The State of the Art in Planning Education

Authors: Dennis Keating and Norm Krumholz, AICP, with Ann Pylkas
College of Urban Affairs
Cleveland State University
July 1998

Executive Summary
In 1997-1998, APA commissioned Professors Dennis Keating and Norman Krumholz, AICP, to conduct a survey of planning schools to determine how neighborhood planning was being taught. The goal was to learn about how the field was preparing planners to work in this area and to start a discussion between the academic planners and the practicing planners about this subject.

Here is the survey report that was completed in July 1998.

In November 1998, Dennis Keating and APA Education Manager Carolyn Torma participated in a session at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in Pasadena on the subject of teaching neighborhood planning. On April 28, 1999 (10:15 am) in Seattle, a companion session, called "Street Smarts" will be held. These sessions reported on the survey and initiated a discussion on the subject of how to prepare planners to work with neighborhoods.

One: Introduction
Organizing and planning at the local level for cooperative civic improvement is a strong tradition in the United States that goes back at least 100 years. From about 1880 to 1920 the urban neighborhood, heavily populated by recent immigrants, used settlement houses to organize improvements. Settlement workers like Mary K. Simkhovitch, Jane Addams, and Robert Woods served as the focus for social reform as the city planning movement took hold. In cities like St. Louis, Baltimore, and Chicago, leading city planners of the day accepted the idea of neighborhood plans as a strategy for urban revitalization. (1)

Later on, during the period from 1920 to 1960, Clarence Perry's neighborhood unit plan carried the general ideas of the social reformers into a systematically devised neighborhood blueprint. Perry's neighborhood plan attempted to separate vehicular and pedestrian traffic and develop community life around the neighborhood school. (2) Despite some criticism that the neighborhood unit plan would foster racial and economic exclusion and that planning at the regional scale was more appropriate, Perry's formulation has remained an enduring contribution to neighborhood planning.

Although the neighborhood unit plan influenced the development of new residential areas, it had little impact on the problems of older inner-city neighborhoods. To address their long-standing problems of poverty, unemployment and slum living, the cities lobbied the federal government for a post World War II urban renewal program. This program began in 1949 as a proposed means to clear slum neighborhoods and improve the living conditions for slum residents. By the 1950s, however, urban renewal was instead being used extensively to strengthen central city downtowns against suburban competition, and the neighborhoods and housing of poor, inner-city residents was often worsened.

None of the three major federally-assisted urban programs of the 1950s—urban renewal, public housing or the interstate highway program—mandated citizen participation in the decision-making process. Many mostly poor and minority neighborhoods were destroyed without adequate relocation housing being provided. By the 1960, however, the bitter grievances of urban neighborhoods against these programs mounted to a wave of opposition. As urban renewal and freeways faltered, "citizen participation" and "community control" became the watchwords, giving a larger voice to neighborhoods in framing policies and programs that affected neighborhood interests. Federal support for neighborhood participation was explicitly mandated in the ill-fated Model Cities program of the mid-1960s. In 1968, a federal directive ordered the involvement of public housing tenants in management. As urban renewal was replaced in 1974 with the Community Development Bloc Grant program, a citizen participation requirement was imposed.

These broadened mandates for citizen participation set the stage for the emergence of the community action approach to neighborhood planning. By the 1960s, this included efforts of professional city planners operating out of city halls in support of neighborhood planning efforts. As Rohe and Gates indicate in their survey of 51 neighborhood planning programs, (3) these programs varied widely: some involved a concentrated effort to organize neighborhood groups, others did not; some programs were officially sanctioned by city council, others were not; some provided financial support to neighborhood groups, others provided only technical support (4).

In some cases, professional planners who were assigned responsibility for specific neighborhoods within a city found themselves with conflicting loyalties as their neighborhood interests clashed with the goals and organization of their parent bureaucracies. These planners confronted pressures from three points: their own planning departments, the city administration of which they were part and the neighborhood residents with whom they worked. Sometimes, they responded by becoming "administrative guerrillas," representing themselves inside city hall as disinterested technicians while actually operating as community advocates for neighborhood interests (5).

