Letter From the Editor

Abstract

This issue is a meaningful one for me because a special section honors David Godschalk, a great scholar, researcher, practicing planner, and teacher who served as Editor of JAPA from 1968 through 1971. Godschalk died in January 2018; many of his former students and colleagues, all accomplished academics and practitioners themselves, immediately asked if they could do a special section of the journal honoring him. JAPA is clearly the right place to do so because he remained an active member of the Editorial Board until just months before his death, because he cared deeply about the journal, and because so much of his work is foundational for both planning practitioners and academics. He was, moreover, the Editor with the intelligence and good sense to publish an atypical article in 1969: Sherry Arnstein’s “Ladder of Citizen Participation.”

ABOUT THE EDITOR: Dr. Sandra Rosenbloom is a professor of Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin. She served as JAPA Editor from August 1, 2013, through January 1, 2019. This is the last issue of the journal over which she presided.

Three major themes run through all the articles and contributions in this issue: the importance of land use planning and regulation, the impact of the sometimes cataclysmic events of the 1950s and 1960s on the planning profession, and the importance of public participation in planning decisions. This issue celebrates both the life of David Godschalk, FAICP, an influential planning scholar and practitioner who wrote the seminal text on land use planning; and Sherry R. Arnstein’s “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” now reaching its 50th anniversary and one of the most influential articles that JAPA has ever published. The two are irreversibly linked because Godschalk was the JAPA Editor who published the Arnstein article; moreover, his work often focuses on the role of citizens in contemporary land use and comprehensive planning processes. One of the research articles in this issue also focuses on a critical element of traditional land use planning: annexation. The other research article considers the role of online technologies in facilitating meaningful public participation in planning decisions. Finally, Floyd Lapp’s Perspective piece in this issue initially focuses on that same time period when Godschalk was Editor of JAPA and Arnstein published her work; he describes how growing up facing the astonishing changes that occurred in those two decades shaped his life and led him to a five-decade distinguished career as a planner.

This is a very meaningful issue of the journal for me for a number of reasons. I hope you will excuse my taking so much space here to explain why.

My Final Issue

This issue of JAPA is the last I have overseen in my role as Editor of the journal. I began this journey in March 2013, as Interim Co-Editor of the journal with Dr. Tim Chapin. I became the Editor on August 1, 2013. It has been my pleasure and privilege to steer the journal over the last 5 and a half years and an equal pleasure and privilege to hand the journal over to Dr. Ann Forsyth of Harvard University as she assumes the Editor’s mantle. I know that Ann will bring new talents and a keen intellect to JAPA in the coming years. I have already been impressed by her energy, enthusiasm, and foresight as she has transitioned into her new post.

I must thank all of the Associate Editors for their assistance and counsel over these years, starting with Tim Chapin, Senior Associate Editor and Review Editor. All the Associate Editors have helped me immensely to steer this sometimes unwieldy ship. I appreciate their support and guidance, their willingness to work on behalf of the journal, and their friendship and insights as we navigated the complicated waters of academic publication at a time when even scholarly media are changing in new and sometimes unknown ways. I also want to extend my appreciation to the entire Editorial Board for their assistance in maintaining the high standards of the journal, ensuring JAPA’s independence and integrity, and expanding the journal’s impact in multiple ways.

JAPA’s scholarly impact factor has grown significantly over the last 5-plus years, with the formidable help of our Editorial Board. Both our Google Scholar citations and our Altmetrics scores have also increased and consistently outpace those of other major urban planning and development journals. Scholarly citations highlight the value of the research we publish for planning scholars and planning program curricula, documenting JAPA’s contribution to developing and disseminating new knowledge on the complicated issues that planners address. Altmetrics, in contrast, are a measure of how often our articles are discussed in the print and online media, in policy reports and planning documents, and on blogs and other forms of commentary and debate in the era of social media. These metrics show the role that the journal plays in the major policy and planning debates of the day. JAPA articles are also viewed or downloaded at substantially higher rates than those of almost all of the scholarly journals that publish in the same fields. I believe that all these measures demonstrate that JAPA’s work is relevant and meaningful for multiple audiences: scholars and practitioners, students and faculty, planners and policy analysts. I see these numbers soaring under Ann Forsyth’s editorial hand.

