Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Neighborhood Planning Uses of Oral History
Neighborhood Planning Uses of Oral History
Neighborhood Planning:
10.1177/1538513203262047
JOURNAL
Thomas / USES
OF PLANNING
OF ORAL HISTORY / February 2004
S
cholars are still exploring the connections between history and urban
and regional planning, an effort that this journal is aiding in great part.
We are beginning to learn more about specific historical events and
processes related to planning, as well as about how this evolution has
affected cities throughout the world. However, we are just beginning to tap
the potential uses of history as a tool for informing and guiding difficult
problems in contemporary urban planning in a way that moves beyond
description and toward prescription.
One area of concern is how to tap the experiences of neighborhood resi-
dents as a source of guidance for current and future efforts in neighborhood
planning. At this point, we know much about certain aspects of neighbor-
hood planning, for example, that effective planning is one of the skills that
effective community-based organizations must have. A few studies have
begun to explore the specific role and nature of the planning function in
organizations’ development and success,1 and case studies have provided
variegated knowledge about the history and development of neighborhood
initiatives.2 Still needed is additional information about how research
involving the residents themselves can help to start, maintain, and enhance
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article was originally presented to the Society for American City and Regional
Planning History. It is supported in part by a research grant from the Aspen Institute.
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY, Vol. 2 No. 1, February 2004 50-70
DOI: 10.1177/1538513203262047
© 2004 Sage Publications
50
Thomas / USES OF ORAL HISTORY 51
and many of his techniques are those used for municipal planning.10 But
Barry Checkoway suggests that neighborhood planning could be either top
down or bottom up.11 Bottom-up planning at the neighborhood level
involves grassroots organization and may include the creation of formal
organizations such as community development corporations (CDCs).
As Peterman notes, limiting neighborhood planning to areas in which
CDCs flourish is too exclusionary. He suggests that the planning that takes
place at the neighborhood level in today’s cities relates closely to advocacy
planning and equity planning. Both of these are theories of planning that
address issues of power; both imply that planners must see planning not as
value neutral and serving some general public but rather as requiring
acknowledgment of different publics, and both advocate planning repre-
sentation for disadvantaged groups. From the bottom-up perspective, neigh-
borhood planning therefore aims to plan for the future in a way that helps
create the process of capacity-building community development in affected
neighborhoods.
If we accept this definition of neighborhood planning, then the special
needs of such neighborhood planning become clearer. Peterman describes
three of these special needs. First, neighborhood planning must be a collab-
orative process, involving a number of experts including planners, but also
involving neighborhood residents and community organizers. True collabo-
ration implies that all parties should be equal because it is necessary for
everyone to respect everyone else’s opinion. The second requirement is
that the process of neighborhood planning should be relatively open and
transparent, so that residents can understand everything that is taking
place in terms of techniques and processes, and so that the planning pro-
cess is an educational one. Third, he suggests that all neighborhood plan-
ning be driven by the community, with focus placed on the neighborhood’s
agenda, not the planner’s agenda. The process of social change should be
one of empowerment, as defined in a number of ways, including increas-
ingly investing community members in the ability to make decisions about
the process and results of planning.12
To this list of three requirements for neighborhood planning, we can add
a few others from additional authors, requirements particularly appropri-
ate when neighborhood planning is being carried out in urban areas under-
going a process of social and economic change. In such circumstances,
Baum notes, neighborhood planning may need to overcome likely fractures
of race, class, and ethnic background. It may also be necessary, he suggests,
for the planning process to overcome residents’ grief over the changes that
are taking place in their neighborhood, if these are not for the better.13 Fur-
thermore, implicit in Peterman’s list and noted elsewhere, neighborhood
planning may need to involve organizational development, as described by
a number of authors including Vidal.14
Thus, neighborhood planning as here defined is a complex process, nec-
essarily involving an array of purposes and multifaceted requirements. We
Thomas / USES OF ORAL HISTORY 53
now turn to a discussion of the planning tools that might be helpful in this
process and of how historical methodology might assist.
change affected neighborhood planning efforts during the 1950s and 1960s
and how neighborhood planning failed because of racial turnover.25 A reli-
ance on a few contemporary interviews and largely written sources record-
ed in the past, however, as in that narrative about Detroit, makes it difficult
to envision how such history can help inform community development
within the context of contemporary neighborhood planning.