In the late 1960s, a new type of grassroots planning and development organization with no ties to professional city planning emerged on the urban neighborhood scene. These neighborhood-based community development corporations (CDCs) were spawned amid the activism of the War on Poverty and got their start with federal funding from the Equal Opportunity Act's Special Impact Program. Over the last thirty years, these organizations have grown in number, competency, and productivity. They have continued to attract a steady stream of support regardless of the changes occurring in the national political and fiscal climate. By 1998, there were more than 2,000 neighborhood-based development organizations in the U.S. (6) and, during the period from 1960 to 1990, they had produced a total of 400,000 units of affordable housing (7). By the late 1990s, the neighborhood-based community planning and development movement was maintaining its popularity with the philanthropic community, both political parties, and the private sector. It has matured into what many consider a new industry and a sub-field within the practice of urban and regional planning. Many CDCs have engaged in strategic planning for development.

This industry has also become institutionalized in federal legislation. The Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act of 1990 mandates that at least 15 percent of funds under the HOME program be earmarked for use by nonprofit community development housing organizations, and states are now required to set aside 10 percent of their low-income housing tax credits for use by nonprofit providers. City governments around the U.S. also see CDCs as a useful and even preferred vehicle for service delivery.

The emergence of these neighborhood-based organizations has been well-recognized in the planning field, where practicing planners working out of city and county agencies are creating new definitions, equipping themselves with pr amassing new tools and struggling with issues of planning agency response, management and service delivery. It is clear from American Planning Association (APA) national conferences that planners in the field are responding to this phenomenon in a substantial way. In the academic community there also seems to be growing interest in neighborhood planning to address severe and persistent problems (8). This survey is the first time APA has looked at the role of the academic community in teaching neighborhood planning as a sub-field or specialty of urban and regional planning.

This survey examines such questions as: the importance of collaborative neighborhood planning (NCP) in academic planning curricula; how important educators think it should be; what constitutes good practice in the teaching of neighborhood planning; whether neighborhood planning should be different in older, distressed neighborhoods than in more affluent communities; and other related questions.

This survey arose for a variety of reasons:

1. the realization by APA that there is much more to the "new" neighborhood planning than was supposed

2. the realization, made clear in national APA conferences, that this sub-field was expanding rapidly and engaging more professional planners at the city, philanthropic, and neighborhood level

3. APA's hope that this survey could act as an educational vehicle in researching, understanding, articulating, and reinforcing this emerging planning specialty.

Two: Methodology

A. Survey Sample
The goal of the NCP survey was to reach as many Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) faculty as possible who teach or have taught NCP-related courses. The choice of the sample was based upon the information contained in the 10th edition (October, 1996) of the "Guide to Graduate Education in Urban and Regional Planning" published by ACSP.

We chose the categories of: citizen participation/community organization, community development, and housing and neighborhood planning. The total number of mailings was 283. We received 43 responses from faculty in the United States, 3 from Israel, and 2 from Canada, a total of 48 or 17%. We received several responses from faculty indicating that they do not teach NCP-related responses. Of the 80 U.S. schools represented in the ACSP Guide, we received responses from at least one faculty member at half (40) of these schools. (Appendix A) Therefore, we believe that we have a representative sample of U.S. faculty involved in teaching NCP. We have not included the responses of the Israeli and Canadian faculty in our analysis.

In addition to the above, we also identified planning faculty at ACSP schools with Community Outreach Partnership Centers (COPC) programs funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as of November 1997. These can be found at HUD's Office of University Partnership's web page. We sent a separate inquiry to 20 faculty involved in neighborhood-based COPC projects. Unfortunately, we received only 3 responses. We have not included these in this report because of the insufficient responses.

