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Introduction
Minner directs the Just Places Lab a platform for and creative action focused on how communities care for, preserve, adapt, repair, reuse, remember, and reimagine places. She conducts research related to land use and spatial planning; methods of planning for more just, sustainable, and circular cities; and historic preservation planning. She is a cofounder of the Circularity, Reuse, and Zero Waste Development (CR0WD) network.
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Publications (71)
As Australia looks forward to hosting the 2032 Olympics, it is an opportune time to reflect on the hard edges of mega-event soft power in the land down under, especially in relation to Brisbane’s experience with Expo 88. This chapter provides a brief review of the history of Australian mega-events, including international exhibitions and the Olympi...
This white paper consists of an analysis of the current linear construction economy in New York State, an assessment of the economic, environmental, and social potential of deconstruction and reuse, and state-level policy and practice recommendations based on this assessment. The intent of this analysis is to aid policymakers, state agencies, and l...
This article examines the work of ‘image construction’ and ‘memory reconstruction’ by focusing on World Expos held in Sydney and Brisbane, Australia. We argue the construction of urban imaginaries through triumphal narratives induces a form of mega-event amnesia: the erasure from collective memory of communities and cultural artefacts, and the supp...
Embodying Justice in the Built Environment: Circularity in Practice is a guide and workbook for local governments and community organizations seeking to center justice and equity in their work toward building carbon neutral futures to address climate change. Unjust practices have shaped the built environment, from land dispossession to discriminato...
Drone imagery has the potential to enrich urban planning and historic preservation, especially where it converges with the growing creation and use of 3D models in the context of cities and metro regions. Nevertheless, the widespread adoption of drones in these fields faces limitations, and there is a shortage of research addressing this issue. The...
In October 2024, the Cornell Circular Construction Lab, Just Places Lab, and the Circularity, Reuse, and Zero Waste Development (CR0WD) network jointly published a white paper titled Constructing a Circular Economy in New York State: Deconstruction and Building Material Reuse (the White Paper). The White Paper, which is the basis for this article,...
The profession of planning must act now to become an integral player addressing the existential crisis of climate change. This Commentary builds on the findings of the 2020–2021 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Presidential Climate Action Task Force, which assessed opportunities to enhance the academy’s climate leadership in research...
Drone imagery has the potential to enrich urban planning and preservation, especially where it converges with the growing creation and use of 3D models. The authors have conducted a systematic literature review of articles published between 2002 and 2022, drawing from reputable academic repositories including Science Direct, Web of Science, and Chi...
An essay collection exploring the board game's relationship to the built environment, revealing the unexpected ways that play reflects perceptions of space.
Board games harness the creation of entirely new worlds. From the medieval warlord to the modern urban planner, players are permitted to inhabit a staggering variety of roles and are prompted t...
In this article, we elevate the importance of equitable long-term planning and preservation at Expo sites. Given the long-lasting effects of Expos on host cities, we recommend that managers of former Expo sites, such as government agencies and private organizations, take action to transform the social legacy of Expos into one that benefits those wh...
Local governments view land banks as an improvement to the municipal management of foreclosed property. Critics contend that land banks wield too much power, concentrate demolitions in poor and majority neighborhoods of color, and have unfortunate parallels to the flawed, top-down policies of mid-twentieth century urban renewal. Examining land bank...
This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .
This document is intended to be an initial resource for local government elected officials, staff, and other community leaders about the adoption of policies that support salvage, deconstruction, and reuse. This document was produced by the Circularity, Reuse, and Zero Waste Development (CR0WD) network to aid in the adoption of ground-breaking poli...
The planning profession and planning theory have been compared to the “magpie” (Sandercock, 2000; Barry et al, 2018). The metaphor implies the diversity, inclusiveness, and multidisciplinary nature of planning as a field and as a body of theories, which must respond to the complex needs of communities and regions globally. Similarly, students of
pl...
International exhibitions, also known as world's fairs or international expos, are important examples of large-scale mega-events. Regulated and promoted by the Bureau of International Expositions, world and specialized expos are purported to aid in the achievement of urban development goals for host cities and nations. Scholars have focused analyse...
[Intro to review] In Preserving Neighborhoods, sociologist Aaron Passell sets out to answer the question of how historic preservation affects urban neighborhoods in the United States. More specifically, he focuses on historic districts in two contrasting cities—Baltimore, Maryland and Brooklyn, New York. Passell probes for evidence of positive effe...
The concept of circular economy seeks to disrupt the enormous amount of waste generated by a linear system. The system extracts raw materials from the earth to construct the built environment, including its buildings and infrastructure, only for those materials to be dumped into landfills after a relatively short lifespan (Fusco Girard & Nocca, 201...
