Robert W Lake
Biographic Data
| ID | 277331 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert W Lake |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert W |
| FAMILY NAME | Lake |
| SIGNATURE | LAKE R W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0560-4084 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 70 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 393 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 67 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Nihilism, Post-Truth and the Moral Future of Planning: Edited by Andrew Zitcer
On resisting the seduction of theory
Theory carries a heavy workload in the academic enterprise, offering access to Truth or Understanding of an external world. But theory has proven to be a capricious guide amidst the actual practice of academic theory production, in which the unending cycle of theoretical fashionability vanquishes hope for access to an enduring Truth and the obdurate complexity of the world poses impediments to Understanding at least as severe as those inhibiting …
Mind the gap
Theory resides in the mind, regarding an external world. While mind and matter are in relation, they are not – and can never be – a singular unity, and how we navigate the ontological gap separating mind from matter makes all the difference for our practices of inquiry, their consequences for the world, and our psychic and professional identities as scholars. That seven commentators offer widely disparate approaches for theorists navigating the r…
From Professional Geography to Public Geography, from Representational Certainty to Not Knowing the Answer
Most practices of professional geography employ a realist ontology of knowledge, seeking accurate representations of an external world that exists in itself, prior to our attempts to know it. Certainty in the accuracy of our interior representations of an external world, however, breeds dogmatic claims to truth in the attempt to bridge the unbridgeable gap separating matter from mind. A reading of Rorty’s (2021) posthumously published Pragmatism …
How to think about cities , by Deborah G. Martin and Joseph Pierce: Cambridge, Polity Press, 2023
"How to think about cities, by Deborah G. Martin and Joseph Pierce." Journal of Urban Affairs, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
Value magic
The urban process encompasses vast structures and practices engaged in creating, extracting, and accumulating value in and from the urban landscape. But what is value and how does it attain its coercive power over urban life? The unreflective deployment of axiomatic assumptions regarding the source and substance of value constitutes a form of magical thinking conjuring something out of nothing and transforming an immaterial abstraction into a mat…
On seagulls, hedgehogs, and foxes: Representation, reconstruction, and the challenge of getting from here to there
The common bond linking feminist theories of identity politics and process ontologies is that, while differing in their ontological presuppositions, both are modes of representation of an external reality, asserting an unverifiable correspondence between our mental representations and an antecedent, external reality. To escape the quagmire of representationalism, Ihnji Jon turns to transitionalist pragmatism in a radical move that redirects atten…
Yimbyism Then and Now
The upsurge in anti-regulatory rhetoric known as YIMBYism has deep historical roots in laissez-faire liberalism. Contemporary YIMBYism lacks empirical validation; embraces a categorical fallacy; embodies moral failure; exemplifies the arrogance of policy expertise; reveals the maturation of neoliberalism; and provides an object lesson in the dominance of power politics in the production of truth in the contemporary moment
Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country
Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country
This book explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs. This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource e…
Introduction Land Fictions and the Politics of Commodification in City and Country
Conversational gambits: Talking points to a better future
I am immensely grateful to Kathe Newman and James DeFilippis for organizing this discussion and to my colleagues for their astute, generous, and challenging engagement with my work. Their willingness to continue the conversation is all the affirmation that one could hope to receive. In this response, I comment on the ad hoc and provisional nature of academic knowledge and highlight the possibilities presented by pragmatism to forge a path to a be…
Years of the journal Urban Geography
2020 marks 40 years of the publication of Urban Geography. The journal was established at about the same time as the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Urban Geography Specialty Group (UGSG)
Degraded Work: The Struggle at the Bottom of the Labor Market
Locating the Social in Social Justice
A concept of social justice in which the social names a subset of justice suggests that the social constitutes a distinct sphere within which a distinctively social justice is produced and experienced and within which a specifically social injustice can be addressed. Theorists from Dewey to Latour to Foucault, however, have questioned the conceptualization of the social as a separate substantive domain within which a distinctively social justice …
Rebuilding America's Cities: Roads to Recovery
A growing cooperation between the public and private sectors indicates that the tasks of redevelopment are too large and complex for either sector to accomplish alone. Some people maintain that government can do few things right; others are equally distrustful of the private sector. As used here, the private sector is considered to be all that is not government. Each of the success stories illustrated is, in part, a road to recovery, although non…
For creative democracy
Emerging commonalities between philosophical pragmatism and contemporary political thought suggest that those who find resonance in recent political theory will find in Deweyan pragmatism a fruitful source of insight and inspiration. Pragmatism’s commitments share deep affinities with parallel impulses in feminist and post-positivist thought animating engaged, activist scholarship inside and outside of geography. An ethic of radical equality appl…