I also want to express gratitude without bounds to our Managing Editor, Michelle Treviño, who has guided JAPA since 2013. Michelle is the bedrock on which the journal is built; she keeps the trains running on time even when facing extraordinary challenges. She is the first point of contact for all authors submitting a manuscript to the journal and almost the last point of contact for those authors whose work is good enough to be published in JAPA. Michelle has agreed to continue as Managing Editor, to Ann’s delight, I am sure. I also want to thank Harriet Bogdanowicz, APA Chief Communications Officer, and Meghan Stromberg, APA Editor-in-Chief, for their support and assistance. Taylor & Francis, our publishers, have been the good partners of the editorial team for more than a decade. I am deeply grateful to the University of Texas at Austin, and my colleagues in the Graduate Program in Community and Regional Planning, for supporting me and the journal, financially and intellectually, for the last 5 and a half years.

Special Section

This issue is also a meaningful one for me because a special section honors David Godschalk, a great scholar, researcher, practicing planner, and teacher who served as Editor of JAPA from 1968 through 1971. Godschalk died in January 2018; many of his former students and colleagues, all accomplished academics and practitioners themselves, immediately asked if they could do a special section of the journal honoring him. JAPA is clearly the right place to do so, not only because he was once the Editor, but because he remained an active member of the Editorial Board until just months before his death, because he cared deeply about the journal, and because so much of his work is foundational for both planning practitioners and academics. He was, moreover, the Editor with the intelligence and good sense to publish an atypical article in 1969: Sherry Arnstein’s “Ladder of Citizen Participation.”

Godschalk revealed a great deal about himself in a piece in 2014 in JAPA’s Perspective series, in which senior planning academicians and practitioners look back over their careers and reflect on changes in planning practice and scholarship. His piece, “A Planning Life: Bridging Academia and Practice” (Godschalk, 2014) focused on the need to ensure that meaningful bridges exist between scholars and practitioners, even when there is pressure to disconnect the two sides of our shared profession. Godschalk began his career as a practitioner in fact (he was actually trained as an architect, as were many planners of his generation) and then became an academic, spending 46 years teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC Chapel Hill). He suggested that his personal history as a practitioner who became a professor made him “…a member of an endangered species” (p. 83). He was also a politician, elected to the Chapel Hill Town Council in 1985, something he called “a humbling experience” that taught him “…the need for patience” (p. 87). Godschalk felt that planners must first and foremost create “good places for people,” doing so collaboratively. He concluded that a planner must “…be a tireless advocate for good collaboration and good places, building consensus for doing the right thing…” (p. 83).

Godschalk is the author or co-author of 15 books; he is probably best known by practitioners for his seminal book, Urban Land Use Planning, the first edition of which published in 1957 and the fifth edition in 2006 (Berke, Godschalk, & Kaiser, 2006; various editions were co-authored with different UNC Chapel Hill colleagues). He also co-authored a 2015 Planning Advisory Service report (no. 578) with David Rouse, Sustaining Places: Best Practices of Comprehensive Plans, and a 2017 book with Emil Malizia, Sustainable Projects; Integrated Design, Development, and Regulation, each designed for and widely used by both academics and practicing planners.

Godschalk is mentioned at least once in 260 publications in JAPA, sometimes in reviews of his books or acknowledging his service as Editor or as a reviewer. He is also, however, the author or co-author of 10 scholarly articles, five planning notes or commentaries, and four book reviews or review articles in the journal. He also served as editor of two special issues or symposia, one on creating new communities (1967b), the year before he became JAPA Editor, in what was likely a rehearsal for the job. The second, in 1985, was on coastal zone management long after he had stepped down as Editor (Godschalk & Cousins, 1985).

