPA has also constructed a website that will serve as an information center for the public. To gain public input to the plan, five area workshops will be held throughout Kenner beginning June 1st, 2002.

CUPA has contracted with St. John Parish to review current zoning and regulation practices. CUPA will also conduct educational forums to the public about comprehensive planning.

CUPA professor Jane Brooks and adjunct professor Robert Becker are assisting the Planning Department of the City of Covington in the development of a revised zoning ordinance for downtown. The revised ordinance, which draws on the principles of New Urbanism, is in response to development of the new courthous

CUPA has completed the installation of the City of New Orleans Department of Housing

Management Information System. CUPA worked with Cochran Sternhill and Luther and Speight on the project.

CUPA Professor Ralph Thayer has received funding from the Coastal Management Division, Department of Natural Resources to assemble an annotated bibliography of ways in which secondary and cumulative impacts of development on wetlands are first identified and then calculated. CUPA will survey state agencies and private entities to see how they currently identify and measure secondary and cumulative impacts on wetlands, and complete a "futures scenarios" as to what might be expected if current activities which impact wetlands are allowed to continue unmitigated and what the consequences of such action are under various development scenarios.

Dr. David Gladstone has been awarded a research grant from the Fanny Mae foundation to study gentrification in New Orleans.

CUPA is subcontracting with Earth Search, an archeological investigating firm funded by the US Army Corps of Engineers to complete a computerized database of properties in four historic neighborhoods impacted by Inner Harbor navigation canal lock replacement programs.

University of California at Los Angeles

Professor Brian Taylor and a group of Urban Planning students spent spring break in Berlin meeting with planners, activists, and transportation officials as part of a comparative urban transportation policy course. The course which compared and contrasted transportation policy and planning issues in two world cities: Berlin and Los Angeles, focused on the role of transportation policy and planning in facilitating access to such things as employment, housing and culture. Student teams planned the trip and took the lead in arranging each day's field activities. Last year Taylor and 17 planning students spent spring break in London.

Professor Abel Valenzuela and a group of students went to Brazil during the spring break to study community development and built environment strategies in Curitiba and Rio de Janeiro. Students met with planning officials, community economic development scholars, practitioners and activists to learn first-hand about community development issues facing Brazilians. They also examined housing, the  role of community based organizations, transportation, and environmental and sustainable development strategies.

Doctoral student Dan Chatman has been selected as an Eno Transportation Foundation Fellow for 2002. The award includes a five-day visit to Washington D.C. to meet with top policymakers and transportation leaders under the auspices of the Eno Foundation's Leadership Development Program.

Fellows are chosen on the basis of their accomplishments, leadership and intention to pursue a career in transportation. Transportation graduate students are nominated by their professors with a limit of one nominee from each campus.

The Department of Urban Planning held a Welcome Day, April 8, for newly admitted students. The activities included a program overview, class visits, campus tours, an ice cream social, and a reception with current UCLA Urban Planning students and alumni. The keynote speaker at the reception was UP alum Ed Reyes, who is now a member of the Los Angeles City Council. Reyes represents the First District, the densely populated home of both the notorious Rampart police division and the Belmont Learning Complex, a mega-monument to bad planning and bad luck. In his 12 years in City Hall, where he started in the Department of City Planning, Reyes often applied the community organizing techniques learned at UCLA and in subsequent northern California Community Development Corporation (CDC) positions to muster public support for clean streets, safe parks, and better schools.

He brokered public-private partnerships that have helped to bring businesses to the historic neighborhoods of Adams-Normandie and Highland Park. Asked what he learned at UCLA that still applies to his work, Reyes said, "Patience. I learned patience. I learned how policies affect people on the street. "The teachers I had at UCLA not only served me as instructors, they inspired me, they gave me hope, and they helped me be able to make a difference."

Congratulations to Diego Sanchez, UP'02 who was selected for the NCCED Emerging Leaders Program. The Emerging Leaders Program (ELP) is a unique leadership development program open to undergraduate and graduate students as well as recent graduates from colleges, universities, community colleges and trade schools. The ELP brings together over 100 students and recent graduates each year to learn more about the diverse and exciting field of community economic development (CED). The ELP is a part of NCCED's Human Capital Development Initiative (HCDI) to create a "talent pipeline" of CED leaders and professionals. The ELP attracts students and recent graduates from schools all across the U.S. We've also had participants from Canada, Nigeria and Puerto Rico. Since it begun in 1997, more than 430 have participated in the ELP.

