2021 Awards

Professor Lawrence Vale’s impact on planning history education has been sustained and profound.

Professor Lawrence (Larry) Vale received his B.A. in American Studies from Amherst College in 1981, where he graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He received a Rhodes Scholarship to study at New College at Oxford, where he completed his Ph.D. in International Relations in 1985. He went on from there to study Architecture at Harvard GSD and MIT, where he completed the MS in Architectural Studies in 1988. That same year he was appointed to a Lectureship in the MIT Department of Architecture before moving to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He became Professor of Urban Design and Planning in 2002 and Ford Professor in 2009.

Much of Vale’s early work dealt with issues of civil defense and its relation to architecture and planning, culminating in his well-known book Architecture, Power, and National Identity (Yale 1992). Over the next two decades he gained an international reputation as a leading scholar of public housing, urban resilience, and governance of cities, publishing such staple books as From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Harvard 2000), Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods (Harvard 2002), and Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities (Chicago 2013). He has also published nearly 100 journal articles, chapters, reports, and papers.

Over the years, Vale’s work has attracted accolades in the form of numerous grants and awards. He has won best book prizes from the International Planning History Society (thrice), the Urban Affairs Association (twice), the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, and the Society of Architectural Historians. He has also held awards from the Fulbright-Hays Program, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and the Macarthur Foundation. He has been invited to give over 100 lectures, keynotes, and addresses in locations around the world.

Among many service roles he has undertaken for professional associations over several decades, he served as President of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History from 2011-2013.

However, it is ultimately the quality of teaching and mentoring that the Gerckens Prize addresses. Here, the committee draws attention to Larry Vale’s numerous accomplishments and contributions. He has received numerous awards over the years, including the MIT Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising, the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning Students’ Award for “Outstanding Advising”, the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning Students’ Award for Outstanding Contribution to Student Life, and the Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellowship for excellence in teaching. He also held the Bousfield Distinguished Visitorship in Planning at the University of Toronto, an award that is primarily dedicated to bring outstanding educators to the university, and received the “Excellence in Housing Education” by the Commonwealth Tenants Association, which included citations from the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Massachusetts Senate.

At MIT Vale has taught at least 12 unique courses on urban planning, design, and architectural studies, including one of the MIT signature courses “Planning Ideas that Matter.” He has served on 40 PhD committees, 21 as chair. Many of his PhD students have become active members of SACRPH and great planning history educators in their own right, including Daniel Serda, Aditi Mehta, Yonah Freemark, Kian Goh, Linda Shi, Zach Lamb, and Steven Moga, among others.

Vale has also supervised 59 students in completion of their Masters in Urban Planning, and served as a reader on another 60 theses. His students work as planners and in planning-related fields all over the world.

Larry Vale’s contribution as an educator is well captured by former student Thomas Campanella, quoted in the original nomination by Steven Moga and James Buckley. He writes: “Larry Vale is a superlative teacher and mentor, unstinting in his willingness to listen to his students and to help them navigate the byzantine corridors of academia. He is generous with his time and has always been available to share his wisdom … Larry is a thorough scholar with a clear sense of social justice and a keen eye for issues of crucial relevance to contemporary urban planning.”

In conclusion, because Larry Vale has demonstrated sustained teaching excellence and educational leadership in the field of planning history, we are delighted to award him the Laurence Gerckens Prize.

In this innovative and persuasive work of interdisciplinary planning history, Paige Glotzer provides an essential “prehistory” to the patterns of housing segregation that have persisted in twentieth- and twenty-first century cities. In How the Suburbs Were Segregated, Dr. Glotzer corrects a bias in schoarship that has focused on postwar public policy and shows how “racial segregation was built into suburban development from the beginning.” Baltimore’s Roland Park Company (RPC) becomes an essential vehicle in exposing this prehistory, as Dr. Glotzer weaves a narrative that begins with an analysis of the impact of global capitalism on American housing and follows the intertwining connections between private real estate and New Deal housing policy that led to the landmark Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954. The prominence of the RPC and its operators allows this work to serve as both a case study of an individual city as well as a transnational study of the diffusion of private practices and the evolution of public policy.

With a compelling organizational structure that moves both chronologically and thematically, Dr. Glotzer shows how racism and capitalism gave rise to segregated suburbs, connecting the history of American housing to a global history that recognizes “American places as nodes in a global circuit of capital.” Dr. Glotzer nimbly ranges across scales of analysis, from international finance and its ingrained logics of racial capitalism; to the actions and policies of influential standard-setters like the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB); to the coordination between private actors and public mechanisms such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC); to the local tactics that enforced residential segregation on-the-ground and “correlated race with risk.”