Big Data, urban governance, and the ontological politics of hyperindividualism
Big Data's calculative ontology relies on and reproduces a form of hyperindividualism in which the ontological unit of analysis is the discrete data point, the meaning and identity of which inheres in itself, preceding, separate, and independent from its context or relation to any other data point. The practice of Big Data governed by an ontology of hyperindividualism is also constitutive of that ontology, naturalizing and diffusing it through pr…
Postscript: Planning urban geographies and the contested rationalities of city-making
Urban space is produced through material enactments performed by situated actors whose practices follow a determinative logic – a rationality – that links specific means to specific ends. The three papers in this special issue explore the divergent, contested, contingent, and relational character of rationalities through which urban geographies are produced on the ground
On poetry, pragmatism and the urban possibility of creative democracy
Democracy everywhere is under siege, overwhelmed by oligarchy, apathy, bureaucracy, and spectacle, at best an ideal that has never been achieved. Yet against the dystopian vision of post-democracy and the post-political is what John Dewey, more than a half-century ago, called “creative democracy,” a moral practice of radical equality in the pragmatic, collective project of hammering out answers to the question of how we should live. This article …
Justice As Subject and Object of Planning
Considerations of justice have moved to a central place in planning theory following Susan Fainstein's (2010) eloquent plea to elevate justice to the principal criterion for the evaluation of planning practice. Justice based on this understanding is the object of planning-the normative end that planning practice should strive to achieve. In this essay I explore the implications for planning theory and practice of making justice the subject rather…
The Financialization of Urban Policy in the Age of Obama
Additional informationNotes on contributorsRobert W. LakeRobert W. Lake is Professor and Graduate Director in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. He is the author or editor of five books and more than fifty articles in academic and professional journals. His previous research has examined the intersections of race and housing, land use, community development, and environmental c…
Methods and moral inquiry
Despite a consistent and pervasive concern with analytic method, geography and the social sciences in general lack an adequately developed method of moral inquiry. When researchers working across a variety of political and ideological perspectives, for example, equally embraced the analytical turn in mid-twentieth century geography, the considerable disagreements among them rested not on methodological but on political and moral grounds. But whil…
Who Says? Authority, Voice, and Authorship in Narratives of Planning Research
Recent developments in communicative planning theory and participatory research methods emphasize collaboration between researcher and research subject in the process of knowledge production. We ask how the ideal of collaboration that is integral to the process of data collection extends to the authorial phase of planning narratives and we identify ethical, pragmatic, and substantive justifications for collaborative authorship. The multidisciplin…
What's Love Got To Do With It? Illuminations on Loving Attachment in Planning
10.1080/14649357.2012.731210 Original image by Libby Porter, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia In 2009, the People of Color Interest Group (POCIG) sponsored a round table at the annual Associ
Planning and applied geography: Positivism, ethics, and geographic information systems
Differential citizenship in the shadow state
The Financialization of Urban Policy in the Age of Obama
Additional informationNotes on contributorsRobert W. LakeRobert W. Lake is Professor and Graduate Director in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. He is the author or editor of five books and more than fifty articles in academic and professional journals. His previous research has examined the intersections of race and housing, land use, community development, and environmental c…
Democracy, bureaucracy and difference in US community development politics since 1968
Manuel Castells' (1983) groundbreaking investigation of urban social movements traced `the decisive input of purposive social action' through case studies over five centuries, culminating in the 1960s social revolts in US cities. This paper continues the narrative forward by examining the changing dynamics of community development politics in US cities since 1968. Structural transformations under neoliberalism marked the end of the democratic/red…
On poetry, pragmatism and the urban possibility of creative democracy
Democracy everywhere is under siege, overwhelmed by oligarchy, apathy, bureaucracy, and spectacle, at best an ideal that has never been achieved. Yet against the dystopian vision of post-democracy and the post-political is what John Dewey, more than a half-century ago, called “creative democracy,” a moral practice of radical equality in the pragmatic, collective project of hammering out answers to the question of how we should live. This article …
Methods and moral inquiry
Despite a consistent and pervasive concern with analytic method, geography and the social sciences in general lack an adequately developed method of moral inquiry. When researchers working across a variety of political and ideological perspectives, for example, equally embraced the analytical turn in mid-twentieth century geography, the considerable disagreements among them rested not on methodological but on political and moral grounds. But whil…
What's Love Got To Do With It? Illuminations on Loving Attachment in Planning
10.1080/14649357.2012.731210 Original image by Libby Porter, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia In 2009, the People of Color Interest Group (POCIG) sponsored a round table at the annual Associ