The Northland Pattern Wall: City of Past and Future Craft is an assemblage artwork created by artist and architecture professor Dennis Maher with coinstructors and students of the Society for the Advancement of Construction Related Arts (SACRA) program. SACRA is an arts-based vocational training program providing construction skills training to ind...
The built environment in US cities displays uneven geographies and patterns of spatial exclusion. Preservation, as a profession that cares for places and communities should help to redress these inequities. Likewise, socially engaged art and creative practices can act as catalysts for transformative change. This article describes three community en...
https://www.cr0wd.org/resources
The Northland Pattern Wall: City of Past and Future Craft is an assemblage artwork created by artist and architecture professor Dennis Maher with co-instructors and students of the Society for the Advancement of Construction-Related Arts (SACRA) program. SACRA is an arts-based vocational training program providing construction skills training to in...
The uses of information and communication technologies (ICT) and planning support systems (PSS) are expanding and diversifying in planning practice. The availability of technology is transforming the ways in which planning education can be delivered, as well as the pedagogical methods available to planning educators to prepare the next generation o...
Book essay about:
1) T. J. Boisseau and Abigail Markwyn, eds. (2010). Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 243 pp.; 2) Margaret Creighton (2016). The Electrifying Fall of the Rainbow City. New York: W.W. Norton. 3) Jonathan Jones, ed. (2016). Barrangal Dyara (Skin and Bones). Kald...
Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) is an emerging form of farming increasingly found in cities worldwide. Advocates promote CEA as the future of food production, arguing for its potential to address challenges ranging from climate change to food insecurity. Detractors state that CEA’s narrow focus on high-end produce, along with its intensive...
In Curator: The Museum Journal:
The bowerbird assembles and fastidiously cares for displays of found objects. The bowerbird actions are a metaphor that illustrate the deep connections between humans and objects in communicating about places and the past. This article presents three vignettes of artists and history advocates interpreting former int...
Integral to some conceptualizations of the “smart city” is the adoption of web-based technology to support civic engagement and improve information systems for local government decision support. Yet there is little to no literature on the “smartness” of gathering information about historic places within municipal information systems. This chapter p...
Planning educators orient students to a profession that is continually evolving in relation to technological change. In this chapter we examine five areas of innovation with technology for planning education. These innovation areas include: 1) expansion in the means of delivery and access to planning courses, 2) new means of organizing university-b...
Integral to some conceptualizations of the “smart city” is the adoption of web-based technology to support civic engagement and improve information systems for local government decision support. Yet there is little to no literature on the “smartness” of gathering information about historic places within municipal information systems. This chapter p...
International Expos can leave long-lasting imprints on host cities. The production and evolution of legacy public spaces from these events deserve scholarly attention. Case studies were conducted at two former expo sites in the US and Australia, focusing on the role of retention, reuse, heritage, and parks conservation in the evolution of public sp...
Geospatial datasets are the outcome of processes of government regulation, taxation, and innovation in an era of smart cities and big data. The application of these geospatial datasets and geographic methods are bringing together sources of information and methodologies once rigidly divided by discipline. Interdisciplinary alliances are being forge...
Historic preservation has the potential to offer tools and strategies that can empower disadvantaged and historically underrepresented communities. This graduate workshop explored linkages between historic preservation, community development and social equity in Buffalo, New York.
Geospatial datasets are the outcome of processes of government regulation, taxation, and innovation in an era of smart cities and big data. The application of these geospatial datasets and geographic methods are bringing together sources of information and methodologies once rigidly divided by discipline. Interdisciplinary alliances are being forge...
International Expos can leave long-lasting imprints on host cities. The production and evolution of legacy public spaces from these events deserve scholarly attention. Case studies were conducted at two former expo sites in the US and Australia, focusing on the role of retention, reuse, and heritage and parks conservation in the evolution of public...
This is the final report of the Equity Preservation Workshop at Cornell University. The workshop included work with and research for two national partners-- the Preservation Rightsizing Network and the Preservation Green Lab (the research arm of the National Trust of the Historic Preservation) and with the local partner Buffalo Preservation Niagara...
Immigrant entrepreneurship is important to local and regional economies, cultural identity, placemaking, and tourism. Meanwhile, regional conditions, such as the development of suburban immigrant gateway communities and increases in the cost of business ownership, complicate local economic development efforts in urban ethnic districts. This researc...
With growing interest in wealth creation in rural areas from farmer participation in urban local food markets, defining empirical measures is crucial. However, data limitations and a lack of agreement on what serves as reasonable proxies for alternative capital measures makes the process challenging. Using the Delphi Method and considering a large...
This is an updated version of a previously posted technical report.
Flushing Meadows Corona Park, which is located in the Borough of Queens in New York City, was the site of our investigations. Over the years, steps have been taken to preserve and revitalize this important park. However, substantial questions remain about how best to steward the p...
