THEMATIC GROUPS
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- Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS
- Category: Sustainable Food Planning
Jerry Kaufman was born in 1933, in Middletown, Connecticut. He is the son of immigrant Jews from Lithuania and Belarus. At the age of two the family moved to Corona, Queens and he grew up there in a small two-bedroom apartment. His father was a housepainter and the house was often filled with arguments. Arguments between his combative brother and his mother and arguments between his mother and father over financial matters. Jerry would try to escape the strife by heading for the street to play baseball. He was a fierce competitor his whole life, as many of his former squash partners will attest. His family’s conflicts taught him to be a good listener and fed a longstanding desire to resolve conflicts in a pieceful way. His father’s financial struggles gave him a deep, unshakable empathy for those that have little.
He enjoyed a free college education at Queens College, commuting from home, while working summers as a waiter in the Borscht Belt to pay for his books and other expenses. Throughout his undergraduate years Jerry was mostly adrift, searching for a direction and receiving little attention from faculty in this large commuters’ college. During his senior year he approached a sociology professor of his, asking him for advice on what he should do with his life. The professor pulled a book of his shelf and said, “what about planning?” That book was Lewis Mumford’s “The City in History." Jerry was smitten with Mumford’s critique of the direction of American life and Mumford's vision for a more humanistic society. He went on to study with Mumford at the University of Pennsylvania and afterward began a long and fruitful career as a planning visionary.
One of his first jobs took him to Champaign-Urbana. Shortly after his wife completed college they moved to the southside of Chicago. Jerry began working for the American Society of Planning Officials and most importantly was taught by a kind and demanding boss named Dennis O’Harrow how to write well. Writing was a skill he cherished and later taught to his students. His own prose style was clear and void of academic jargon. In 1971 he was offered a job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, though he had only a masters degree.
In the nineteen seventies the focus in his work turned more and more towards addressing ethical, moral, and political questions. In the late 70s, with his colleague Beth Howe, he wrote the first paper that dealt with the ethical considerations of city planners. He later helped draft the first code of ethics for members of the American Planning Association, which posits that residents of communities should have the opportunity to have a meaningful impact on the development of plans and programs that may affect them. This was a radical departure from the top-down days of Robert Moses and urban renewal.
The last phase of his professional career starting in the late 90s was dedicated to food systems. Much to his surprise Mumford never addressed food. He wrote in a paper that Mumford’s vision of a city as a place for “vivid and autonomous personal life” was not realizable without “secure, ongoing access for all citizens to high quality, nutritious food.” He has been called, rightly, “the father of food systems planning.” He did not limit his work to academic paper writing but got involved in many projects such as Troy Gardens project in Madison (Wi). After his retirement from the university in 2001 he remained hard at work as president of the board of Will Allen’s non-profit urban farming organization Growing Power. He formed a close partnership with Will and an even closer friendship. He admired Will’s vision and work enormously and admired him even more as a person.
In the last twenty years Jerry visited Amsterdam (Netherlands) frequently. He spend a full year with his wife in the Dutch capital as a visiting professor in the social sciences department of Amsterdam University. The couple took a course in Dutch. Judy his wife successfully completed the course and managed to write poems in Dutch. Jerry for his part could say hello and goodbye. He didn't have a knack for foreign languages. Being a charming person and a brilliant teacher Jerry was admired and praised by his Amsterdam colleagues and students. One of them was inspired so much by his pioneering food studies that he decided to explore the opportunities for a European food planning group. This initiative produced the AESOP sustainable food planning thematic group. Jerry was invited as a guest of honour October 9, 2009 at the founding session in the newtown of Almere in the Netherlands. The organisers were not unaware that Jerry was willing to risk his life to go there. He was on the brink of a life threatening operation and had undergone multiple heart surgery in the preceding year. The doctor obviously could not stop him, Jerry was a renowned charmer in this type of situations. His concerns were always outward, towards others. He never saw people as a means to an end, but rather as an end onto themselves. Jerry will be remembered as a warm and caring colleague and tutor with a magnificent Jewish sense of humour.
Thanks to Daniel Kaufman who wrote a touching personal obituary on Jerry's Caring Bridge site.
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- Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS
- Category: Planning and Complexity
VIDEO RECORDINGS
Thursday, the 2nd of May:
- Welcome by Paulo Silva (Chair organizing committee)
- Opening speech by Ward Rauws (Co-chair AESOPs thematic group on Complexity & Planning)
- Ulysses Sengupta, Eric Cheung- Incorporating Informal Patterns: New Computational Approaches aimed at Integration of Socio-Spatial and Temporal Aspects of Self Organisation in Mumbai, within Future Co-ordinated Planning Strategies
- Jenni Partanen- Empirical Indicators for Self-Organisation
- Jorge Batista e Silva, José Antunes Ferreira - Intelligent cities and intelligent plans: how to foster self-organisation?
- Beitske Boonstra - Co-housing as self-organisation in spatial development: mapping the trajectories of becoming of four Danish co-housing initiatives
- Ward Rauws, Gert de Roo - Cohousing, self-organization in Dutch urban planning practice?