Negotiating local autonomy
Structural Constraints and Pluralist Contradictions in Hazardous Waste Regulation
Local community opposition constitutes the single greatest hurdle to the siting of hazardous waste facilities in the United States. Conventional explanations of its causes focus on questions of risk and equity; that is, on outcomes of facility siting. In this focus it is assumed that hazardous waste management is synonymous with facility siting, when siting is in fact only one of many possible answers to the management problem. Rather than ask wh…
Legitimation Conflicts: The Politics of Hazardous Waste Siting Law
The meaning of law resides not in the statute but in its interpreter. The mode of interpretation used by a particular agency of the state in a particular instance varies from interpretation based on abstract principles to interpretation guided by local contingency. These modes of interpretation are associated with conflicting and mutually exclusive forms of state legitimation. Law and regulation as written, adjudicated, and implemented provide a …
For creative democracy
Emerging commonalities between philosophical pragmatism and contemporary political thought suggest that those who find resonance in recent political theory will find in Deweyan pragmatism a fruitful source of insight and inspiration. Pragmatism’s commitments share deep affinities with parallel impulses in feminist and post-positivist thought animating engaged, activist scholarship inside and outside of geography. An ethic of radical equality appl…
A Typology of Black Suburbanization in New Jersey since 1970
Ninety-three suburban municipalities in New Jersey with above-average black concentrations or black in-migration are categorized in a sixfold typology based on population density land use characteristics and distance from a central city. The typology includes central-city spill-over dormitory metropolitan rural outer industrial subsidized and mixed use communities. These community types differ in socioeconomic and housing characteristics in the l…
Toward a Revised Model of Residential Segregation and Succession: Puerto Ricans in New York, 1960-1970
Generally accepted models of ethnic assimilation outline a pattern of decreasing residential segregation associated with increasing similarity to native whites. Similar models for the black population posit continuing residential concentration combined with rapid turnover and succession. Our analysis of data on recent settlement patterns of Puerto Ricans in New York incates that this group is conforming the neither type of previously accepted mod…
Big Data, urban governance, and the ontological politics of hyperindividualism
Big Data's calculative ontology relies on and reproduces a form of hyperindividualism in which the ontological unit of analysis is the discrete data point, the meaning and identity of which inheres in itself, preceding, separate, and independent from its context or relation to any other data point. The practice of Big Data governed by an ontology of hyperindividualism is also constitutive of that ontology, naturalizing and diffusing it through pr…
Aging Suburbs and Black Homeownership
The 30 years since rapid post-World War II suburban residential development began have seen an in creasing diversification in the characteristics of the suburbs. The principal dimensions of diversification include the age of housing, age of the population, and distance from the central city. Since suburbanization proceeded outward from the central city, the signs of this aging process are most pronounced in the inner suburbs, with densities and a…
Value magic
The urban process encompasses vast structures and practices engaged in creating, extracting, and accumulating value in and from the urban landscape. But what is value and how does it attain its coercive power over urban life? The unreflective deployment of axiomatic assumptions regarding the source and substance of value constitutes a form of magical thinking conjuring something out of nothing and transforming an immaterial abstraction into a mat…
Justice As Subject and Object of Planning
Considerations of justice have moved to a central place in planning theory following Susan Fainstein's (2010) eloquent plea to elevate justice to the principal criterion for the evaluation of planning practice. Justice based on this understanding is the object of planning-the normative end that planning practice should strive to achieve. In this essay I explore the implications for planning theory and practice of making justice the subject rather…
Who Says? Authority, Voice, and Authorship in Narratives of Planning Research
Recent developments in communicative planning theory and participatory research methods emphasize collaboration between researcher and research subject in the process of knowledge production. We ask how the ideal of collaboration that is integral to the process of data collection extends to the authorial phase of planning narratives and we identify ethical, pragmatic, and substantive justifications for collaborative authorship. The multidisciplin…
Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place: A Commentary
(1990). URBAN FORTUNES: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PLACE: A COMMENTARY. Urban Geography: Vol. 11, Review Symposium on Logan and Molotch's Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, pp. 179-184
Urban Crisis Redux
The Power of Culture and the Culture of Power in Urban Geography in the 1990S 1
(2003). The Power of Culture and the Culture of Power in Urban Geography in the 1990S1. Urban Geography: Vol. 24, Urban Geography in the 1990s, pp. 461-464
Needed: Geographic Research on Urban Sustainability
Racial Transition and Black Homeownership in American Suburbs
Home ownership has traditionally served as an efficient wealth generating mechanism for the American middle class. Recent data indicating an increase in the metropolitan area black population living in the suburbs raise two questions: is black suburbanization equivalent to home ownership, and does black suburban homeownership lead to equity accumulation and the generation of wealth? These questions are addressed through analysis of a national sam…
Yimbyism Then and Now
