ACSP Distinguished Educator, 2011: Peter Marcuse

This essay is the twenty-fourth in a series on the recipients of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Distinguished Educator Award, ACSP’s highest honor. The essays appear in the order the honorees received the award. Peter Marcuse arrived in the United States at the age of five in 1933, having fled Nazi Germany with his parents, Herbert Marcuse and Sophie Wertheim. His father, the eminent social philosopher, was a major figure in the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, and his mother was a mathematician. After graduating from Harvard College and Yale Law School, Peter took a somewhat circuitous route to becoming a professor of urban planning. His interest in politics, undoubtedly influenced by his family’s values, led him initially to the law, which he regarded as a useful path to political influence. For twenty years as a practicing attorney, he worked for labor unions and non-profit housing corporations, along with advocating on behalf of civil-rights litigants. Involvement in planning issues as an alderman and city planning commission member in Waterbury, CT generated his desire for formal training in the discipline. He received a PhD in planning at Berkeley in 1972, having earlier acquired master’s degrees at Columbia and Yale in urban studies. His first faculty position was in the UCLA planning department; while in Los Angeles, he became a member, then president, of the city’s planning commission. In 1975, he returned east to assume the directorship of Columbia’s planning program. Consistent throughout Peter’s career as scholar, teacher, and practitioner has been his commitment to social justice. This aspiration took on various forms as he combined political activities, legal skills, technical knowledge, and aspirations for radical change in his writings and actions. In an autobiographical book chapter, he describes a turning point in his career when, in 1975, upon reading the early works of David Harvey and Manuel Castells, he identified “the outlines . . . of what a radical, transformative, verging on the utopian, set of guiding principles for good planning might look like” (Marcuse 2017, 38). At Columbia, Peter continued to operate on three tracks: the political, the technical, and the theoretical. He kept up his activist role by participating in numerous governmental and non-profit organizations, including the Upper-West Side Manhattan Community Board and the American Civil Liberties Union board of directors. Using his technical expertise, he led a major study in 1978 of housing conditions in New York City. The study, required every three years by the state’s rent control law, embodied extensive statistical calculations of vacancy rates, rent burdens, owner occupancy, and so on. Peter refused to provide only a technical report but used it as a vehicle for demonstrating the inequitable outcomes of the city’s housing market. Work addressing urban segregation resulted in numerous pieces in both German and English on the meaning of ghettoization. Frequently cited is his 1997 article (Marcuse 1997) which distinguishes among the classic ghetto resulting from purposeful segregation of subordinate groups, the enclave as a voluntarily developed spatial concentration of a group, and the citadel, created by a dominant group to maintain its superior position. He coins the term “the outcast ghetto” to refer to spatial exclusion caused by economic inequality and joblessness. Later writings included discussions of gentrification and investigations of policy/planning differences between the United States and the more social-welfare-oriented states of Europe. 1081477 JPEXXX10.1177/0739456X221081477Journal of Planning Education and ResearchFainstein research-article2022