B. Survey Instrument
To assist us in developing our survey instrument, we assembled a review panel of four academics and one practitioner knowledgeable about NCP, namely:

Professor Howell Baum, University of Maryland at College Park
Ray Boezi, AICP, Toledo, Ohio
Professor Ken Reardon, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Professor Victor Rubin, University of California at Berkeley
Professor June Thomas, Michigan State University

After taking into account their comments and suggestions, as well as the concerns of APA staff about a draft questionnaire that we circulated, the survey was mailed to ACSP faculty in late February 1998, with a return date of April 15. On March 21, we sent a message out on the PLANET network soliciting additional responses (a few of which were received). On April 20, we mailed to the COPC participants, with a return date of May 8.

Twenty-six (26) of the U.S. respondents sent recent syllabi for courses and workshops, supplementing their survey responses. However, we received no student evaluations. Therefore, we have no data independent of the faculty surveys to measure the effectiveness of the teaching of NCP courses.

Three: Findings

The following are the findings of the survey:

A. Profile of the Faculty
The majority of the respondents were Full and Associate Professors, with 8 Assistant Professors. All but two are full-time faculty (with Ph.D. degrees mostly). They have been at their institution for periods ranging from 2 to 30 years.

B. Type of Courses
There are a wide range of courses, including planning, architecture, community development, community design, housing, and neighborhood revitalization. Many were designated as studios and workshops. Forty-six (46) were graduate courses. Only nine (9) were undergraduate courses. Thirty-five (35) were required, while 18 were electives. Enrollment ranged from a high of 50 to a low of 2. The enrollment, at least for the most recent offerings, was most typically 8-25 students.

C. Teaching Techniques
Of the six in-class teaching techniques that we identified, almost all (36 of 43 respondents) used two: analysis of the neighborhood and readings. The former could consist of various perspectives (demographics, economics, geography, social conditions, politics). This was closely followed (30 of 43) by learning the history of the neighborhood. The last technique used by a majority (26 responses) was mapping the neighborhood. A minority of faculty used two other techniques: team teaching (20 responses) and films and videos (14 responses).

Of the five experiential teaching techniques listed, most (35 of 45 respondents) employed field research. A majority also employed four other teaching techniques: interaction with practicing planners (32 responses), neighborhood tours (31 responses), working with real neighborhood-based clients (31 responses), and neighborhood charrettes/presentations (29).

Other teaching techniques that were mentioned were: archival research, GIS, group projects, student journals, storytelling, production of neighborhood plans, internships, role-playing, and simulation games.

Where class projects were assigned, almost all were to be done by students working in teams. In one course, students were required to choose and perform community service and write a case study based upon their experience.

Respondents were asked to identify the strength and weakness of these alternate teaching techniques. Their responses are summarized in Table 1:

1. Dynamics of Teaching
Respondents noted the many issues that arise from this form of teaching, particularly when it involves field research and often real clients. They include:

• Neighborhood organizations are sometimes divided internally and can react negatively to student recommendations;
• Neighborhood organizations may have weak leadership, making collaboration difficult;
• With field work, there is often a conflict between the deadlines of a real client versus the academic calendar; a corollary problem is that real world delays may interfere with the completion of projects/papers within the academic calendar;
• Communication between students and real world clients and their constituents can often prove difficult, leading to frustration and delay;
• Setting priorities for neighborhoods can prove difficult when the needs are many, especially in distressed neighborhoods, and the resources are limited;
• Occasionally, finding even limited funds to support NCP-based course-related expenses can cause a problem;
• The logistics of transporting students off-campus to a neighborhood site can sometimes presents problems (funding, liability and student assimilation);
• Because of the attraction of working with real clients, there is often heightened student interest in an NCP class;
• Where students work in groups, there are often personality conflicts and/or tension about each student's contribution; however, this also allows for intensive interaction among students working in teams; team grading can pose problems;
• The experience may result in job opportunities for students;
• Despite problems, as one faculty respondent stated: "When students and clients click, it's magic".

