Organizational Legacy
In addition to being an important scholar, planning educator, planning practitioner and Civil Rights activist, Paul Davidoff created and inspired others to launch organizations and institutions committed to advancing racial equality, social justice, and democratic decision-making within our nation’s major Metropolitan Areas. The following section identifies and describes a number of organizations that Paul Davidoff helped to create.
Planners for Equal Opportunity
Was a national organization of progressive-minded planners inspired by Paul Davidoff’s work which sought to advance more just forms of planning and more participatory approaches to urban planning and policy-making.
The group, which included 500 members at its height, was organized by Walter Thabit, a well-known planning activist from NYC, was active from 1964 until 1978. Its members fought to integrate planning commissions and departments across the country. They also challenged various forms of “top-down” planning that resulted in harsh treatment of poor and working-class communities, including Urban Renewal, Federal Highways, and Public Housing. They also advocated the integration of teaching faculty at the nation’s graduate planning programs.
PEO members wrote articles, gave speeches, and organized demonstrations to encourage cities and towns to use planning to advance racial equality, social justice, and democratic decision-making. One of the most significant successes of this group was their development of an anti-displacement plan for the Cooper Square community of New York City which PEO members. led by Walter Thabit, pursued for more than 30 years.
Many of the members of this group, which included significant numbers of young African American planners, paid a high price for their Civil Rights-oriented approach to urban planning – many PEO activists lost good planning jobs for standing up for racial equality and social justice causing many talented young people to leave the profession.
Was a national organization of progressive-minded planners inspired by Paul Davidoff’s work which sought to advance more just forms of planning and more participatory approaches to urban planning and policy-making.
The group, which included 500 members at its height, was organized by Walter Thabit, a well-known planning activist from NYC, was active from 1964 until 1978. Its members fought to integrate planning commissions and departments across the country. They also challenged various forms of “top down” planning that resulted in harsh treatment of poor and working-class communities, including: Urban Renewal, Federal Highways, and Public Housing. They also advocated the integration of teaching faculty at the nation’s graduate planning programs.
PEO members wrote articles, gave speeches, and organized demonstrations to encourage cities and towns to use planning to advance racial equality, social justice, and democratic decision-making. One of the most significant successes of this group was their development of an anti-displacement plan for the Cooper Square community of New York City which PEO members. led by Walter Thabit, pursued for more than 30 years.
Many of the members of this group, which included significant numbers of young African American planners, paid a high price for their Civil Rights-oriented approach to urban planning – many PEO activists lost good planning jobs for standing up for racial equality and social justice causing many talented young people to leave the profession.
Planners Network
Is an international organization of progressive-minded planners in the United States, Canada, England, and Brazil established by Chester Hartman in 1976.
With the end of many of the major social movements of the 1960s, Chester Hartman was concerned that progressive planers working in local communities could become isolated and discouraged in the absence of active social movements committed to environmental protection, racial equality, social justice, human rights, and peace. So, Chester invited activist planners and designers to write to him regarding their social justice work emphasizing innovative approaches to organizing, planning, and design. He also encouraged them to share thorny questions they were seeking to work through in their social justice planning activities. Each month for nearly 20 years, Chester published the Planners Network Newsletter providing a virtual “community” for planners promoting positive change. In the mid-1990s, Professors Peter Marcuse of Columbia, Tom Angotti of Pratt, and Bill Goldsmith and Pierre Clavel of Cornell encouraged a number of their students to form an expanded Steering Committee to continue the PN Newsletter and to undertake other activities. This generation of planners which included Ann Forsyth, Norma Rantisi, Richard Milgrom and others transformed the PN Newsletter into a quarterly journal called Progressive Planning. These planners also organized PN members on various college campuses to organize national conferences focused on critical issues in planning in Brooklyn, Berkeley, Rochester, Memphis, Toronto, New Orleans, and East St. Louis. Finally, PN published a “Disorientation Guide” for students entering planning school encouraging them to explore opportunities to organize for positive change.
Suburban (Metropolitan) Action Institute
In 1970 Paul Davidoff left Hunter College to establish a non-profit organization dedicated to removing legal and social barriers to equal opportunity in public education, residential housing, and the labor force through research, education, advocacy, and planning.
While most activists focused on the problems of inner-city neighborhoods to address issues of racial and social injustice, Paul Davidoff sought to expand opportunities for African Americans and other oppressed groups by opening the American suburbs to these communities through inclusionary zoning policies and utopian plans such as the Ramapo Mountain Garden City Plan. The later was a Garden City-inspired plan crafted to provide workers for the then newly-constructed Ford Motor Company automobile plant in Mahwah, NJ with the opportunity to live in a high quality and beautifully designed community with a wide range of services close to their place of work. While the overwhelming majority of these efforts undertaken by Paul, with his long-time colleague, Neil Gold, a successful developer, met significant opposition, they led to a number of lawsuits that helped establish important new rights for poor and working-class Americans. The most visible of these lawsuits was the Mt. Laurel v. Burlington County NAACP which established an affirmative obligation for local communities in NJ to provide a “fair share” of affordable housing for their region.
Hunter College Master of Urban Planning Program
In 1965 Paul Davidoff was invited by Dean Ruth Weintraub of Hunter College of the City University of New York…
…to launch a new graduate program to train socially-conscious urban planners. While his tenure at Hunter College was relatively short, the urban planning program he launched has trained generations of equity-oriented planners focused on resident-led planning and design in NYC and elsewhere.
Garden City Corporation
Was a for-profit corporation Paul Davidoff and Neil Gold established in the early 1960s to promote the development of Ebenezer Howard-inspired Garden Cities
…designed to provide poor and working-class Americans, especially people of color, the opportunity to live in environmentally sustainable, economically vibrant, racially integrated and democratically governed communities in suburban locations close to living wage industrial jobs in Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey.
Suburban Action Institute at Queen College
In 1982, Paul Davidoff moved his Suburban Action Institute research and advocacy center to Queen College
where he continued his advocacy planning activities within the Department of Urban Studies until his untimely death in 1984. Each year, the department honors a student engaged in equity-oriented research, advocacy, and organizing with the Paul Davidoff Award for Student Activism.