Departmental News
Department Ranked Highly by Planetizen
Planetizen, in collaboration with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, has released the 2009 Guide to Graduate Urban Planning Programs. The program here at UW-Madison was ranked 6th by practitioners, 13th by educators, and 17th overall (and 4th in the Midwest Region) by Planetizen's editors. Our program was also rated among the best in Environmental Planning, Land Use Planning, and Real Estate Development. More details can be found here: http://www.planetizen.com/topschools
Jim LaGro's Site Planning class presented, on May 12, 2008, proposed design guidelines for Madison's Urban Design District 6. The report can be accessed here
Dr. Susana Lastarria Receives UW Award
In April 2008 Dr. Susana Lastarria-Cornhiel was the recipient of the first Annual UW-Madison Outstanding Women of Color Award. Dr. Lastarria, a senior scientist in URPL and a native of Peru, shared the receipt of this award with five other women on the UW campus.
Dr. Lastarria received her Ph.D. at UW-Madison, and spent much of her career on the staff of the Land Tenure Center. Testimonials for the award noted her long-standing and ground breaking work connecting land rights and women’s rights in the developing world through applied research in Central and South America, Africa, and the former Soviet Union, and her influence on institutions such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank.
In URPL, Dr. Lastarria teaches one course per year on international development planning. She is currently working with a number of URPL students on their master’s theses.
On March 27, 2008 Professor Harvey M. Jacobs was awarded an L’Ordre des Palmes Académiques (Order of the Academic Palms), rank Chevalier (Knight) by the government of France.
The Palmes Académiques is one of France’s most cherished awards, dating to 1808, and is one of the world’s oldest civil awards. L’Ordre des Palmes Académiques was initiated by Napoleon to to honor eminent members of the University of Paris. In 1866, the scope of the award was widened to include major contributions to French national education made by anybody, including those who are not French citizens.
The Palmes recognizes dedication and accomplishment in the areas of teaching, scholarship and research. L’Ordre des Palmes Académiques was awarded to Prof. Jacobs for his co-leadership of the project “Environmental Policy, Land Use and Conservation Biology in Franco-American Perspective,” conducted collaboratively between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure Agronomique de Montpellier, France, under funding from the Franco-American Cultural Exchange Foundation for French-American Academic Partnerships.
Brian Ohm recently authored a "friend of the court" brief on behalf of the American Planning Association and the Wisconsin Chapter of the American Planning Association in a significant case currently pending before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The case entitled "Wisconsin Realtors Association v. Town of West Point" involves a challenge to the authority of local governments in Wisconsin to impose temporary moratoria on subdivisions/land divisions while a community prepares an update to its comprehensive plan. The Wisconsin Realtors Association and the Wisconsin Builders Association allege that the Town of West Point does not have the authority to impose a temporary moratoria under Wisconsin law. The APA and WAPA disagree with that interpretation and the negative impact the case could have on local government's ability to protect public health, safety and welfare. This is a case of first impression in the state of Wisconsin. A copy of the brief is available on APA's website at: http://www.planning.org/amicusbriefs/pdf/wisconsinrealtors.pdf
Harvey Jacobs is serving a second one year term with the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (the Fulbright Commission) on the panel that reviews urban planning applications for the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program. The program invites applications from senior practitioners and scholars in urban planning for short international visits under the sponsorship of universities or public agencies.
As part of his continuing European work, Prof. Jacobs will be collaborating with a frequent UW visitor, Prof. Rafael Crecente Maseda of the University of Santiago de Compostela, Lugo, in a new Spanish research program on “Decision Support Systems for Land Use Planning at the Local Level.” He will be joined by participants from Brazil, Italy, and Norway.
Closer to home, in August, Prof. Jacobs was the featured speaker to the Sensible Land Use Coalition of the Minnesota Twin Cities; his talk was part of a program on “Property Rights vs. Community Rights: Backlash or Whiplash?” Most recently Prof. Jacobs is the author of “New Actions or New Arguments over Regulatory Takings?” Yale Law Journal Pocket Part 117 (2007): 65-70; http://yalelawjournal.org/2007/09/16/jacobs.html
Harvey Jacobs is the author of one of the featured articles in the April 2007 issue of Land Lines, the quarterly magazine of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The article "Social Conflict Over Property Rights" can be accessed via the Lincoln website at http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/PubDetail.aspx?pubid=1222
In February Harvey Jacobs gave a lecture on "Social Conflict Over Property Rights: Domestic, European and Global" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), under the joint sponsorship of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS). In March he traveled to Taiwan where he gave a lecture and participated in a research workshop at the Department of Real Estate and Built Environment of National Taipei University. In addition he continued his long-standing relationship with the International Center for Land Policy Studies and Training of Taiwan, teaching a one week short course in their 102nd Regular Session on Land Policy for Sustainable Rural Development. Later in March he traveled to Spain where he instructed a short course titled "Planning Theory, Land Policy, and Property Rights," at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Department of Agroforestry Engineering. Together with colleagues from the Netherlands, he assisted faculty in the design of new graduate degree programs in planning at the master's and Ph.D. levels.
Government Benefits from Professor's Planning Expertise
The work of Professor Brian Ohm was recently spotlighted in the Wisconsin Week, a publication of UW-Madison. To read the article, click here. Professor Ohm was also recently recognized as a "backyard hero" for his volunteer work as a founding board member of 1000 Friends of Wisconsin and in helping to create Wisconsin's 1999 comprehensive planning legislation. To read article, click here. Ohm's work on the comprehensive planning legislation was also discussed in the February 2007 issue of Planning magazine.
Professor Brian Ohm is the principle investigator of a $58,483 grant from the National Sea Grant Law Center to evaluate local strategies to manage Great Lakes coastal hazards and to develop model ordinances for local Great Lakes communities. The ordinances will incorporate recent innovations in methodologies for understanding bluff stability and computer visualization of Great Lakes coastal hazards. URPL Affiliate Faculty David Hart is the co-principal investigator on the project.
Professor Brian Ohm is the co-principal investigator (along with Mike Adams, Emeritus Professor in Botany) of a $65,000 grant from the United States Department of Education to conduct a trans-Atlantic comparison of education about U.S. and European institutions involved in environmental policy. Ohm and Adams will be working on a comparison of the lower Elbe River in Germany with the Wisconsin River. The work will culminate in an international conference in Madison in 2008.
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Connections
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