PhD Program in Spatial Planning & Urban Development, Milan Polytechnic

The Ph.D. degree is the highest academic degree awarded. The Doctoral Programs of Politecnico di Milano aim to develop the professional competence to carry out high level research in manufacturing and service companies, public bodies and universities.
The Doctoral Programs provide a selected number highly qualified graduates, endowed with a solid preparation and keen intellectual curiosity, with the opportunity of acquiring a high degree of professional expertise in specific scientific, technological, social and economic fields.
Ph.D. graduates are not only capable of carrying out research projects but develop, during their period of study, new knowledge on scientific frontiers that can be immediately applied in professional activities. 

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more PhD programs in urban planning:

PhD in Urban and Regional Sciences in Texas A&M University

PhD of urban planning in The University of Melbourne, Melbourne School of Design (MSD)

PhD in urban planning in UCLA, School of Public Affairs

Ph.D. program in Land-Use Planning, Management, and Design (LPMD), Texas Tech University

The interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Land-Use Planning, Management, and Design (LPMD) focuses on various aspects of land and land use. It aims to train students to be leaders in their community and their organizations with enhanced understanding of multidisciplinary endeavors, improved communication skills between compartmentalized systems of knowledge and the ability of bringing knowledge from one discipline to focus on problems and ongoing projects in another. LPMD training prepares students to be leaders in administrative, legislative, research or design organizations that deal with land use.

This program is administered by the College of Architecture with an interdisciplinary steering committee. Faculty and courses drawn from units across the university. Academic It is designed to provide education in several facets of physical design, with special emphasis on non-urban lands and those in arid and semi-arid environments. Included in the program are studies of the complex factors influencing human use of resources, training in the research and evaluative methods that can be applied to interdisciplinary studies, and education in the institutional structures that shape policy and action.

There are four tracks in this program:

1. Environmental/natural resource management and planning
2. Community planning and design
3. Public policy administration, and
4. Historic preservation. 

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more PhDs:

PhD program in City Planning, in University of Pennsylvania

PhD in Planning, University of Toronto

PhD in Urban and Regional Sciences in Texas A&M University

PhD program in urban design & planning, University of Washington

The Ph.D. in Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington is one of 39 Ph.D. programs in urban and regional planning in North America, and one of the oldest, founded in 1967.
This program brings together faculty from disciplines ranging from Architecture to Sociology to focus on the interdisciplinary study of urban problems and interventions. Covering scales from neighborhoods to metropolitan areas, the program addresses interrelationships between the physical environment, the built environment, and the social, economic, and political institutions and processes that shape urban areas. The breadth of this program permits students to pursue doctoral studies in the various aspects of urban design and planning as well as in a number of related social science, natural resource, and engineering areas.

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more PhD programs:

PhD program in City Planning, in University of Pennsylvania

PhD in Planning, University of Toronto

PhD in Urban and Regional Sciences in Texas A&M University

The Dilemma of Gentrification

The city isn’t complaining. It can finally look at the neighborhood without feeling sorry for its residents; after all they seem to have gotten a new lease of life. And of course, there is that little matter of increased tax revenue through property taxes for the city coffers. Everyone loves the new folk and like what they are doing to the neighborhood. Soon there is a Starbucks to cater to the new clientele and a wine bar is opening shortly. You hear faint music and laughter on Friday nights.

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Gentrification before Gentrification? The Plight of Pilsen in Chicago

Since the 1960s, activists have used the term gentrification to describe and challenge the recent path of socio-economic and spatial restructuring in major US cities. Whether we limit its definition to the displacement/replacement of lower- by higher-income households or expand it to address the wholesale transformation of the city into a place of speculation and spectacle, gentrification has spread steadily driving up along the way real estate prices to unprecedented levels. In Chicago, gentrification has advanced in the last three decades to cover the ring of neighborhoods surrounding the CBD, the lakefront, selected train or station routes, and other areas particularly in the north side and is moving into many other locations of strategic importance to the public-private growth coalition presiding over the process.

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NON INNER-CITY GENTRIFICATION IN ISRAEL

by Amiram Gonen

In the recent two decades, as result of growing preference among the Jewish middle class for detached residence, many suburbs and villages were subject to gentrification. Especially prone to gentrification, were housing estates built in the 1950s at low densities. It was, then, the increasing suburbanization middle-class households that brought about the gentrification of these neighborhoods. A similar process took place in immigrant towns and villages on the periphery of metropolitan regions.

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Pedestrian Dead Zones

Just because you build nice wide sidewalks and create a barrier between cars and pedestrians (such as trees) does not mean you will create an environment that conducive to pedestrian activity. To create pedestrian activity you need to have someplace to walk to but also reduce the number of barriers that exist to actually using those sidewalks to get somewhere.

Despite its very long blocks, there is some good pedestrian activity in downtown Salt Lake City from North Temple to about 350 South. If you travel any farther south than that you will see a remarkable decrease in the number of pedestrians. There is several causes of this drop off in pedestrian activity and I will cover some of the major ones in this posting.

Since Main Street is home to the TRAX light rail line I will start off at the corner of 400 South and Main. On the northwest corner of the intersection with have a court house. Court houses tend not to foster pedestrian activity because they are a single point destination, in other words people may go to the court house but that is the only reason they head there.

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On defining "Sprawl"

Last week, I was busy trying to turn my paper on sprawl in Canada (available at http://works.bepress.com/lewyn/65/) into a speech.   In my paper, I define sprawl in two ways: where we grow (measured by growth or decline of central cities, controlling for municipal annexations) and how we grow (measured by modal shares for cars and transit).  As I was proofing, I asked myself: why these particular measurements?  What presuppositions underlie defining sprawl based on, say, modal share as opposed to the growth of a urban area's land mass?

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Cleanliness from a car

A few months ago, I was talking to a faculty colleague who lives in a part of Jacksonville even more sprawl-bound where I live, an area about a mile or so from the nearest bus stop and with a single-digit Walkscore.  He said Jacksonville was "safe and clean."  I was a little surprised: "clean" is one word I would never use to describe Jacksonville.  When I walk down the sidewalks of San Jose Boulevard, I notice litter aplenty - and from what I know of Beach Boulevard (the grim commercial strip near my colleague's house) I doubt that it is much better.

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