The upsurge in anti-regulatory rhetoric known as YIMBYism has deep historical roots in laissez-faire liberalism. Contemporary YIMBYism lacks empirical validation; embraces a categorical fallacy; embodies moral failure; exemplifies the arrogance of policy expertise; reveals the maturation of neoliberalism; and provides an object lesson in the dominance of power politics in the production of truth in the contemporary moment
Postmodern Urbanism
Aging Suburbs and Black Homeownership
The 30 years since rapid post-World War II suburban residential development began have seen an in creasing diversification in the characteristics of the suburbs. The principal dimensions of diversification include the age of housing, age of the population, and distance from the central city. Since suburbanization proceeded outward from the central city, the signs of this aging process are most pronounced in the inner suburbs, with densities and a…
Toward a Revised Model of Residential Segregation and Succession: Puerto Ricans in New York, 1960-1970
Generally accepted models of ethnic assimilation outline a pattern of decreasing residential segregation associated with increasing similarity to native whites. Similar models for the black population posit continuing residential concentration combined with rapid turnover and succession. Our analysis of data on recent settlement patterns of Puerto Ricans in New York incates that this group is conforming the neither type of previously accepted mod…
Racial Transition and Black Homeownership in American Suburbs
Home ownership has traditionally served as an efficient wealth generating mechanism for the American middle class. Recent data indicating an increase in the metropolitan area black population living in the suburbs raise two questions: is black suburbanization equivalent to home ownership, and does black suburban homeownership lead to equity accumulation and the generation of wealth? These questions are addressed through analysis of a national sam…
A Typology of Black Suburbanization in New Jersey since 1970
Ninety-three suburban municipalities in New Jersey with above-average black concentrations or black in-migration are categorized in a sixfold typology based on population density land use characteristics and distance from a central city. The typology includes central-city spill-over dormitory metropolitan rural outer industrial subsidized and mixed use communities. These community types differ in socioeconomic and housing characteristics in the l…
The new suburbanites: Race and Housing in the Suburbs
Integration Management: Municipal Constraints on Residential Mobility
The concentration of recent suburban black population growth in relatively few suburban municipalities is prompting such communities to institutionalize integration management through local ordinances. A national survey reveals four categories of municipal integration management activities: controlling real estate brokers, preventing white flight, attracting new white residents, and monitoring black concentrations. Proponents justify such program…
Real Estate Tax Delinquency: Private Disinvestment and Public Response
Neighborhoods and Urban Development
The New Suburbanites: Race and Housing in the Suburbs
Readings in Urban Analysis: Perspectives on Urban Form and Structure
This important work brings together a range of perspectives in contemporary urban analysis. The field of urban analysis is characterized by the multiplicity of approaches, philosophies, and methodologies employed in the examination of urban structure and urban problems. This fragmentation of perspectives is not simply a reflection of the multifaceted and complex nature of the city as subject matter. Nor is it a function of the variety of discipli…
Changing symptoms, constant causes: Recent evolution of fair housing in the United States
Revitalizing America's Cities: Neighborhood Reinvestment and Displacement . Michael H. Schill and Richard P. Nathan; Regional Impacts of the United States-Mexico Economic Relations . Lay James Gibson,…
Resolving Locational Conflicts
Legitimation Conflicts: The Politics of Hazardous Waste Siting Law
The meaning of law resides not in the statute but in its interpreter. The mode of interpretation used by a particular agency of the state in a particular instance varies from interpretation based on abstract principles to interpretation guided by local contingency. These modes of interpretation are associated with conflicting and mutually exclusive forms of state legitimation. Law and regulation as written, adjudicated, and implemented provide a …
Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place: A Commentary
(1990). URBAN FORTUNES: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PLACE: A COMMENTARY. Urban Geography: Vol. 11, Review Symposium on Logan and Molotch's Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, pp. 179-184
Political Decentralization and Capital Mobility in Planned and Market Societies: Local Autonomy in Poland and the United States1
Knowledge is power: Power is knowledge
(1991). Knowledge is power: power is knowledge. Journal of Geography in Higher Education: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 78-81
Planning and applied geography
Structural Constraints and Pluralist Contradictions in Hazardous Waste Regulation
Local community opposition constitutes the single greatest hurdle to the siting of hazardous waste facilities in the United States. Conventional explanations of its causes focus on questions of risk and equity; that is, on outcomes of facility siting. In this focus it is assumed that hazardous waste management is synonymous with facility siting, when siting is in fact only one of many possible answers to the management problem. Rather than ask wh…
Planners' Alchemy Transforming Nimby to Yimby: Rethinking Nimby
Planning and applied geography: Positivism, ethics, and geographic information systems
In Praise of Eclecticism
Challenge Assumptions
What Urban Policy
Democracy and the Transformation of the Public Sphere
Sociology (50 works) · Political science (39 works) · Geography (33 works) · Law (25 works) · Economic geography (23 works) · Politics (23 works) · Economics (19 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (15 works) · Epistemology (14 works)