In the 1980s, austerity and severe social safety net cuts coincided with the emergence of “new homelessness.” This article examines this policy-induced crisis through the life and work of Houston Congressman Mickey Leland. Grounded in the experiences of his constituents and aligning with the critical housing scholarship of his time, Leland diagnosed homelessness as a structural issue. Leland’s Homeless Person’s Survival Act included a national right to shelter, low-income housing preservation, and rent relief. Though not adopted at the time, this legislation still offers a radical blueprint to eliminate homelessness at the root of housing insecurity.
In 1975, the American Law Institute (ALI) published A Model Land Development Code, a 500-page book designed to reform the foundational laws governing municipal planning in the US. Arising from the urban and environmental crises of the 1960s, the code reflected a broader movement to address land use problems. The goal was to create a new legal framework for land use. Despite its aim to reshape planning practice by redesigning the rules governing bureaucratic institutions, the code is now largely forgotten. This paper explores the code’s origins, its critique of existing laws, and its process of creation and distribution.
Throughout history, governments have shaped urban spaces through policies informed by historical knowledge and contemporary ideologies. In Afghanistan, while European urban planning methods were introduced during Amanullah Khan's reign (1919-1929), a distinct transformation occurred under Mohammad Zahir Shah (1933-1973). This study examines Kabul's urban policies during Zahir Shah's rule, focusing on modernization processes influenced by Western and Soviet planning models. The establishment of a modern municipality, collaboration with foreign experts, and the adoption of the Soviet-inspired Macrorayon housing system marked a shift toward state-led, technocratic urbanism. Although these transformations modernized Kabul's spatial structure, they also erased many historical and cultural layers, producing a hybrid cityscape where socialist rationalism and Western aesthetics coexisted in tension with traditional urban identity.
In California, as in other parts of the country, freeway construction fueled decentralization and suburbanization. Using archival research, census data, and interviews with community members this paper explores how freeway construction and urban renewal together reshaped Sacramento's landscape. The construction of US-50 and SR-99 through the city created economic and social disparities in Oak Park, a predominantly African American neighborhood. Construction of I-5 on the west end of the city contributed to displacement of Japanese Americans and several other communities of color. The legacy of freeway building combined with other policies continues to disproportionately impact communities of color in Sacramento.
This research revisits the widely accepted two-stage framework for understanding Barcelona's transformation between the late 1970s and early 1990s. According to this view, the first stage focused on small-scale, symbolic projects (such as the Espais Urbans program and early planning efforts), followed by a second stage of large-scale development driven by the 1992 Olympic Games. While acknowledging the heuristic value of this framework, the article argues that large-scale ambitions were already present in Barcelona's planning agenda from the late 1970s, when democratic planning structures were first established. Drawing on policy documents, testimonies of key political and technical actors, and secondary sources, the study reveals that from as early as 1979 to 1981, the city's political leadership and planning apparatus conceived a holistic urban strategy grounded in a vision of neighborhood's public space improvement and international projection. The article emphasizes how political optimism and administrative innovation enabled the mobilization of resources and sustained long-term transformation, even under significant fiscal and political constraints.
Zoning is widely criticized for incompatibility with housing diversity and smart growth, often with reproach toward zoning's first foundations and authors. Using extensive archival and spatial research, this article traces zoning's trajectory from first to present applications, showing these limitations arose not from first ordinances but mid-twentieth-century reforms. It argues early zoning was more supportive of design and land use patterns aligned with twenty-first century planning goals. In contrast, mid-century initiatives-particularly Urban Renewal-produced auto-centric, suburban-style codes restricting walkable, mixed-use environments. The article argues that mid-century changes reshaped zoning in ways that hinder twenty-first-century planning.
In the nineteenth century, cities were described as "creatures of the state," until a fervent home rule movement arose among urban reformers. This History Note traces the evolving politics of preemption, or the power of higher governments to override local decisions, in the U.S. Since then, preemption has served both progressive and conservative ends, playing out in the realm of civil rights, corporate influence, and, most recently, renewable energy and labor protections. Revisiting early home rule debates contextualizes a recent wave of state preemption challenges in the longer contest between state and local power.
Given Israel's unique political, economic, and social conditions-marked by rapid development and the need for landscape preservation-landscape architects played a central role in the nation-building project from the early twentieth century. While most writings focus on built environments and their creators, this article examines the profession's institutionalization, tracing its evolution from gardening to spatial design. It highlights the efforts of the professional association, founded in 1952, to elevate the field, including its inclusion in the 1958 Engineers and Architects Law, securing employment through government negotiations, and establishing Israel's first academic program in landscape architecture at the Technion.
This article traces the spatial history of the Ulysses S. Grant Houses and Columbia University's planning projects in Morningside Heights, New York City. In 2020, Grant Houses recorded one of the highest COVID-19 death rates in public housing in the city. The paper focuses on two key moments: mid-century urban renewal and Columbia's twenty-first-century Manhattanville expansion. It examines how Columbia has used planning tools, health discourses, and policing to secure land and displace or contain neighboring Black communities. Drawing on archival materials, the article introduces the concept of the split city to describe a form of racialized urbanism shaped not by complete separation but by selective and conditional inclusion. The split city is not a stable or totalizing formation. It is shaped by ongoing struggle, as residents have continually resisted erasure and asserted their right to the spaces and futures of Morningside Heights.