2. Evidence of Learning
About half (20) of the respondents answered the question of what their requirements/assignments are to determine that students have learned NCP. The most cited were as follows: (1) research papers; (2) exam essays; (3) analysis of neighborhood plans; and (4) preparation of a plan/report to a real client.

3. Real Client
Faculty were asked whether the course was a practicum/studio that does work for a real client. Thirty-two (32) indicated that this was the course structure. When asked how they would characterize the client, they answered as follows: local government (21), community development corporation (16), business/merchant group (10), church (6), and other (18).

4. Length of Course
Most (26) of these courses were one-term only. However, eight did continue beyond one academic term.

D. Distressed neighborhoods
Almost all (39 of 43) respondents specifically address issues facing "distressed" neighborhoods. About half (23 of 43) of the respondents differentiated this from addressing the concerns of other types of neighborhoods. Of those who work with real clients, many work with organizations in distressed neighborhoods.

Most (36) respondents indicated that NCP courses educate future planners about the special problems/needs of distressed neighborhoods and most (33) believe that NCP courses provide helpful research/knowledge to real clients in these neighborhoods, where that approach is used.

E. Core/Critical Components of Teaching NCP
A majority of the respondents incorporated the following five components in teaching NCP: Social issues (37); Economic issues (37); Political issues (31); Physical development/Infrastructure (30); Urban design (22). We believe that the first four should be addressed in all NCP courses. The last seems particularly appropriate for design-related studios. Other components mentioned were: communication; mediation/negotiation/facilitation; law; real estate; and environmental issues. Respondents indicated that these components can be used in other types of academic courses.

F. Teaching Background
Respondents identified the following academic/disciplinary backgrounds as critical in the teaching of NCP: Design, Economics, Ethics, Geography, Humanities, Planning, Political Science, Real Estate, Service Learning, Social Sciences, Social Work, and Sociology.

G. Importance of NCP in the planning curriculum
Respondents rated the importance of NCP in the curriculum of their degree program as follows: very important (12), important (11), somewhat important (13), and not very important (6). No one responded that NCP was not important at all. Therefore, most respondents felt that NCP was important to some degree in their curriculum.

In response to the follow-up question of how important NCP should be in the planning curriculum and why, we received a variety of answers from 32 respondents. All agreed that NCP should play a very important role in the curriculum. The following are recurrent reasons given to support this view:

• this exposes students to community partnerships and a more diverse population and provides assistance to community clients;
• provides an understanding of past practices of planners toward low income neighborhoods;
• helps to fulfill the mission of urban universities;
• enables students to learn planning and development practices;
• educates students about issues related to social justice and equity.

H. APA, ACSP and PAB support for NCP
We received suggestions from 27 respondents, generally as follows:

• PAB should require an NCP course/planning practicum in its accreditation guidelines;
• APA should publicize examples of good/successful NCP, do PAS reports on NCP, and support other forms of research and education (reports and videos); APA should support the continuing education of practitioners;
• ACSP and APA should hold special symposia on NCP at their conferences and encourage faculty to conduct research on NCP (including networking);
• ACSP institutions should hire practitioner faculty who are not necessarily academically credentialed and reward community service and NCP teaching by regular faculty.

Four: Comments
Most of our respondents agree that there are powerful reasons why neighborhood collaborative planning should receive more attention in planning curricula, especially concerning poor areas. As jobs, wealth, population and economic opportunity continue their migration outward from central cities to suburbs, poor communities in the central city and in older suburbs (and rural areas) have become increasingly isolated from the opportunities and prosperity of their metropolitan regions, the nation and the emerging global economy (9).

Stark contrasts now exist between central cities and their surrounding suburbs. As of 1990, median income levels in central city jurisdictions were almost 30 percent below those in the suburbs, and the poverty rate was 18 percent in American central cities compared with only 8 percent in the suburbs (10).