Dr. Glotzer’s creative excavation of evidence such as the RPC’s “exclusion files” exposes the degree to which real estate professionals created a “commercial logic binding real estate’s profitability to racial segregation.” She brings characters alive, from the individual investors in the RPC who were largely unaware of the broader implications of the circulation of their capital to the figures such as John Mowbray and James Rouse who helped shape a coordinated effort between NAREB, the HOLC, the FHA, and, ultimately, the authorship of mid-century housing policy that favored a decentralized structure and reinforced local control. Readers will greatly benefit from this exposition of privately influenced public policy; together with Dr. Glotzer’s attentiveness to the global networks of racial capitalism, this work represents a major contribution to the field of planning history, and we anticipate that it will be highly generative of future scholarship.

A People’s Atlas of Detroit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020).

With top tier academic presses unlikely to allocate resources for extensive community recovery and inquiry, much less even undertake it, the Awards Committee is grateful to the Wayne State University Press, in particular, for its People’s Atlas of Detroit. Sadly, academic presses today simply do not have the ability or staff to undertake a project as vast as this: in this People’s Atlas alone there were literally dozens of active contributors to a volume, boasting text, cartography, charts, and images – all of which attest to the expertise that was required here and the care with which the work was undertaken. A People’s Atlas of Detroit provides an ambitious and inspiring example of this kind of multidisciplinary public project, but as Makani Themba of Higher Ground writes on the back cover, “Detroit organizing has always been among the smartest, sharpest, and most innovative work.” This collection is a participatory research project that centers race and resident experience as key components of understanding the history and future of Detroit. With its feminist, spatial, and overtly decolonized methodologies in action, A People’s Atlas provides extensive interviews, public history, and revelatory cartography to deliver an encyclopedic preview of the sort of exhaustive book project that our colleagues Mary Corbin Sies, the late Clyde Woods, Genie Burch, Gail Dubrow, et al, have also worked to deliver throughout their careers. By providing an example of what is possible in planning history, policy, and advocacy, A People’s Atlas also acts as a welcome antidote to hometown Fordism and recent Michigan state revanchism, and should be required reading starting today in all U.S. planning history and urban studies courses.

As intersectional, BiPOC, and queer theory come to the forefront, the editors of A People’s Atlas have emerged from both academic and activist Detroit communities to build on emerging and established theoretical literatures. Editor Andrew Newman of Wayne State University adeptly combines ethnographic, historical, and collaborative approaches to urban research in the pages of A People’s Atlas. Sara Safransky of Vanderbilt University traverses the intersections of urban and environmental studies broadly while engaging critical race studies, as a way forward towards social and ecological justice. Editor Linda Campbell has had an illustrious career in the Detroit community nonprofit movements including the Detroit People’s Platform and the Building Movement. Tim Stallman has worked tirelessly with communities to facilitate social change through the use of maps, data, and technology. This edited collection effectively brings together their areas of expertise as scholars and practitioners in service of Detroit’s complex racial, economic, and political planning histories.

The first several chapters alone in A People’s Atlas of Detroit’s table of contents are evidence of its decolonizing ambitions. “Detroit and the Long Struggle for Liberation” opens the Atlas with a timeline of colonization in Detroit and features (among others) essays on the Underground Railroad, Detroit’s fraught labor history and finally an essay entitled “1967: ‘Riot Is a Four-Letter Word’” that frames what is now understood as the Detroit Rebellion of 1967. A People’s Atlas continues with the chapter “This Land is Our Land” that provides a sensory rich evocation of Detroit’s indigenous and pre-colonized landscape along the Detroit River between Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie. As A People’s Atlas segues into the colonized and post-industrial, the chapter entitled “Growing a Revolution” is also a comprehensive look at the city’s subsistence agricultural economies from the thrift farms of the Depression era to Detroit community anglers or River Rats – those people taking fish from Lake St Clair and the Detroit River – to the subsistence farms now found throughout Detroit that help put food on the table. A People’s Atlas of Detroit engages with urban history, planning policy, and political power to expose the long history of fiscal disinvestment and industrial decline and at the same time showcases the equally long tradition of movement culture, for worker’s rights, Black liberation, and immigrant justice.

Campbell, Newman, Safransky, and Stallmann inevitably pose the question: “Who has a right to the city?” – specifically the city of Detroit. A People’s Atlas makes clear that the right to Detroit remains in the hands of an ethnically and racially diverse population and that through collaboration and co-creation between its many stakeholders another city is possible.

