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of News from the Schools.
Casey Dawkins of Blacksburg,
assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s urban affairs and planning program in
the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), has been awarded a
2004 U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Urban Scholars Postdoctoral
Fellowship.
Dawkins, a native of Gainesville, Ga., joined Virginia Tech’s College of
Architecture and Urban Studies in 2003. His research examines the causes and
consequences of residential segregation by race and the implications of
residential segregation for the design of regional governance structures.
Dawkins plans to use the $53,000 HUD award to examine factors contributing
to homeownership transitions among first-time homebuyers and to examine the
effect of residential segregation on racial differences in homeownership
rates. He will be working with project mentor Ted Koebel, professor and
director of the Virginia Tech Center for Housing Research.
Dawkins received his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and Ph.D. from
Georgia Institute of Technology.
As part of the College of
Architecture and Urban Studies, SPIA helps communities across the world
understand their most critical problems and most promising solutions. SPIA
addresses issues in urban and metropolitan development, environmental policy
and planning, community and economic development, housing, non-profit
organizations and civil society, international relations, information
technology and society, globalization and international development,
transportation policy, e-governance, equity and human diversity.
April Press Release
• Dave Godschalk receives prestigious Massey Award
• DCRP research used as a base for national legislation
• Graduate student recognized for her work with the FEMA Community
Planning Fellowship program
MASSEY AWARD
DCRP’s Dave Godschalk receives Massey Award - One of the Largest and Most
Prestigious Awards at UNC at Chapel Hill
The award fund was started in 1980 by Durham advertising executive C. Knox
Massey. "As an alumnus of the class of 1925, C. Knox Massey loved the
university," said Chancellor James Moeser. "As a businessman, he recognized
the value of dedicated employees and believed in rewarding them for a job
well done. Expanding the awards offers an even greater opportunity to
fulfill his vision." Massey founded his advertising agency in 1930 and was
considered one of North Carolina’s advertising pioneers. Thanks to growth
in the endowment, the C. Knox Massey Distinguished Service Awards for
"unusual, meritorious or superior contribution" to the university will
increase to $6,000.
One of six recipients of this year’s award, Dave Godschalk combined his
training in architecture and planning and his academic expertise in
mediation in dedicated service to the University as chair of the
Chancellor's Building and Grounds Committee. Since becoming chair of the
committee in 1995, the committee has considered two master plans for central
campus, two land-use plans for the Horace Williams Tract and participated in
dozens of designer selections and influenced the design of major new
projects throughout Chapel Hill’s campus. Chancellor James Moeser said, "We
have better buildings because of the work of this committee, and especially
the chair." The Massey award recognizes Dave’s leadership style that is in
keeping with Carolina's tradition of consensus building, the award also
acknowledges his contribution to the university is superior and lasting.
North Carolina Leads Nation with Anti-Predatory Lending Legislation DCRP
research used as a base for national legislation
U.S. Reps. Brad Miller (NC-13) and Mel Watt (NC-12) have introduced
anti-predatory lending legislation that eliminates specific abusive lending
practices and ensures that credit for home ownership is available for
consumers with impaired credit. Introduced March 19th, the Prohibit
Predatory Lending Act of 2004 is based on the State of North Carolina's
predatory lending statute, which is widely considered the model state
statute for preventing abusive lending while preserving access to credit.
”Predatory lending” encompasses a wide range of abusive practices engaged in
by lenders who take advantage of uninformed borrowers. Such practices
include charging fees and rates that are not reflective of the risk, not
informing borrowers of less expensive loan alternatives and not disclosing
terms and options of products and services offered with a loan. "This bill
protects vulnerable consumers without cutting off credit for lower income
borrowers,” Miller said. "It's time that all American consumers have the
protection that Carolina consumers now have.”
Since the North Carolina law was enacted, the state has seen a dramatic
reduction in abusive or predatory sub-prime lending and refinancing. A
recent study conducted at UNC at Chapel Hill (Roberto Quercia, Michael
Stegman, and Walter R. Davis) found that after the passage of North Carolina
legislation, there was a reduction of loans with predatory terms without a
restriction in access to or increase in the cost of loans to borrowers with
imperfect credit.
Rep. Watt stated, “North Carolina’s approach in crafting its law ensured the
creation of the best possible law and, consequently, North Carolina is now
the acknowledged leader in addressing predatory lending. The federal
government should follow North Carolina’s example and guarantee that
borrowers in every state have the same protections as the citizens of North
Carolina."
