Top 100 Urban Thinkers

James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler is a prominent author and social critic on the problems of suburban development and the blighted American landscape. "The books I wrote represented to a large extent a personal struggle to understand why we could do such damage to our civilization," said Kunstler in an interview.

Kunstler began his lambast of the built environment of America in 1994 with The Geography of Nowhere, pointing to the rise of automobiles as the most prominent culprit. In his follow-up Home From Nowhere, Kunstler finds some answers in the work of the New Urbanists, a group to which he continues to have deep connections.

In 2005, Kunstler brought awareness to the issue of "peak oil" in his book The Long Emergency. Making the connection to land use, Kunstler argues that the loss of cheap oil will make the current American way of life obsolete and that the investment in an auto-oriented infrastructure has been "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world."

More recently, he extended his ideas into fiction in a novel titled World Made By Hand (2008). Kunstler speaks frequently on these issues on college campuses and around the world, on his blog, and on his weekly podcast.

Ian McHarg

Ian McHarg was born in Scotland and was educated in landscape architecture and city planning at Harvard after serving in World War II. He has been called a "true pioneer of the environmental movement," perhaps because he vehemently believed that design should be concerned with and respect the natural environment, as well as the needs and desires of humans.

He founded the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Landscape Architecture. His 1969 book, Design with Nature, a work revered in the environmental movement as well as in planning, laid out his ideas on land use planning, landscape architecture, and ecological planning. The book also explored some of the basic concepts that would later become Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Enrique Penalosa

Enrique Penalosa is an influential thinker on urban challenges particularly those related to the relation between urban design and sustainability, mobility, equity, public space and well being. His vision and proposals have significantly influenced policies in numerous cities throughout the world. He is currently a consultant on Urban Vision and Sustainability Strategy and works with many local, regional and national governments as well as other organizations all over the world. He is President of the Board of Directors of ITDP (Institute for Transportation and Development Policy).

As mayor of Bogotá, the 7 million inhabitant's capital of Colombia, between 1998 and 2000 he implemented profound changes which transformed the city and its citizens's attitude towards it. He massively improved slums, built formidable schools and nurseries, beautiful libraries and hundreds of parks and other pedestrian spaces. He was a leading innovator in America in creating a 300-km bicycle path network, restricting car use and radically improving pedestrian facilities. He built more than a hundred kilometers of pedestrian-only streets and greenways, such as the Porvenir Promenade, a 24 km pedestrian and bicycle- only street that goes through the poorest neighborhoods, and the Juan Amarillo Greenway, a pedestrian street that goes from the richest to the poorest neighborhoods of the capital. Inspired in the Curitiba model he created the TransMilenio bus system which has been a model to many cities and it is now considered the best bus system in the world.

Penalosa has lectured at many universities throughout the world as well as many environmental, urban, and managerial forums. His work and ideas, as well as his articles, have been featured in publications from many countries.

He holds a BA in Economics and History from Duke University, a Master's Degree in Government from the IIAP in Paris and a DESS in Public Administration from the University of Paris II. He was also a Visiting Scholar at New York University for 3 years and has taught at several Colombian universities.

Donald Shoup

Donald Shoup has extensively studied parking as a key link between transportation and land use, with important consequences for cities, the economy, and the environment. He is best known for his 2005 book The High Cost of Free Parking.

His research on employer-paid parking led to the passage of California's parking cash-out law, and to changes in the Internal Revenue Code to encourage parking cash out. His research on municipal parking policies has led cities to charge fair market prices for curb parking and to dedicate the resulting meter revenue to finance added public services in the metered districts.

Professor Shoup is a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners. He has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and the World Bank, and has served as Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA.

David Harvey

David Harvey is distinguished professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).

He has made significant contributions to the field of geography, and especially Marxist geography, arguing that capitalism's effect on space is destructive in order to ensure its own reproduction. His earlier works, Limits to Capital and Social Justice and the City, emphasised his view that geography could not be a neutral field of study. Harvey has argued that the contradictions and arguments of capitalism come from within capitalism itself, as in his work, The Condition of Postmodernity. In his later work, he took a closer look at specific urban places in time, as in Paris, Capital of Modernity and The New Imperialism, examining the Paris Commune and Iraq in the context of war and neoliberalism, respectively.

Bill Hillier

Bill Hillier is a professor of architecture and urban morphology who created the concept of space syntax, a way of looking at the social, economic and environmental functioning of cities on a common basis. He is Professor of Architectural and Urban Morphology in the University of London, Chairman of the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies and Director of the Space Syntax Laboratory in University College London. He holds a DSc (higher doctorate) in the University of London.

As the original pioneer of the methods for the analysis of spatial patterns known as ‘space syntax', he is the author of The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge University Press, 1984, 1990) which presents a general theory of how people relate to space in built environments, ‘Space is the Machine' (CUP 1996), which reports a substantial body of research built on that theory, and a large number of articles concerned with different aspects of space and how it works. He has also written extensively on other aspects of the theory of architecture.

Ebenezer Howard

Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) is known for his publication Garden Cities of To-morrow (1898), the description of a utopian city in which man lives harmoniously together with the rest of nature. The publication led to the founding of the Garden city movement, that realized several Garden Cities in Great Britain at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

In 1899 he founded the Garden Cities Association, now known as the Town and Country Planning Association and the oldest environmental charity in England.

His ideas attracted enough attention and financial backing to begin Letchworth Garden City, a suburban garden city north of London. A second garden city, Welwyn Garden City, was started after World War I. His contacts with German architects Hermann Muthesius and Bruno Taut resulted in the application of humane design principles in many large housing projects built in the Weimar years. Hermann Muthesius also played an important role in the creation of Germany's first garden city of Hellerau in 1909, the only German garden city where Howard's ideas were thoroughly adopted.

The creation of Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City were influential in the development of "New Towns" after World War II by the British government. This movement produced more than 30 communities, the first being Stevenage, Hertfordshire (about halfway between Letchworth and Welwyn), and the last (and largest) being Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. Howard's ideas also inspired other planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted II and Clarence Perry. Walt Disney used elements of Howard's concepts in his original design for EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow).

Peter Calthorpe

Peter Calthorpe is an architect, planner and urban designer. He was a founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism. He was named one of 25 "innovators on the cutting edge" by Newsweek Magazine for his work redefining the models of urban and suburban growth in America. His long and honored career in urban design, planning, and architecture began in 1976, combining his experience in each discipline to develop new approaches to urban revitalization, suburban growth, and regional planning.

Mr. Calthorpe's early published work includes technical papers, articles for popular magazines, and a number of seminal books, including Sustainable Communitieswith Sim Van der Ryn, and The Pedestrian Pocket Book with Doug Kelbaugh. The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream, published in 1993, introduced the concept of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) and provided extensive guidelines and illustrations of their broad application. His latest book with William Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl, explains how regional-scale planning and design can integrate urban revitalization and suburban renewal into a coherent vision of metropolitan growth.

Mr. Calthorpe has lectured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and South America. He has taught at U.C. Berkeley, the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, and the University of North Carolina. Over the years he has received numerous honors and awards, including appointment to the President's Councils for Sustainable Development.

Jaime Lerner

Jaime Lerner was governor of the state of Paraná, in southern Brazil. He is renowned as an architect and urban planner, having been mayor of Curitiba, capital of Paraná, three times (1971–75, 1979–84 and 1989–92). In 1994, Lerner was elected governor of Paraná, and was reelected in 1998.

