Expanding Planning’s Public Sphere: STREET Magazine, Activist Planning and Community Development in Brooklyn, NY 1971-75

Laura Wolf-Powers, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a paradigm of activist planning or critical city planning became a new “tributary” feeding the stream of the planning profession. STREET Magazine, published from 1971 to 1975 by the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development in Brooklyn, NY, offers a lens through which to examine the expansion of the profession to encompass a range of ideas associated with this paradigm. This article, drawing on an extensive review of STREET magazine’s content within the historical context in which it was produced, as well as interviews with people involved with the publication, argues that STREET reflected the introduction of new modes of practice into the city planning profession, as well as influencing those modes in a particular place, New York City.