The Gill-Chin Lim Award Committee received six very strong nominations for its annual dissertation prize, and wishes to report that the field of international development planning continues to produce outstanding scholarship on a diversity of geographies and themes of critical importance to planners across the globe. While all submitted dissertations were certainly worthy of commendation, the committee – Tridib Banerjee, William Goldsmith, and Gabriella Carolini (chair) - found consensus in its deliberations about the top submissions.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Pietro Calogero of Berkeley and Dr. Andrew Rumbach of Cornell are Co-Recipients of the 2011 Gill-Chin Lim Award for the best dissertation in international planning. Dr. Calogero's dissertation, supervised by Dr. Ananya Roy, was entitled, Planning Kabul: The Politics of Urbanization in Afghanistan. This work was written with flare and skill, effectively navigating the profound complexity of the history and modern impact of sensitive geopolitics on planning in Kabul. Dr. Calogero deftly identifies the origins and persistence of three distinct typologies of planning that have emerged from the situation in this distinct city, while also highlighting their pertinence for planners in many other cities of the world. Dr. Rumbach’s dissertation, supervised by Dr. Neema Kudva, was entitled, The City Vulnerable: New Town Planning, Informality, and the Geography of Disaster in Kolkata, India. It provides an exceptional account of the symbiotic relationship between formality and informality in the design of vulnerabilities in Kolkata. Dr. Rumbach argues that planning there must be recognized not only a reactive profession but rather one with an indicative influence on the determination of what becomes a disaster situation. He masterfully utilizes a mixture of methods to make the powerful argument that planning is indeed a root cause of vulnerability in Kolkata.

The committee also found one other dissertation to merit an Honorable Mention. This commendation goes to Dr. Kyung-Min Nam of MIT for "Foreign Direct Investment, Intra-organizational Proximity, and Technological Capability: The Case of China's Automobile Industry". Dr. Nam’s three-paper dissertation was supervised by Dr. Alice Amsden. It was superbly organized and makes the overall insightful and innovative argument that domestic technological innovation and long-term benefits for FDI-host countries result not so much from FDI but from FDI combined with outward-directed investment by nationally-based firms.

The committee congratulates these scholars and their faculty supervisors for such outstanding contributions to the field.