Serving UIC's Great Cities Commitment: Solutions for Today's Urban Challenges

Great Cities Institute is proud to announce the publication by Oxford University Press of Understanding India’s New Approach to Spatial Planning and Development: A Salient Shift?  GCI Senior Fellow, Sanjeev Vidyarthi is co-author along with Shishir Mathur and Sandeep Agrawal.

In the face of the many changes in India’s rapidly developing urban – and rural areas, it is a remarkable time for such a book on India’s spatial planning to be published. The range of diverse settlement patterns and recent regime shifts in its polity set the stage for this examination of the complex web of infrastructure finance and development and local planning practices. In this book, the authors study regional cities and rural settlements, taking us further into India and past the largest cities of Kolkata, Mumbai, and Delhi.

Underlying the empirical depictions of planning outcomes is the ongoing, but significant debate within India – tensions that reverberate across the world – between inclusive, democratic development principles vs market fundamentalism. Though at times, nuanced, the clash of values are shaping India’s “existing and emerging settlements.”  From their interdisciplinary and comprehensive research, Professor Vidyarthi and his co-authors, “skillfully draw out useful insights for scholars and practitioners alike.”

This important book:

• Breaks fresh ground by locating the ongoing shift in India’s approach to spatial planning in the overall trajectory of country’s post-independence urban development model anchored upon the Nehruvian ideal of centralized planning.
• Illustrates how the tensions between democratic and market oriented impulses are shaping India’s existing and emergent settlements in complex ways that are messy, uneven, and largely invisible while explaining how the country in trying to channelize its urbanization toward a more egalitarian and environmentally sustainable trajectory. In doing so, the volume offers lessons not only for scholars of India but the developing world more broadly.

Understanding India’s New Approach to Spatial Planning and Development: A Salient Shift? Is released at a time when many of us are paying close attention to the shifting struggles in the shaping of human settlements.

If you would like to hear more about this exciting new book, please join us for our first Cities across the Globe activity of the 2017-2018 academic year.  Sanjeev will speak about his book at noon on Wednesday, September 6, 2017 at Great Cities Institute. 

About the authors (From the Cover)

Sanjeev Vidyarthi is Associate Professor, Urban Planning and Policy and a senior fellow of the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois, Chicago, USA.
Shishir Mathur is Associate Dean of Research in the College of Social Sciences and a professor in the Urban and Regional Planning Department at San Jose State University, California, USA.
Sandeep K. Agrawal is a Professor and inaugural Director of the Urban and Regional Planning Program at the University of Alberta, Canada.

At its 47^th annual meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 19-22, 2017, the Urban Affairs Association awarded Rachel Weber, Great Cities Institute Fellow and Professor of Urban Planning and Policy at UIC, the “Best Book” in the field of urban affairs/urban studies.  According to the association, “The purpose of the award is to encourage high-quality research on urban issues and reward cogent writing on urban affairs.”  Dr. Weber received the award for her book, From Boom to Bubble:  How Finance Built the New Chicago (University of Chicago Press), which “investigates the causes and effects of the dizzying building booms that occur when real estate development financial markets, and city planning all operate in overdrove to rapidly erect new structure and demolish older ones.”  Congratulations, Rachel!

The annual conference of UAA attracts urban studies scholars from across the U.S. and includes many international attendees as well.  Several researchers from UIC attended the conference.  GCI’s Timothy Imeokparia presented his analysis on “Bringing Rigor to Urban Planning Scholarship:  The Need for Conceptual Integration,” and Matt Wilson presented GCI’s work on “Economic Restructuring and Youth Employment: Implications for Effective Policy Prescriptions.”  Urban Planning and Policy Professors John Betancur and Janet Smith presented on neighborhood change and Public Administration Professors Michael Pagano and Jered Carr also spoke on panels.  GCI Director, Teresa Córdova, added to the list of UIC researchers in attendance.

The book exhibit was tremendous and a great way to learn about some of the most recent research on cities.  Several films were also showcased.

There were many interesting panels on an array of urban topics including transportation, infrastructure, housing, income inequality, urban design, neighborhood change, etc. An opening plenary included local officials and activists, including Minneapolis City Councilor (Alondra Cano).   A particular favorite of ours was a panel of European scholars on “Governing Urban Crises and Austerity:  Lessons from a Cross-National Study.”  Cities discussed included Dublin, Barcelona, Athens, Leicester and Montreal, Canada.

And speaking of Canada, next year’s conference of the Urban Affairs Association will be in Toronto, April 4-7, 2018.

When Chicagoans learned that nearly half of Chicago’s young Black men ages 20-24 were out of school and out of work in 2014, attention focused throughout the city on a long standing problem.  That finding came from the January 2016 Great Cities Institute report commissioned by the Alternative Schools Network (ASN) and released at the Chicago Urban League. The figures from a series of GCI reports complemented what the young people had been telling us, “We want to work.”  Based on the data, GCI described the problem as “chronic, concentrated and comparatively worse” than Los Angeles, New York, Illinois and the U.S. as a whole. The report called for “all hands on deck” to address the expansiveness of the problem, which it said has ramifications for all aspects of young peoples’ lives.

A year later in January 2017, Great Cities Institute released another report, also commissioned by ASN and released at the Urban League to an audience of elected officials, non-profits that work with youth, and young people themselves.  Another figure from that report highlighted the extent of Chicago’s joblessness problem.  Namely, there were 58,565 16 to 24 year olds in the city of Chicago who were neither in work, nor in school in 2015.  This group is often described as Disconnected or Opportunity Youth.

It has been our hope, that with these reports, the work of those organizations that have stood by these young people to provide support and help them find employment opportunities would be enhanced and expanded.  We also hoped that new initiatives to supplement these efforts would emerge to tackle this issue, which is tied to violence and other social and personal issues.

Of those new initiatives, Thrive Chicago, a recently formed non-profit organization, sponsored an Opportunity Youth Summit on March 14, 2017, with approximately 300 attendees including foundations, community-based organization representatives, educators, and members of the business community. After welcoming remarks and an introduction by the Mayor, Father Pfleger from Saint Sabina Church delivered a keynote speech.  Three panels followed.  Teresa Cordova, Director of GCI, opened the research panel; a youth programs panel featured Jack Wuest, Executive Director of ASN and Quiwana Bell, Chief Operations Officer of the Westside Health Authority, and a youth dialogue panel moderated by Berto Aguayo, Safety Organizer for The Resurrection Project.  Carmelo Barbaro, Executive Director of University of Chicago’s Poverty Lab announced a $3.6 million award from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to further study Opportunity Youth. The full program included additional excellent moderators and speakers.

To conclude the summit, Thrive Chicago announced general strategies developed from several months of facilitated working groups with the goal to reconnect 10,000 Opportunity Youth by 2020.

For more information on Thrive Chicago’s Opportunity Youth work, visit their website.