During his first term, Lerner implemented the Rede Integrada de Transporte (also call for Bus Rapid Transit), and continued to implement a host of social, ecological, and urban reforms during his ensuing terms as mayor.As Mayor, Lerner employed unorthodox solutions to Curitiba's geographic challenges. Like many cities, Curitiba is bordered by floodplain. While wealthier cities in the United States such as New Orleans and Sacramento, have chosen to build expensive, and expensive-to-maintain levee systems to build on floodplain. In contrast, Curitiba purchased the floodplain and made parks. The city now ranks among the world leaders in per-capita park area. Curitiba had the problem of its status as a third-world city, unable to afford the tractors and petroleum to mow these parks. The innovative response was "municipal sheep" who keep the parks' vegetation under control and whose wool funds children's programs.

When Lerner became mayor, Curitiba had some barrios impossible to service by municipal waste removal. The "streets" were too narrow. Rather than abandon these people, or raze these slums, Lerner began a program that traded bags of groceries and transit passes for bags of trash. The slums got much cleaner.

As governor, Lerner used a policy of attracting investment to turn Paraná into one of Brazil's industrial hubs, generating investments of over US$20 billion between 1995 and 2001. Following upon his experience in Curitiba, Lerner focused on issues like transport, education, health, sanitation, leisure, and industrialization.

Pierre-Charles L'Enfant

Pierre-Charles L'Enfant was a French-born American architect and civil engineer best known for his work on the design of Washington D.C.

L'Enfant established a successful and highly profitable civil engineering firm in New York City. He achieved some fame as an architect by redesigning the City Hall in New York for the First Congress in Federal Hall. He also designed coins, medals, furniture and houses of the wealthy, and he was a friend of Alexander Hamilton.

President George Washington appointed L'Enfant in 1791 to design the new capital city under the supervision of three Commissioners, whom Washington had appointed to oversee the planning and development of the ten-mile square of federal territory that would later become the District of Columbia. Thomas Jefferson, who worked alongside President Washington in overseeing the plans for the capital, sent L'Enfant a letter outlining his task, which was to provide a drawing of suitable sites for the federal city and the public buildings. Though Jefferson had modest ideas for the Capital, L'Enfant saw the task as far more grandiose, believing he was not only locating the capital, but also included devising the city plan and designing the buildings.

Georges-Eugène Haussmann

Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891), who called himself Baron Haussmann, was a French civic planner whose name is associated with the rebuilding of Paris.

Commissioned by Napoleon III to instigate a program of planning reforms in Paris, Haussmann laid out the Bois de Boulogne, and made extensive improvements in the smaller parks. Additional, sweeping changes made wide "boulevards" of hitherto narrow streets. A new water supply, a gigantic system of sewers, new bridges, the opera house, and other public buildings, the inclusion of outlying districts - these were among the new prefect's achievements, accomplished by the aid of a bold handling of the public funds.

His work had destroyed much of the medieval city. It is estimated that he transformed 60% of Paris' buildings. Notably, he redesigned the Place de l'Étoile, and created long avenues giving perspectives on monuments such as the Arc de Triomphe and the Opera Garnier.

Robert Moses

Robert Moses (1888–1981) was the "master builder" of mid-20th century New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County, New York. As the shaper of a modern city, he is one of the most polarizing figures in the history of urban planning in the United States. Although he never held elected office, Moses was arguably the most powerful person in New York state government from the 1930s to the 1950s. He changed shorelines, built roadways in the sky, and transformed neighborhoods forever. His decisions favoring highways over public transit helped create the modern suburbs of Long Island and influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners who spread his philosophies across the nation.

Moses' projects were considered by many to be necessary for the region's development after being hit hard by the Great Depression. During the height of his powers, New York City participated in the construction of two huge World's Fairs: one in 1939 and the other in 1964. Moses was also in large part responsible for the United Nations' decision to headquarter in Manhattan as opposed to Philadelphia. His supporters believe he made the city viable for the 21st century by building an infrastructure that most people wanted and that has endured.

However, his works remain extremely controversial. His critics claim that he preferred automobiles to people, that he displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in New York City, uprooted traditional neighborhoods by building expressways through them, contributed to the ruin of the South Bronx and the amusement parks of Coney Island, caused the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants Major League baseball teams, and precipitated the decline of public transport through disinvestment and neglect.

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is a founding principal of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company. She is dean of the University of Miami's School of Architecture, where she has taught since 1979. Having initiated the graduate program in Suburb and Town Design in 1988, Elizabeth continues to explore current issues in city growth and reconstruction with students and faculty. She has served as Director of the Center for Urban Community and Design, organizing and promoting numerous design exercises for the benefit of communities throughout South Florida.

Elizabeth is a founder and emeritus board member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, established in 1993. The New York Times has characterized the New Urbanism as "the most important phenomenon to emerge in American architecture in the post-Cold War era." She has co-authored two books: Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream and The New Civic Art.

Elizabeth received her undergraduate degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton University and her master's degree in architecture from the Yale School of Architecture. She has received several honorary doctorates, the Brandeis Award for Architecture, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Medal of Architecture from the University of Virginia, the Vincent J. Scully Prize for exemplary practice and scholarship in architecture and urban design from the National Building Museum, and the Seaside Prize for contributions to community planning and design from The Seaside Institute. She lectures frequently and has been a visiting professor at a number of schools of architecture in North America. She has been a resident at the American Academy in Rome and for fourteen years served as a member of the Board of Trustees of Princeton University. She is a board member of the Institute of Classical Architecture.

Camillo Sitte

Camillo Sitte (1843–1903) was a noted Austrian architect, painter and city planning theoretician with great influence and authority of the development of urban construction planning and regulation in Europe.

He traveled around the towns of Europe and tried to identify aspects that made towns feel warm and welcoming. Architecture was a process of culturization for him. Sitte received a lot of attention in 1889 with the publication of his book "Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen" (English title: "City Planning According to Artistic Principles"). The richly illustrated book pointed out that the urban room around the experiencing man should be the leading motif of urban planning, thus turning away from the pragmatic, hygienic planning procedures of the time. Sitte emphasized the creation of an irregular urban structure, spacious plazas, enhanced by monuments and other aesthetic elements.

Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, who went by the name Le Corbusier (1887–1965), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and also painter, who is famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called Modern architecture or the International Style.

He was a pioneer in studies of modern high design and was dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities. His career spanned five decades, with his buildings constructed throughout central Europe, India, Russia, and one each in North and South America. He was also an urban planner, painter, sculptor, writer, and modern furniture designer.

Scott Bernstein

Scott Bernstein is president and co-founder of the Center for Neighborhood Technology.

Scott leads CNT's work to understand and better disclose the economic value of resource use in urban communities, and helps craft strategies to capture the value of this efficiency productively and locally.

He studied at Northwestern University, served on the research staff of its Center for Urban Affairs, taught at UCLA and was a founding Board member at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Center. President Clinton appointed Scott to the President's Council for Sustainable Development, where he co-chaired its task forces on Metropolitan Sustainable Communities and on Cross-Cutting Climate Strategies and to other Federal advisory panels on global warming, development strategy, and science policy. He helped write a climate change strategy for the 1st 100 days of the new Administration. Scott is a Fellow of the Center for State Innovation, works with governors, mayors and metropolitan organizations across the U.S., and most recently helped create the Chicago Climate Action Plan at the request of Mayor Richard M. Daley. CNT is a signer of the Charter of the New Urbanism and Scott is a member of the Urban History Association, which includes urbanists old and new.

Henri Lefebvre

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) was a French sociologist, intellectual and philosopher who was generally considered a Neo-Marxist.

