Laura Wolf‐Powers
Biographic Data
| ID | 5917841 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura Wolf‐Powers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura |
| FAMILY NAME | Wolf‐Powers |
| SIGNATURE | POWERS L W |
| AFFILIATIONS | City University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5104-823X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 63 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Nihilism, Post-Truth and the Moral Future of Planning: Edited by Andrew Zitcer
Dilemmas of 21st century land value capture: Examining Henry George's legacy in a new Gilded Age
This essay reviews 20th century applications of Henry George's thought by local and national policy makers in the Anglo-American context with the goal of better interpreting contemporary debates about land value capture (LVC). Proponents of LVC mechanisms argue that incentive zoning, planning obligations/exactions, special assessments, transfers of development rights, density bonusing, and tax increment financing can rebalance public and private …
Real Estate Development and Economic Development Planning Education: Pragmatic Turn or Trojan Horse
Development planning agencies seek professionals who understand the real estate process, which has led to an interest in real estate development courses within planning programs; however, educators are skeptical of conflating the two because real estate development is often at odds with the economic development field’s focus on social equity. How should economic development planning educators approach real estate? This article extends the discuss…
Uneven innovation: The work of smart cities , by Jennifer Clark
Uneven innovation: The work of smart cities, by Jennifer Clark." Journal of Urban Affairs, 43(4), pp. 607–608
Opportunities and risks of localised industrial policy: The case of “maker-entrepreneurial ecosystems” in the USA
Efforts in US cities to support the emergence of the “maker economy” could take urban-level industrial policy in a new direction. Optimistic projections about the potential of the maker economy for urban manufacturing revitalisation, however, downplay an enduring tension in local economic development between efforts to build endogenous capabilities and pressures to facilitate property value growth. Exploring maker industrial policy efforts in New…
Industrial inheritances: Makers, relatedness and materiality in New York and Chicago
As policy-makers and advocates seek to harness the ‘Maker movement’ for regional innovation and economic development, attention is turning to the role of regional ‘entrepreneurial ecosystems’ in supporting Makers’ growth potential. Through interviews with 92 Maker enterprises across three industry subsectors in two regions, the paper demonstrates how the materiality of manufacturing processes, products and end markets influences Makers’ growth tr…
User fees and the permeability of public space at municipal pools and bathhouses in New York City, 1870 – present
This paper examines fees for access to New York City’s public swimming and bathing spaces from 1870 to the present. We argue that, beyond generating revenue and rationing space, charges for admission to public bathing spaces have served to condition how permeable those spaces were to various groups of potential users. Municipal actors involved in administering baths and pools have used fees to maintain and order these spaces; to distinguish betwe…
Manufacturing without the firm: Challenges for the maker movement in three U.S. cities
Participants in the U.S. maker movement generate market-worthy consumer goods from the bare bones of novel ideas and simple production equipment. For cities and policymakers, making thus represents the opportunity to develop new manufacturing industries and employment. For makers to transform themselves into large-volume producers, however, they must negotiate significant financing, production and distribution barriers without recourse to the cap…
The Maker Movement and Urban Economic Development
Problem, research strategy, and findings: The maker movement is placing small-scale manufacturing development on mayoral agendas across the United States and promises to reinvigorate production economies in central cities. To make effective policy, planners need more knowledge about the entrepreneurs at the center of this phenomenon. Here we present a qualitative investigation of urban maker economies. We draw on semistructured interviews with fi…
The servant class city: Urban revitalization versus the working Poor in San Diego
The servant class city: urban revitalization versus the working Poor in San Diego." Urban Geography, 38(7), pp. 1111–1112
Who works in a working region? Inclusive innovation in the new manufacturing economy
Scholars have documented economic gains for regions that promote manufacturing through co-location of innovation and production activities. But it is unclear whether the production jobs created in this new context remain inclusive of workers with limited formal education. This paper compares US states that specialize in biopharmaceuticals to understand who participates in a so-called working region. While some state policy-makers have privileged …
Food Deserts and Real-Estate-Led Social Policy
Since the early 2000s in the United States, food deserts-neighborhoods in which households have limited geographic access to full-service supermarkets or grocery stores- have become conceptually central in public policy research on food security. Analyzing this phenomenon from a 'policy mobility' perspective, this article traces the food desert's emergence in policy discourse, locating it within an entrepreneurial social policy paradigm that priv…
Teaching Planners to Deal: The Pedagogical Value of a (Simulated) Economic Development Negotiation
This paper describes a classroom exercise in which students apply negotiation and project finance skills in a simulated economic development negotiation. The goal of the exercise is that students’ experience of negotiating a deal will lead them to constructively explore concepts of “good process” and “just outcomes.” Public–private development dominates redevelopment practice, and its vocabulary—that of negotiation and contracting—has gained asce…