Professor J. Eugene Grigsby III, will begin a new position as President/CEO of the National Health Foundation (NHF) in June 2002. The NHF plays a critical role in addressing the medical needs of uninsured and underserved populations. Dr. Grigsby has been on the UCLA faculty for 30 years. For the last 5 years he has directed the Advanced Policy Institute at SPPSR, overseeing the development of major technology projects including one that facilitates access to critical services for underserved populations. Dr. Grigsby's knowledge of the health care industry comes as a result of numerous consulting assignments including program planning, facilities development and strategic planning for the California Hospital Medical Center, the UCLA Medical Center, the Charles R. Drew University, and theLos Angeles Regional Family Planning Council. Dr. Grigsby also serves on the boards of directors of Catholic Healthcare West Southern California and the California Hospital Medical Center. NHF is a Los Angeles-based charitable 501 (c) (3)corporation that specializes in forming public/private partnerships and collaborations that address healthcare issues; and in creating projects that can be replicated, sustained and provide permanent solutions to gaps in the healthcare delivery system. To accomplish its objectives NHF utilizes technology, provides training, technical assistance and conducts outreach efforts to underserved communities. To learn more about NHF, visit its website at http://www.nationalhealthfdt.org/

Charlie Sciammas, second year M.A. student in Urban Planning, was a winner of the California Planning Roundtable's Essay Competition for 2001 for an essay on smart growth and equity in California. PhD student Jeffrey Brown was selected by the Executive Committee of the University of California Transportation Center as the Outstanding University of California Transportation Student for 2001-2002. The U.S. Department of Transportation honors the university transportation centers' outstanding students at a ceremony held during the annual Transportation Research Board meeting in Washington, D.C. Mary Jane Breinholt, who received her PhD in Urban Planning from UCLA in June 2001, has been named the winner of the Charles Wootan Award for the best PhD dissertation in transportation policy and planning, in a nationwide competition sponsored by the Council of University Transportation Centers. The Wootan Award, and a check for $1,500, will be given to Dr. Breinholt at a special reception at the 81st Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C. in January. Dr. Breinholt's dissertation, entitled "Private Responses to Public Failures: Firm and Worker Responses to Transportation Deficiencies in the Indonesian Garment Industry," was supervised by Professors Randall Crane and Donald Shoup, and chaired Professor Martin Wachs (now of UC Berkeley). Dr. Breinholt has recently been appointed as a Lecturer in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. Dr. Breinholt is the third Institute of Transportation Studies student from the UCLA Department of Urban Planning to receive the Wootan Award in the past four years. Jeffrey Brown, who is currently a PhD student in the Department of Urban Planning, won in 1998 for his masters thesis entitled "Trapped in the Past: The Gas Tax and Highway Finance." And Philip Law, now an planner/analyst with the Southern California Association of Governments, won in 1999 for his masters thesis entitled "The Los Angeles Bus Shelter Program: An Analysis of Location, Design, and Construction Contracts."

Joy Chen (M.A.Urban Planning and MBA, 1998) has been appointed by Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn to the new post of Director of Economic Recovery. The former project manager for Catellus Development Corporation also served as the project manager for the Economic Impact Task Force, which was appointed by the Mayor to address the city's worsening economic situation in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York. For more detail see the news story at http://www.sppsr.ucla.edu/about/newspage.cfm?rowid=68

Over 125 practitioners, researchers, activists, and elected officials attended the 11th Annual UCLA Symposium on the Transportation -- Land Use -- Environment Connection at Lake Arrowhead, California in October. The theme of this year's symposium was "Reinventing Transit," and included research presentations by UCLA Professors Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Paul Ong, Donald Shoup, and Brian Taylor. Other presenters included Robert Cervero of UC Berkeley, Reid Ewing of Rutgers University, Gordon "Pete" Fielding of UC Irvine, and Jonathan Levine of the University of Michigan, among many others. Professors Donald Shoup and Brian Taylor and over a dozen current and former planning students presented recent Institute of Transportation Studies research with the new Administrator of the Federal Transit Administration -- Jennifer Dorn -- in Los Angeles in September. PhD student Lisa Schweitzer was awarded a four-year Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship by the U.S. Department of Transportation. PhD student Jung Won Son was awarded the prestigious Benjamin H. Stevens Graduate Fellowship in Regional Science for 2002-03. This is awarded through a national competition open to graduate students enrolled in Ph.D. programs in North American who have completed all degree requirements except the dissertation.