It is fascinating to watch the development of Godchalk’s ideas over the decades he published in JAPA, particularly how he conceptualized citizen participation. Godschalk’s first JAPA article, with William Mills, was published in 1966; sadly, it is not available to JAPA subscribers and must be purchased from the publisher. In “A Collaborative Approach to Planning through Urban Activities,” Godschalk argues the value of urban-activities surveys, which he considers both a useful data-gathering device and a way to effectively involve citizens in policy decisions. His is a fairly tame view of citizen involvement here (or fairly low on Arnstein’s ladder); he largely focuses on the value of gathering data on what citizens do as a foundation for good planning. The paper implies that the next step is then to inform citizens about policy and planning decisions made using those data rather than seeking their views and perspectives in formulating those decisions.

Godschalk’s earliest approach to citizen participation published in JAPA contrasts significantly with his later work. Citizen participation is front and center in his penultimate JAPA article in 2003, with Sam Brody and Ray Bradbury. In “Mandating Citizen Participation in Plan Making: Six Strategic Planning Choices” (Brody, Godschalk, & Burby, 2003), the authors view citizen input as an important part of the planning process, although they take note of criticisms that planners ignore that input. The authors evaluate state growth management legislation mandates that require active citizen involvement in local planning efforts, using a national survey and detailed assessment of local practices. The authors conclude that “despite the growing emphasis on citizen participation in the planning literature, participation requirements embodied in most state growth management laws are vague, outdated, and general. They provide little direction or guidance to planners seeking to craft effective citizen participation programs” (p. 246). Godschalk et al. suggest how state and local governments can improve the process.

Godschalk’s last research article in JAPA (2004) is a trenchant analysis of the conflicts that arise when planners attempt to apply a sustainability lens to local planning decisions. Between his first JAPA research article in 1966 and his last in 2004, Godschalk also wrote about new community design processes in Holland, Scandinavia, and Britain (1967a); the problems caused by a shift to private market-driven community development (1973); the role and value of computerized land tracking systems (Bollens & Godschalk, 1987); policy guidelines for negotiating conflicts over development (a Longer View piece, 1992a); the value of traditional land use planning efforts as they become more participatory, electronically based, and complex (Kaiser & Godschalk, 1995); the need to develop long-term institutional structures and fora to resolve intergovernmental disputes over land development (1992b); and reducing losses from natural disasters through land use planning and management at the federal, state, and local level (Burby et al., 1999).

Godschalk also wrote provocative opinion pieces in JAPA. In 1992 he took on Anthony Downs and the report of the Advisory Commission on Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing, which recommended, not surprisingly, removing a number of land use regulations that increased housing prices. Godschalk wrote, “I believe in affordable housing but I also believe in effective environmental protection, efficient provision of infrastructure, coordinated patterns of land use and transportation, adequate revenues to finance development needs, and healthy preservation of open space” (1992b, pp. 422–423). He argued that focusing only on regulatory barriers was a narrow view of the affordability problem and that well-done growth management strategies were a better way to solve these problems than “hand wringing about impact fees and suing local governments over their development regulations” (1992a, p. 423).

Godschalk later took on Sonia Hirt, whose 2007 article in JAPA (Hirt, 2007) argued for the superiority of German land use regulations over traditional U.S. Euclidean zoning ordinances. Godschalk (2007) asserted that Hirt was, in essence, beating a dead horse, that there were substantial improvements in American zoning that had moved the state-of-the-art of U.S. land use regulation far beyond the traditional models that Hirt criticized.

The body of Godschalk’s work published in JAPA shows him to be a keen scholar of land use planning practice, a dedicated academic whose views changed, developed, and grew over time based on his continuing focus on the major planning challenges of every decade, and whose “foot in both camps” provided keen insights to practitioners and scholars alike. The special section honoring David Godschalk contains an overview piece by Philip R. Berke and Daniel Rodriguez, his former UNC Chapel Hill colleagues, who describe how David approached his practice and scholarship and his indelible impact on the planning profession. Seven other former students or colleagues write short essays talking about David’s role in their lives, or impact on their scholarship and practice, or the lessons he taught them and others: Zorica Nedović-Budić, Jim Schwab, Yan Song and Zhendong Luo, Bruce Stiftel, Larry Susskind, and Shannon Van Zandt. These essays make powerful reading and highlight the loss that our profession and discipline has suffered at the death of David Godschalk.

