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The below was originally published in the SACRPH March 2025 e-Newsletter
Dear SACRPH Community,
We are happy to share our March 2025 newsletter. Please see below for an announcement about SACRPH prizes, a spotlight of a recent article in the Journal of Planning History, jobs and opportunities, and a profile of a SACRPH member.
– Genna Kane
SACRPH Board Graduate Student Representative
& Communications Director
Update on Prizes
SACRPH is pleased to announce a new prize to be given out as part of our next biennial awards competition, in 2026: the Global Book Prize for the best book on city and regional planning history whose focus is outside the United States and Canada.
Nominations for this and SACRPH’s other awards, including the Lewis Mumford Prize for best book on American city and regional planning history, the Catherine Bauer Wurster Prize for best scholarly article on American city and regional planning history, the Journal of Planning History Prize for best article published in that journal, the John Reps Prizes for best doctoral dissertation and master’s thesis in American city and regional planning history, and the Laurence Gerckens Prize for an outstanding teacher-scholar who has demonstrated sustained excellence in scholarship, teaching, and leadership in the field of planning history, will open this summer.
To realign SACRPH’s biennial awards schedule with our biennial conference schedule, ruptured during the pandemic, the window for publication and research awards is being expanded this round to include work with a publication date between August 1, 2023 and December 31, 2025. Subsequent award cycles will revert to a two-year window.
Highlight from the Journal of Planning History
In Volume 24, Number 1 (February 2025), Andres F. Ramirez, Emmanuel Proussaloglou, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, and Jacob L. Wasserman examine the selection of freeway routes in Los Angeles County in “Exposing Freeway Inequalities in the Suburbs: The Cases of Pasadena and Pacoima.” This article offers a comparative historical analysis of freeway routing in two ethnically diverse municipalities in northern Los Angeles, both of whose planning authorities chose routes that displaced a greater share of households of color than the proposed alternatives. The article also considers how white homeowners in wealthier sections of these towns shaped the route selection process and the long-term negative impacts of the freeways on social equity and the environment that persist today.
The authors also assembled a StoryMap related to their research, which can be viewed here.
Member Spotlight
SACRPH is a one-of-a-kind community that brings together scholars and practitioners. We are excited to showcase our members’ work and what SACRPH means to them.
Thomas Storrs, ABD in History at the University of Virginia
What are you currently working on?
I am primarily working on my dissertation (in case my advisor reads this). It is a biography of the planner Earle Draper. Between 1915 and 1945, he went from planning textile mill villages in the South to (temporarily) running the FHA with lots of interesting work in between that foreshadows mid century federal efforts in urban renewal, regional planning, and suburbanization.
I am also working with colleagues at the Redlining Lab (redlininglab.org) to digitize a couple hundred block maps from the 1930s that the FHA seems to have used in the process of redlining and 120,000 FHA and VA loan cards from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation Mortgage Company, a predecessor to Fannie Mae. Lastly, I have a few other interdisciplinary papers cooking on New Deal era mortgage finance history.
What most excites you about your field right now?
AI, LLMs, and “the machines” excite me in both negative and positive ways. On the positive side, for data collection, they make prohibitively expensive projects plausible. On the negative side, they open up a superficial pathway to writing something that sounds erudite but is actually slop. I think they can be great helpers but only once we have developed our skills without them. There will be amazing new discoveries from the first generation of scholars to embrace them but there might not be a next generation of scholars unless we can find a way to teach without students’ using them as a crutch.
Why did you join SACRPH?
I joined SACRPH because it’s a wonderful group of scholars. Their work overlaps with my work in a way that is of great value to me. I had the pleasure of presenting at the recent conference in San Diego. In my session, David Breiner presented on a cool midcentury neighborhood near Philadelphia, Sy Adler shared on his work with Ellen Shoskes on correspondence between Catherine Bauer Wurster and Mel Webber, Steven Moga did a presentation on the 19th century origins of city planning, and I gave my little talk on Earle Draper. All different subjects that overlap and enrich each other. It was a magical session and highlighted to me the real value in SACRPH.