His Critique of Everyday Life, first published in 1947, was among the major intellectual motives behind the founding of COBRA and, eventually, of the Situationist International. Lefebvre dedicated a great deal of his philosophical writings to understanding the importance of (the production of) space in what he called the reproduction of social relations of production. This idea is the central argument in the book The Survival of Capitalism, written as a sort of prelude to La production de l'espace (1974) (The Production of Space). These works have deeply influenced current urban theory, mainly within human geography, as seen in the current work of authors such as David Harvey and Edward Soja. Lefebvre is widely recognized as a Marxist thinker who was responsible for widening considerably the scope of Marxist theory, embracing everyday life and the contemporary meanings and implications of the ever expanding reach of the urban in the western world throughout the 20th century. The generalization of industry, and its relation to cities (which is treated in La pensée marxiste et la ville), The Right to the City and The Urban Revolution were all themes of Lefebvre's writings in the late 1960s, which was concerned, amongst other aspects, with the deep transformation of "the city" into "the urban" which culminated in its omni-presence (the "complete urbanization of society").

In his book The Urban Question (translated into English very early, in contrast with Lefebvre's works), Manuel Castells heavily criticizes Lefebvre's theoretical arguments contained in the books published in the 1960s about the contemporary city from a Marxist standpoint. Castells' criticisms of Lefebvre's subjective approach to Marxism echoed the Structuralist school of Louis Althusser, of which Lefebvre was an early critic. Many responses to Castells are provided in The Survival of Capitalism, and some may argue that the acceptance of those critiques in the academic world would be a motive for Lefebvre's effort in writing the long and theoretically dense The Production of Space. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre contends that there are different levels of space, from very crude, natural space ('absolute space') to more complex spatialities whose significance is socially produced ('social space').

Richard Florida

Richard Florida is an author and researcher focusing on unique, data-driven study into the social, economic and demographic factors that drive the 21st century world economy. He is best known for his book The Rise of the Creative Class.

He is author of The Flight of the Creative Class and Cities and the Creative Class. His previous books, especially The Breakthrough Illusion and Beyond Mass Production, paved the way for his provocative looks at how creativity is revolutionizing the global economy.

Florida is a regular correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and a regular columnist for The Globe and Mail. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Economist, and The Harvard Business Review. He has been featured as an expert on MSNBC, CNN, BBC, NPR and CBS, to name just a few.

Manuel Castells

Manuel Castells is a sociologist especially associated with information society and communications research.

His work synthesises empirical research literature with combinations of urban sociology, organization studies, internet studies, social movements, sociology of culture, and political economy. About the origins of the network society, he posits that changes to the network form of enterprise predate the electronic internet technologies (usually) associated with network organisation forms (cf. Castells and Organization Theory). Moreover, he coined the (academic) term "The Fourth World", denoting the sub-population(s) socially excluded from the global society; usual usage denotes the nomadic, pastoral, and hunter-gatherer ways of life beyond the contemporary industrial society norm.

He is the author of 22 academic books and editor or co-author of 21 additional books, as well as over 100 articles in academic journals. His trilogy "The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture" was published by Blackwell in 1996-98 in the first edition and in 2000-2003 in its second edition.

Bruce Katz

Bruce Katz is vice president and founding director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. He regularly advises national, state, regional and municipal leaders on policy reforms that advance the competitiveness of metropolitan areas.

He focuses particularly on reforms that promote the revitalization of central cities and older suburbs and enhance the ability of these places to attract, retain and grow the middle class. In 2006, he received the prestigious Heinz Award in Public Policy for his contributions to urban and metropolitan America.

Mr. Katz is a frequent writer and commentator on urban and metropolitan issues. He is the editor or co-editor of several books on transportation, demographics and regionalism.

Janette Sadik-Khan

Janette Sadik-Khan serves as the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation.

Sadik-Khan has implemented an ambitious program to improve safety, mobility and sustainability throughout New York City, and ensure a state of good repair on all the Department's roads and bridges. In April 2008 the Agency published its Strategic Plan, Sustainable Streets. Projects highlighted in that plan include the first Select Bus routes for NYC, the NYC Plaza Program, the creation of Broadway Boulevard in midtown Manhattan, the addition of 200 miles of on-street bike lanes, car-free summer streets and weekend pedestrian walks.

Before joining the NYCDOT, Sadik-Khan was a Senior Vice President of Parsons Brinckerhoff, a leading international engineering firm. She handled the U.S. transit market and was the founding president of Company 39, a communications consulting company. She previously worked in Washington D.C. as the Deputy Administrator at the Federal Transit Administration, where she managed the capital construction budget and federal assistance programs and policies. Prior to her tenure in Washington, Sadik-Khan served as the Director of the Mayor's Office of Transportation and as Special Counsel/Legislative Director at NYCDOT.

Robert J. Gibbs

Robert J. Gibbs is an urban-planning consultant and the founder of Gibbs Planning Group, Birmingham, Michigan.

Gibbs is a charter member of the Congress for New Urbanism, and he has worked on New Urbanist communities in Beverly Hills, Howell, Grand Rapids and Canton, and for many other cities across North America.

Patrick Geddes

Patrick Geddes was a Scottish biologist, known also for his innovative thinking in the fields of urban planning and education. He was responsible for introducing the concept of "region" to architecture and planning and is also known to have coined the term conurbation.

Geddes shared the belief with John Ruskin that social processes and spatial form are related. Therefore, by changing the spatial form it was possible to change the social structure as well. This was particularly important in the late 19th and early 20th century when industrialization was dramatically altering the conditions of life.

Geddes demonstrated this theory through his work in Edinburgh's Old Town. Here, in this most dilapidated area, he used associations with prominent thinkers who lived there in the 18th and 19th century (like Adam Smith), to establish residential halls. The building in question is still part of the University of Edinburgh complex. Here he situated his famous Outlook Tower, a museum of local, regional, Scottish, and world history.

He collaborated with his son-in-law, architect Sir Frank Mears on projects in the Middle East. In 1919, Geddes was commissioned by the British Mandate to draw up a masterplan for Jerusalem. In 1925, he submitted a master plan for Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is the only known city whose core is entirely built according to Geddes' plan.

Dan Burden

Dan Burden is the nation's most recognized authority on walkability, bicycle & pedestrian programs, street corridor & intersection design, traffic flow & calming, road diets, and other planning elements that affect roadway environments.

Dan is also sought after by the health community, promoting neighborhoods, villages, and cities that are designed for more active, interactive, and healthy living. Dan has nearly 40 years of experience in developing, promoting and evaluating alternative transportation facilities, traffic calming practices and sustainable community design.

Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.

Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (1870-1957) was an American landscape architect best known for his wildlife conservation efforts.

He had a lifetime commitment to national parks, and worked on projects in Acadia, the Everglades and Yosemite National Park. Olmsted Point in Yosemite and Olmsted Island at Great Falls of the Potomac River in Maryland are named after him. He and his brother John C. Olmsted created Olmsted Brothers as a successor firm to their father's.

By 1920, his better-known projects included plans for metropolitan park systems and greenways across the country. In 1928, while working for the California State Park Commission, Olmsted completed a statewide survey of potential park lands that defined basic long-range goals and provided guidance for the acquisition and development of state parks, and was a founding member and later president of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Peter Hall

Peter Hall is an English town planner, urbanist and geographer. He is the Bartlett Professor of Planning and Regeneration at The Bartlett, University College London and President of both the Town and Country Planning Association and the Regional Studies Association.