Human-capital-centred Regionalism in Economic Development: A Case of Analytics Outpacing Institutions
Drawing on the case of the Delaware Valley Innovation Network, a regional consortium funded under the US Department of Labor, the paper argues that sophisticated analytical tools developed to facilitate workforce- and occupation-led economic development are running ahead of the institution-building required to put new approaches into practice. There are two main reasons for this. First, tensions persist around the role of the public-sector workfo…
Community Benefits Agreements and Local Government: A Review of Recent Evidence
Problem: As community benefits agreements or community benefits arrangements (CBAs) become more common in redevelopment practice they are generating conceptual confusion and political controversy. Much of the literature on CBAs is focused on local organizing coalitions’ inclusivity and political strategies, or on the legal aspects of the agreements, providing only limited information to planners who encounter advocacy for CBAs. Purpose: I aim to …
Expanding Planning's Public Sphere: STREET Magazine, Activist Planning, and Community Development in Brooklyn, New York, 1971—1975
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a paradigm of activist planning became a new “tributary” feeding the stream of the planning profession. STREET magazine, published from 1971 to 1975 by the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development in Brooklyn, NY, offers a lens through which to examine the expansion of the profession to encompass a range of ideas associated with this paradigm. This article, drawing on an extensive r…
Reading Rival Union Responses to the Localization of Technical Work in the US Telecommunications Industry
Between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, state-sponsored deregulation and its market repercussions, combined with technological change, sparked profound changes for employees in the heretofore highly unionized US telecommunications sector. In this paper I examine the responses that this industry-wide restructuring of technical labor has prompted within two unions—the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the Communications…
Up-Zoning New York City's Mixed-Use Neighborhoods: Property-Led Economic Development and the Anatomy of a Planning Dilemma
This article examines land use policy and real estate market activity in the 1990s in two mixed-use neighborhoods in New York City. Using data from case studies of Greenpoint-Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Long Island City in Queens, this article finds that adherence on the part of officials to the principle of highest and best use, together with an incremental approach to planning and land use regulation, has contributed to opportunistic developme…
Information Technology and Urban Labor Markets in the United States
The technologies that now dominate the production of goods and services, especially in advanced industrialized countries, have irrevocably changed the dynamics of the demand for and return to labor. Employment in technology-intensive occupations such as computer programming and network technology has increased at double the rate of US non-farm employment overall since the mid-1990s (US Department of Commerce, 2000), and thousands of other jobs in…
Up-Zoning New York City's Mixed-Use Neighborhoods: Property-Led Economic Development and the Anatomy of a Planning Dilemma
This article examines land use policy and real estate market activity in the 1990s in two mixed-use neighborhoods in New York City. Using data from case studies of Greenpoint-Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Long Island City in Queens, this article finds that adherence on the part of officials to the principle of highest and best use, together with an incremental approach to planning and land use regulation, has contributed to opportunistic developme…
Who works in a working region? Inclusive innovation in the new manufacturing economy
Scholars have documented economic gains for regions that promote manufacturing through co-location of innovation and production activities. But it is unclear whether the production jobs created in this new context remain inclusive of workers with limited formal education. This paper compares US states that specialize in biopharmaceuticals to understand who participates in a so-called working region. While some state policy-makers have privileged …
Industrial inheritances: Makers, relatedness and materiality in New York and Chicago
As policy-makers and advocates seek to harness the ‘Maker movement’ for regional innovation and economic development, attention is turning to the role of regional ‘entrepreneurial ecosystems’ in supporting Makers’ growth potential. Through interviews with 92 Maker enterprises across three industry subsectors in two regions, the paper demonstrates how the materiality of manufacturing processes, products and end markets influences Makers’ growth tr…
Opportunities and risks of localised industrial policy: The case of “maker-entrepreneurial ecosystems” in the USA
Efforts in US cities to support the emergence of the “maker economy” could take urban-level industrial policy in a new direction. Optimistic projections about the potential of the maker economy for urban manufacturing revitalisation, however, downplay an enduring tension in local economic development between efforts to build endogenous capabilities and pressures to facilitate property value growth. Exploring maker industrial policy efforts in New…
Dilemmas of 21st century land value capture: Examining Henry George's legacy in a new Gilded Age
This essay reviews 20th century applications of Henry George's thought by local and national policy makers in the Anglo-American context with the goal of better interpreting contemporary debates about land value capture (LVC). Proponents of LVC mechanisms argue that incentive zoning, planning obligations/exactions, special assessments, transfers of development rights, density bonusing, and tax increment financing can rebalance public and private …
