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Type of site | News website |
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Available in | English |
URL | www |
Commercial | Yes |
Launched | February 2000 |
Planetizen is a planning-related news website and e-learning platform based in Los Angeles, California. It features user-submitted news, editor-evaluated news and weekly user-contributed op-eds about urban planning and several related fields. The website also publishes an annual list of the top 10 books in the field published during the current year, and a directory and ranking of graduate-level education in the field of urban planning.
The name of the website is a concatenation of Plan, as in the word, planning, and Netizen, a portmanteau of Internet and citizen. [1] The website self-reports that it is visited by 1.5 million unique visitors each year. [2]
In 2006, the website also started publishing books, including the first urban planning book for children, Where Things Are, From Near to Far, published in 2008 by Planetizen Press. This book was reviewed by The New York Times . [3] Their 2007 book Planetizen's Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning, a collection of brief essays published by Island Press, received positive reviews. [4]
Planetizen introduced a much-needed broader perspective on city planning in the US, which very often extends into international practice as well. Coming out of the very formal car-oriented planning philosophy and practice following the Second World War, American urbanism risked becoming a dinosaur as it missed all the (at the time) new New Urbanist practices being implemented. The great value of Planetizen was to juxtapose ALL planning practice and let readers judge the effectiveness of each idea. Coming as it did in the internet age, it provided, and continues to provide, an extremely useful central location for urbanists and planners to follow what is happening around the world. More than any other site, Planetizen is a clearing house of planning ideas, and its inclusivity without any ideological prejudice is both refreshing and invaluable.
The major problem in developed economies is urban sprawl and its energy-devouring urban morphology. Planetizen has broadly championed the New Urbanist solutions while juxtaposing a variety of alternatives and criticisms. This interplay lays the groundwork for facing a difficult problem. Debate on Planetizen juxtaposes practical concerns of developers and government entities with the need for more sustainable urban fabric. Developers who build Sprawl are being educated towards new strategies for a more livable suburbia.
In the Developing World, the major problem facing both economies and governments lies in owner-built settlements, favelas, villas miserias, gecekondu, or slums by any other name. Here the debate is more difficult to access, because for a long time, the problems and solutions found in informal settlements have been either ignored or misinterpreted by mainstream planners. Solutions to this exponentially growing problem are not obvious. Planetizen has commendably brought attention to this other side of urbanism, so often ignored by the urban planning schools. For example, it sponsored a discussion on the Bombay slum Dharavi, which brought the topic of slum clearance versus upgrading to worldwide attention. [5]
World economies and major construction companies are driven in part by building megaprojects, the most prominent component of which is one or more skyscrapers. Planetizen has opened up the debate on skyscrapers more than once. A city has to balance the drive to build high, using high-tech, with the theoretical objections that skyscrapers drain the resources and energy from the region in which they are implanted. New skyscrapers are claimed to be eco-sustainable, but those claims have as many critics as they have proponents. Again, there is a need for a broad debate, and Planetizen contains many different and dissenting viewpoints on the question of skyscrapers as a viable building typology.
Planetizen has ranked planning graduate programs in the United States through six editions of its Guide to Urban Planning Graduate Programs, and has published the top 10 ranks on its website.
