2015 Clarkson Week in Planning
October 26-30, 2015
Todd Swanstrom, the 2015 Will and Nan Clarkson Chair in Planning, is the E. Desmond Lee Professor of Community Collaboration and Public Policy Administration at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, with a doctorate from Princeton University. He specializes in urban politics and public policy.
Join us for two provocative events addressing the socioeconoimc and place-based inequalities behind racial tensions across urban America.
He is an award-winning scholar and “deep” thinker on urban issues. In 2011 he published a co-edited volume, Justice and the American Metropolis (University of Minnesota Press), which develops the idea of “think injustice.” His co-authored book, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century (University Press of Kansas) is must-read for anyone concerned about metropolitan inequality.
His provocative essays on Ferguson, Mo., moved the discussion beyond the shooting of Michael Brown to the tangled web of injustice and structural racism that led to that deadly encounter. He is presently doing research on neighborhood dynamics in weak market metros and the causes and effects of high levels of involuntary residential mobility.
Swanstrom also views the world through the lens of practice. He worked as a neighborhood planner in Cleveland and as the Director of Strategic Planning for the City of Albany, NY. In St. Louis, he has assisted in supporting a network of community development corporations (CDCs) and has been working on reforming the community development infrastructure system and raising funds for grassroots neighborhood planning and community projects.