Oral history is a technique that is quite allied with qualitative interview-
ing and with storytelling, and it is a form of history that may be potentially
well suited for the needs of neighborhood planning as defined here.
Although thus far in planning scholarship, oral history appears to have been
used either to create narrative accounts of prominent planners26 or, in a few
cases, to illuminate the role of minority citizens whose accounts would not
otherwise be known,27 other potential exists.
One pair of authors has suggested that “oral history does not differ from
the unstructured interview methodologically, but in purpose.”28 Some have
suggested that oral history involves a range of strategies, from using a list of
preconstructed questions to asking a person to tell his or her story in the
way he or she chooses, but that in general it shifts attention away from “the
right questions” to “the process,” which is to engage in dialogue about
events and experiences.29 Perhaps the best introduction to oral history
comes from examining several well-regarded oral history works. A particu-
larly powerful compendium of accounts is Portelli’s The Death of Luigi
Trastulli, and Other Stories, in which the author uses oral histories he col-
lected from workers in Italy and Kentucky to draw compelling lessons about
history, social change, and research, in ways that in effect rewrite official
accounts of major events from the perspective of the working class.
From this book and other allied writings, we may anticipate several bene-
fits of oral history, many stemming from the method’s ability to involve
unheard voices in a dialogue about planning. Oral historians, for example,
have offered extensive insight into the need to place researcher and subject
on an equal basis for trust to facilitate dialogue, a topic explored in some
depth by Portelli.30 The technique can become an extraordinary tool for
empowerment, as with Kerr’s work with the homeless in which a massive
oral history project led directly to a movement for social change.31 And oral
history is particularly adept at soliciting input from those for whom no writ-
ten records exist or who are unlettered or relatively powerless, as illustrated
by both these authors. As argued forcefully by John Stanfield II, method-
ological approaches such as oral history have particular potency among
peoples at the “margins.” Oral data gathering is important, he notes, for
understanding the nature of people affected by “the marginalization and
56 JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / February 2004
We will offer some of the results of one project as a way of generating addi-
tional thoughts about the potential linkages between neighborhood plan-
ning and oral history. The overall study that generated the data tapped for
this article involved interviewing approximately thirty people associated
with five active community-based development organizations (CBDOs) in
Detroit and Battle Creek, Michigan. The research was based on qualitative
interviews containing questions about vision and strategy in neighborhood
planning.36 People associated with these organizations who were inter-
viewed ranged in age from their early twenties to well more than eighty
years old. Some were staff members, such as community organizers and
housing directors, and others were board members; they were of different
races, and all were significant players in their organizations.
Something unanticipated happened with four of the interviews.
Although these four residents seemed willing to answer the questions,
which were set to elicit only cursory information about the person’s back-
ground and much more about neighborhood planning, in these cases peo-
ple themselves turned the interview into an oral history session. (Oral his-
torian Portelli notes that when people seem to “take over” an interview, it is
often best to let them because the researcher must be able to listen and
“show your respect for what people choose to tell you.”37) The four people
whose opinions we feature in the present discussion focused heavily on the
Thomas / USES OF ORAL HISTORY 57
As these four, in particular Maple and Esther, narrated much of their life
histories, a consistent theme was a longing for the past, when the neighbor-
hood was in better condition. In Maple’s youth, the west side and another
neighborhood near Pershing High School “were the nicest neighborhoods
for black people. And I have been fortunate enough to live in both neighbor-
hoods.” She noted that people were more self-sufficient at that time: “My
daddy used to rent a mule and plow and would cultivate a whole city block
[to feed] momma, daddy, and eight kids.” She evoked her memories of a
time of flexible adjustment and entrepreneurship in a conscious effort to
show that strengths of Depression-era parents deserved to be emulated, if
possible, in a neighborhood where hopelessness was too common.
Father Bill was an elderly priest who had a strong sense of the neighbor-
hood’s history that translated into his attachment and dedication to its revi-
talization. He knew that most of the founders of his congregation’s church
building had originally come from the British Isles and that they were work-
ing-class laborers. A motivating force behind his many hours of volunteer
service to the local CBDO appeared to be his desire to help bring back a
semblance of those better years, which he described in some detail.
