2023-24 Awards

In academia, it is sometimes possible to work on grassroots politics and yet be quite different in one’s own conduct as a professor. Margaret Crawford is the opposite of this: she is someone who takes diverse viewpoints as seriously in her teaching and mentorship as she does in her academic research and writing. The members of the committee have seen her challenge and gently encourage scholars at all stages of their careers, all the while moving the field to think more seriously about the ephemeral, the ordinary, and the everyday. It’s probably fair to say Margaret has taught and led all of us, and not only the students lucky enough to sit in her classes over these many years.

Margaret’s work is well known and perhaps requires only a brief reminder. As her letter writers have noted, her many writings have dismantled the idea that planning and design experts consistently served the needs of ordinary people. In her students’ words, “Crawford’s contributions draw bright lines between the abstract forms of knowledge that traditionally guided most planning (and that continued to inform the field of urban design)… and the experiential knowledge rooted in all of our everyday, ordinary, quotidian lives.” Perhaps we would not be studying malls, or garage sales, informal alleys, or street life, in quite the same way if Margaret had not pushed us to think differently – and we would all be the poorer for it.

Margaret is intrepid in her research, and she has taught her students to be the same way, looking for connections around the world and exploring ideas locally and globally. Her studio on urban art villages in the Pearl River Delta is a classic case of how Margaret teaches. She weaves together basic observational and data collection skills with the requirement that students take apart conventional wisdom about urban citizenship to formulate a more expansive and inclusive understanding. No surprise that Margaret often publishes with colleagues and students: she believes in learning together and she provides a model for how to do it.

Last but not least, a personal note: Margaret can be intimidating on paper, but one of the most remarkable things about her is how warm and kind she has been to so many of us now making our way in the profession. She shows up for talks. She offers supportive feedback on work in progress. She is genuinely interested and engaged, even in the work of someone who is just beginning. She remembers and follows up with questions. It is wholly unsurprising that her nominators described her as follows: “The authors of this letter would like to emphasize more broadly how beautifully Crawford communicates and connects with students; how generous she is with her time; how supportive and committed she is to providing constructive feedback; how encouraging she is of novelty and hybridity in topics and methods; her superior scholarly instincts; how artfully she arranges her course lectures; how provocative, even radical, her approach in the classroom is while eschewing the anger, utopianism, and abstraction typical of orthodox Marxists; how she offers a to-the-bone critique of designers and planners while guiding professional-degree students to produce exciting, creative, and promising new interventions.”

The prize committee wholeheartedly agrees with this description. SACRPH is lucky to have such a remarkable teacher and leader amongst us and we are delighted to honor her now.

The Gerckens committee is delighted to select Mark Rose as one of our two co-winners of the prize this year. Mark Rose’s nomination letters came in from faculty in urban planning, urban history, American studies, and urban studies, but they also impressively included practitioners and public historians. It is clear that Mark’s influence stretches far and wide across disciplines and multiple generations of scholars, and that he has inspired many to join the field of planning history in the first place.

Of the many commendations we received about Mark’s mentorship over the years, it is remarkable that each and every one mentioned Mark’s ability to build community and to make SACRPH (and academia generally) a welcoming place for new members. Mark went out of his way to help junior scholars find their place and to make friends along the way. He introduced scholars with shared interests, invited newcomers to group dinners, and conjured up remarkable conference panels and co-edited special issues that brought people together.

Mark not only made people feel welcome; he showed them how to find the resources they needed to build their careers. He cared about access for all and gave of his time unstintingly: he read extensively and made a point of applauding new books by first-time authors. One letter writer emphasized how meaningful it was to know that Mark had read so closely and that he was willing to offer feedback on future writing. His gentle approach made him the “perfect respondent” for young scholars testing out ideas in conferences, as he knew how to support and invigorate even as he offered critiques. He also worked closely with authors in his work as an editor for the University of Pennsylvania Press’ series, American Business, Politics, and Society, Mark not only passed along acceptances and rejections but also read manuscripts closely himself and pushed scholars to articulate clearer, better researched arguments.

