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IPS interim director Sandra Newman
with Cork's lord mayor Damien Wallace and urban fellow John
O'Donnell.
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Each year four to six senior fellows, who are urban studies
scholars, come to Hopkins to conduct cross-national research on
topics ranging from fiscal imbalance to poor quality of schools.
The Iinternational Urban Fellows Program traces its roots back to
the American-Yugoslav Project in Urban and Regional Planning in
Ljubljana, set up by Jack Fisher, now a professor of geography
and environmental engineering at Hopkins, during the height of
the Cold War. With Ford Foundation support, Fisher trained
Yugoslavians in the latest city planning techniques, including
the use of computerized data as the basis for land use plans. He
not only imported well-trained Americans to help, he brought
computers into the country and trained a cadre of Yugoslavians as
planners. The result: a modern network of roads and a solid
working infrastructure.
Known throughout Europe for his early success in breaking through
the Iron Curtain, Fisher was soon besieged by Europeans who
wanted to come to the United States to study urban planning. He
organized the first group of international urban fellows,
including a number of Eastern Europeans, at Wayne State
University in Detroit in 1968. Steve Muller, then president of
Johns Hopkins, lured the program to Hopkins in 1972.
Over the years, the program has generated a rich cross-national
fertilization of ideas and practical solutions, resulting from
the fellows' diverse backgrounds, says Fisher.
As cities make the transformation from heavy industry to the
information age, their structure changes and so do the principles
that guide those who shape urban spaces.
Today urban planning has broadened from buildings and zoning
documents to focus also on policies and how they affect the
people who live in those spaces. The new crop of urban fellows at
Johns Hopkins this fall reflects this broadened emphasis, as they
explore such issues as "environmental racism," or how the urban
poor have been displaced by development.
Program director Newman says the shift reflects the growing
realization that the deterioration of older inner cities results
from a mix of social, economic, and spatial forces.
"We've learned the hard way that we can't save distressed inner
city neighborhoods solely by building nicer housing or improving
the roads--the so-called 'place' policies," Newman explains. "We
now know we also have to address the needs of the residents of
these areas through 'people' policies." --LE
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