Eric, the fairly young president of his CBDO, did not know neighborhood
history that took place before his three decades of life, but he remembered
his experiences well enough to use that memory as part of his vision of the
future. He narrated accounts of what it was like to grow up in the neighbor-
hood when it had more people and services. “I grew up here, and my broth-
ers and sisters grew up here . . . making it obviously a family, a community-
type area.” His concern was to make the community like that again, “but
that means you’ve got to have resources that make a lot of people want to
make it a community. That means you’ve got to have commercial [uses] in
the sense of being able to go to stores and things like that; and cleaners and
banks and things like that. So that’s why [Project X] includes a commercial
center, a potential area for jobs.”
Negative memories of the past seemed just as important to the respon-
dents as the positive ones. Father Bill was able to contrast the origins of the
parish with conditions just before and then after he appeared.
There were some attempts at outreach in the 1980s, early 80s and so there was some
community meals, those kinds of things, trying to get people to just meet each other
because at that point people . . . were pretty much living inside their homes with bars
on the windows and, you know, all of that. . . . There were kind of continual drug
houses . . . I remember they used to stop, drop somebody off over here on [X Road].
Thomas / USES OF ORAL HISTORY 59
They’d come and walk down the alley into a drug house, get their drugs and then get
picked up over here on [X Road]. And the prostitutes, when they got hassled on [Y and
Z Roads], they’d come back into this area.
Another theme that emerged in the accounts was the changing nature of
neighborhood organizations. Esther’s organization, for example, has been
more active than most in Detroit in combining preparation for new con-
struction with selective rehabilitation. To understand why, consider how
she interwove the story of her CBDO with her personal history to show how
she was able to help change the organization’s programmatic direction.
One of Esther’s stories is how she, under newly destitute financial cir-
cumstances, had become a champion of historical preservation on her
organization’s housing board. In part she supported preservation because of
her growing interest in salvaging what she could of her mother’s house, as
she and her husband struggled with unemployment. She noted that her old
house had many of the same features that middle-class urban pioneers val-
ued: wood floors, magnificent doors and high ceilings, a clawfoot iron bath-
tub, and most particularly a huge, old-fashioned kitchen sink. Piece by
piece she collected articles and photos displayed in home improvement
magazines and created a scrapbook showing what upscale preservationists
wanted and what she was able to do in her own house that was comparable.
This scrapbook she carried around and showed freely to all interested par-
ties, along with her before-and-after pictures of nearby lots that her hus-
band began to clear of weeds and debris. Her home became, in many ways, a
showpiece.
60 JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / February 2004
Becoming more attuned to the innate beauty of what others had begun to
accept as a ghetto, she realized that tearing down all the older housing was
not necessarily the best strategy. Her older neighbors and brother helped
her see the light:
Interviewer: What do you see the residents want? What is their vision of what they
want?
Esther: They want, they want their houses that can be saved to be saved. They want
help with doing that. The houses that need to go, everybody’s in agreement. Tear down
anything that’s raggedy and that’s an eyesore. . . . But the few that stood here and
stayed through all the turmoil, trying to hold on, help us. The older blacks, they’re
looking, saying okay, we helped you get an education. [My brother said] blacks are
labeled as tearing up property or tearing up neighborhoods, but you educated ones are
no better. You are no better than those who tear down, because . . . what you all want to
do now is come and tear down our remaining houses and just put up something new
without keeping what’s here, restoring, building up. . . . We want new housing but keep
something as a reminder of where our parents came from.
Maple: I tell my neighbor next door all the time; I say, “I want your house to look just
as nice as my house.”
Interviewer: So you’re saying it’s important for them to get involved in block clubs
and join various associations.
Maple: Not various associations; whatever association is over [this area]. See, first
you have all of these different, little block clubs. . . . Then you have the association as a
combination of all of those, so whatever the association does . . . can pull from all of
these people here. And that’s what I would like to see [my CBDO] do. As a matter of
fact, they have said this is what they have wanted to do, but in order for them to do
that, we need to have a plan to go back into the neighborhoods now and to encourage
people to have their individual block club.