Poverty is concentrated further within central cities. Between 1970 and 1990, the number of people living in areas of concentrated poverty (where over 40 percent of the residents are poor) grew from 3.8 million to 10.4 million (11). Within these neighborhoods, social conditions are bleak and housing, schools, public safety and the general quality of life and economic opportunity are much lower than most American families have come to expect. Professional urban planners, who seek a better future for everyone in their communities, should be equipped by their educational institutions with the skills necessary to work with neighborhood based planning and development organizations toward the goal of improving living environments for all citizens especially those in greatest need.

Overwhelmingly, our respondents observed that NCP should be more important than it is in planning curricula. Using phrases like: "deserves a prominent place," "builds a critical link between the university and community," "gets students jobs and helps local government and CDCs," planning professors argue that NCP helps improve neighborhood housing, key services and leads to greater citizen empowerment.

They argue that NCP provides students with a knowledge of neighborhood dynamics while also giving them a firm grasp of the local state and national legislation that affects these communities. Students should have a grasp of how such legislation can enhance or distort the local housing market and should understand "the dynamics that are producing patterns of uneven development in our cities so that they can, in the future, be prepared intellectually to remedy this situation."

In terms of their collaborative partners, class syllabi and assignments make clear that most neighborhood planning classes work closely with real neighborhood-based clients including CDCs. They also work extensively with local government. A smaller number work with local business/merchant groups as well. A few of the classes forge close relationships with social services agencies or other nontraditional planning partners.

Our respondents provided a wide range of suggestions about what APA, AICP, and PAB can do to strengthen the role of neighborhood planning in the curriculum. One suggestion was enforcing the APA code of ethics as it deals with low-income communities. A variant on this theme was to require pro-bono work by all AICP members in low-income, minority communities. Other respondents suggested organizing special issues of the JAPA and JPER journals on collaborative planning models and disseminating best-practice examples in manuals, PAS publications, Planning magazines, and by other means. All of the suggestions deserve careful consideration.

As we approach the millennium, the central tenets of urban revitalization are widely shared. Categorical federal programs are bad, decentralized state and local programs are good. Every neighborhood has unique needs, and should have its own solutions arising from its residents. Community organizing, leadership development and collaborative planning are essential to revitalization. Community-based initiatives are particularly important because they ensure that the community both initiates and supports programs for their neighborhoods. CDCs and Comprehensive Community Building Initiatives are important elements in neighborhood revitalization and should be supported even as the federal government continues to reduce its commitment to central cities.

Even though these tenets are widely accepted, what CDCs actually do in their urban neighborhoods is not uniform. The main activity of CDCs is building, renovating and maintaining low-and-moderate-cost housing. A visitor to a successful CDC neighborhood will be impressed by blocks of neat low-rise housing in areas marked otherwise by severe deterioration. After housing, the next thing a visitor to a CDC neighborhood will notice is that a lot of social services are being provided. Some CDCs run day-care and health center, self-improvement programs, and job training programs. The most substantial CDCs have also built shopping centers, plausibly demonstrating that economy of a poor neighborhood is reviving.

The need for viable, functioning neighborhood based organizations is particularly crucial in low-income neighborhoods with the worst conditions and few viable neighborhood institutions. Strong neighborhood organizations can not only help rebuild neighborhood infrastructure and improve service delivery by pressuring city hall to raise the level of public services, but might also strengthen the social fabric of their communities. Their purpose is to help low-income residents gain more control over their lives, build self-worth and have more influence over local affairs. For all these reasons, significantly more resources should be devoted to creating, nurturing and empowering such organizations.

This survey suggests that the teaching of Neighborhood Collaborative Planning is relevant to most of these activities. Many of the courses surveyed were designed as studios and workshops and directly involved students with neighborhood-based organizations as real clients. Students were taught from a variety of perspectives, including planning, design, housing, and plan implementation. They were frequently asked to apply to neighborhood problems such basic planning research skills as data gathering, data analysis, map-making, project recommendations and report writing. Many of the courses asked students to make written and oral presentations to neighborhood representatives, thus sharpening their presentation techniques. In spite of the difficulty of matching neighborhood needs to academic schedules, students in NCP seem to be generally enthusiastic and supportive of the approaches used.

