Stacy Harwood

Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning
PhD, University of Southern California, 2001

Professor Harwood's research explores participatory approaches to community development, diversity and the urban planning process, particularly in immigrant communities, and feminist analysis of the planning process. Her dissertation, Locating Gender in the Planning Process: Municipal Housekeeping in Santa Ana, California, was an ethnographic study of community development in a diverse immigrant community in Southern California. Using a feminist framework, the dissertation explored such issues as violence and policing, families and neighborhood improvement, and immigrants and access to the planning process. This project examined how state-led neighborhood improvement efforts reconfigure relationships of power and identified how such programs reinforce existing social inequalities.

She has also begun a series of studies on local government response to Pacific Rim immigration in the United States. The first case study focused on Santa Ana, an important immigrant destination point in Southern California. This project examined the urban policy choices and ensuing political controversies surrounding residential overcrowding and the City of Santa Ana's overcrowding ordinances. Future case studies will look at municipal ordinances for garage conversions, home temples and other controversial uses of the home and neighborhood in communities with rapidly changing human and physical landscapes.

Professor Harwood teaches courses in community development, neighborhood planning and social inequality. She is also sponsoring a ten-week summer planning studio in Costa Rica where students can live in a rural Costa Rica rain forest community struggling to achieve a balance between its agricultural based economy, the pressures of eco-tourism, and the desire to save the rain forest.

In her free time, Professor Harwood enjoys running, reading novels by Latin American authors and catching bugs in the yard with her children.

Contact Information
Room M208, Temple Buell Hall
611 Lorado Taft Drive
Champaign, IL 61820
Phone: 217.265.0874
Fax: 217.244.1717
E-mail: sharwood@uiuc.edu

Current Research Areas

• Locating Gender in the Planning Process
  
  
• Immigration and Local Governance: Policy Issues in Planning
  
  
• Municipal Housekeeping and Neighborhood Activism in Contemporary American Cities

Selected Publications

Harwood, Stacy A. and Dowell Myers. 2002. The Dynamics of Immigration and Local Governance in Santa Ana: Neighborhood Activism, Overcrowding and Land-Use Policy, Policy Studies Journal, 30(1): 70-91.

Harwood, Stacy Anne. 2003. Environmental Justice on the Streets: Advocacy Planning as a Tool to Contest Environmental Racism, Journal of Planning Education and Research.

Myers, David, Margarita Hill and Stacy Harwood. 2005. Cross Cultural Learning and Study Abroad: Transforming Pedagogical Outcomes. Landscape Journal: Design, Planning and Management of the Land, 24 (2): 172-184.

Harwood, Stacy Anne. 2005 Struggling to Embrace Difference in Land-Use Decision Making in Multicultural Communities. Planning Research and Practice, 20(4): 355-171.

Harwood, Stacy A. Forthcoming. Using Scenarios to Build Planning Capacity. In Lew D. Hopkins and Marisa Zapata, eds. Envisioning Our Future: Forecasts, Scenarios, Plans, and Projects, Cambridge, Lincoln Institute for Land Policy.

Harwood, Stacy Anne and Marisa Zapata. Forthcoming. Preparing to Plan: Collaborative Planning in Monteverde, Costa Rica. International Planning Studies.

Harwood, Stacy Anne. Work in Progress. Geographies of Opportunity for Whom? Neighborhood Improvement Programs as Regulators of Neighborhood Activism.

Harwood, Stacy Anne. Work in Progress. A Social Capital Perspective on Land-Use Conflicts in Multicultural Southern California.

Harwood, Stacy Anne. Work in Progress. Insurgent Practices in Land-Use Planning: Putting Difference on the Municipal Agenda.