He is an internationally renowned authority on the economic, demographic, cultural and management issues that face cities around the globe. Hall has also been for many years a key planning and regeneration adviser to successive UK governments. He was Special Adviser on Strategic Planning to the British government (1991-94) and a member of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's Urban Task Force (1998-1999). Hall is also considered by many to be the father of the industrial enterprise zone concept, adopted by countries worldwide to develop industry in disadvantaged areas.

James Rouse

James Rouse (1914-1996) was a pioneering American real estate developer, civic activist, and later, free enterprise-based philanthropist.

In 1958, Rouse built Harundale Mall in Glen Burnie, Maryland, the first enclosed shopping center east of the Mississippi River and the first built by a real estate developer. His company used the term "mall" to describe the development, which was an alternative to the more typical strip malls usually built in the suburbs (the "mall" in "strip mall" came into usage later, after the enclosed mall had been popularized by Rouse's company). Although many now attribute the rise of the shopping mall to the decline of the American downtown core, Rouse's focus at the time was on the introduction of malls as a form of town center for the suburbs.

His company became an active developer and manager of shopping center and mall properties, even as he shifted focus to new projects which eventually included planned communities and festival marketplaces. In the 1960s Rouse turned his focus to planned communities.

Kennedy Lawson Smith

Kennedy Lawson Smith is one of the nation's foremost experts on commercial district revitalization and development, independent main street businesses, and economically and environmentally sound community development.

After graduate school in architecture, Kennedy directed the downtown revitalization program in Charlottesville, Virginia, where her small business development work led her to create a retail market analysis methodology specifically for older commercial districts that is now used in downtown revitalization programs throughout the US. She joined the staff of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's National Main Street Center in 1985, and in 1991 she became its director, a position she held for 13 years. During her tenure, the Main Street program was widely recognized as one of the most successful economic development programs in the US, expanding to a nationwide network of almost 2,000 towns and cities.

In 2004 Kennedy co-founded the Community Land Use and Economics (CLUE) Group, LLC, a private consulting firm that blends downtown development, land use management, and historic preservation disciplines into a cohesive approach to solving community development challenges.

Edmund Bacon

Edmund Bacon (1910-2005) was a noted American urban planner, architect, educator and author.

During his tenure as the Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970, his visions shaped today's Philadelphia, the city in which he was born, to the extent that he is sometimes described as "The Father of Modern Philadelphia."

Mike Davis

Mike Davis is an American social commentator, urban theorist, historian, and political activist. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California.

He is best known for his books City of Quartz and Planet of Slums.

F. Kaid Benfield

F. Kaid Benfield is director of NRDC's smart growth program, which supports innovative solutions to sprawling land development and its associated environmental impacts.

Kaid is a founder and former vice chair of Smart Growth America, a national coalition working on smarter land development policy. His numerous publications include Solving Sprawl (2001) and Once There Were Greenfields (1999), NRDC's definitive books about smart growth and sprawl, and Smart Growth in a Changing World (2007), published by the American Planning Association. He is also a founder and leader of LEED for Neighborhood Development, a national program to evaluate and certify environmentally superior residential, commercial, and mixed-use development. He is a graduate of Emory University and Georgetown University Law Center. Kaid writes (almost) daily about community, development, and the environment on NRDC's Switchboard.

John Nolen

John Nolen (1869-1937) was an American landscape architect and planner best known for his extensive work in Florida.

He established an office in Cambridge, where he and his associates branched out into city planning as well as landscape architecture. Nolen was a frequent lecturer on city and town planning, and was active in many professional organizations, including the American City Planning Institute, American Civic Association, American Society of Landscape Architects, American Society of Planning Officials, International Garden Cities and Town-Planning Federation, National Conference on City Planning, and the Town Planning Institute of England.

Nolen completed a number of projects in Wisconsin as well as earlier efforts in Virginia, Georgia, and particularly, San Diego, California. Nolen's prestige as an innovative urban planner was firmly established. By 1919, Nolen had written two books, edited two others, and published dozens of articles. In 1927, he was elected president of the National Conference on City Planning. Mr. Nolen was the official landscape architect to such municipalities as Kingsport, Tennessee, Madison, Wisconsin, Montclair, New Jersey, Reading, Pennsylvania, Roanoke, Virginia, San Diego, California, New London, Connecticut, Savannah, Georgia, and Schenectady, New York.

After his initial success with Mariemont, Nolen moved on to Florida to plan what he called, "the last frontier." In February 1922, he contracted with St. Petersburg to design Florida's first comprehensive plan.

Ildefonso Cerdá Suñer

Ildefonso Cerdá Suñer (1815-1876) was the progressive Spanish Catalan urban planner who designed the 19th-century "extension" of Barcelona called Eixample.

He originally trained as a civil engineer. When the Spanish government of the time finally gave in to public pressure and allowed Barcelona's city walls to be torn down, he realized the need to plan the city's expansion so that the new extension would become an efficient and livable place, unlike the congested, epidemic-prone old town within the walls. When he failed to find suitable reference works, he undertook the task of writing one from scratch while designing what he called the 'Eixample', borrowing a few technological ideas from his contemporaries to create a unique, thoroughly modern integrated concept that was carefully considered rather than whimsically designed.

He continued to create projects and improve existing designs throughout his lifetime, as well as to develop his theories taking on larger planning scopes (at regional planning level), until the very end. In the process, he lost all his family's inheritance and he died a heavily indebted near-pauper, never having been paid for his chief masterpiece, the design of the Barcelona 'Eixample'.

Stefanos Polyzoides

Stefanos Polyzoides is an architect, urban designer and co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism.

Polyzoides' prominent career covers the areas of architectural and urban design education, design and execution, and theory. His professional experience spans educational, institutional and civic buildings, historic rehabilitation, commercial projects, housing, campus planning, and urban design. From 1973 until 1997, he was Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California and has been Visiting Professor at several prestigious schools of architecture. From 1983 through 1990, he was on the Advisory Board for the School of Architecture at Princeton University.

He is a co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a national organization reforming suburban sprawl, and is a member of the Board of Directors. Polyzoides is a popular speaker on the subjects of new urbanism, transit-oriented development, mixed use development, housing and sustainability and is a frequent guest at academic symposia.

Fred Kent

Fred Kent is a leading authority on revitalizing city spaces and one of the foremost thinkers in livability, smart growth and the future of the city. As founder and president of Project for Public Spaces, he is known throughout the world as a dynamic speaker and prolific ideas man.

Fred attended Columbia University's Graduate and Undergraduate Schools, where he studied Geography, Economics, Transportation, Planning, and Anthropology. He studied with Margaret Mead and worked with William H. Whyte on the Street Life Project, assisting in observations and film analysis of corporate plazas, urban streets, parks and other open spaces in New York City.

The research resulted in the now classic 'The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces', published in 1980, which laid out conclusions based on decades of meticulous observation and documentation of human behavior in the urban environment.

Earl Blumenauer

Earl Blumenauer represents Oregon's 3rd congressional district which includes most of Portland east of the Willamette River, and is a leading proponent of livable communities and bicycle-related legislation.

Elected to the US House of Representatives in 1996, Mr. Blumenauer has created a unique role as Congress' chief spokesperson for Livable Communities: places where people are safe, healthy and economically secure. From 1996 – 2003, he served on both the International Relations Committee and the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, where he was a strong advocate for federal policies that address transportation alternatives, provide housing choices, support sustainable economies and improve the environment. Now a member of the Ways and Means Committee and the Budget Committee, Congressman Blumenauer also serves as Vice Chair of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was the third President of the United States (1801–1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and an accomplished architect.