An Epic 50-Year Anniversary

This year, 2019, marks the 50th anniversary of the most cited and viewed article in JAPA’s history: Sherry Arnstein’s (1969) “A Ladder of Citizen Participation.“ The article, published when JAPA was still the Journal of the American Institute of Planners, has been viewed or downloaded almost 50,000 times; Google Scholar reports it has been cited in scholarly publications more than 17,000 times. Those striking metrics, however, represent citations and downloads for less than a quarter of the history of the article; it has only been possible to read or download an article online within the last 10 to 12 years (and thus electronically count these metrics) because the Arnstein article was not available online until the end of 2007. Google Scholar only assumed its current parameters in 2007 as well. Imagine what the real number of readers, citations, and discussions of the article must be over its 50-year history.

Arnstein wrote the article while serving as a special assistant to the assistant secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW; now Health and Human Services) in the 1960s; her framework was the role of public participation in desegregating the nation’s hospitals. The topic of hospital administration was not directly related to city planning, and she was not presenting traditional scholarly research, but David Godschalk (the JAPA Editor at the time), showed great foresight in accepting the article. The article was published at a major inflection point in our history: the Civil Rights Revolution, protests against the Vietnam war, recognition of the devastation of urban renewal, urban riots/uprisings in communities from Watts (CA) to Newark (NJ), growing awareness of the environmental and ecological disasters around the world, and the building of the interstate highway system were changing America in profound ways, challenging planners to rethink almost everything they believed about the practice of city planning.

One result of the tumultuous events and major societal changes challenging the country at that time was a greater focus on the role of citizens in determining their own destiny and that of the neighborhoods and communities in which they lived. Citizen participation became both a duty and a rallying cry, but one that Arnstein viewed with great skepticism. She had no problem saying that the emperor had no clothes, not because the idea was flawed but because its execution was. Arnstein complained that the arguments over citizen participation (and its cousins citizen control and maximum feasible participation) were “exacerbated rhetoric and misleading euphemisms” (p. 216). She offered her ladder of participation to “encourage a more enlightened dialogue” and admitted or perhaps boasted that it was designed to be provocative. She succeeded, perhaps beyond her wildest dreams.

We have republished the original Arnstein article in its entirety in this issue of the journal. Our goal is to commemorate its longevity and impact and also to serve as a “trailer” or “coming attractions” for a special issue of JAPA to be published later this year celebrating, challenging, critiquing, and evaluating the article, perhaps with the clear vision of hindsight. The guest editors of the special issue are Mickey Lauria and Carissa Slotterback; I am delighted that they accepted my invitation to create the special issue. The guest editors are working with Ann Forsyth to do justice to the original article and to all the intellectual ripples, debates, and controversies it has and continues to engender.

Sherry Arnstein died in January 1997 of breast cancer; she was 67 years old (American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, 2015). She was a first-generation American, born in New York and raised in California; she obtained a bachelor’s degree in physical education from the University of California at Los Angeles and a master’s in communication from American University in Washington (DC). She worked at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for a number of years after her HEW stint; she had an active role in the Model Cities Program and served as the chief advisor on citizen participation for the department.¹ Arnstein later became the executive director of the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, a post she held until she retired in 1995.

