Planning Journal 12 September 2005

Dear Member:

If you, like me, did not make room for any of the juicy Summer conferences, here is your cheat sheet! Pattsi's notes from the conferences she attended, and great links below.

(If you did attend conferences this year and would like to share them with everyone in next week's e-mail, please forward them to me here.)

Regina Rega
Electronic News Editor
(Correction from last week's e-mail -- "Olmstead" is spelled "Olmsted" -- please remember this when you send him an invitation to dinner at your house.)

Summer 2005—a summer of conferences
-Pattsi Petrie

Most normal people during the summer head to sea from shining sea, read 10 good books, and dream of a fantasy vacation in their favorite place. There is nothing normal about me—I opted for attending two conferences. As the world turns, these two conferences were so stimulating that I am stimulated to share some of the highlights and various web sites discovered.

The first part of June, I headed to Minneapolis, specifically the university campus, to experience every thing new—new state, new city, new campus, new conference. It was the Justice by Design, Planners Network Conference June 2-5, 2005. As of this writing, the conference web site is still active at http://www.designcenter.umn.edu/reference_ctr/planNetConf.html

A readers digest introduction to Planners Network, in case you have not heard of the organization, follows. In 1975, Chester Hartman mimeographed a newsletter as "the first mailing of a new communications/action network of leftist planners in the U.S. and Canada." This was sent to 300 planners. The organization became formalized in 1979 and the rest is history that you can read on the web site www.plannersnetwork.org Chester is now president/executive director of Poverty and Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) www.prrac.org , another social action organization.

Indeed, the conference had a very dominate social planning thrust. A session titled, A good place to age: Demographic shifts and the necessity to consider universal design at the neighborhood scale, offered such practical information beginning with Maurizio Antoninetti, Dept. Geography, San Diego SU. Using GIS mapping, visually he portrayed that the majority of the aging population across the US lives in the suburbs—within cul de sac street design. (I have a copy of his presentation if you would like to see it.) The implications for planning are far and wide let alone for design. Then Richard Duncan, Center for Universal Design, North Carolina SU, built on the demographic information and then showed outstanding examples of universal design from entrances to convertible bathroom cabinets. (I have a copy of this presentation if you would like to see it—rather large file.) You can track down the Center web site at http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/ Excellent examples. Jordana Maisel, IDEA Center, School of Architecture & Planning, U. of Buffalo, built on Richard’s examples with many more. Take a look at that web site, another excellent one, http://www.ap.buffalo.edu/idea/Home/index.asp

I went to this talk as member of the aging population so I can learn what to do and I have been studying universal design since 1975, takes a long time for a concept to become universal. As it turns out, this new knowledge is being put to work on a huge collaborative eXtension project, Housing for Boomers, being lead by Iowa State University—always a leader in community planning issues. The eXtension web site is relatively new, but growing and will be filled with very useful information. The site is a national collaborative effort throughout all of the extension entities at land grant universities. Here is the url http://intranet.extension.org/index.php

The mobile workshop that I choose was an introduction to the one-year old light rail transit that traverses 12 miles of Minneapolis. It extends from Mall of American (as a planner just had to have this experience), past the airport, then past the baseball stadium, to the heart of downtown. Minneapolis is developing into an architecture gem—the new addition to the Walker Art Museum http://www.walkerart.org/index.wac with the wonderful gardens across the street and the Guthrie Theater sharing the space, only for a short time longer. The Guthrie will be moving into a new venue design by Michael Graves, exciting design, along the Mississippi River http://www.guthrietheater.org/act_ii/newguthrie.htm and next to the Mill City Museum, http://www.millcitymuseum.org/index.htm a preserved flour mill—at the zenith there were 7 mills along the river.

Another architectural gem is on the university campus—the Weisman Art Museum http://www.weisman.umn.edu/ designed by Frank Gehry and located right next to the river, which affords fantastic views and reflections. Speaking of the river, the university campus is both in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Translated this means the students cross the river several times a day getting to and from class. This is facilitated by a unique bridge-- the center section is a huge covered bridge with sliding doors--for walking, skate boarding, biking, transportation of your choice, but a car, to cross the river—again affording an incredible view of the river and bluffs and the shoe tree. From a design perspective, the university has nicely integrated the original campus, with the 1960s campus, and the new campus through bridges crossing a major thorough fare, bicycle pathways, and handicap accessible. Parking on or near campus is a impossible so the university provides enclosed bike parking at the edge of the parking lot. This encourages one to climb on a bike after parking the car for a ride to campus. The campus bike parking is cleverly done with unique bike parking stands www.umn.edu

An interesting fact about the two cities that does not appear in the tourist information—there are at least 15 coop natural food grocery stores. This number does not include Whole Foods or Wild Oats. One is at the edge of the area of campus in St. Paul along with two vegetarian coop restaurants, all within two blocks.