M.A. student Paula Castro has been selected for an Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation Graduate Summer Internship in International Affairs. This provides an opportunity for UC graduate students to gain international affairs experience in Washington, D.C. 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Professor Ralph Gakenheimer is organizing a new graduate program in Transportation and Logistics for the new Malaysian University of Science and Technology, Kuala Lumpur on behalf of the MIT Technology Advisory Program.

The Resilient City

A Colloquium on Urban Trauma, Recovery and Remembrance Cities throughout history have been exposed to a variety of trauma, but in almost every case have been rebuilt, either to re-accommodate urban life or to serve as sites for mourning. This spring, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, a semester-long colloquium is being held at MIT to examine the economic, political, social and cultural forces that have enabled cities to establish new order out of their chaos and devastation. Intended both as a scholarly and therapeutic exercise, the series is seeking to establish a framework for understanding the commonalities and the differences in post-traumatic urbanism by investigating a range of experiences from around the world.

The program was organized by Professors Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, who have commissioned papers from a number of prominent scholars and historians. Vale and Campanella are also co-teaching a graduate seminar on urban resiliency, which will send a number of students on research trips to sites of trauma in the past--including Guernica, Spain; Tangshan, China; and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Seminar papers will be collected in a special edition of the student journal Projections, while those commissioned for the colloquium are being edited for publication.

The Resilient City lectures are being held on Monday evenings throughout the spring -- in MIT Room 10-485 at 5:30pm -- and will conclude with a final presentation on September 11, 2002. Video streams of all lectures will be available on the colloquium website (http://resilientcity.mit.edu).

The Resilient City series began on February 11 with presentations by Campanella and Vale, and continues throughout the spring with the following addresses:

 à February 25: Max Page, Assistant Professor of Architecture and History at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst: Creatively Destroying New York: Fantasies, Premonitions, and Realities in the Provisional City

 à March 4: Kevin Rozario, Assistant Professor in the American Studies program at Smith College: Spectacular Reconstructions: Ways of Seeing and the Politics of Recovery in American Urban Disasters

 à March 11: Brian Ladd, historian and former Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin: Double Restoration: Berlin after 1945

 à March 18: Diane E. Davis, Associate Professor of Political Sociology in MIT@s Department of Urban Studies and Planning: Shaking the Foundations: Mexico City's 1985 Earthquake and the Transformation of the Capital

 à April 1: Hashim Sarkis, Associate Professor of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design: Beirut, Beirut

a April 8: Anthony S. Pitch, author of The Burning of Washington: The British Invasion of 1814 (United States Naval Institute, 1998): Patriotism and Reconstruction: Washington, DC after Conquest and Arson during the War of 1812

à April 22: William B. Fulton, journalist, urban planner, researcher, pundit and author: After the Unrest: Ten Years of Rebuilding Los Angeles Following the Trauma of 1992

à April 29: Edward Linenthal, Edward M. Penson Professor of Religion and American Culture and the Chancellor's Public Scholar at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh: 'The Predicament of Aftermath': Reflections on 9-11 and Oklahoma City

à May 6: Carola Hein, Assistant Professor in the Growth and Structure of Cities Program at Bryn Mawr College: Fires, Earthquakes, Modernization and Air Strikes: The Destruction and Revival of Japan's Cities

à May 13: William J. Mitchell, Dean of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning: Trauma and Rebuilding in the Digital Electronic Era à September 11: Julian Beinart, Professor of Architecture at MIT: Cities and Resurrection: Jerusalem and Us

The Resilient City initiative has received generous support from the Dean's Office and the Office of the MIT Chancellor. For more information, visit the colloquium website at http://resilientcity.mit.edu/.