I think the second thing to do is to, to try to go out and talk to people in the community.
What do you like, what don’t you like, how are things. Think back to a time when,
when you really enjoyed living in the neighborhood: What do you know, what do you
remember about the community during that time? So maybe it was twenty-five years
ago, and maybe they remember that, you know, there was white people living in the
neighborhood as well as black people living in the neighborhood. And maybe they
remember that every lot was filled with a house, and maybe they remember that the
department of transportation buses ran up and down the streets on a regular basis, or
62 JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / February 2004
whatever they remember, and try to pull back some of those [good things]. You can’t
bring back all of those things, but you can start to focus on what made people happy;
that’s, that’s an important thing, trying to revitalize a neighborhood is [bringing back]
what . . . made people feel happy.
The third theme that seemed to emerge was of dedication and triumph
over adversity. Father Bill, for example, told about a corner that was “over-
grown with bushes”; his church bought two lots, and their neighborhood
organization obtained funds to build a park. A number of residents pitched
in to construct the park, and it remained well maintained over many years.
Father Bill then went on to describe other changes made in the distressed
neighborhood, changes that related to far more important issues than cre-
ation of a park. Citizens had gone on to make important statements about
crime and the social order in their neighborhood.
So a couple of things happened during that same time. One was a woman . . . had her
purse snatched and an old guy about seventy, eighty years old took after the young
man and the fire truck was coming back from a run and saw it and so they joined in and
so that was one thing. [Another example:] A prostitute came back in one of these
streets here with her John and the ladies in the neighborhood ran her out. So to me it
just said, you know, things are changing. You notice the sign, the weathered sign on the
front of the community center, change is coming.
Father Bill’s stories of these triumphs served to offset the stories of how bad
things had been.
It is a short step from stories of dedication and triumph to a sense of
vision. Note Maple’s comments as she describes how her neighbors and
their “spirit” were affected by bad times and then moves on to praise those
who stayed:
The drugs that have been thrown in on us and all this violence and all this stuff, it has
done something to the spirit of the . . . neighborhood; it’s made a lot of people cynical
and . . . feeling hopelessness and all that. And then the people who could move out—
first you had “white flight,” then it’s followed by “black flight,” and “black flight” is still
in progress. . . . The people who remain, we have the faith, we believe, we have a vision,
and we have faith. And one thing the neighborhood planning process can do, it can give
people faith and it can give them a vision and it can give them hope.
Maple had a vision, and she recognized that others did as well. She served as
an inspiration to her comrades because she still planned to keep on working
to improve the neighborhood despite the fact that she had already lived
eight decades. This explained her continued work with her neighborhood
and her organization:
There are things that I personally have committed to myself to do, and this is what [my
CBDO] is doing. And you asked me about the vision of what I see for [my CBDO]. I see
[it] reaching out and touching the people in a way to make it a beautiful community.
Thomas / USES OF ORAL HISTORY 63
Because we can. . . . I try to sell them on the idea that it isn’t how much you pay for your
house, ghetto is a state of mind and we could have our beautiful spirit of a community
right here. And the spirit that I have, I try to engender it to the people that I come in
contact with in every way that I can. Where I live over there, I bought the house next to
me, the house next to that, and right now I have, I have planned to have a center for the
kids in the community. I want to do something for the children, because, see, if we
don’t try to help save our children, we can forget it.
Esther, who also represented this spirit of triumph, told many stories
about herself and her husband during her verbal autobiography of life in the
neighborhood that illustrated great courage and dedication. As an example,
she talked about an alcoholic neighbor. Esther, noting that the children had
not been bathed in months, sent soap and washcloths to their house. When
that did not work, she went to the woman and “very lovingly and kindly [I]
started working with the children and lovingly telling them, now this is
what you do every day; wash up here, this is for that, bring the clothes back
to us. We’ll wash them.” The mother watched warily. The pastor and his
wife began to buy clothes for the children and to teach them how to buy
food cheaply when the wife noticed they were hungry and stealing food.
I felt a need to show these children how to survive without stealing and I went to the
Eastern Market and I’ve never done anything like this before because I didn’t have to.
