The Lim dissertation award committee raised an issue about the current criteria for the Lim dissertation award.  Currently, the awardee must be receiving a degree from an ACSP member school which are essentially planning departments.  However, it received some applications from doctoral students who are enrolled in other programs that are not ACSP members.  The committee raised the issue whether we should expand consideration to applications from other departments. For the meantime, we decided to keep to the original criteria and only considered those in ACSP registered programs. But, we also would like to open it as a topic for discussion, per the committee’s request.

The committee and present and past GPEIG leadership have had an informal email discussion about the pros and cons which can be summarized as:
pros: planning is an inter-disciplinary pursuit so we should consider applications from any related discipline and award excellence.
cons: it is unclear where to draw the boundaries of consideration (architecture, art, economics, political science, sociology, etc.); there are more awards available in other disciplines and few that planning PhD’s are eligible for so we should use this award to give recognition for excellence within our field

Please weigh in with your opinion and we can also continue the discussion at the business meeting.

Petra Doan, GPEIG co-chair

Since it is a short amount of time, let’s have an on-line discussion about what should be the focus of the meeting.  Please post your thoughts to this thread.

As background, starting with the ACSP meeting in 2006 in Fort Worth, Faranak Miraftab led a stimulating, substantive brainstorming meeting with great participation from GPEIG members about what we might advance as a collective.  From those meetings emerged a focus to advance scholarship on the particularly complex ethical and political implications of working as global planners.  | View Archive info |

The next ACSP meeting in 2007 in Milwaukee, GPEIG sponsored many panels along those themes.  We also had another brainstorming meeting where we discussed what to do moving forward.  We converged on three foci: 1) share the intellectual resources we have already built up through web-based media; 2) promote more international exchanges 3) explore further collaboration with HUD’s international programs.

Toward this end, we will be having a meeting with Dr. Alven Lam.  He has been a long-time supporter of GPEIG, working most closely with Keith Pezzoli.  Last year his office also sponsored two GPEIG member authored papers to be published in HUD’s Cityscape publication next year.  He has also funded a concept paper for GPEIG members Faranak Miraftab and Neema Kudva to advance a web-based teaching resource.  So, he has already done a lot and we are grateful!

At our Milwaukee brainstorming meeting we had discussed that we would like to invite Alven to Chicago and discuss ways that we might both contribute to HUD’s work and how HUD might further support GPEIG’s work.  Some initial ideas discussed in Milwaukee included:
1) how we might contribute towards American construction companies being more ethically sensitive to local community needs in overseas projects.
2) the future of COPSI funded programs at HUD

Any other ideas or thoughts you would like to share?

Annette M. Kim, GPEIG co-chair