From the Field and the Academy: JAPA Honors Its 2025 Award Winners

Each year, the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA) recognizes the papers and authors that best exemplify the journal's commitment to research that is useful to practicing planners, policymakers, scholars, and students. For the articles published in 2025 — JAPA's 100th anniversary year — that recognition carries special weight.

The awards committee appointed by JAPA Editor Yan Song, PhD, has selected the winners of the 2025 JAPA Article of the Year Award and the 2025 Emerging Scholar Award, who will be honored at the National Planning Conference (NPC) in April 2026 and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) annual conference in October 2026.

Article of the Year

'Planning With a Basic Income: Achieving Equity Planning Goals With No Strings-Attached Cash'

"Planning With a Basic Income: Achieving Equity Planning Goals With No Strings-Attached Cash," written by Marc Doussard, PhD, and Kevin Quinn, AICP, is the recipient of the 2025 Article of the Year Award.

The committee called the paper "outstanding for many reasons," citing its compilation of a comprehensive national database of basic income trials and its creation of typologies that enable readers to understand and distinguish these experiments along eight important dimensions. The paper also provides a cogent synopsis of evaluation research on these programs and contextualizes basic income trials within the equity planning literature.

Behind the article's deft synthesis and clear writing are hundreds of hours of key informant interviews, thoughtful analysis, and careful attention to "presenting this field of endeavor in terms that promise to be useful and actionable for practicing planners."

What makes this paper particularly notable is that one of its authors, Quinn, is a practicing planner in La Grange, Illinois.

The paper establishes basic income programs as part of the equity planning canon and demonstrates how this intervention can contribute to the American Planning Association's (APA) core goal of creating great communities.

Congratulations to Doussard, who is a professor and head of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, and Quinn, who is an alumnus of the Master of Urban Planning program at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.

Emerging Scholar

Christine Quattro, PhD, AICP

The 2025 Emerging Scholar Award goes to Christine Quattro, PhD, AICP, assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at Appalachian State University, for the paper, "Zoning for Infill Development: San Antonio's Create-Your-Own Zoning District." Quattro co-authored the paper with Esteban López Ochoa, PhD, associate professor of urban and regional planning at The University of Texas at San Antonio.

Quattro and López Ochoa evaluate San Antonio's 25-year-old Infill Development Zone (IDZ), tracing its origins in the 1997 master plan through subsequent developments in 2001, 2003, and a mid-course correction in 2018. Their analysis relies on document review and extensive observation at hearings and meetings over seven years, as well as analysis of actual development outputs against eight goals proposed in the literature on regulation for infill.

The paper makes a strong case that the IDZ approach has the capacity to balance regulatory standards with flexibility and innovation, benefiting members of a diverse public. As the committee observed, the authors offer insights into the "day-to-day, unglamorous, yet deeply consequential work" of San Antonio planning staff, zoning commission members, community-based organizations, and city council members in making this approach effective. Further, they conclude, the paper illustrates how a tool's viability depends on planners' non-technical skills and their ability to sensitively navigate specific situations.

Acknowledgement

Special thanks go to the awards committee — Laura Wolf-Powers, PhD; Joseph Heathcott, PhD; and chair Jeffrey S. Lowe, PhD — for their time and dedication to recognizing excellence in planning research.

Top image: Pictured (left to right) are Kevin Quinn, AICP; Christine Quattro, PhD, AICP; and Marc Doussard, PhD. Illustration by Catherine Bixler.