Last but not least, Mark’s own path-making scholarship on transportation networks, on energy, and most recently, on the Great Recession, demonstrate just how remarkable it is that such a prolific and esteemed scholar would make mentorship and teaching an equally important part of his work. As one letter writer put it, while he cared about infrastructure in his research and writing, Mark also helped build infrastructure for students and emerging scholars finding their way in the profession.

It seems fitting to end this accolade with a quote from one his mentees: “Mark Rose, among others, and following Larry Gerckens’s example, helped to put SACRPH and SACRPH’s biennial conferences on the map as open and welcoming to a diverse range of grad students and emerging scholars, as places where people learn about opportunities in the field, experience networking where they learn things and emerge with opportunities to follow up on, as well as hear first-rate scholarly presentations from academics and professionals at all stages of their careers… SACRPH is very much in Mark’s debt, perhaps without knowing it.”

We know it now – and we are delighted to honor him and thank him for all that he has done.

Amezcua’s work is an achievement of analysis and storytelling most worthy of the Mumford Prize. He writes a recent history of Chicago in a way we have not seen before. He tells new stories of toil, solidarity, and power building by Chicagoans of Mexican descent, while critically examining the role of real estate capitalism in building community spaces and community identities in the city.

In Making Mexican Chicago, Amezcua details the slow, uneven, creative, and contentious process by which Chicagoans of Mexican descent carved out places of belonging, investment, and political power in Chicago over the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Chicago histories have long been framed as opposition between Black and white. Amezcua documents the spatial, political, and economic transformations that have resulted in more than a quarter of the city’s population being Hispanic or Latino – making the city Black, white, and brown in roughly equal proportion.

Amezcua examines real estate strategies to help explain the changes in Chicago’s residential neighborhoods and business districts. Among familiar Chicago figures including Saul Alinsky and the Richard Daleys, Amezcua features new characters such as Anita Villareal, a Chicago real estate investor who negotiated and shaped Chicago development for several decades. Villareal helped establish the neighborhoods and retail districts of Mexican Chicago through both the “civil rights work and blockbusting necessary to pioneer the Southwest Side neighborhoods and open them to Mexicans.” (241) The array of real estate investment strategies Amezcua details ranges from federal slum clearance and urban renewal efforts to municipal investment programs to private efforts that built community solidarity, challenged elite real estate strategies, and “turned unstable vacancies left by white flight into a new base for political and economic power.” (109)

Building that political power took a variety of uncertain forms and changing alliances. Key Mexican Chicago leaders were pillars of the Daley coalition but there were major splits in the community during the 1970s. Many Mexican Chicagoans were haltingly incorporated into the Republican coalition in the 1970s, led by Richard Nixon’s campaigns. Republicans featured both targeted outreach and a Latino version of the Southern Strategy that played on divisions between African Americans and Latino voters in communities like Chicago. At the same time, the Chicano power movement rejected traditional electoral political approaches and invested in a mural movement and adopted sites like Casa Aztlan, formerly an Anglo Pilsen institution that became a Mexican Chicago art, garden, and political center. Amezcua’s political analysis does justice to complexities of local and national settings, illustrating, in part, how Latino voters have become a key constituency courted by both Democrats and Republicans, and whose interests are profoundly shaped by local politics and conditions.

Amezcua’s narrative continues into the 21st century, when the success of the real estate and economic projects to create identifiable, cohesive neighborhoods proved too successful. Land values rose to a point that gentrification began displacing longtime residents and institutions, illustrating the fleeting nature of community gains accumulated in a profit-driven real estate system. In 2017, Casa Azatlan was sold and turned into condominiums. This gentrification was an ironic repudiation of Homer Hoyt’s notorious ranking of ethnic and racial groups’ effects on real estate values – Mexican Chicagoans had built profitable and valuable communities with institutions that have often proven difficult to maintain.

Maia Silber’s “The Home Front: World War I, Tenant Activism and Housing Policy Before the New Deal,” offers a lens into grassroots activism around urban housing during World War I and the 1920s. Silber helps us rethink the history of housing activism with an expertly researched case study of Philadelphia. The article addresses a wide range of issues including housing advocacy, economic conditions, social contexts, and the racial and ethnic dynamics of early housing activism. Silber expertly situates this story within the framework of national efforts around overcrowded conditions that plagued industrial cities during WWI when war production efforts drew waves of residents to urban centers, like Philadelphia. In her focus on housing efforts during WWI, Silber pushes us to decenter the New Deal and post-WWII housing programs and to consider grassroots initiatives that helped shaped the field. For its innovation, style, and argument, “The Home Front” is an exemplar of American city and regional planning history scholarship and the recipient of the 2023 Catherine Bauer Wurster Prize.