Rank | 7th Edition (2023) [6] | 6th Edition (2019) [7] | 5th Edition (2017) [8] | 4th Edition (2015) [9] | 3rd Edition (2012) [10] | 2nd Edition (2009) [11] | 1st Edition (2007) [12] |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) | MIT | MIT | MIT | MIT | MIT | MIT |
2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | Berkeley | Berkeley | Berkeley | Cornell | Berkeley | Berkeley |
3 | Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (Rutgers) | Rutgers | UNC-Chapel Hill | Urbana-Champaign | Rutgers | UNC-Chapel Hill | UNC-Chapel Hill |
4 | University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley) | UCLA | UCLA | UCLA | Berkeley | Rutgers | Harvard |
5 | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill) | UNC-Chapel Hill | Rutgers | Georgia Tech | Urbana-Champaign | Urbana-Champaign | UPenn |
6 | Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) | Harvard | Harvard | Rutgers | UNC-Chapel Hill | Cornell | UCLA |
7 | Harvard University (Harvard) | University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) | Georgia Tech | Cornell | USC | Harvard | Cornell |
8 | University of Southern California (USC) | USC | University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Urbana-Champaign) | UNC-Chapel Hill | Georgia Tech | UCLA | Rutgers |
9 | University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) | University of Michigan | USC | USC | UCLA | USC | USC |
10 | Tufts University (Tufts) | Georgia Tech | Cornell University (Cornell) | Harvard | UPenn | UPenn | Urbana-Champaign |
Planetizen is often criticized for running news stories or user-contributed op-eds that are critical of current urban planning practices. Planetizen is also criticized by some urban planning educators in higher education for ranking graduate-level urban planning programs in the Guide to Graduate Urban Planning Education. [13]
The site was created in February 2000 by co-editors in chief Abhijeet Chavan and Chris Steins. In 2005 David Gest was appointed the first managing editor. Subsequent managing editors have included Christian Peralta Madera (2006), Timothy Halbur (2008), Jonathan Nettler, AICP (2012) and James Brasuell (2014). [23]
Planetizen Press is the publishing arm of Planetizen, and has published several print books.
New Urbanism is an urban design movement that promotes environmentally friendly habits by creating walkable neighbourhoods containing a wide range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually influenced many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use strategies. New Urbanism attempts to address the ills associated with urban sprawl and post-WW II suburban development.
Dharavi is a residential area in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It has often been considered to be one of the world's largest slums. Dharavi has an area of just over 2.39 square kilometres and a population of about 1,000,000. With a population density of over 277,136/km2 (717,780/sq mi), Dharavi is one of the most densely populated areas in the world.
The College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP) is the school of architecture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. It offers 20 undergraduate and graduate degrees in five departments: architecture, art, urban planning, real estate, and design technology. Aside from its main campus in Ithaca, AAP offers programs in Rome, Italy and in New York City, New York.
Wendell Cox is an American urban policy analyst and proponent of the use of the private car over rail projects. He is the principal and sole owner of Wendell Cox Consultancy/Demographia, based in the St. Louis metropolitan region and editor of three web sites, Demographia, The Public Purpose and Urban Tours by Rental Car. Cox is a fellow of numerous conservative think tanks and a frequent op-ed commenter in conservative US and UK newspapers.
The University of VirginiaSchool of Architecture is the graduate school of architecture at the University of Virginia, a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. The school offers master's, doctoral and limited bachelor's programmes in architecture, landscape architecture, architectural history, and urban and environmental planning. Additionally, the school offers a certificate in historic preservation.
The A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, also known as Taubman College, is the school of architecture and urban planning and one of the nineteen schools of the University of Michigan located in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) at Virginia Tech offers graduate and undergraduate education in the fields of public administration, public policy, international affairs, urban affairs, and urban & regional planning. It has three campuses throughout Virginia: Arlington; Blacksburg and Richmond.
The MIT School of Architecture and Planning is one of the five schools of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1865 by William Robert Ware, the school offered the first architecture curriculum in the United States and was the first architecture program established within a university. MIT's Department of Architecture has consistently ranked among the top architecture/built environment schools in the world.
The R. Wayne Estopinal College of Architecture and Planning, commonly referred to as CAP, is one of seven academic colleges of Ball State University based in Muncie, Indiana, with a satellite facility in Indianapolis. The college offers degrees in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, urban design, construction management, and interior design. CAP was established in 1965.
The Cal Poly Pomona College of Environmental Design is a college part of the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. The college houses over 1,600 students; making it one of largest environmental design programs in the United States. The college offers bachelor's degrees in five departments, as well as three master's degree programs. It is the only academic unit within the California State University system to be associated with a Pritzker Prize laureate.
Housing in India varies from palaces of erstwhile maharajas, to modern apartment buildings in big cities, to tiny huts in far-flung villages. The Human Rights Measurement Initiative finds that India is doing 60.9% of what should be possible at its level of income for the right to housing.