Moving from Minneapolis to Washington, DC for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research Eighth International Women’s Policy Research Conference http://www.iwpr.org/Conference2005/index.htm held several weeks later. For some reason, the word "international" had not registered with me. This was the exciting aspect—having the opportunities to learn from and talk with women from all over the world about gender and planning. The unexciting aspect was learning that women in the United States are definitely not as liberated as we perceive and our rights lag woefully behind countries we view as developing third world. I was most fortunate to develop a conference friendship with someone from Belgrade. She is Serbian and I am Croatian—immediate bonding culturally. Again this conference web site is still active http://www.iwpr.org/Conference2005/index.htm and http://www.iwpr.org/Conference2005/PDF/Conf_Brochure_Final.pdf

This institute was started by Heidi Hartman, a superb research economist. Under her leadership, the institute’s research programs yield incredible data about women’s issues. The web site is a wealth of useful information and data. As a reminder, the PW Division invited folks from the institute to give a presentation as one of the by right sessions when the national conference was in DC. Those presentations are on the division web site http://www.urban.uiuc.edu/apa%2Dpw/confrce.html

Every session of this conference would take pages to talk about so I will be judicious. A group of us unanimously agreed that the session, Make room at the top: Getting to the heart of women’s exclusion from science and the professions, was one for further thought and discussion. Virginia Valian, Department of Psychology, Hunter College, really put us to the test of understanding what she presented about why women do not achieve as rapidly as men, especially in the sciences. Go through the tutorials on her web site to wrestle with this concept http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/gendertutorial/tutorials.htm#tut1 Her home page is http://maxweber.hunter.cuny.edu/psych/faculty/valian/valian.htm Another panelist was Nancy Hopkins, Department of Biology, MIT. Here is her web site if you want to find out about her http://web.mit.edu/biology/www/facultyareas/facresearch/hopkins.shtml She is the professor who challenged the inequities that existed between the treatment of academic males and females at her institution. She also is the individual who walked out of Larry Summers’ talk when he threw down the gauntlet that there might just be a difference between males and females that explains why females do not achieve in science. Summers is president at Harvard University. Here is an article that appeared in the Boston Globe about the incident. http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/01/17/summers_remarks_on_women_draw_fire/

If this piques your curiosity, you can read his speech and drawn your own ideas http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html and read his letter to the Harvard community http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/womensci.html

Knowing all of this, it was refreshing to hear the telling of the story from "the horse’s mouth." She is a great scientist with an amazing sense of humor. What started her quest was the denial of her request for 200 square feet additional lab space. This need was generated by her receiving a huge grant. Being a scientist, she approached the problem in the scientific method—she measured each and every lab allotment within her college at MIT. Her discovery was that she had the smallest lab space even if she obtained the additional space—those with much larger spaces were not bringing in grant funding to match hers. She took the data to the department chair and then head of the college and was turned down both times. Then she went to the university president. He was so amazed to hear the facts and her request (actually he was so relived with the size of the request as he was convinced that she would be requesting a whole building) that not only did she get the larger lab, but also caused a paradigm shift of viewing all issues at MIT through an equity lens.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the conference other than I was writing about MIT. Have you stumbled across the MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html --a totally amazing well designed web site. MIT now has mounted the materials for over 1000 MIT courses on the site. Take a look—you can venture from anthropology to writing and humanistic studies. This is a free education.

Back to the conference—at the closing plenary, there were five speakers. All laid out a challenge for the audience to consider. Martha Burk’s, chair, National Council of Women’s Organizations, words resonated with me. There is an excellent summary of her talk in the summer 2005 issue of Ms Magazine. This is not on the Ms web site yet.

Mildred Warner and her students at Cornell University are putting out very useful information about linking child care with economic development. Here is the url to find all of their publications that will help you make this argument within your community http://government.cce.cornell.edu/doc/viewpage_e.asp?ID=Child_Care Mildred’s web site is http://www.crp.cornell.edu/people/profile.mgi?fm=Warner in case you want to contact her for more information.

While I was on the Cornell U, Department of City and Regional Planning, I discovered that the female students have a web site titled, Women’s Planning Forum, http://www.crp.cornell.edu/people/wpf.mgi There are interesting links on this page.

Last presentation to mention is that of my UK colleague, Dory Reeves, and me. This paper is the prelude to the division sponsored survey, Survey about Pay, Position, Race, and Gender Equity of Women and Men in Planning, and can be found at http://www.urban.uiuc.edu/apa%2Dpw/IWPR.html Enjoy the fall!!!!!!

________________________________________________________
Regina Rega, MPDS
>>Highlighting Women Planners<<
for Planning and Women Division of the American Planning Association
E-mail: planningjournal@rickengineering.com
Direct: (619) 908-3528
________________________________________________________