While there has been plenty of scholarship on the “meds and eds” economy, racial capitalism, deindustrialization, and housing exploitation, these threads are brought together anew in this deeply researched, well-written, and hard-hitting History dissertation. We learn about state actors and grassroots activists, municipal bonds and city incinerators, lead paint and lungs, all of which fit into the puzzle that was—and is—Baltimore. Indeed, Cumming’s work not only offers historians much to consider about metropolitan America, but also affords an excellent, theory-driven model for anyone grappling with the entrenched problems of health inequities and urban revitalization elsewhere.

Rarely does a study make you stop and reconsider basic concepts. But that’s exactly what Taketomo does in “City Mutable,” elegantly tracing the contested history behind one of the most important ways of defining what a city is: census designation. This was no trivial distinction; the consequences were many and far-reaching. Census officials, civic boosters, and city politicos understood this, and they often celebrated urban growth as a proxy for national progress. Today, we hear countless reminders about the supposedly intractable “urban-rural” divide. In this History dissertation, Taketomo helps us complicate this narrative, blurring the boundaries between “urban,” “rural,” and “suburban” in a provocative work that stays with the reader in a way that few dissertations manage to accomplish.

In this original, well-written, and fun (rarely a word used to describe a master’s thesis) project, Nguyen takes us through Philadelphia’s Little Saigon, a neighborhood long neglected by tourists and preservationists alike. Along the way, we come to appreciate the spaces and the ways in which Vietnamese-American culture has been built and erased. Drawn from an impressive array of sources—oral history and ethnography, photographs, architectural drawings, and more—Nguyen’s Historic Preservation thesis makes important contributions to the growing field of Asian American urban history.

Todd Michney’s “How the City Survey’s Redlining Maps Were Made: A Closer Look at HOLC’s Mortgagee Rehabilitation Division” fulfills all the criteria for the prize, including centrality to city and regional planning in the North American context and innovation in building on existing scholarship that will necessarily generate questions for further research and practice. The article is well written while also addressing a subject that has gained renewed salience among non-academic, activist and academic audiences in discussions of the history of redlining in relation to the differential spatial impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic and gentrification processes, for example. Michney’s work addresses a body of literature of central importance to city and regional planning and should stimulate further investigation as well as scholarly and praxis-oriented debates.

The article re-examines the politics of redlining. Michney considers previously under-explored archival correspondence and makes an original contribution to how we understand HOLC, FHA, and redlining across the United States. To do so, Michney provides administrative details that reconstruct facets of the political decision-making process that informed the production and use of the HOLC’s maps. The article interrogates long-standing beliefs regarding their creation and FHA-related redlining practices. In sum, the article presents an original reassessment of the creation, use, and significance of HOLC insurance maps that should be generative of new scholarship in the field of urban planning. As a result, it could be considered a field changing article.

This year’s Graduate Student Paper Prize winner is Genevieve (Genna) Kane for their paper “To Contrast the Twisting Streets of Boston: Landmaking and the Urban Grid in Early Nineteenth Century East Boston, Massachusetts.” The award committee commends the narrative arc and Kane’s ability to concisely unravel how the East Boston Company planners and boosters found themselves unable to enact their vision for the land. Kane’s work documents the role of the grid plan in constructing urbanness and, for East Boston, establishing equally priced lots throughout the neighborhood. However, the waterfront, priced in dollars per square foot instead of cents per square foot like the land lots, complicated this and encouraged the rise of shipyards and freight terminals tied to economic development and activity. The paper contributes to our understanding of the residential and industrial development of East Boston into the present, as the East Boston Company’s failed planning vision set the foundation for the eminent domain of a working-class neighborhood and established decades of tension between residents and reconceptualizing urban space. Congratulations to Kane on this contribution to the field.