Mega-event sites can yield valuable information for urban planning and they provide a remarkable set of cases to study sustainability, resilience and the urban management of public spaces. This chapter examines concepts of resilience and the application of geodesign tools in the context of design and heritage
conservation at former international ex...
Commercial strips are common within metropolitan regions throughout the world and particularly within Canada and the United States. Planners have identified these linear clusters of commercial land use as a form of auto-oriented sprawl on the one hand, and as fertile ground for local independent businesses on the other. Despite the rapid churn of b...
Students in my Land Use Planning workshop completed this report for the City of Ithaca Planning, Building, Zoning and Economic Development Department. The report consists of recommendations for the neighborhood planning process in Phase II of the City of Ithaca's Comprehensive Planning process.
Note: Format of poster does not show up 100% correctly when viewed on screen. Background of printed poster/document is black. This poster presents faculty and student research to understand farmers markets as a key element of local food systems and their relevance to planning at the scales of neighborhood, community, region, and nation. We focus he...
A broad range of planning support technologies (PST) are used to aid physical, spatial, and land use planning; urban design; and transportation planning, among other areas of concentration. Computer-aided analysis and communication tools are increasingly embedded in planning practice. Limited systematic research has been conducted on the ways plann...
Preservation is a form of urban design, particularly within historic neighborhoods, districts, and cultural landscapes. Digital tools for heritage uses should incorporate the ability to visualize and analyze sites in three dimensions at various scales and provide window into the additional dimension of time. This research examines the potential to...
Problem, research strategy, and findings: Historic preservation and planning often operate together in the United States within local planning departments, sharing some common roots and a "fragile, uneasy alliance" (Birch & Roby, 1984). Over time, developments in both preservation and planning brought these disciplines and professions closer togeth...
Government agencies are adopting a variety of web-based strategies to improve information systems, increase civic engagement, and enhance decision-making capabilities and planning processes. Within the U.S., a university research team designed a municipal web tool called the Austin Historical Survey Wiki to fill a pragmatic need for information abo...
This chapter traces the adoption of Envision Tomorrow, an open source planning support tool, in a large-scale planning effort within the Austin metropolitan region. A regional consortium of public, nonprofit, and private organizations was awarded a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Sustainable Communities grant to create and de...
World’s fairs are no longer the cultural phenomenon they once were in North America, but their physical footprints live on. Mid-twentieth century modern world’s fair sites present a number of unique challenges and opportunities for communities, users, park managers, administrators, and planners tasked with charting a new course for these spaces. Th...
This is a book review of Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents: Dissimulating the Sustainable City by Editors Andrés Duany and Emily Talen.
Government agencies are adopting a variety of web-based strategies to improve information systems, increase civic engagement, and enhance decision-making capabilities and planning processes. Within the U.S., a university research team designed a municipal web tool called the Austin Historical Survey Wiki to fill a pragmatic need for information abo...
Since 2009 the US Department of Agriculture has supported over 2,600 local food initiatives (USDA, 2013). These initiatives are primarily concentrated in urban areas where there is a sizable, growing market for local foods. They are widely understood to support communities, economies, and farmers; however, there have been few, if any, studies that...
We should all become tourists in our own cities, surveying and enjoying the iconic, historic, and ordinary around us. Actually, we often do: imagining the landscapes of the past, mourning the loss of beloved elements of the urban landscape, and appreciating or disapproving of new development. However, the daily tours of our local habitat can become...
Commercial strips are ubiquitous elements of the American landscape. They offer important opportunities for inquiry into the ways in which cities are adapted, preserved, and redeveloped over time. This research examines the dynamics of reinvestment along central city commercial strips in Austin, Texas. Research was aimed at understanding the relati...
Short article on The End of Austin: an exploration of urban identity in the middle of Texas: https://endofaustin.com/2013/12/19/austin-within-and-beyond-the-dome/
Visions for the good governance of cities rest upon the premise that local governments should maintain and use indepth, accurate, and uptodate information and fully engage citizens in planning processes. Recent years have brought a plethora of approaches to engaging citizens using a variety of participatory methods and web technologies. There are a...
A popular motto for Austin is " Keep Austin Weird. " How weird are Austin's neighborhoods? Were they historically so strange? What are prospects for the future? How can the qualities of place be captured in a geodatabase and studied? This presentation focuses on opportunities to incorporate GIS in the classroom for hands-‐on study of the dynamics...
Partially funded by a prestigious Save America’s Treasures grant, a plan to restore the landscape at the Elisabet Ney Museum in Austin, Texas, spurred conflict and renegotiation among various actors. These included the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Texas Historical Commission, local preservation and parks officials, and neighborhood and envi...
This field area paper represents an exploration of the planning history of Portland's Central Eastside Industrial District and an analysis of differing perceptions as to the future of the district.
This was a study of three industry clusters within the Central Eastside Industrial District in Portland, Oregon. The report was produced for the Central Eastside Industrial Council.