Dylan Gottlieb’s “Hoboken is Burning: Yuppies, Arson, and Displacement in the Postindustrial City,” delivers an urgent argument for the violence of gentrification in postindustrial America. Through gripping prose that situates the reader in the broader history of Hoboken, New Jersey, Gottlieb offers insight into how violence and dispossession were foundational to metropolitan transformation during the late twentieth century. The destruction by arson and subsequent “rebirth” of American cities, he argues, were two sides of the same coin. In the process, Gottlieb exposes the local repercussions of the growth of finance which occurred just as older models of federally backed urban solutions gave way to profit-driven public-private partnerships that sought to entice Manhattan-based “yuppies.” It was within this cauldron that lethal displacement flourished. In its argument, style, and contribution, “Hoboken is Burning” is a model of outstanding scholarship in American planning history.

By taking a familiar set of policies and giving them an entirely new origin story, LaDale Winling and Todd Michney have provided planning historians with the gift we didn’t know we needed until we opened it. In “The Roots of Redlining,” the authors document how the principles of real estate economics, as developed and championed by Richard T. Ely and his acolytes in the 1920s, influenced the professionalization of the real estate industry at a time when the country was looking for a more rational and scientific approach to land valuation. They show how these ideas, and their explicit racial bias, subsequently shaped New Deal housing policy and were applied on the ground by real estate professionals and others nationwide. Winling and Michney bring to light the various overlapping networks that facilitated this process, providing a thought-provoking genealogy of the concept of redlining. Their prose is clean, their conclusions are well-founded, and their sources reflect a commitment to chasing down hard-to-find information. In all, the committee finds that this article is highly deserving of the Catherine Bauer Wurster prize.

The intersection between race, ideology, and built space remains a central topic of inquiry for urban planners. Matthew Gordon Lasner’s “Segregation by Design: Race, Architecture, and the Enclosure of the Atlanta Apartment” provides critical research on how racism in urban space penetrates not just land use but the architecture itself. Lasner’s article illustrates how in response to black urban unrest following social justice activist Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, white real estate developers hid their racial bias in the design of luxury apartments. Marketed to wealthy white adults, these apartments, Lasner cogently contends, were designed according to what he called the architecture of enclosure. Reduced visibility from the street, single driveways, limited retail options, racially coded building names, and country-like landscaping were but a few of the architectural techniques of enclosure. Well-researched, well-structured, and thought-provoking, Lasner’s article provides a disquieting but important take on how racism remains pervasive in contemporary society and embedded in the built environment.

This is an ambitious, well-researched, and well-written dissertation that both contributes to the history of education (the histories of school desegregation and school finance) and offers a new approach for understanding historical and existing inequality among suburbs, challenging the longstanding notion of suburban homogeneity. Glass doesn’t just show that disparities exist among suburbs, but meticulously researches and explains how they came to be through a deep dive into the institutional structures that underlie resource disparities: real estate, municipal debt, and commercial development. He then expertly details how these disparities play out in the realm of education through an impressive seven case studies in Nassau County, Long Island at multiple scales of governance.

Steifbold explores suburban growth from the perspective of rural farmers at the urban fringe in Bucks County, PA, challenging prevailing literature that understands suburban expansion from the urban perspective. She highlights the influential role of landowning farmers in shaping the process of suburbanization, and shows how agriculture and open space preservation efforts were deeply tied to preserving exclusionary, anti-urban spaces. Drawing from an impressive array of sources, this is a truly regional history of suburbanization that offers scholars a new take on the well-studied process of suburbanization, compelling us to reconsider the many actors and values involved.

Kyiv is a city that can only be understood in layers: whether in the medieval monasteries, the grand boulevards, or the post-independence apartment blocks, the capital of Ukraine holds in place conflicting spatial orders. For scholars Anastasiya Ponomaryova and Brent D. Ryan, it is the industrial spaces that fascinate and that are particularly vulnerable to destruction; Kyiv’s industrial heritage showcases larger post-Soviet experiences of independence, evolution from secondary to primary city status, transformation from socialist to capitalist urbanism, and the enactment of rehabilitation and redevelopment regimes. It is the precision of the analysis along with the detailed comparison to global counterparts that makes this article so impressive: in addition to providing an overview of architectural and planning history in Kyiv as well as more detailed study of five enterprises in the industrial districts, the authors take the unusual step of proposing strategies for reimagining rehabilitation and preservation of industrial heritage. In knitting together past planning practices with broader political history and with future planning, Ponomaryov and Ryan provide a study that is at once deeply researched and forward-thinking.