6th Annual Graduate Student Recognition Ceremony Second year DCRP graduate
student to be recognized
Jane Sibley was honored at the 6th Annual Graduate Student Recognition
Ceremony on Wednesday, April 7. Jane was recognized for her work with the
FEMA Community Planning Fellowship program. Her accomplishments reflect the
outstanding programs and research opportunities offered to DCRP students.
“Whether it is through research on cancer or volunteering for community
groups such as the American Red Cross, Carolina’s graduate students add to
the betterment of the University and the larger community through their
research and service,” said Linda Dykstra, Dean of The Graduate School.
“These students certainly deserve recognition, as our graduate and
professional students represent one-third of Carolina’s total student body.”
According to Graduate School figures, over $2.5 million in external
fellowships and grants were brought in to the University by graduate
students in during the 2003-04 academic year.
Paul Ong, Professor of Urban Planning and Director of the Ralph and Goldy
Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, is co-editor of a new
peer-reviewed national journal entitled AAPI Nexus: Asian Americans and
Pacific Islanders: Policy, Practice and Community. The mission of the
journal is to facilitate an exchange of ideas and research findings that
strengthen the efforts to tackle the pressing societal problems facing Asian
American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities.
Professor Donald Shoup has been elected as a Fellow of the American
Institute of City Planners. His book, The High Cost of Free Parking, is
forthcoming from The Planners Press of the American Planning Association.
The Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies has issued new reports on :
$ Status of American Indian Children in Los Angeles. Three decades of
census data is used to provide an updated analysis of the socioeconomic
status of AIAN children in Los Angeles, focusing on demographic
characteristics, poverty, and educational issues. Los Angeles AIAN children
are compared with AIAN children in California and the United States, and
with other children in these three geographic units.
$ Trajectory of Poor Neighborhoods in Southern California 1970-2000.
Prepared by Lewis Center Director Paul Ong and Shannon McConville (MPP '99),
in conjunction with the Brookings Institution's Center on Urban and
Metropolitan Policy, the report details the shifting concentration of poor
neighborhoods in the Los Angeles region.
UCLA Urban Planning Ph.D. candidate Lisa Schweitzer was selected 2003
Transportation Student of the Year by the University of California
Transportation Center (UCTC). Schweitzer won the vote of transportation
faculty at the four Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS) campuses in
the University of California System, and was honored in January at the
Transportation Research Board Conference in Washington D.C. Schweitzer's
research centers on the intersections between environmental and
transportation planning, with a special focus on how planning and policy
decisions affect impoverished and minority groups. Ms. Schweitzer has
recently accepted a faculty position at Virginia Tech.
Recent UCLA Urban Planning graduates have won prestigious awards from the
Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC). The Wootan Award is
given to the two best M.A. theses and the two best Ph.D. dissertations by
graduate students in transportation. The CUTC/HNTB Non-Thesis Award is
given annually to the top non-thesis project/report/paper submitted by a
transportation student from a CUTC member college or university.
$ Kathleen Rogers (Urban Planning M.A. 03=) won the Wootan Award for
her master's thesis "Measuring Social Equity of Public Transit Finance: A
Synthesis and Reinterpretation of the Literature."
$ Jeffrey Brown (Urban Planning Ph.D. =03) won the Wootan Award for
best Ph.D. dissertation for his work on AThe Numbers Game: The Politics of
the Federal Surface Transportation Program.@ Brown also won the Wootan
Thesis Award in 1999.
$ Heather Burton (Urban Planning M.A. '03) was named winner of the
2003 Non-Thesis Award for her project on "Culver City Rapid Bus: An
Evaluation of Bus Rapid Transit on Culver City Bus Line 6." "We have had
past winners, but the fact that we have three winners this year,
representing both the M.A. and Ph.D. programs, shows the overall strength of
our students and of the Department of Urban Planning," said Brian Taylor,
Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Director of the Institute of
Transportation Studies at the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social
Research.
An evaluation of residential recovery 10 years after the Northridge
California earthquake has been released by the California Policy Research
Center, a systemwide University of California research and public service
program. The authors, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Nabil M. Kamel,
look at the long-term effects of the 1994 earthquake on residential
structures and development, and make recommendations for improving recovery
strategies in future emergencies.