At the end of the day the farmers, they leave food out. People can come in afterwards
and you could pick some good food up off the ground or at the end of the day you can
get food very reasonably priced. . . . But it dawned on me they may not even have a dol-
lar or two. . . . I said [to the children], you may get in a position where you don’t have
money to buy food for your family. I said, but always remember what I’m telling you,
you never have to steal food. You can always come down here and get you some fresh
food for yourself and for your family. And people started giving us crates of food.
Well, my husband saw beyond that. He said, “No, honey. I’m looking at [an area] as far
as my eyes can see; when I look out my front window I want everything nice.” I said,
what are you saying? He said, “I’m saying, every lot in the —00 block and every lot in
the —00 block is gonna be cut.” . . . Now that was his vision, and you had lots that had
been grown over. Up to twenty years you had broken bottles, debris, tires, furniture
[accumulating], because the city didn’t pick up bulk but once a year. So now you’ve got
all these sofas. You’ve got all this junk. It looked like hell. That’s exactly what it looked
like. And you can almost . . . it looks hopeless and if you pass by that every day, you
almost accept it. You figure, well, that’s the way it is.
rake and bag all the junk, even though each lot was 145 feet long. This is the
reaction he got from neighbors:
People came from literally everywhere to look because he started doing this day after
day after day. He’d get out there at six in the morning, all way to night, all though the
heat of the summer day after day, so people started coming out. So they would come
out and they would say: “Who’s paying you to do this? You know,” they say, “you a fool.
That’s city property. Let the city cut it.” So he would say, “People don’t [should not]
live like this. We live here. Something must be done.” Others would come out and say,
“Oh, you’re really blessing us. You’re encouraging us. We can see light now. We’ve seen
it like this for so long we sort a like accepted it.” Most of them are senior citizens. One
lady came out and gave him sixteen dollars. A guy on a corner who owned a store, he
gave him a couple of Vernor’s Ginger Ale [drinks] a couple of times. Here’s some pic-
tures he had taken. This is before, all of it was like was five or six feet [tall], but you can
see the trash.
ASSESSMENT
The accounts about “what was” offered both positive and negative mem-
ories about the past. Portelli noted in his accounts of Italian workers that
many of them who had gone through the same traumatic times—labor
repression, as opposed to our neighborhood degeneration theme—recalled
the events in differing ways that were in fact instructive. The fact that peo-
ple wanted to remember good times in the past may have been a natural
part of surviving in a neighborhood with obvious problems. But Baum has
noted that nostalgia can be a barrier, a way of failing to link the past and the
future in a proactive way, which required forgetting much of the past. He
would suggest that the need is to allow people to share pleasant memo-
ries of the past but to encourage hard assessment of current realities and
likely futures.44 Some oral historians have noted that older people tend to
Thomas / USES OF ORAL HISTORY 65
overlook the obvious poverty of the past and inflate such moral values
such as fortitude and adaptation, as described by Maple, as an indulgence
in nostalgia.45
In this case, the respondents seem to balance good and bad memories,
however, and use this balance in positive ways. They understood that the
neighborhood had indeed gone down, and yet they had also seen positive
movement from some very bad times and appeared to be using these as a
way to support neighborhood redevelopment efforts. Eric, for example,
used his memories as a visioning exercise: part of his vision included a
neighborhood with families that included people of all ages. This vision,
which was also a historical memory, made his hard work to support the con-
struction of new family housing all the more important. It also spurred
action to build commercial facilities, in testimony to the days when resi-
dents could easily go to local stores (which are almost absent from the
neighborhood now).
Images of the past and how good life was previously drove the priest to
work to improve the present. Images of past horrors provided a benchmark
for measuring the quality of life in the area, which had improved somewhat
in both neighborhoods. Such memories suggested how bad things could be
and served to help motivate these actors to become involved in progressive
efforts to change things for the better.
In the case of the second theme, organizational development, the linkage
between personal histories and positive change seems even stronger. Here
accounts of scrapbooks, personnel hires, and previous organizational strat-
egies provided direct feedback concerning what had worked in the neigh-
borhood and what had not. One could easily argue that such knowledge
could be extremely useful; it might be possible to collect such accounts as
one form of organizational analysis. In this case, all of these people served
actively on CBDO boards with which they shared such knowledge, but the
question arises concerning how many other people in the neighborhood,
not currently serving on boards, might retain such organizational history
wrapped up in their personal stories and how tapping such knowledge
might influence current strategy. Eric asked about personal memories as a
way of influencing organizational development, but it is not clear how
deeply he probed.