As an architect, Jefferson was extremely influential in bringing the Neo-Palladian style-popular among the Whig aristocracy of Britain-to the United States. The style was associated with Enlightenment ideas of republican civic virtue and political liberty. Jefferson designed his home Monticello near Charlottesville, Virginia. Nearby is the University of Virginia, the only university ever to have been founded by a U.S. president. Jefferson designed the architecture of the first buildings as well as the original curriculum and residential style. Monticello and the University of Virginia are together one of only four man-made World Heritage Sites in the United States of America.

Jefferson also designed Poplar Forest, near Lynchburg, in Bedford County, Virginia, as a private retreat from his very public life. Jefferson contributed to the design of the Virginia State Capitol building, which was modeled after the Maison Carrée, an ancient Roman temple at Nîmes in southern France. Jefferson's buildings helped initiate the ensuing American fashion for Federal architecture.

Carol Coletta

Carol Coletta is president and CEO of CEOs for Cities and host and producer of the nationally syndicated public radio show Smart City.

Previously, she served as president of Coletta & Company in Memphis. In addition, she served as executive director of the Mayors' Institute on City Design, a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, U.S. Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation.

Carol was a Knight Fellow in Community Building for 2003 at the University of Miami School of Architecture and completed coursework toward a Master of Design Methods at the Institute of Design at IIT and at the University of Houston in Future Studies. She is a highly sought after speaker on the success formula for cities and creative communities and is frequently interviewed as an expert on urban issues by national media.

Richard Sennett

Richard Sennett is a sociologist at New York University, where he co-founded the New York Institute for the Humanities, as well as the London School of Economics.

One of his books, Flesh and Stone, according to his website, is "a history of the city in Western civilization, one that tells the story of urban life through bodily experience." This seems to complement his other works, which focus on the study of work and life in urban environments in the context of ever-evolving capitalism. Other books in this vein include The Craftsman, Respect, in an Age of Inequality, and The Culture of the New Capitalism.

Ed Glaeser

Ed Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard, where he also serves as Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. He studies the economics of cities, and has written scores of urban issues, including the growth of cities, segregation, crime, and housing markets. He has been particularly interested in the role that geographic proximity can play in creating knowledge and innovation. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1992 and has been at Harvard since then.

Allan Jacobs

Allan Jacobs taught in the Department of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley from 1975 to 2001 and twice served as its Chair. Presently he is a consultant in city planning and urban design with projects in California, Oregon, and Brazil, among others.

Prior to teaching at Berkeley, Professor Jacobs worked on planning projects in the City of Pittsburgh and for the Ford Foundation in Calcutta, India, and spent eight years as Director of the San Francisco Department of City Planning. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berkeley Citation, and the Kevin Lynch Award from Mil Publication include The Boulevard Book (with Macdonald and Rofe), Great Streets, and Looking at Cities.

Christopher B. Leinberger

Christopher B. Leinberger is a land use strategist, author and developer, combining an understanding of business realities with a concern for our nation's social and environmental issues. Currently, Mr. Leinberger is a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC and a Professor of Practice and Director of the Graduate Real Estate Development Program at the University of Michigan.

Mr. Leinberger is a founding partner of Arcadia Land Company, a New Urbanism/transit-oriented development and consulting firm dedicated to land stewardship and building a sense of community.

Mr. Leinberger has written chapters for eight books. His most recent book is The Option of Urbanism, Investing in a New American Dream, published in 2008 by Island Press. It demonstrates how the pendulum of how the country invests in the built environment, which comprises 35% of the asset base of the country, is swinging back toward 'walkable urbanism.'

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 -- 1959) is possibly the most famous American architect and interior designer. His work includes original and innovative examples of many different building types, including offices, churches, schools, sky scrapers, hotels, and museums. Wright promoted organic architecture (exemplified by Fallingwater), was a leader of the Prairie School movement of architecture (exemplified by the Robie House and the Westcott House), and developed the concept of the Usonian home (exemplified by the Rosenbaum House). Wright authored 20 books and many articles, and was a popular lecturer in the United States and in Europe.

Norman Krumholz

Norman Krumholz is a Professor in the Levin College of Urban Affairs who earned his planning degree at Cornell. Prior to this, he served as a planning practitioner in Ithaca, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. He served as Planning Director of the City of Cleveland from 1969-1979 under Mayors Carl B. Stokes, Ralph J. Perk, and Dennis Kucinich.

Professor Krumholz has published in many professional journals, including the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Planning Education and Research, and the Journal of Urban Affairs. In addition, he has written chapters for many books. His book(with John Forester) Making Equity Planning Work won the Paul Davidoff book of the year award of the Associated Collegiate Schools of Planning. His most recent book, Revitalizing Urban Neighborhoods (with Dennis Keating), was published by Sage in 1999. His research has been supported by the Cleveland Foundation, the George Gund Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. He served as the President of the American Planning Association (1986-1987), received the APA Award for Distinguished Leadership in 1990, and in 1999 was serving as the President of the American Institute of Certified Planners. He was awarded the Prize of Rome in 1987 by the American Academy in Rome. Professor Norm Krumholz was recently appointed an AICP fellow, and his Cleveland Policy Plan declared a "Planning Landmark".

Saskia Sassen

Saskia Sassen is professor of sociology at Columbia University, New York, and at the London School of Economics.

She has been a leader in the study of globalization and the ways the movement of capital, people, and information across borders effects the structure of life in the city. Her 1991 book, The Global City, was a watershed work at a critical time in the evolution of transnationalism and is credited with coining the term, global city. She is an authority on immigration and globalization.

Her other books include Losing Control? Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 1996) and her latest book is Territory, Authority, and Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2006), based on a five-year project on governance and accountability in a global economy.

Donald Appleyard

Donald Appleyard (1928–1982) was a Professor of Urban Design at the University of California, Berkeley.

In his book Livable Streets, he showed that streets have many social and recreational functions which are severely impaired by fast car traffic. For example, residents of streets with light traffic had, on average, three more friends and twice as many acquaintances as the people on streets with heavy traffic. His work provides a quantitative rationale for traffic calming and living streets.

Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (1892 – 1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist, literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. Benjamin's final, unfinished work, known as the Arcades Project, was to be an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the roofed indoor "arcades" which created a new kind of Paris street life and extended the culture of flânerie (definition: strolling about and observing the passing people and scenes).

Walt Disney

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (1901 – 1966) was a film producer, director, animator, and American icon. Besides founding an entertainment empire and his pioneering work in animation, Disney had an interest in urban planning and transportation in particular. The Alweg Monorail that debuted in Disneyland in 1959 was the first daily operating monorail in the Western Hemisphere, and Disney experimented with other innovative transportation concepts such as the WEDWay PeopleMover. Influenced by books he'd read by architect Victor Gruen and Ebenezer Howard's Garden City of To-morrow, Disney's original plans for EPCOT (ExPerimental Community Of Tomorrow) included an actual city for 20,000 people where the latest urban planning ideas could be tested.

His influence on the built environment is more widely seen in the theming of his amusement parks, the creation of "fake" environments through design elements.

Buckminster Fuller 

Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller (1895 – 1983) was an American architect, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. Fuller published more than thirty books, inventing and popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetics. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, the best known of which is the geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their resemblance to geodesic spheres.

James Rojas

James Rojas holds a Master's degree in City Planning from M.I.T. He is a transportation planner in Los Angeles and founder of the Latino Urban Forum (LUF), a group dedicated to improving the Latino built environment through urban planning and advocacy.

