Economic and Community Development

• Seed Initiative: The SEED Initiative's primary objective is to develop, promote, and implement an equitable and sustainable economic development approach in PlanMaryland, the State's first state-wide development plan.

• STAR Project: Working with local governments, civic organizations, and local residents in Western Maryland to identify the particular needs and opportunities for sustainable economic development.

Planning Professor Willow Lung-Amam's project engages two important trends in the fields of planning and urban design—suburban “retrofit” or redevelopment and the suburbanization of poverty and immigration. Suburban retrofitting, which promotes more walkable, mixed-used, and compact suburban development, has recently become popular in many urban design and planning circles and has helped to transform many formerly sprawling suburbs into more prototypically “urban” places. At the same time, suburbia is undergoing massive demographic change. Once thought to be the sole province of white middle-class and elites, over the past few decades, suburbia has been at the center of America’s increasing social diversity—home to the majority of all racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and the poor.

This research focuses on the concerns raised by these two intersecting trends for disadvantaged communities. It asks how the resistance to suburban redevelopment and retrofit projects in low-income, minority, and immigrant communities informs the challenges of and to suburban redevelopment in an age of unprecedented suburban diversity and shifting geographies of metropolitan inequality. It probes questions about how communities are mobilizing to fight against such seemingly “good” urbanism, what they are fighting for and against, how these projects’ location in suburbia both complicates and informs the debates about them, and the impacts of contemporary processes of suburban spatial transformation on socially and economically vulnerable communities. The research uses a case study approach focused on several low-income minority and immigrant communities in Washington, DC metro area, which have recently or are proposed to undergo major redevelopment.

This project hopes to forward a critical conversation about the way that contemporary suburban redevelopment and renewal practices are taking shape among urban planning and design scholars, practitioners, and policy makers. The project adds a sustained focus on questions of social equity to a discourse that has hereto largely focused on urban form and environmental sustainability. It proposes to proffer both cautionary tales as well as potential policy responses and design practices to better respond to the concerns of increasingly diverse and vulnerable suburban populations.

Emeritus Professor Sidney Brower has entered into an agreement with the Department of Recreation and Parks of the City of Baltimore to undertake a year-long survey of users in Patterson Park. Surveyors will approach people in the park at four seasons of the year to ask their ideas and opinions about the park: what it is like now and what it should be like in the future. The survey is part of the City’s process of updating the master plan for the park. It follows earlier surveys in the park conducted by the School in 1994 and 2007. The surveys was undertaken by second year planning student Yijing. He, with assistance from local community volunteers, were working under the supervision of Professor Emeritus Sidney Brower.