- José Carlos Mota - The added value of city civic movements in local spatial planning policies: Discussing the case of Aveiro, Portugal
- Oswald Devisch, Oscar Rommens, Joris Van Reusel - Towards a culture of urban improvisation – reconstructions of the interplay of private and public initiatives in spatial transformation processes
Friday, the 3rd of May:
- Sara Levy, Karel Martens, Rob van der Heijden - Networks, Markets and Hierarchies: how different governance modes organize urban development
- Matthias Loepfe, Christina Zweifel, Lineo Devechi - On emergence and power of strategies: exploring the relations between strategic planning and urban development in Switzerland
- Helena Farrall, Lia Vasconcelos - Planning for Urban Panarchy or Panarchy in Urban Planning?
KEYNOTE speaker prof. Francis Heylighen (NO VIDEO)
- Sharon Ackerman - Applying principles from Complex Adaptive Systems theory towards urban planning strategies: A test case that replaces the design of urban objects with the choreography of urban processes.
- Paulo Silva - Spatial planning systems: emergence and co-evolution involving illegal settlers, institutional, planning and spatial design
- Sara Levy, Karel Martens, Rob van der Heijden - Just a little patience: an agent-based model of the effect of a planning institution on residential patterns
- Closing and group evaluation by Ward Rauws
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- Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS
- Category: Planning/Conflict
RC 21 Conference Berlin, 29-31 August 2013
Session 27: Contentious movements, conflict and agonistic pluralism in urban development transformative trajectories and potentials
Session organizer: Enrico Gualini, TU Berlin – Berlin University of Technology
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- Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS
- Category: Public Spaces and Urban Cultures
AMBIVALENT LANDSCAPES, Sorting out the present by designing the future
Public Spaces & Urban Cultures Conference
Lisbon, 6th -7th December 2012
Ambivalence stands for the simultaneously contradictory and opposing perception of a given phenomenon, which despite disorienting in its manifestations, may be regarded as a condition from which to build renewed frameworks of analysis and criticism.
Recent trends in spatial, social and cultural processes show a growing sense of this ambivalence – in the coexisting patterns of spatial polarization and shrinkage, in the informal public spaces patched under recombining networks of individual and collective exchange, in the increasingly difficult access to social and physical infrastructures that (used to) support modern cities. These are the landscapes of a changing urban Europe. No longer confined to the City but ever more dependent on stronger spaces of citizenship.
Ambivalent landscapes are the common ground and the opportunity to address public space and urban culture in the face of an open and transdisciplinary perspective.
This is an invitation to scholars to participate with original papers on a multiple disciplinary basis – architecture and urbanism, social sciences and landscape, design and technology. Three trackswere designed to bringing together different approaches into a shared topic: Empty Cities, Collective spaces, Living infrastructures.
Venue: Faculty of Architecture, Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal Call for papers: 1stSeptember/5th October 2012; Acceptance notice: 1st November Accepted papers will be published in a cd-rom edited by FA-UTL (ISBN)
Keynote Speakers:
Ali Madanipour (Newcastle University);
José Pinto Duarte (Faculty of Architecture, Technical University of Lisbon); Frank Eckardt (Bauhaus Universität Weimar)
Dias Coelho(Faculty of Architecture, Technical University of Lisbon);
More information and contact:
AMBIVALENT LANDSCAPES
http://gaudi.fa.utl.pt/~metropolis/PublicSpace/
- Details
- Parent Category: THEMATIC GROUPS
- Category: Planning and Complexity
16th and 17th of November the 10th meeting of the Thematic Group on Complexity and Planning was held in Groningen, The Netherlands. The theme of the event was ‘Complexity and the collaborative reationale to planning’. A keynote presentation was given by prof Judith Innes, Berkeley University, US. The event was hosted by the Department of Spatial Planning & Environment, Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen.
VIDEO RECORDINGS:
Key Note prof. Judith Innes: Regional Sustainability Through Networks: A Complex Systems Perspective
Friday, 16th November 2012
Opening of the conference - Ward Rauws
Spatial Planning and the Collaborative Rationale - prof Gert de Roo
Complexity and knowledge building - Helena Farrall, Lia Vasconcelos
Concrete Machines: Collective Decision-Making Processes in Complex Planning Situations as Practices of "Closure" - Matthias Loepfe [No video available]
Stimulating quality of place: governing tensions between robustness and flexibility - Stefan Hartman
Translational self-organization: a way out of the participatory planning paradox? - Beitske Boonstra
Understanding the role of institutions in self-organizing cities - Zhang Shuhai, Ward Rauws
Saturday, 17th November 2012
Planning with complexity - An introduction to Collaborative Rationality for Public Policy - David Booher, Judith E. Innes (The discussion after the presentation)
Planning paradigms, between pre-conditions and forecasts - plans, actors and time - Paolo Silva
Reflecting on Complexity in Planing; a Post-Contingency approach - Christian Zuidema
Complex planning practice in blooming mining communities in Northern Sweden - Kristina L. Nilsson
Strategic governance and planning as a fractal - Lucia Dobrucka [no video available]
- Call for Paper: AESOP Annual Conference, Ankara 11-15 July 2012, Special Session for the thematic group 'Public Spaces and Urban Cultures'
- Announcement: AESOP Thematic Group “Public Spaces and Urban Cultures”, Meeting with the coordinators of Human Cities Festival
- Announcement: AESOP Thematic Group “Public Spaces and Urban Cultures”, Annual Meeting 11/2011
- 9th Meeting "Self organizing and Spatial Planning"
