His Legacy

More than fifty years after the publication of Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners by Paul Davidoff, this article remains one of the most frequently downloaded, read, and cited, urban planning articles. 

It prompted planners attending the Annual Conference of the American Institute of Planners in 1968 to establish Planners for Equal Opportunity, a Civil Rights organization, that pursued a wide range of direct action organizing activities to promote racial integration and justice within the American planning profession. It also led to the establishment of the first graduate program in urban affairs dedicated to training both lay and professional planners in the theory and methods of advocacy planning by Paul Davidoff at Hunter College of the City University of New York. The success of this program, in turned, enabled Paul Davidoff to subsequently launch Suburban Action Institute (later renamed Metropolitan Action Institute) that generated high quality legal and social science research in support of lawsuits designed to promote greater equal opportunity in education, employment, and housing. The most significant of these cases with the Mt. Laurel v. NAACP Supreme Court Case that struck down the use of “exclusionary zoning” by suburban communities in New Jersey designed to prevent low-income families of color from moving into communities with better schools, more jobs, and higher quality services.