The Davidoff Tapes

By Kenneth M. Reardon

Each fall, thousands of planning students are introduced to Paul Davidoff 's "Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning". More than 50 years after its publication, it remains one of our profession's most frequently cited articles.

But while most students and professionals are familiar with the article's powerful critique of mid-20th century planning, few planners are aware of the author's influential public life. That is understandable, given his early death, the absence of biographies, and the lack of web-based resources highlighting his contributions to the planning profession and our national civic life — until recently.

Paul Davidoff in a photo from Cornell University's archives. The date and location are unknown. Photo courtesy Cornell University.

Last February, the University of Massachusetts Boston's Urban Planning and Community Development Program launched The Paul Davidoff Tapes Project (pauldavidoff.com). The website features many of Davidoff 's most important articles and speeches, scholarly articles about Davidoff and advocacy planning, and a dozen interviews with his former colleagues and family commenting on his legacy.

My colleagues and I created the site, with support from Cornell University and UMass Boston, to inspire planners — particularly those alarmed by growing income and wealth disparities and heightened racial tensions in our society — to reconsider the transformational role planning can play in addressing social injustice.

Davidoff 's impact

In "Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning," Davidoff argues that centralized planning agencies tend to promote policies that advance the interests of powerful downtown elites at the expense of low-income and working-class neighborhoods. He encourages planners to devote time generating high-quality plans that advance the hopes and desires of frequently overlooked groups like the economically disadvantaged, racial minorities, immigrant communities, senior citizens, and disabled people. He was convinced that the quality, fairness, and legitimacy of planning decisions could be significantly improved through the public presentation of multiple plans at commission and city council meetings where their values, empirical data, policy frameworks, and planning recommendations could be critically examined and publicly debated.

The article prompted a social justice movement through advocacy planning, changes to planning education, and more diverse staffing within planning agencies. In that spirit, new groups arose in the 1960s and 1970s, including Planners for Equal Opportunity and Planners Network, which challenged planning schools and municipal planning agencies to diversify staff, end their support of clearance-oriented renewal policies, and promote more participatory forms of planning.

"Looking for a better word, [Davidoff's approach] was really not advocacy but guerrilla architecture," Luis Aponte-Pares, a retired University of Massachusetts–Boston professor, says in one of the tapes (pauldavidoff.com/interviews). "You get information, you give it to the right people so you can develop an alternative plan."

In 1965, Davidoff brought his progressive ideas to Hunter College's new graduate planning program, creating an experientially based curriculum to maximize student learning through ongoing engagement in community-based planning in New York City's poorest neighborhoods. At this time, Davidoff became increasingly involved in public affairs, undertaking a 1968 congressional campaign, and testifying before congressional committees seeking increased funding for affordable housing programs.

Marcia Marker Feld, a former graduate student and faculty colleague of Davidoff, recalled his advice during her interview with The Tapes Project: "Don't just sit in your office and write the report. Go out and meet the people, talk with them, and find out what they really want."

Davidoff left Hunter in 1969 to establish the Suburban Action Institute, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization. For more than a decade, Davidoff and a small staff challenged exclusionary housing policies that prevented low-income families of color from taking advantage of educational, employment, and housing opportunities in New York City's rapidly expanding suburbs.

When private developers and local lenders failed to implement plans featuring integrated suburban housing, Davidoff and developer Neil Gold created the Garden City Development Corporation, which produced visionary plans with attractive housing options for executives and workers employed by suburban factories such as the Ford Assembly Plant in Mahwah, New Jersey.

When local planning bodies refused to approve these plans, Suburban Action took legal action, and in 1975, the state's Supreme Court issued its landmark Burlington NAACP v. Mt. Laurel Township decision, ruling that municipalities could not use zoning to exclude people from their communities based on income.

"Paul Davidoff was an unyielding force for justice and equity in planning," wrote Barry Checkoway, professor of Social Work and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, in an issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association devoted to advocacy planning. "He viewed planning as a process to address a wide range of societal problems, to improve conditions for all people while emphasizing resources and opportunities for those lacking in both, and to expand representation and participation for traditionally excluded groups in the decisions that affect their lives."

Kenneth M. Reardon is a professor and director of the newly launched MS in Urban Planning and Community Development Program in the School for the Environment at UMass Boston. He and Antonio Raciti, an assistant professor of urban planning and ecological design at UMass Boston, are codirectors of The Paul Davidoff Tapes Project.