Learning and Educational Alliance and Resource Network

MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning, in collaboration with Cities Alliance and the World Bank Institute, hosted a meeting in Cambridge on February 4-6, 2002 to explore the possibility of setting up a global network of academic institutions focused on urban poverty alleviation in developing countries. Dubbed LEARN (Learning and Educational Alliance and Resource Network), the proposed program includes universities and research institutes in Brazil, China, Cuba, El Salvador, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Korea, Mexico, Philippines and Vietnam. Participants from these countries will join officials from Cities Alliance and the World Bank Institute as well as urban researchers from MIT and other institutions in the Cambridge area in discussing the objectives, approach, methodology, and financial requirements of the proposed program.

Through LEARN, MIT and its global partners seek to establish a network where educational institutions will collaborate with operational agencies in dealing with urban poverty issues. The network proposes to utilize action-research to help in shaping policies and programs by making the results of monitoring and evaluation studies available to policy makers and practitioners. LEARN partners will also jointly develop new courses that can be disseminated globally through MIT's open course work initiative. Using new information and educational technologies, LEARN hopes to help improve the living conditions of the urban poor by interjecting a new worldwide voice of impartial academic rigor in the ongoing discussions on urban poverty.

 For more information on LEARN, please contact Prof. Bish Sanyal (sanyal@mit.edu) or Prof. Prod Laquian (laquian@ mit.edu).

  Professor Larry Susskind had a joint appointment this year as Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and taught a DUSP-HLS course entitled Multi-party Negotiation with Professor Robert Mnookin. His International Environmental Negotiation course will be taught jointly with Professor William Moomaw at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Professor Susskind continues to serve as a key advisor to the Joint Environmental Mediation Service (JEMS) in Jerusalem -- an Israeli-Palestinian NGO that is mediating land use and environmental disputes in contested areas. He is also part of the mediation team assembled by the Rocky Mountain Institute to lead the National Energy Policy Initiative.

  Professor Diane E. Davis, Associate Professor of Political Sociology in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, was recently named a Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The designation carries a fellowship of $100,000 which will fund her research on "Public versus Private Security and the Rule of Law: The Transformation of Policing in Mexico City, Johannesburg, and Moscow.

ANNOUNCEMENT LLOYD AND NADINE RODWIN INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL FELLOWSHIP

 The Department of Urban Studies and Planning has announced that DUSP students can apply for the Lloyd and Nadine Rodwin international travel fellowships. These are  funded from an endowment established by the Rodwin's to assist students "pursuing research or writing theses while at MIT with special preference, when feasible, for students from poor countries or regions." Students who receive the travel funds will be known as the Lloyd and Nadine Rodwin Fellows.

Professor Karen R. Polenske was one of the main speakers at the Coke Summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in October 17, 2001. She spoke on "Coke's Strategic Industrial Role: Globally and Locally". Prior to the conference (October 15), she gave a four-hour workshop to coke managers covering the transportation, technology, pollution, and employment issues of cokemaking in China.

In October, Karen also presented a talk "Transforming China's Cokemaking Sector: Training Methods and Techniques" at the Alliance for Global Sustainability meeting in G÷teborg, Sweden.

In December, Karen attended the first meeting of the Brazilian Regional Science Association in Sao Paulo, Brazil and presented her paper: "Coke's Strategic Industrial Role: Globally and Locally". In March, she attended the annual Alliance for Global Sustainability meeting in San Jose Costa Rica and held an all-day workshop with eight members of her cokemaking team.

She is currently funded to conduct research on cokemaking on China and has just received funding as part of a 12-person team to examine the Yellow Dust problem in  China using interactive modeling approaches. She also received funds to write a book on the Strategic Role of Cokemaking in China.

While in San Jose, she met with the former President of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias.

PUBLICATIONS:

Professors Lawrence J. Vale and Sam Bass Warner Jr., eds. "Imaging the City: Continuing Struggles and New Directions" (Center for Urban Policy Research Press, 2001).

Professor Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Director, MIT Program on Human Rights & Justice and Assistant Professor of Law and Development, Department of Urban Studies and Planning is expecting to complete his book, "Development, Resistance and International Law," by February 1, 2002 and should be released on September 2002.