He has also taken steps to get Angelenos thinking interactively about revitalization and downtown by giving frequent lectures and creating large, interactive, public models of the area.

Henry George

Henry George (1839 – 1897) was an American writer, politician and political economist, who was the most influential proponent of the land value tax, also known as the "Single Tax" on land. He inspired the philosophy and economic ideology known as Georgism, that holds that everyone owns what they create, but that everything found in nature, most importantly land, belongs equally to all humanity. His most famous work is Progress and Poverty written in 1879; it is a treatise on inequality, the cyclic nature of industrial economies and possible remedies.

Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry (1934-present) is an American man of letters, academic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer. He is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is also an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

According to Berry, the good life includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence, and the interconnectedness of life. The threats Berry finds to this good life include: industrial farming and the industrialization of life, ignorance, hubris, greed, violence against others and against the natural world, the eroding topsoil in the United States, global economics, and environmental destruction. As a prominent defender of agrarian values, Berry's appreciation for traditional farming techniques, such as those of the Amish, grew in the 1970s, due in part to exchanges with Draft Horse Journal publisher Maurice Telleen. Berry has long been friendly to and supportive of Wes Jackson, believing that Jackson's agricultural research at The Land Institute lives out the promise of "solving for pattern" and using "nature as model."

Roberta Brandes Gratz

Roberta Brandes Gratz is a board member of Project for Public Spaces, as well as a critic, journalist and consultant. She is a well-known advocate for urban husbandry as urban rejuvenation. Rather than being rebuilt wholesale, she says, urban centers should be revitalized slowly and organically, preserving the inherent value in urban areas which already exist.

Her books, The Living City: Thinking Small in a Big Way and Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown, offer insight into her idea of revitalization as rebirth of the city, rather than simply rebuilding.

Jane Jacobs has said of her, "Roberta Gratz is wonderful at discovering important things that are going on that most of us have not yet heard of."

Rem Koolhaas

Rem Koolhaas founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in 1975 together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp. He graduated from the Architectural Association in London and in 1978 published Delirious New York, a Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. In 1995, his book S,M,L,XL summarized the work of OMA and established connections between contemporary society and architecture. He heads the work of both OMA and AMO, the conceptual branch of OMA focused on social, economical and technological developments and exploring territories beyond architectural and urban concerns. Rem Koolhaas is a professor at Harvard University where he conducts the Project on the City.

John Gilderbloom

John I. Gilderbloom is a professor of urban and public affairs in the Graduate Program in Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville, where he also directs the highly lauded Center for Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods.

Since he earned his Ph.D., Gilderbloom's real estate research has appeared in over thirty five peer-reviewed journals, twenty chapters in edited books, eleven monographs and twenty-five opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines. He has written or edited five books. His book Rethinking Rental Housing was declared, "The most significant piece on housing policy written in the last 30 years" by the Journal of the American Planning Association.

In July of 2005 SUNY Press released Promise and Betrayal: University and the Creation of Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods, which includes an introduction by former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros and supporting comments form President Bill Clinton and Harvard President Derek Bok. His 2008 book Invisible City: Poverty, Housing and New Urbanism, earned earned praise from Andres Duany, William Domhoff, Donovan Rypkema, and Neal Pierce.

Gilderbloom has published opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone and USA Today Magazine He has been featured in the Sunday New York Times, Planning, Atlanta Journal Constitution and various other international newspapers (Japan, Netherlands, and Cuba).

Walter Kulash

Walter Kulash is a principal and senior traffic engineer with the Orlando-based community-planning firm of Glatting Jackson Kercher Anglin Lopez Rinehart Inc. Since the early 1990s, Kulash has specialized in the rapidly emerging field of livable traffic design. Recent projects that incorporate the principles of livable traffic include neotraditional communities throughout the U.S. and Canada, community shopping centers that serve as centers for walkable communities, resort villages, outdoor shopping villages and park-once districts. Kulash is in the forefront of the field of traffic calming changing motorist behavior through street redesign.

Donovan Rypkema

Donovan Rypkema is principal of PlaceEconomics, a Washington, D.C.-based real estate and economic development-consulting firm. The firm specializes in services to public and non-profit sector clients who are dealing with downtown and neighborhood commercial district revitalization and the reuse of historic structures. In 2004, Rypkema established Heritage Strategies International, a new firm created to provide similar services to world-wide clients. He also teaches a graduate course in preservation economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Today Mr. Rypkema is recognized as an industry leader in the economics of preserving historic structures. Since 1983 he has provided ongoing consulting services to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and its National Main Street Center. He has undertaken assignments in 49 states and the District of Columbia.

Herbert J. Gans

Herbert J. Gans (1927–present) has published pioneering sociological studies and mentored generations of students via both his teaching and publications. In his work, Professor Gans expresses deep concern over social problems and how social science might be used to further illuminate them. His Urban Villagers, published 40 years ago, still stands as a classic statement against urban renewal and the effects it can have on the community ties and patterns, which Professor Gans researched in an eventually demolished Boston Italian neighborhood. His book on Levittown and his study of popular culture were rebuttals against common middle-class leftist intellectuals' depictions of these topics.

Harvey Molotch

Harvey Molotch is renowned for studies that have reconceptualized power relations in interaction, the mass media, and the city. He is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and has helped create the field of environmental sociology and, in recent years, that of the sociology of objects. His research interests span urban development and political economy; the sociology of architecture, design, and consumption; racial segregation and ‘white flight'; environmental degradation, especially the Santa Barbara Oil Spill; the mass media and frameworks of social construction.

Charles, Prince of Wales

Charles, Prince of Wales (1948-present) is the eldest child of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Since 1952, he has been heir apparent to the thrones of the Commonwealth realms.

The Prince of Wales has frequently shared his views on architecture and urban planning in public forums, claiming to "care deeply about issues such as the environment, architecture, inner-city renewal, and the quality of life." He is known to be an advocate of neo-traditional ideas, such as those of Christopher Alexander and Leon Krier, which were illustrated in his 1984 attack on the British architectural community in a speech given to the Royal Institute of British Architects, describing a proposed extension to the National Gallery in London as a "monstrous carbuncle". Charles also published a book and created a documentary entitled A Vision of Britain, which critiqued some aspects of modern architecture. Despite criticism from the professional architectural press, the Prince has continued to put forward his views, stressing traditional urbanism, the need for human scale, and the restoration of historic buildings as an integrated element of new development and sustainable design. Two of the Charles' charities in particular forward his theories on design: The Prince's Regeneration Trust (formed by a merger of Regeneration Through Heritage and the Phoenix Trust in 2006) and The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment (which absorbed The Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture in 2001). Further, the village of Poundbury was created at the instigation of Prince Charles, with a master plan by Krier.

Jacob Riis

Jacob Riis immigrated to the United States from Denmark in 1870. After years of extreme poverty and hardship he finally found employment as a police reporter for the New York Tribune in 1877. In the 1880s his work gravitated towards reform and he worked with other New York reformers then crusading for better living conditions for the thousands of immigrants flocking to New York in search of new opportunities. His most popular work, How The Other Half Lives, became a pivotal work that precipitated much needed reforms and made him famous. Jacob Riis's photography, taken up to help him document the plight of the poor, made him an important figure in the history of documentary photography.

Jacob Riis employed a blend of reporting, reform and photography that made him a unique legend in all three fields. Theodore Roosevelt held Riis in very high esteem offering him positions of power and influence in his administration and calling him, "the most useful citizen of New York". Instead Riis continued his creative work, producing books on the plight of poor children , immigrants and tenement dwellers. He died in 1914.

