In Memoriam
The planning profession has recently lost three men who have made great contributions to the profession. Their contributions to the profession of planning will be remembered and honored by many future generations.
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Is Stollman
For decades, the name Israel Stollman, FAICP, was synonymous with urban planning. Known for his comprehensive view of the field, Stollman was instrumental in the 1978 consolidation of two planning groups into one national organization, the American Planning Association.
Stollman, who served as APA's executive director from 1978 to 1993, died February 2, 2005, from a fall in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he was visiting his daughter Sasha. He would have turned 82 on March 15.
"Is's death is a major loss to the field," said Paul Farmer, AICP, APA's current executive director. " He played a major role in guiding the planning movement for over a half century."
The future planner was born in 1923 to Russian Jewish immigrants on New York's Lower East Side. In a September 1993 Planning article by William H. Lucy, Stollman recalled the "rich institutional life" of the neighborhood. His college years, at the City College of New York, were interrupted by a two-and-a-half year stint during World War II with the Army Air Corps. He finally received his B.S. in social science (with a self-devised major in housing and planning) in 1947, and received his master’s in city planning in 1948 from MIT.
Stollman's 45-year-long career began with a job as junior planner for the Cleveland Planning Commission. During this time, he also taught a class in planning at Western Reserve University. He moved on to Youngstown, Ohio, and in the mid-1950’s Stollman led the effort to establish a graduate program in city and regional planning at Ohio State University. He chaired the new department until 1968. According to Lucy, the program focused on physical planning but also paid attention to to "social consequences and political and financial feasibility."
It was the sudden death of Dennis O'Harrow in 1968 that started Stollman on a new career as association director. He was asked to take over as executive director of ASPO, which was headquartered in Chicago. It was a politically turbulent time, Lucy wrote. Stollman responded with an effort to add black members to then all-white board of directors and to recruit minority planners to the profession.
For several years in the 1970s, much of Stollman's time was taken up by the intricate negotiations leading up to the consolidation of ASPO and the other major planning group, the American Institute of Planners. The American Planning Association was formed in 1978, with Stollman as executive director. By the time of his retirement in 1994, APA membership had grown from 18,000 to 28,000 (it's about 35,000 today).
"Is demonstrated brilliant leadership capabilities in helping to merge AIP and ASPO, said Ron Short, FAICP, president of APA's Arizona chapter in an e-mail to chapter members. "And he then proceeded to build APA as the premier planning organization in America."
"Is stood for the best in planning — intelligence and idealism tempered by realism. But above all, was a towering sense of integrity."
"As executive director of APA, he oversaw its development into a first-class professional and research organization. No doubt about it. And I think he was profoundly respected by anyone who came in contact with him.
"He treated everyone the same way. He was a kind and gentle person, an ethical man of high principles. And he had a great sense of humor." APA staffers remember his good humor at his retirement party when he donned a Beatles wig given him as a parting gift and when he joined in the jokes about his ever-present bow ties..
In 1999, Stollman became a charter member of the AICP College of Fellows.
"Is Stollman was responsible for APA's initial contacts with China, visiting Beijing in 1978, and again in the mid-'80s," said Jeff Soule, FAICP, APA's Director of Policy. Stollman accompanied Soule to China in 1996, a visit that Soule says helped establish the growth and development of APA's current China initiative.
After retirement, Stollman remained active in APA, particularly in the area of ethics, a long-time interest. He worked on the AICP Code of Ethics. In the last few years, Stollman taught classes in planning history at the northern Virginia campus of the University of Virginia, not far from his Washington home.
Last fall, he and wife Mary left for an extended visit to Australia and New Zealand, where two of his three daughters live. The couple was planning to return to Washington later this month.
APA executive director Paul Farmer notes that Stollman was a presenter at APA's last two conferences, where "he continued to share his encyclopedic knowledge of planning with today's planners.
An APA commemoration in honor of Israel Stollman is planned for the San Francisco conference. Donations may be made to the Planning Foundation of APA to support the Israel Stollman Ethics Symposium. Two symposium sessions will be held in San Francisco.
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Frederick “Fred” Haigh Bair, Jr.
Fred Bair, Jr., a planning pioneer and author who enjoyed a varied career in government and private practice, died February 14, 2005, in Auburndale, Florida. He was 89.
He is "part of a disappearing breed of generalist planners," wrote AICP President Daniel Lauber, AICP, in 2000 when he nominated Mr. Bair for APA's Distinguished Leadership by a Planner Award.
"Few planners have influenced the practice of planning to the degree that Fred Bair has," said Dennis Andrew Gordon, AICP, chair of the 2000 APA awards jury. "His pioneering work helped to define the rational, progressive, humane side of planning that so many members of our profession aspire to implement."
Much of today's planning theory and practice is based on Bair's 40 years of professional practice with the Florida Development Commission, and then as an independent consultant at his own firm, Bair & Abernathy. His three editions of The Text of a Model Zoning Ordinance guided several decades of planners as they introduced modern zoning to their communities. For 30 years, Bair served as a reporter and editorial board member for Zoning Digest and its successor, Land Use Law and Zoning Digest, where his commentaries helped advance sound zoning practices before a national audience. Indeed, most of today's zoning for mobile and manufactured homes, recreational equipment storage, trailer and truck rentals, and signage, and other issues, is based in Bair's work in these areas.
A 1981 profile in Planning magazine, a year after Bair's retirement from a long consulting practice, traces a varied career. Bair was born in New York City in 1915, graduated from the University of Chicago in 1935 with a degree in sociology, and found work with two New Deal agencies, the Works Progress Administration and the Soil Conservation Service. Later, he talked about how much he learned from being on the road during the Depression. In World War II, he served as a regimental carpenter.