Comments on the third theme, concerning experiences of dedication
and triumph, showed that people had experienced changing very bad cir-
cumstances with efforts that generated a sense of pride and accomplish-
ment. Remembering earlier terrible conditions, which the community
organizations have helped to allay, conceivably gave these residents a sense
of power and allowed them to feel optimistic about their continuing efforts
to improve the future.
In the context of abandoned housing and weeded lots, it is not hard to
understand why a neighborhood griot who tells about acts of kindness
66 JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / February 2004
PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS
The question might here arise concerning how exactly such use of oral
history would come into being. One should note that some historians, years
Thomas / USES OF ORAL HISTORY 67
similar but contrasting definitions of “oral history” and “research interviews” in D. Clandinin and
F. Connelly, “Personal Experience Methods,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, 413-27.
37. Portelli, Death of Luigi Trastulli, p. x. Oral histories need not “guide” subjects and may indeed
seek spontaneity. See, for example, Hoberman’s description of his methodology when interviewing resi-
dents of a New England town. M. Hoberman, “High Crimes and Fallen Factories: Nostalgic Utopianism in
an Eclipsed New England Industrial Town,” Oral History Review 28, no. 1 (2001): 17-39. In terms of sto-
ries, compare these with the “fairy’s tales” told by the women in Ritzdorf’s class, who offered keen
insights into issues of gender and personal security in urban situations. M. Ritzdorf, “The Fairy’s Tale:
Teaching Planning and Public Policy in a Different Voice,” Journal of Planning Education and Research
12, no. 2 (1993): 99-106.
38. Real names are not used because under federal “Human Subjects” guidelines administered by my
university, these informants were told that their names would not be publicized. For the same reason,
their organizations are not named since their specific roles within the organizations are sometimes
described.
39. R. Y. Williams, “‘I’m a Keeper of Information’: History-Telling and Voice,” Oral History Review
28, no. 1 (2001): 41-63. “‘Comrade Sisters’: Two Women of the Black Panther Party,” in Unrelated Kin:
Race and Gender in Women’s Personal Narratives, ed. G. Etter-Lewis and M. Foster (New York:
Routledge, 1996).
40. Portelli, Death of Luigi Trastulli; M. DeVault, “Talking and Listening from Women’s Standpoint:
Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and Analysis,” Social Problems 37, no. 1 (1990): 96-116.
41. T. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
42. D. Warren, Black Neighborhoods: An Assessment of Community Power (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1975); J. M. Thomas, Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar
Detroit (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
43. S. Cochrun, “Understanding and Enhancing Neighborhood Sense of Community,” Journal of
Planning Literature 9, no. 1 (1994): 92-99.
44. Baum, “Forgetting to Plan.”
45. M. Hoberman, “High Crimes and Fallen Factories: Nostalgic Utopianism in an Eclipsed New Eng-
land Industrial Town,” Oral History Review 28, no. 1 (2001): 17-39.
46. L. Shopes, “Oral History and Community Involvement: The Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage
Project,” in Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public, ed. Susan P. Benson, Stephen Brier,
and Roy Rosenzweig (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).
47. D. Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1995).
48. Portelli, Death of Luigi Trastulli, chap. 2.
49. Ibid.; Kerr, “We Know What the Problem Is”; DeVault, “Talking and Listening.”
50. Lerner, Why History Matters, 118.
June Manning Thomas, PhD, FAICP, is a professor of urban and regional planning at Mich-
igan State University (MSU), with a joint appointment at the MSU Extension, where she
codirects an outreach initiative titled Urban Collaborators. She has published books and
articles on topics related to social equity, notably Redevelopment and Race: Planning a
Finer City in Postwar Detroit (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), which has won the
ACSP Paul Davidoff award, and Urban Planning and the African-American Community: In
the Shadows (Sage, 1996), coedited with Marsha Ritzdorf.