William Fulton is an American author, urban planner, and politician. He served as mayor of Ventura, California, from 2009 to 2011, and later as the Planning Director for the City of San Diego. From 2014 to 2022, he was the head of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is considered an advocate of the "Smart Growth" movement in urban planning. In 2009, he was named to Planetizen's list of "Top 100 Urban Thinkers". He is the founder and publisher of the California Planning & Development Report.
The USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, previously known as School of Policy, Planning, and Development (SPPD), is the public policy school of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles & Sacramento, California. It offers undergraduate and graduate programs, including a doctoral program and several professional and executive master's degree programs. USC Price also offers the Master of Public Administration program at a campus in Sacramento.
Urban planning education is a practice of teaching and learning urban theory, studies, and professional practices. The interaction between public officials, professional planners and the public involves a continuous education on planning process. Community members often serve on a city planning commission, council or board. As a result, education outreach is effectively an ongoing cycle. Formal education is offered as an academic degree in urban, city, rural, and/or regional planning, and more often awarded as a master's degree specifically accredited by an urban planning association in addition to the university's university-wide primary accreditation, although some universities offer bachelor's degrees and doctoral degrees also accredited in the same fashion; although most bachelor's degrees in urban planning do not have the secondary-layer of urban planning association accreditation required for most positions, relying solely on the university's primary accreditation as a legitimate institution of higher education. At some universities, urban studies, also known as pre-urban planning, is the paraprofessional version of urban and regional planning education, mostly taken as a bachelor's degree prior to taking up post-graduate education in urban planning or as a master's or graduate certificate program for public administration professionals to get an understanding of public policy implications created by urban planning decisions or techniques.
Jennifer Keesmaat is a Canadian real estate developer and urban planner who served as Chief City Planner of Toronto from 2012 to 2017 and the runner-up in the 2018 Toronto mayoral election to Mayor John Tory, where she won 23.6% of the vote and lost to Tory in each of Toronto's 25 wards.
Technical aspects of urban planning involve the technical processes, considerations and features that are involved in planning for land use, urban design, natural resources, transportation, and infrastructure.
Urban planning, also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning in specific contexts, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportation, communications, and distribution networks, and their accessibility. Traditionally, urban planning followed a top-down approach in master planning the physical layout of human settlements. The primary concern was the public welfare, which included considerations of efficiency, sanitation, protection and use of the environment, as well as effects of the master plans on the social and economic activities. Over time, urban planning has adopted a focus on the social and environmental bottom lines that focus on planning as a tool to improve the health and well-being of people, maintaining sustainability standards. Similarly, in the early 21st century, Jane Jacobs's writings on legal and political perspectives to emphasize the interests of residents, businesses and communities effectively influenced urban planners to take into broader consideration of resident experiences and needs while planning.
Jason M. Barr is an American economist and author at Rutgers University-Newark, whose work is in the field of "skynomics", the study of skyscrapers and skylines using modern economics methods. He is the author of Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan's Skyscrapers, which chronicles the history of the Manhattan skyline from an economic perspective, and Cities in the Sky: The Quest to Build the World's Tallest Skyscrapers, which discusses how and why the world's largest cities are building their skylines. Barr's work is interdisciplinary and integrates multiple disciplines including urban studies, geography, and economic history. Barr is one of the few academic economists studying the intersection of economics and skyscraper construction.
The Levin College of Public Affairs and Education (Levin) is an accredited college that houses the Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs, School of Communication, as well as, the Department of Counseling, Administration, Supervision and Adult Learning, the Department of Criminology and Sociology, the Department of Educational Studies, Research and Technology, and the Department of Teacher Education. Levin is a part of Cleveland State University located in Cleveland, Ohio. The Levin College offers undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees, as well as professional development programs. Its urban policy research centers and programs provide communities with decision-making tools to address their policy challenges. The Levin College is recognized for offering highly ranked programs in urban policy, local government management, nonprofit management, and public management and leadership.
Ellen Dunham-Jones is an architectural educator and urbanist best known for her work on re-educating the public how to interact with their environment. She is also an authority on suburban redevelopment.