Students in The Promise and Pitfalls of Contemporary Planning were asked to share images of “ideal” and “damaged” places. The assignment yielded over 80 images of locations around the world. These included urban, rural, and suburban areas in North and South America, Asia, Europe, and Australia. Reflections on these places were shared in journal entries and in class. The contributed places illustrated both the breadth of hope for healthy, sustainable, and vibrant places and the depth of challenges in many communities.

Ideal places included park space in Seoul and at the Highline and Central Park in New York City; community gardens in Boston; a variety of transit-oriented and mixed use developments in the U.S. and Asia; a carbon-neutral suburban community in Germany; a “lively and colorful neighborhood” in Buenos Aires; the sustainable aspects of Curitiba, and Main Market Square in Krakow. Visions for ideal places were projected onto marginalized places. They were illustrated in Ebenezer Howard’s visions of garden cities of tomorrow and in the avant-garde and robotic machinations depicted in “The Walking City” by Ron Herron in the journal Archigram. Ideal places were located in the bustling downtown in Connecticut, a tree-filled small town; a mixed use development in the Bronx; Dolores Park in San Francisco; and “authentic urbanism” in Pennsylvania that “seem to fall very neatly between the T-2 and the T-5 transect zones” in a New Urbanist typology. Additional mentions included the transformation of a community in Colombia, regional cooperation in Minnesota, and wildlife habitat of Tanzania. These are just a few examples illustrating the range of visions and interpretations of ideal places.

Damaged places were identified on an environmentally-devastated island of Hawaii; in the Bronx and Long Island; New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; in informal settlements in Argentina, in under-served and impoverished communities in Asia; and in the vacant lots of Detroit. Additional damaged places included the landscapes of Pruitt-Igoe; the lack of pedestrian infrastructure along Aurora Avenue in Seattle; a factory collapse in Bangladesh; an eight-way intersection in Melbourne, Australia; and inequity in South Africa, among others. Damage was created both through unanticipated and planned disasters and both created and exacerbated by inequities. Students reflected on the role of planning in both creating and responding to damaged places.