Peter Marcuse (November 13, 1928 – March 4, 2022) was a German-born American lawyer and professor of

urban planning Urban planning (also called city planning in some contexts) is the process of developing and designing land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportatio ...

Early life and education

Marcuse was the older son of Sophie Wertheim and philosopher and critical theorist

Herbert Marcuse Herbert Marcuse ( ; ; July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a German–American philosopher, social critic, and Political philosophy, political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at ...

. He was born in

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

, left Germany shortly after Hitler came to power, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1934. Marcuse obtained a JD from

Yale Law School Yale Law School (YLS) is the law school of Yale University, a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was established in 1824. The 2020–21 acceptance rate was 4%, the lowest of any law school in the United ...

in 1952. He earned master's degrees from Columbia in public law and government in 1963 and from Yale in urban studies in 1968. He completed a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

in city and regional planning in 1972 with a thesis on the legal and financial implications of home ownership for low income families.

Career

Marcuse began his career as a lawyer in

New Haven New Haven is a city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound. With a population of 135,081 as determined by the 2020 U.S. census, New Haven is the third largest city in Co ...

and

Waterbury Waterbury is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. Waterbury had a population of 114,403 as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 Census. The city is southwest of Hartford, Connecticut, Hartford and northeast of New York City. Waterbury i ...

, Connecticut, where he served as majority leader of the board of aldermen from 1959 to 1963. In July 1964 he participated in the

Freedom Summer Freedom Summer, also known as Mississippi Freedom Summer (sometimes referred to as the Freedom Summer Project or the Mississippi Summer Project), was a campaign launched by civil rights movement, American civil rights activists in June 1964 to r ...

in Mississippi, publishing a series of articles about his experience there. He was a member of the Waterbury City Plan Commission from 1964 to 1968. Marcuse was a professor of urban planning at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...

from 1972 to 1975, then at

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

from 1975 to 2003. He wrote extensively on gentrification, various forms of ghettoization (imposed ghettos, "enclaves," and "citadels"), the right to the city and the

Occupy movement The Occupy movement was an international populist Social movement, socio-political movement that expressed opposition to Social equality, social and economic inequality and to the perceived lack of real democracy around the world. It aimed primar ...

Views on public transit

While a Los Angeles City planning commissioner and professor at UCLA, Marcuse strongly opposed proposals in the 1970s to build a rail transit system in Los Angeles. He argued in 1974 that rail transit primarily benefitted the middle-class and wealthy real estate owners, promoted sprawl, and was funded by regressive sales taxes. The office of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a strong proponent of a rail system in Los Angeles, considered Marcuse's public criticisms of the mayor's proposals to be damaging.

Views on housing

In 2008, Marcuse criticized New York City Mayor

Michael Bloomberg Michael Rubens Bloomberg (born February 14, 1942) is an American businessman and politician. He is the majority owner and co-founder of Bloomberg L.P., and was its CEO from 1981 to 2001 and again from 2014 to 2023. He served as the 108th mayo ...

's PlaNYC, a strategic plan to prepare New York City for one million more residents by expanding housing, enacting congestion pricing, repairing infrastructure, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Marcuse called the process of participation a "sham", and said the plan focused narrowly on infrastructure and environmental threats without comprehensively evaluating the city's economic and racial inequalities. In the 2016 book ''In Defense of Housing'' (co-authored with David Madden), Marcuse argues that zoning changes and policy changes cannot solve the housing crisis unless housing is de-commodified and removed from the market entirely.

Personal life

Marcuse had three children with his wife, Frances (née Bessler): novelist Irene Marcuse, UC Santa Barbara history professor Harold Marcuse, and Andrew Marcuse. He died on March 4, 2022, at the age of 93.

Books and publications

* * *with James Connolly, Johannes Novy, Ingrid Olivo, Cuz Potter, Justin Steil, ''Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice''. Routledge 2009. ISBN 978-0415687614 *with Neil Brenner and Margit Mayer, * *"From Utopian and Realistic to Transformative Planning," in: Beatrix Haselsberger, ed. ''Encounters in Planning Thought: 16 Autobiographical Essays from Key Thinkers in Spatial Planning'' (Routledge, 2017), pp 35–50. *"From Gerrymandering to Co-Mandering: Redrawing the Lines," in: Andrea Kahn and Carol J. Burns (eds.), ''Site Matters: Strategies for Uncertainty through Planning and Design'' (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 252–266. *"From Gerrymandering to "Social Mandering", ''Progressive City Newsletter'', June 2021, https://www.progressivecity.net/single-post/from-gerrymandering-to-social-mandering

References

External links

Peter Marcuse's personal page
at marcuse.org.
Critical planning and other thoughts
Peter Marcuse's blog. {{DEFAULTSORT:Marcuse, Peter 1928 births 2022 deaths Writers from Berlin Writers from Connecticut Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States American urban planners Yale Law School alumni UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design alumni Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation faculty Public housing in the United States University of California, Los Angeles faculty Connecticut lawyers Connecticut city council members Urban theorists