Research Articles

This issue also contains two scholarly articles and an entry in JAPA’s Perspective series, all of which address the main themes in Arnstein’s and Godschalk’s work, directly or indirectly. Greg P. Griffin and JungFen Jiao ask an important question about new types of citizen participation made possible by the internet: Does citizen input, and particularly crowd-sourced data, matter? Do planners actually listen to or use the data that comes to them via online platforms? In “Crowdsourcing Bike Share Station Locations” the authors look at crowdsourcing suggestions for bike share stations in New York City and Chicago (IL), cities that used an online GIS-based platform to solicit citizen input on locating bike share stations as they expanded their basic systems beyond the central core. The authors use two GIS-based techniques to compare the locations where citizens suggested bike share stations with the locations where these cities ultimately located the actual stations. They find that there is meaningful overlap between suggested and actual stations and conclude that online GIS-based platforms can be an important planning tool and a useful forum for citizen participation.

Noah J. Durst, in “Race and Municipal Annexation after the Voting Rights Act,” examines how cities made annexation decisions in the United States after 2013 when the Supreme Court invalidated a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which allowed the Justice Department to oversee local annexation. Many unincorporated low-income neighborhoods, particularly those with a high share of African-American residents, seek to be annexed to adjacent cities to improve their infrastructure and increase the quality of public services. Scholars refer to any failure of adjacent cities to annex such communities as underbounding. Cities may have fiscal reasons for failing to annex low-income or underserved communities; it is expensive to substantially improve service and infrastructure standards in newly annexed communities that rarely provide sufficient new revenue to do so. A growing body of research shows, however, that fiscal issues alone do not account for underbounding; many cities appear to make annexation decisions on racial grounds, an issue the invalidated section of the Voting Rights Act was originally designed to address.

Durst concludes that cities freed from federal oversight did indeed annex fewer adjacent communities with high shares of African-American residents. He finds no evidence that cities failed to annex neighborhoods with poor infrastructure alone, or that they increased annexation of high-income neighborhoods. Durst concludes that planners should recognize the discriminatory causes of underbounding and seek to address them. A number of states have created other mechanisms to prevent or at least highlight underbounding based on racial discrimination; Durst argues that planners should work to adopt these mechanisms and seek financial incentives to offset the infrastructure costs involved in annexing poorly serviced communities of color.

Perspective

Floyd Lapp writes the latest entry in JAPA’s Perspective series, in which senior practitioners and academics consider the changes they have seen, and perhaps participated in, over the years of their planning career. Lapp has been a respected planner for more than five decades, largely in the tri-state area (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut). He has also taught at Columbia and in other prestigious planning programs. In “Up Close and Personal: What One Planner Learned in a 55-Year Career that Has Paralleled the Major Events of the Time,” Lapp discusses how his formative years in the crucible of the events of the 1950s and 1960s shaped his professional life and led him to become a “complete planner” (p. 60). Lapp sets a high bar: He feels that planners should be practitioners in the public and private sectors, an adjunct faculty member in academic planning programs, a local and national leader in the APA, and a volunteer in organizations advocating for affordable housing, accessible transportation, and sustainable development: all facets of his own career. He warns that planners should not fool “…ourselves that we can accurately predict more than 10 or so years into the future” and worries that increasingly technical approaches to planning and long-range planning horizons “lack the touch and feel of the community of people they are designed to serve” (p. 66).

Lapp ends with 10 planning “commandments” that might engender vigorous debate given that he challenges many deeply held planning beliefs while upholding others. He stresses the value of mid-range rather than long-range planning, critiques transportation modeling efforts, views regional planning efforts with skepticism, advocates streamlining regulatory review processes, and encourages planners to be entrepreneurs. He also urges planners to support transit-oriented development, promote energy-efficient public transit with “a zeal similar to that used to advance the interstate highway system,” and create “marriages” among planners, environmentalists, and earth scientists (p. 67).

Conclusion

I am grateful for the opportunity I have had at the helm of JAPA. I know that Ann Forsyth will bring new energy, remarkable talents, and keen intelligence to the journal as the incoming Editor. I could not leave the journal in better hands.

Note

Notes

1 Many of Arnstein’s published bios and obituaries confuse HEW and HUD (often assuming the initial H in HEW stands for Housing instead of Health). It seems clear, however, that she was at HEW when she worked on desegregating hospitals and wrote her 1969 article; she was then at HUD when working on the Model Cities program.