Planners Debate: “The Future Metropolis: Regional or Local?”
What is the ideal unit for thinking about the cities of tomorrow? As population growth, transportation, and social media have doubtlessly have made cities regional entities with regional economies, what is the best unit for planning them? Is planning regionally a realistic tool? Or has new regionalism brought with it a renewed need to focus in locally on the neighborhood scale?
Please join the Harvard Urban Planning Organization in welcoming a panel of experts for a lively debate over topics such as home rule versus state powers, the role of central business districts, the implication of technological innovation for the feasibly scale of planning, and a host of related issues.
The panel includes the following:
Robert J. Sampson is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University as well as the director of the Social Sciences Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Professor Sampson’s research covers a variety of areas including crime, disorder, the life course, neighborhood effects, collective civic life, urban inequality, ecometrics, and the social structure of the city. He is the author of several books and numerous papers. The University of Chicago Press recently published Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, the culmination of his work as Scientific Director of the “Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods” (PHDCN). In this work, Professor Sampson argues that communities still matter because life is decisively shaped by where people live and that neighborhoods influence a remarkably wide variety of social phenomena and that even national crises cannot halt the impact of place. Professor Sampson received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Albany and his B.A. from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Armando Carbonell, Senior Fellow and Chairman of the Department of Planning and Urban Form at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, is a nationally recognized expert on land-use planning for growing metropolitan regions and sustainable growth. His areas of expertise include city and regional planning, property rights and regulation, and land use and the environment. He also teaches planning at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to his appointment to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Mr. Carbonell was the founding Executive Director of the Cape Cod Commission, a regional planning and land use regulatory agency. He is both contributor to and editor of the Lincoln Institute-published Regional Planning in America: Practice and Prospect, a survey of the roots and applications of regional planning in America today, and the prospects for its practice in the future. Mr. Carbonell received his A.B. degree from Clark University and was a Doctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University and a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University.
Gerald E. Frug is the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard University and is a specialist in local government law, a subject he has taught for over twenty-five years. He worked as Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Washington, D.C. and as Health Services Administrator of the City of New York before teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and then joining the Harvard faculty in 1981. His research interests include legal problems of local governments and legal and he has published dozens of articles on these and other topics. Select publications include: City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation (with David Barron, Cornell University Press 2008); Making Planning Matter: A New Approach to Eminent Domain (71 Harvard Design Magazine 2005); and City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls (Princeton University Press 1999). Professor Frug holds an A.B. from the University of California at Berkeley and an L.L.B. from the Harvard Law School.
David Barron is the Honorable S. William Green Professor of Public Law at the Harvard Law School and is a recognized expert in administrative law, separation of powers and local government law. Previously, Professor Barron was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of justice and he also served as an attorney advisor in the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton Administration. His research interests include administrative law, constitutional law, local government law, and property law. Select publications include Dispelling the Myth of Home Rule: Local Power in Greater Boston (with Gerald E. Frug and Rick Su, Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston 1st ed. 2004) and Reclaiming Home Rule (116 Harvard Law Review 2255 2003). Professor Barron holds a B.A. from Harvard College and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Amy A. Cotter manages implementation of greater Boston’s regional plan, “MetroFuture: Making a Greater Boston Region,” including its Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant and MAPC’s work as a member of the MA Smart Growth Alliance. In her role as Director of Regional Plan Implementation for MAPC, her work uses public engagement, research, analysis, and advocacy to explore policy and planning options, develop best practices, and inform decision making from local to national levels. Ms. Cotter brings to the effort over 15 years of leadership in planning and policy making for smart growth and sustainable development, and has held positions at the Tellus Institute and ICF Consulting. Her areas of expertise include building community and regional sustainability using public engagement, information, analysis, and advocacy. Ms. Cotter obtained Masters degrees in regional planning and environmental policy from the University of Michigan, and received her B.A. from Tufts University.
Moderated by current Harvard GSD Loeb Fellow Anne-Marie Lubenau.
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