Peter M. Haas

Peter M. Haas is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received his Ph.D in 1986 from MIT, and has been at UMASS since 1987. He has had visiting positions at Yale University, Brown, and Oxford. He has published on international relations theory, constructivism, international environmental politics, global governance, and the interplay of science and international institutions at the international level.

His recent work focuses on networked governance and the role of science in international environmental regimes. He is writing a book on the evolution of multilateral environmental governance since 1972.

John Friedmann

John Friedmann is one of the pioneering urban theorists of the late twentieth century. He founded the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning at UCLA in the late 1960. He is famous for his analysis of world city formation.

In Planning in the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action (1987) Friedman promoted a radical planning model based on "decolonization", "democratization", "self-empowerment" and "reaching out". Friedman described this model as an "agropolitan development" paradigm, emphasising the re-localisation of primary production and manufacture. In Toward a Non-Euclidian Mode of Planning (1993) he further promoted the urgency of decentralizing planning, advocating a planning paradigm that is normative, innovative, political, transactive and based on a Social learning approach to knowledge and policy.

Paul Davidoff

Paul Davidoff (1930-1984) was a planning theorist responsible for the creation of the "advocacy planning" paradigm.

Sir Raymond Unwin

Sir Raymond Unwin (1863 – 1940) was a prominent and influential English urban planner.

Influenced by William Morris and by Socialist ideas, he was later drawn to the theories of Ebenezer Howard concerning planning and cities. He formed a partnership (1896–1914) with his brother-in-law, Barry Parker: as Parker & Unwin they designed St Andrew's Church, Barrow Hill, Derbyshire (1893), and several houses in the Arts-and-Crafts style before establishing their reputation by planning New Earswick Village near York for the Joseph Rowntree (1836–1925) Village Trust (from 1901).

Unwin published Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs in 1909, an important text that had a considerable effect on town-planning for the next three decades.

Richard M. Daley

Richard Michael Daley (1942-present) is a United States politician, member of the national and local Democratic Party and current Mayor of Chicago, Illinois.

Daley was chosen by Time in its April 25, 2005 issue as the best out of five mayors of large cities in the United States, and characterized as having "imperial" style and power. He has presided over such successes as the resurgence in tourism, the modernization of the Chicago Transit Authority, the mayoral takeover of the Chicago Public Schools, the construction of Millennium Park, increased environmental efforts and the rapid development of the city's North Side, as well as the near South and West sides. He took over 70% of the mayoral vote in 1999, 2003, and 2007, without significant opposition.

Julienne Hanson

Julienne Hanson is Professor of House Form and Culture, Faculty Graduate Tutor and Director of Teaching at the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, UCL. She is an architect whose research interests embrace a wide range of issues regarding the design of homes and neighborhoods, in relation to supporting older people's lifestyles and aspirations and ensuring accessibility and inclusion for people of all ages.

She is the co-originator with Professor Bill Hillier of the 'space syntax' computer-based representations, analytic techniques and research methodologies that have become the basis for configurational analysis of building layouts and urban places. These have been used successfully to diagnose design problems in urban and housing layouts, particularly the relationship between built environment variables and crime. She has taught for over 30 years on UCL's successful MSc in Advanced Architectural Studies, a course associated with this pioneering approach to architectural and urban morphology.

Vitruvius

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (born c. 80–70 BC, died after c. 15 BC) was a Roman writer, architect and engineer active in the 1st century BC. He has been called by some 'the world's first known engineer'.

Ernest Burgess

As faculty in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, Ernest Burgess published the comprehensive and highly influential Introduction to the Science of Sociology with his colleague, Robert E. Park.

The two collaborated again in 1925 with their work, The City, where they broke the modern city down into concentric circles which contained each of its essential parts, as they conceptualized them. The book is credited with setting the department of sociology in a new direction and with trailblazing the field of human ecology. The model developed in The City was called concentric zone model, which used concentric circles to understand the functioning of cities. Each circle represented a zone, including one for a central business district, a transitional zone (industrial, deteriorating housing), a working-class residential zone (tenements), a general residential zone, and commuter/suburban zones.

Burgess eventually went on to become president of the American Sociological Association after collaborating with multiple other of his colleagues and studying the institutions of family and marriage, as well as sociological methodology. His ASA presidential address in 1935 was entitled "Social Planning and the Mores," and addressed the need for democratic planning in the new Deal era.

Richard Rogers

British architect Richard Rogers (born 1933) was an avowed modernist who represented high tech architecture with his concern for advanced technology. He was best known for his joint design of the Centre Pompidou in Paris with Renzo Piano and for the Lloyd's of London Building in London.

Colin Rowe

Colin Rowe (1920 – 1999) was an ar­chi­tec­tural his­to­rian, critic, the­o­reti­cian, and teacher. In the 1950s and 60s, as the aesthetic of modernism was seemingly on the decline, with the appropriation of some of its principles by corporate America, Rowe was there to promote architecture which could embrace form for form's sake. He mentored a group of students at Cornell University in formalism, including Richard Meier, designer of the Getty Center.

Rowe is also known for a paper in which he drew comparisons between Palladio's 16th-Century Villa Malcontenta and Le Corbusier's Villa de Monzie, highlighting the similarities between the two structures across centuries of design and architecture.

Rowe collaborated with Alfred Koettler on their work, Collage City, in which they analyzed numerous cities, finding that their aesthetic appeal often was borne of successive fragmentation and rejuvenation and diverse ideas, rather than any single vision.

William Penn

William Penn (1644 – 1718) was an English founder and "Absolute Proprietor" of the Province of Pennsylvania, the English North American colony and the future U.S. State of Pennsylvania. He was known as an early champion of democracy and religious freedom and famous for his good relations and his treaties with the Lenape Indians. Under his direction, Philadelphia was planned and developed.

Emily Talen

Dr. Talen is a Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. She is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Urbanism and serves on the editorial boards of Open Urban Studies Journal and Urban Morphology. Dr. Talen teaches urban design, principles of urbanism, mapping urbanism, urban geography, and new urbanism. Her most recent book is Design for Diversity: Exploring Socially Mixed Neighborhoods.

Guy Debord

Guy Ernest Debord (December 28, 1931 - November 30, 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, hypergraphist and founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist International (SI). He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.

In broad terms, Debord's theories attempted to account for the spiritually debilitating modernisation of both the private and public spheres of everyday life by economic forces during the post-WW2 modernisation of Europe. He rejected as the twin faces of the same problem both capitalism of the West and the statism of the Eastern bloc. Alienation, Debord postulated, could be accounted for by the invasive forces of the 'spectacle' - "a social relation between people that is mediated by images".

Myron Orfield

Myron Orfield is a professor of law and the executive director of the Institute on Race & Poverty at the University of Minnesota. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

He has served in both the Minnesota House of Representatives and Senate, where he has precipitated chanegs in policy concerning land use, fair housing, and school and local government aid programs. He subsequently wrote a book, Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability based on his political work on these issues, published by the Brookings Institution. He published a second book American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality based on his work with the nation's 25 largest regions.

Paolo Soleri

Paolo Soleri (born June 21, 1919) is an Italian-American visionary architect with a life-long commitment to research and experimentation in design and town planning. He established Arcosanti and the educational Cosanti Foundation. Soleri is a distinguished lecturer in the College of Architecture at Arizona State University and a National Design Award recipient in 2006.

Anthony Downs

Anthony Downs is a noted scholar in public policy and public administration, and since 1977 is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C..