The Northridge earthquake prompted the distribution of billions of dollars
in public and private funds for residential recovery. The authors assessed
the effectiveness of the six major federal residential recovery programs and
reviewed the recovery process and its outcomes in three distinct areas of
the county in an effort to learn how recovery policies, implementation
strategies and existing institutional arrangements affected post-disaster
recovery. They suggest that in many respects Southern California has
emerged from the Northridge quake stronger than before and point out that
local and state agencies are now more experienced in dealing with large
disasters. But they warn that while population and housing growth exceed
pre-disaster levels, low vacancy rates and a surge in housing prices could
undermine recovery efforts in the face of a new disaster of similar
magnitude. Loukaitou-Sideris is Professor and Chair of the Department of
Urban Planning. Kamel is a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Planning and is a
researcher at UCLA's Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.
The report is available online at
www.ucop.edu/cprc/publist.htm.
UCLA's student run Urban Planning journal, Critical Planning, is presenting
a panel discussion on "Metaprojects in Cities/Citizens and Megaprojects" in
association with the upcoming issue on that theme. Professor Bent Flyvbjerg,
author of Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition (Cambridge
University Press, 2003), will present the keynote lecture on "Megaprojects
and Regional Development in the European Union." Dr. Flyvbjerg is a
Professor in the Department of Development and Planning at the University of
Aalborg, Denmark. Panelists include David Halle, UCLA Professor of
Sociology, and Martha Matsuoka, UCLA doctoral candidate in Urban Planning.
UCLA MA Urban Planning students Jennifer Allen and Reagan Flagler were
selected as two of four students from the United States for the Youth Forum
at Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a week long international conference held in
Copenhagen, Denmark. The goal of the conference is to prioritize
opportunities for solving ten of the world's most pressing challenges,
including Sanitation & Water, Trade Barriers & Subsidies, and Education. The
conference is hosted by the Danish Environmental Assessment Institute.
Finally, and with deep sadness, we report the deaths of two members of our
community.
$ Jim Ortner, an alumnus (Ph.D., 1978) and lecturer in Urban Planning,
died in a traffic collision on December 26. Jim Ortner was Manager of
Transit Technical Services for the Orange County Transportation Authority,
where he developed an alternative-fuels bus program, implemented electronic
fare-box systems, and prepared analysis and policy on transportation and air
quality. Jim recently taught Transportation and Environmental Issues in the
Urban Planning Department, served as guest speaker in several courses, and
was a longtime member of the UCLA Lake Arrowhead Symposium Steering
Committee as well as a strong supporter of the Annual Fund and a mentor to
many Urban Planning students.
$ Katherine Theodora Gouvias, a student in the concurrent Latin
American Studies/Urban Planning M.A. program died Nov. 29 in a car accident
in San Bernardino County. Katherine is remembered fondly for her
enthusiasm, and her spirited and smart participation in class. She conversed
regularly in Greek with the chair of her department and had a strong
interest in Latin America, imagining herself working in the nonprofit sector
after graduation.
Professor Mitchell L. Moss is stepping down as Director of the
Urban Planning Program at NYU's Wagner School at the end August, 2004 and
will teach a new course at NYU for undergraduates on “The Politics of New
York” as well as a waterfront capstone in NYU’s Urban Planning Program..
Under Professor Moss’ leadership, NYU’s Urban Planning Program has
expanded its course offerings in community and economic development,
international planning, and environmental planning. More than 200
applications were submitted for admission to Fall 2004 class of the NYU
Urban Planning Program, an increase of more than 33% over two years.
Professor Rae Zimmerman will be Director of the Urban Planning Program
at NYU as of September 1, 2004.
NYU’s Urban Planning Student Association won the 2004 President’s
Service Award for Community Service in recognition of its’ pioneering work
building a partnership with the Academy of Urban Planning, a high school
dedicated to planning issues. The student organization has sponsored a
series of seminars with leaders in New York City such as Robert Tierney,
Chairman of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and Joshua
Sirefman, Chief Operating Officer of the New York City Economic Development
Corporation as well as panel discussions on faith-based strategies for
community development and neighborhood economic development in Chinatown.
Anthony Townsend, a member of NYU’s
adjunct planning faculty has received an award from the Fulbright Scholar
Program to visit South Korea for three months this summer to study how
near-universal access to broadband Internet is transforming urban life in
the capital city of Seoul. With a population of 11 million, Seoul is one of
the world's largest cities and the hub of Korean government, economy, and
culture. In the last 5 years, South Korea has deployed broadband far more
rapidly than any nation on earth, and recent studies show that 95 percent of
homes in the nation have broadband access. Townsend will interview public
officials, entrepreneurs, planners and others to assess the way this new
communications infrastructure is transforming urban life, focusing on
extracting lessons that can be used by planners to anticipate change in
other cities in coming years.
Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP)
Visiting Prof. Xavier de Souza Briggs was interviewed
as part of the national media campaign for Annie E. Casey Foundation's "Kids
Count." The annual public education effort focuses on a key dimension of
child and youth well-being in America. This year's Kids Count highlights
the transition to adulthood for vulnerable youth, including challenges
associated with neighborhood poverty, fragmented social services, and
underfunded schools.
Professor Karen R. Polenske ran an all-day workshop
March 21 at the Alliance for Global Sustainability annual meetings at
Chalmers University, Godeborg, Sweden, for her China team. Each member of
the team presented papers concerning his/her research on the energy use and
pollution generated by the cokemaking and steelmaking sectors in Shanxi and
Liaoning Provinces, China. Karen is editing the cokemaking portion of
those papers for a book that is under contract with Kluwer publishers. Her
most recent publications include "Leontief's Magnificent Machine and Other
Contributions to Applied Economics," in a Cambridge University book
commemorating the input-output work of Nobel prize winner, Wassily W.
Leontief, and her jointly written paper with Mr. Yu Li, entitled "Measuring
Dispersal Economies," in the Uddevalla, Sweden, volume on Entrepreneurship,
Spatial Industrial Clusters, and Interfirm Networks. She attended advisory
board meetings for the National Ocean Economy Project (NOEP) in Monterey,
California, in February, and for the Bureau of Economic Analysis in
Washington, DC, and for the South Coast Air Quality Management District,
both in May.
The School of Architecture and Planning has joined the
Partners for Places program to support the journal, PLACES, now in its
twentieth year of publication. Professor Larry Vale, Head of DUSP, will
represent MIT on the Editorial Advisory Board. Since its first issue in the
fall of 1983, PLACES has steadily advocated for the consideration and design
of lively places, particularly places that are a part of the public realm.
Special issues have examined Streets, Parks, Urban Public Places,
Participation, Mayors and City Design, and Plaza, Parque, Calle (an
examination of patterns of urban organization rooted in Latin America) and
have explored various design themes that were initiated as symposia,
including ‘Landscape as Mentor,’ ‘Dwellings and Outgoings’ and ‘Images that
Motivate.’ PLACES is particularly concerned with promoting exchange between
the research and design communities and examining the sources of
imagination, evaluation and discipline in design.
Professor Terry Szold received the Distinguished
Alumni/ae Award from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional
Planning at UMASS-Amherst in recognition of her "outstanding leadership and
achievements in regional planning."
DUSP HOSTS INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION AND RESEARCH
TRAINING PROGRAM
Faculty and students from the University of Economics Prague gave
presentations to the MIT community on EU enlargement and the environment
during IAP. The Czech visitors spent two weeks in January at DUSP
participating in a training and research program examining how government
agencies and nongovernmental organizations respond to natural and
technological disasters. The visit was part of an ongoing program that was
initiated last spring when U.S. students traveled to the Czech Republic to
learn about the Czech floods of 2002, train in field research methods, and
assist faculty with data collection. This approach to conducting exchanges
that integrate classroom and field research experiences for graduate
students was developed by Professor JoAnn Carmin as a means to promote
international and interdisciplinary collaboration, training, and research.
The project, which is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation,
continues in the spring when DUSP students will return to the Czech Republic
to participate in additional training seminars and data collection
activities. For more information, visit
http://web.mit.edu/jcarmin/www/FloodWeb/index.htm
Promotions
Professor Diane E. Davis has been promoted to Full
Professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, effective
July 1, 2004.
Professor Eran Ben-Joseph has been promoted to
Associate Professor (without tenure), effective July 1, 2004.
Professor Eric Klopfer has been promoted to Associate
Professor (without tenure), effective July 1, 2004.
Publications
Professor Diane E. Davis has published her latest book,
Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and
Latin America (Cambridge University Press).
Professor Balakrishnan Rajagopal has announced the
release of his new book, International Law from Below: Development, Social
Movements and Third World Resistance” (Cambridge University Press).
Professor Frank Levy has announced the release of his
new book, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next
Job Market (Princeton University Press, Russell Sage Foundation)
