Topic 1: Introduction to Neighborhood Planning

The goal of Neighborhood Planning is to build social capital, which is the ability of the neighborhood to organize itself to identify problems and solve them in partnership with elected officials, businesses, and public agencies. In this section, we define Neighborhood Planning, assemble the parts of a good neighborhood plan, and review its history. Neighborhood Planning is a way to unify and improve place-based social and physical conditions.

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Neighborhoods Reading List (pdf)

Subtopics inside:

  • Some thoughts to begin
  • Neighborhood planning – texts and some cases
  • Neighborhood and culture
  • Community and social capital
  • Neighborhood planning history
  • Rationale for neighborhood planning

Key Readings:

Robert Sampson, “What “Community” Supplies”, in Ronald Ferguson and Williams Dickens, Urban Problems and Community Development (Washington, D.C.: Bookings Institution Press, 1999), 242-291.
Reading #17 (pdf)

Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar, Streets of Hope (Boston: South End Press, 1994) Chapter 1 “Remembering”, 7-36
Reading #20

William Rohe and Lauren Gates, Planning with Neighborhoods, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), Chapter 5 (pp. 102-125)
Reading #33 (pdf)

Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science, 162 (December 1968) (pp. 1243-1248)
Reading #1 (html)