After the war, Bair became a kind of circuit rider planner for the New York State Department of Commerce and wrote his first planning publication, a manual on parking problems. In 1949, he was hired by a citizens group in Casper, Wyoming, to prepare a long-range plan for the city. Then it was on to Florida and a job for the state community planning and industrial development division.
By 1953, when he started his consulting practice, Bair, Abernathy and Associates, Bair was already becoming known for his zoning work. His first commission: to write a zoning ordinance, and prepare a map, for Jasper, Florida-all in three days, at $35 a day.
To stir up planning interest in a conservative state, Bair founded the Florida Planning and Zoning Association and started a newsletter, Florida Planning and Development, which he edited for 17 years out of his home office in Auburndale.
Meanwhile, his consulting business grew. He became known as the man to see for a new zoning ordinance. His longtime colleague Earnest Bartley wrote of him: "He's the best idea man in the field." Among his innovations: the refinement of the land-use intensity system, which he first adapted to fit the needs of a zoning ordinance in Norfolk, Virginia.
Later Bair wrote a Planning Advisory Service report on the land-use intensity system, one of 17 reports he contributed. This and other zoning techniques are all covered in the most well read Bair volume, The Text of a Model Zoning Ordinance.
Yet Bair never lost his wide-ranging interests and down home manner. Both come through in a compilation called Bair Facts: The Writings of Frederick H. Bair, Jr., edited by another longtime consultant, Perry Norton, AICP. In Planning Cities, published in 1970, Bair described the kind of consultant he didn't want to be: "The Expert writes reports in a language called Planningese," prepares a useless master plan, and then skips town.
His sense of humor came out in the captions he drew to accompany Richard Hedman's cartoons in the 1961 classic book And on the Eighth Day, and in the zoning clinics and workshops on land-use controls that he organized at the annual national planning conferences.
An obituary of Mr. Bair in The Ledger of Lakeland, Florida, notes that as a member of the Mid-West Tool Collectors Association and the Early American Industries Association, he enjoyed a love of old tools and traditional woodworking skills.
The organization became a national clearinghouse for demonstrators of everything from tatting to blacksmithing. It was also his way of giving back during his retirement years, his son, Bill Bair, said.
Mr. Bair was a Mason and a member of First United Presbyterian Church. He was preceded in death by his son, Frederick Haigh "Rick" Bair III. In addition to his son, Bill Bair, he is survived by his wife of 59 years, Margaret Bair; daughter Laura Jesseph; sister Betty Bryan; and eight grandchildren.
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C. Britton “Britt” Harris, FAICP
C. Britton Harris, FAICP, Emeritus Professor of City and Regional Planning, died February 7 from complications of pneumonia at the age of 90.
Harris received a BA from Wesleyan University in 1935, and an MA from the Planning Program at the University of Chicago in 1951. Prior to coming to Penn, his planning work included service with the Chicago Housing Authority and the government of Puerto Rico. He became UPS Professor of Planning, Transportation, and Public Policy in 1972, and retired from full-time work in 1984.
Harris served Penn in many capacities: as chairman of the Department of City and Regional Planning and of the graduate group; as dean of the former School of Public and Urban Policy, and through joint appointments in several other departments and graduate groups. After his retirement, he continued to write and lecture, taught in the program in Appropriate Technology and in the Liberal Studies program, and spent a year as visiting professor at Stanford University. From the vantage point of 35 years at Penn, Harris felt that his most productive contributions came from his work on the Penn Jersey Transportation Study, which led to a significant special issue of the Journal of the American Institute of Planning (May 1965) and to a conference on transportation planning, published in an influential volume (Special Report no. 97, Highway Research Board, Washington DC).
Among his later writings, Harris continued to pursue the use of computer technology, especially geographic information systems, in planning support applications to explore urban form. Representative are an essay written with the eminent British modeler, Michael Batty, “Locational Models, Geographic Information and Planning Support Systems,” in Planning Support Systems (2001) edited by Richard Brail and Richard Klosterman and “Accessibility: Concepts and Applications,” Journal of Transportation and Statistics (2001). Eugenie L. Birch, professor and chair, Department of City and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania, notes, “Britton Harris was an intellectual giant whose students were not only Penn graduates but all who were interested in advancing the art and science of the field through rigorous and thoughtful analysis of the dynamic processes of spatial interaction that shape urban places.”
In 1991 the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning awarded Harris its Distinguished Educator Award. In 2000, in recognition of his work, the American Institute of Certified Planners inducted Harris into its College of Fellows citing him as “ a pathfinder [who] over 40 years ago, foresaw the importance of computer simulations in planning, the need for applied location theory, and the salience of human values and behavior in urban development. His basic research and tireless advocacy have spurred the advance of new methods in planning. This work, despite its admitted limitations, has helped pave the way for a new generation of advances in the scientific support of planning for the 21st century.”
Harris pursued many fields during his career at Penn. His interest in developing countries was expressed in his work in Puerto Rico as a member of the Ford Foundation Delhi Master Planning Team, and in other consultancies. He was an early and consistent advocate of the use of computers and models in urban planning; he was a member and past president of the Regional Science Association, and made many contributions to land use and transportation modeling. Most recently he related the use of microcomputers and geographic information systems to his other interests. Throughout his career at Penn, Harris wrote widely on these topics and participated in the work of organizations concerned with them.
Harris is survived by his wife Ruth, his three children, Jared (Wendy Martin), Katherine and Ellen Harris (Gianni Benvenuti) and one granddaughter, Laurel Martin-Harris. He is also survived by a sister Margaret Zorach.
The Department of City and Regional Planning at PennDesign will hold a memorial gathering in late spring.
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