Downs has served as a consultant to many of the nation's largest corporations and public officials, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the White House. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the National Commission on Urban Problems in 1967, and HUD Secretary Jack Kemp appointed him to the Advisory Commission on Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing in 1989. He is officer or trustee of General Growth Properties and the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund.

His most influential books are An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957) and Inside Bureaucracy (1967); widely translated, both are credited as major influences on the public choice school of political economy.

Larry R. Ford

Larry R. Ford is a Professor in the Department of Geography at San Diego State University and author of America's New Downtowns: Revitalization or Reinvention? and The Spaces Between Buildings.

William McDonough

William McDonough is the founding principal of William McDonough + Partners, an internationally recognized design firm practicing ecologically, socially, and economically intelligent architecture and planning in the U.S. and abroad. He is also principal of MBDC, a product and systems development firm assisting prominent client companies in designing profitable and environmentally intelligent solutions.

Reid Ewing

Reid Ewing is a Research Professor at the National Center for Smart Growth, associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, columnist for Planning magazine, and Fellow of the Urban Land Institute. Formerly, he was Director of the Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University, and earlier in his career, he served two terms in the Arizona legislature and worked on urban policy issues at the Congressional Budget Office. He holds master degrees in Engineering and City Planning from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Transportation Systems and Urban Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He has authored books for the major planning and development organizations: Developing Successful New Communities for the Urban Land Institute; Best Development Practices and Transportation and Land Use Innovations for the American Planning Association; and Traffic Calming State-of-the-Practice for the Institute of Transportation Engineers. The two books for the American Planning Association made him APA's top selling author for many years. His study of sprawl and obesity received more national media coverage than any planning study before or since, and at one time, was the most widely cited academic paper in the Social Sciences, according to Essential Science Indicators.

His most recent book, written for EPA and published by the Urban Land Institute, is Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change. His prior work on smart growth development includes the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED-Neighborhood Development guidelines, the Institute of Transportation Engineers' Recommended Practice for Context-Sensitive Thoroughfares, the National Wildlife Federation's Endangered by Sprawl, and dozens of consulting projects around the United States.

William Levitt

For his work that has earned him the nickname, the Father of Suburbia, William Jaird Levitt was named one of Time Magazine's Top 100 Most Remarkable People of the Century in 1998.

He applied assembly-line techniques to the construction of homes after World War II that made them easier to build and far more affordable. The postwar rush of servicemen and women drove the housing boom and Levitt was there to fill the void. In Levittown, NY, using his assembly-line technique, he and his family company built 17,000 houses.

Joel Garreau

Joel Garreau is the author of Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. In what was termed "groundbreaking" work by The New York Times, Joel pointed out that we are building the biggest change in 150 years in how we live, work, play, pray, shop, and die. The cities of the 21st century are not the 19th century versions like downtown Chicago or Philadelphia. Rather, they are the more than 180 enormous new centers of commerce that have sprung up in the last 30 years -- places like Silicon Valley in California and the Route 128 corridor outside Boston, places shaped by the automobile, the jet passenger plane, and the networked computer.

Joel has for over three decades been a reporter and editor at The Washington Post and is now principal of The Garreau Group, the network of his best sources committed to understanding who we are, how we got that way, and where we're headed, worldwide. He is a fellow at the New America Foundation, has served as a fellow at Cambridge University, the University of California at Berkeley and George Mason University, and is an affiliate of the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization at Oxford. He is a member of Global Business Network, the pioneering scenario-planning organization, and is the troll of a small forest in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge.

Paul Crawford

Paul Crawford has over 30 years of experience in city and regional planning. Before forming CMCA, he served from 1980 to 1990 as Director of Planning and Building for San Luis Obispo County and Executive Director of the San Luis Obispo Council of Governments. Those positions followed five years of service to San Luis Obispo County in four other staff assignments, prior consulting work, and a staff position with the City of Visalia.

A nationally recognized zoning expert, his professional research interests are in identifying the key features of livable, pedestrian-oriented communities, the drafting of zoning and land use regulations incorporating those features. Paul has been a frequent writer and speaker on those issues, and is one of the founding members of the Form-Based Codes Alliance.

He was elected to the California Planning Roundtable in 1993, and served as its president in 2000. He is a graduate of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where he has served as adjunct professor in the City and Regional Planning Department since 1980. He is a member of the American Planning Association (APA), American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP), and Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). Paul currently serves as the co-chair of the Planners Task Force for CNU.

Paul received the Award of Excellence for Distinguished Leadership as a Planning Professional from the California Chapter of the American Planning Association in September 1998. He was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners in March 2001.

Saverio Muratori

Saverio Muratori (Modena, 1910 - Rome, 1973) was an architect and historic Italian, as well as a lecturer at the University of Rome. He founded a new methodology for the study of urban architecture.

Timothy Beatley

Timothy Beatley is Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities, in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he has taught for the last eighteen years.

His primary teaching and research interests are in environmental planning and policy, with special emphasis on coastal and natural hazards planning, environmental values and ethics, and biodiversity conservation. He has published extensively in these areas, including the following recent books: Ethical Land Use (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Habitat Conservation Planning: Endangered Species and Urban Growth (University of Texas Press, 1994), Natural Hazard Mitigation (Island Press, 1999, with David Godschalk and others); and An Introduction to Coastal Zone Management (Island Press, 2002, Second Edition, with David Brower and Anna Schwab).

Georg Simmel

(March 1, 1858 – September 28, 1918) 

Georg Simmel, German Sociologist, while not received especially well in his own time, has seen much greater influence since his passing. His prescient work, The Metropolis and Mental Life, presented as a lecture in 1903, analyzed the effects of the city and technology on the mind of the individual. The nuance of the essay has kept it relevant, refusing to define city life as harmful, just different.

He was also a pioneering force in sociological thought on social structure and social networking. Simmel's other most well-known sociological and philosophical works are The Philosophy of Money, The Stranger, and The Web of Group Affiliation.

John Norquist

John Norquist, President and CEO, Center for the New Urbanism, was mayor of Milwaukee from 1988 to 2004. He advises hundreds of city and federal officials across the country on transportation, development and urban planning issues. Under his leadership, Milwaukee experienced a decline in poverty, saw a boom in new downtown housing, and became a leading center of education and welfare reform. He oversaw a revision of the city's zoning code and reoriented development around walkable streets and public amenities such as the city's 3.1-mile Riverwalk.

Norquist sees highways as the great destroyers of a city's soul and has drawn widespread recognition for championing the removal of a .8 mile stretch of elevated freeway in the heart of Milwaukee (Park East Freeway), clearing the way for an anticipated $250 million in infill development. He was also strongly in favor of light-rail as a solution for the city's transit problems. As mayor, he consistently reduced the property tax rate every year he was in office and kept city budgets from growing beyond the rate of inflation.

In 2008, Norquist was honored nationally by the Ed Bacon Foundation for his excellence and leadership in urban development, planning, and design. Norquist is the author of The Wealth of Cities, and has taught courses in urban policy and urban planning at the University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning, and at Marquette University.

William Fulton

Fulton is the author of three books considered classics in their field. The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles, an L.A. Times best-seller, uses novelistic storytelling techniques to trace the way a leading metropolis grew and developed. The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl, co-authored with architect Peter Calthorpe, is a groundbreaking work that has reshaped understanding of how metropolitan regions should be planned and designed. More than a decade after its original publication, Guide to California Planning remains the standard textbook for urban planning classes. He is also founder and publisher of the monthly periodical California Planning & Development Report.

Henry Ford

Henry Ford was the founder of the Ford Motor Company and father of modern assembly lines used in mass production.