Our own experience and informal discussions with other teachers of NCP suggest that students are generally well-prepared to go into the field of neighborhood planning and development. Given that the whole field of neighborhood planning is relatively new, and that planners and others involved in the field are creating on a daily basis new approaches and new tools to address neighborhood problems, we believe most students who complete neighborhood planning courses are equipped to go into jobs in the field. NCP students at Cleveland State University, for example, can be found in city and county and regional planning agencies, working as bank neighborhood investment officers, in posts with foundations and other intermediaries, and directing and serving in neighborhood CDCs. And a few are working on their Ph.D.s.

The question of just who students are being taught to collaborate with is more complex. Since the product of most neighborhood-based development organizations is housing and some commercial development, students are being taught to collaborate with those institutions which are supportive of such development: city planning and community development agencies; local foundations; banks which may be asked to fund such deals; and intermediaries such as the Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC) and the Enterprise Foundation.

In spite of the fact that poverty seems to be a root cause of neighborhood decline, students are rarely being asked to collaborate in classes we surveyed with agencies dealing directly with poverty: social service, health, education, transportation or welfare agencies. At the moment, however, social service agencies, social work faculties and their students are rarely part of Neighborhood Collaborative Planning courses. Such interaction should be made a more important part of NCP. A separate survey of ACSP faculty teaching Social Policy and Human Services might also reveal such interaction, although not necessarily in a neighborhood context.

5. What can Planning Schools and APA do to Improve NCP?
Universities and planning schools should add courses on NCP as a responsible addition to more traditional urban planning practice. The problems of neighborhoods, especially inner city neighborhoods, are among the most difficult problems of our times and are therefore most likely to offer opportunities to advance the university's primary mission of advancing and transmitting knowledge. Academics and students should track and write about the experiences of neighborhood-based planning and development organizations and how they actually get things done through unique development deals, legislation and administrative changes.

Professional schools should put more emphasis generally on interaction with planning practice and practitioners, particularly through outreach efforts and through courses like those in our survey which interact with real neighborhood clients and practicing planners. We believe this function is unrealized because of administrative pressure for "scholarship." Applied research and studio courses which do not result in refereed publications may not be valued as much.

Planning schools should take the lead in creating and publicizing indicators of distribution of income and wealth, municipal service quality, health indicators and other baseline information that defines the health of communities and individual neighborhoods. Part of this agenda would be to reveal the centrality of relative poverty as an underlying cause of neighborhood distress.

APA could provide support for NCP by mandating that AICP membership be conditional on some measure of community service with low-income neighborhoods. APA could also ensure that at least one session at every annual conference would focus on NCP.

1. Silver, Christopher, "Neighborhood Planning in Historical Perspective", Journal of the American Planning Association, Spring, 1985.

2. Perry, C.A. 1929. "Neighborhood and Community Planning." Vol. 3. New York: Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs.

3. William M. Rohe and Lauren B. Gates. 1985. Planning With Neighborhoods. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

4. Op. cit. Chapter 4.

5. Martin L. Needleman and C.E. Needleman. 1974. Guerrillas in the Bureaucracy. N.Y.: John Wiley and Sons.

6. National Congress for Community Economic Development (NCCED). Tying It All Together: The Comprehensive Achievements of Community-Based Development Organizations. Washington, D.C.: l995.

7. Walker, Christopher. "Nonprofit Housing Development: Status, Trends, and Prospects." Housing Policy Debate 4:3 (l993) 361-414

8. Jones, Bernie. 1990. Neighborhood Planning. Chicago: APA Planners Press.

9. Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

10. William H. Frey and Elaine L. Fielding, "Changing Urban Populations: Regional Restructuring, Racial Polarization and Poverty Concentration." Cityscape. 1995.

11. Ronald B. Mincy and Susan J. Weiner, "The Underclass in the 1980s: Changing Concept, Constant Reality." Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, July 1993.

APPENDIX A

RESPONDENT ACSP SCHOOLS