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The below was originally published in the SACRPH January 2025 Newsletter
Dear SACRPH Community,
Please see below for the January 2025 edition of the SACRPH bi-monthly newsletter. We are excited to share announcements from SACRPH members, spotlight a recent article in the Journal of Planning History, highlight jobs and opportunities, and profile a SACRPH member.
– Genna Kane
SACRPH Board Graduate Student Representative & Communications Director
Call for Future SACRPH Conference Hosts
SACRPH seeks a host for its 2028 biennial conference. Continuing the organization’s recent tradition—begun at City College (2022) and continuing through UCSD (2024) and the University of Cincinnati (upcoming in 2026)—we seek an academic campus site, rather than a hotel, as a host venue. The campus should have available space to host the major conference events on Thursday evening, Friday evening, and all day Saturday, and possibly Sunday morning on a weekend in mid-October. Suitable on-campus conference spaces generally include: classrooms for regular program sessions (e.g., panels, roundtables); auditoriums and other large spaces for plenaries, lunch, and receptions; and a central convening area for the book exhibit.
Interested members should email a brief expression of interest containing the following information:
- Name of one or more individuals seeking to organize local arrangements,
- Name of host city and institution (and associated school(s) or department(s)), and
- List of ~4-6 potential tour sites in the immediate or surrounding area.
Please email the above to Francesca Ammon, SACRPH President, at fammon@design.upenn.edu by March 1, 2025.
Announcements from SACRPH Members
La Ciudad Lineal – Ray Bromley
“The Linear City” is both a global concept and a specific pioneering case–a neighborhood in Madrid that was developed following the ideas of Artoro Soria y Mata and his Compañia Madrileña de Urbanización. A quarter-century ago, I spent a week in Madrid photocopying articles from La Ciudad Lineal, Soria’s pioneering journal published between 1897 and 1932–one full filing cabinet drawer of copies. Now, towards the end of my career, I know the project isn’t high on my priority list, and so I would like to give the collection to any Spanish-speaking researcher who wants to write on linear cities. Please e-mail me if you’re interested: Ray Bromley, rbromley@albany.edu.
Do you have an announcement for SACRPH members that you would like to feature in the next bi-monthly newsletter? Email the SACRPH Communications Director, Genna Kane (gweidner@bu.edu), with your 100-word announcement.
What’s New in the Journal of Planning History
SACRPH’s quarterly publication, the Journal of Planning History, provides a scholarly outlet for the growing multidisciplinary cadre of academics and practitioners in the broad field of planning history.
In Volume 23 Issue 4, November 2024, authors Michael Hibbard and Kathryn I. Frank focus on rural planning in the article entitled “What Happened to Rural Community and Regional Development? The Evolution of a Planning Idea.” At the beginning of the profession in the early 1900s, planning considered uniquely rural places and communities through the lens of regionalism. Yet today it tends to regard all spatiality as part of the urban environment and non-city-dwellers as part of the urban population. To understand this shift, Hibbard and Frank examine the history of rural regional development planning over the past century up to the Great Recession. They then apply the lessons to consider what a 21st century reinvention of rural planning might entail, particularly the possible recovery of the comprehensive, reformist approach.
Urban Humanities Global (Un)Conference 2
St, Louis, Missouri, October 16-18, 2025
The Urban Humanities Network (UHN) is excited to announce and invite you to a weekend of intellectual collaboration, community building, and shared meals in St. Louis, Missouri on October 16-18, 2025.
Building on the success of the inaugural (Un)Conference 1 in Tucson, Arizona, in March 2023, we will continue navigating toward the future of urban humanities in St. Louis at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) for the (Un)Conference 2! Wash U is proud to host the upcoming convening and is excited to share the areas in which they have cultivated focused efforts toward urban and public humanities scholarship and practice.
We warmly invite Letters of Interest (LOI) for participation in (Un)Conference 2. We invite submissions showcasing work situated at the intersections, edges, and territories of design, urban studies, and the humanities. Please visit our website, www.urbhum.net and the attached call for proposals (CFP) for more details. The deadline to submit a Letter of Interest is January 31, 2025.
Sign up for updates to stay in touch as we make our way together to St. Louis in 2025!
Deadline Extended for Proposals for Urban History Association’s Biennial Conference
Proposals for a conference panel or individual paper submission to the 11th Biennial Conference of the Urban History Association (UHA), to take place in Los Angeles, CA, in October 2025, are now due by February 28, 2025.
Please visit the UHA’s conference website for the full CFP and submission instructions.
Member Spotlight: Michael Glass
Assistant Professor of History, Boston College
What are you currently working on?
Right now, I’m wrapping up several things and just beginning a new project.
First, I’m putting the finishing touches on my first book, Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America, which will be published by University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2025. The book examines housing and education in the suburbs of Long Island, New York, and it reveals how the post-World War II suburban boom was built on debt and speculation. I focus on home mortgages and municipal bonds, tracing how these debt instruments made life increasingly precarious, established durable inequalities, and sparked dynamic social movements. This project started as my PhD dissertation, and it has evolved a great deal while revising it into a book. I’m excited — and nervous! — for it to be out in the world soon.
I’m also nearing the finish line for a digital project that I’ve been developing with Brent Cebul. For several years we’ve been mapping the addresses for over 7,000 apartment complexes that were underwritten by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in the early 1950s. Our map shows that FHA-insured apartments largely followed the “redlining” patterns that we recognize from single-family homes, with most new units located in all-white neighborhoods, although the apartment program became a major scandal because of flagrant profiteering by many developers. We have an article coming out this summer in the Journal of American History that recounts the policy history of FHA-insured apartments and features the exploits of Fred Trump.
Finally, I’m starting research for a second book project, which will examine wildfires and real estate in California. Like everyone, I’m disturbed by how climate change is already disrupting our living patterns, and I want to explore the historical roots of environmental disaster. In particular, I’m interested in how real estate has generated environmental and financial risks. This has led me to forestry, fire ecology, home insurance, building codes, subprime lending, and other systems of risk management. It’s been fun to start over and learn about entirely new topics.
What most excites you about your field right now?
As with many urban historians of my generation, a lot of my research interests originated in grappling with the 2008 financial crisis and the attendant political conflicts that erupted in Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and elsewhere. Now, nearly two decades later, we have a rich body of scholarship that helps us understand a range of actors and processes, including austerity politics, low-income homeownership, realtor discrimination, the urban reinvestment movement, municipal debt, nonprofits, environmental justice, public-private partnerships, property taxes, and insurance redlining, with lots more exciting work on the way. Taken together, we might consider it something like a “financial turn” in urban history.
Why did you join SACRPH?
I initially joined SACRPH as a graduate student thanks to the encouragement of Alison Isenberg, a past SACRPH president and one of my graduate school mentors. There’s just so much to love about the organization. The conferences are truly interdisciplinary, with historians mingling with urban planners, architects, cartographers, and other practitioners. I’ve also found the longstanding SACRPH members to be very supportive of graduate students and junior scholars.