Manufacturing without the firm: Challenges for the maker movement in three U.S. cities
Participants in the U.S. maker movement generate market-worthy consumer goods from the bare bones of novel ideas and simple production equipment. For cities and policymakers, making thus represents the opportunity to develop new manufacturing industries and employment. For makers to transform themselves into large-volume producers, however, they must negotiate significant financing, production and distribution barriers without recourse to the cap…
Real Estate Development and Economic Development Planning Education: Pragmatic Turn or Trojan Horse
Development planning agencies seek professionals who understand the real estate process, which has led to an interest in real estate development courses within planning programs; however, educators are skeptical of conflating the two because real estate development is often at odds with the economic development field’s focus on social equity. How should economic development planning educators approach real estate? This article extends the discuss…
Teaching Planners to Deal: The Pedagogical Value of a (Simulated) Economic Development Negotiation
This paper describes a classroom exercise in which students apply negotiation and project finance skills in a simulated economic development negotiation. The goal of the exercise is that students’ experience of negotiating a deal will lead them to constructively explore concepts of “good process” and “just outcomes.” Public–private development dominates redevelopment practice, and its vocabulary—that of negotiation and contracting—has gained asce…
Information Technology and Urban Labor Markets in the United States
The technologies that now dominate the production of goods and services, especially in advanced industrialized countries, have irrevocably changed the dynamics of the demand for and return to labor. Employment in technology-intensive occupations such as computer programming and network technology has increased at double the rate of US non-farm employment overall since the mid-1990s (US Department of Commerce, 2000), and thousands of other jobs in…
User fees and the permeability of public space at municipal pools and bathhouses in New York City, 1870 – present
This paper examines fees for access to New York City’s public swimming and bathing spaces from 1870 to the present. We argue that, beyond generating revenue and rationing space, charges for admission to public bathing spaces have served to condition how permeable those spaces were to various groups of potential users. Municipal actors involved in administering baths and pools have used fees to maintain and order these spaces; to distinguish betwe…
Expanding Planning's Public Sphere: STREET Magazine, Activist Planning, and Community Development in Brooklyn, New York, 1971—1975
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a paradigm of activist planning became a new “tributary” feeding the stream of the planning profession. STREET magazine, published from 1971 to 1975 by the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development in Brooklyn, NY, offers a lens through which to examine the expansion of the profession to encompass a range of ideas associated with this paradigm. This article, drawing on an extensive r…
Information Technology and Urban Labor Markets in the United States
The technologies that now dominate the production of goods and services, especially in advanced industrialized countries, have irrevocably changed the dynamics of the demand for and return to labor. Employment in technology-intensive occupations such as computer programming and network technology has increased at double the rate of US non-farm employment overall since the mid-1990s (US Department of Commerce, 2000), and thousands of other jobs in…
Up-Zoning New York City's Mixed-Use Neighborhoods: Property-Led Economic Development and the Anatomy of a Planning Dilemma
This article examines land use policy and real estate market activity in the 1990s in two mixed-use neighborhoods in New York City. Using data from case studies of Greenpoint-Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Long Island City in Queens, this article finds that adherence on the part of officials to the principle of highest and best use, together with an incremental approach to planning and land use regulation, has contributed to opportunistic developme…
Reading Rival Union Responses to the Localization of Technical Work in the US Telecommunications Industry
Between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, state-sponsored deregulation and its market repercussions, combined with technological change, sparked profound changes for employees in the heretofore highly unionized US telecommunications sector. In this paper I examine the responses that this industry-wide restructuring of technical labor has prompted within two unions—the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the Communications…
Expanding Planning's Public Sphere: STREET Magazine, Activist Planning, and Community Development in Brooklyn, New York, 1971—1975
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a paradigm of activist planning became a new “tributary” feeding the stream of the planning profession. STREET magazine, published from 1971 to 1975 by the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development in Brooklyn, NY, offers a lens through which to examine the expansion of the profession to encompass a range of ideas associated with this paradigm. This article, drawing on an extensive r…
Community Benefits Agreements and Local Government: A Review of Recent Evidence
Problem: As community benefits agreements or community benefits arrangements (CBAs) become more common in redevelopment practice they are generating conceptual confusion and political controversy. Much of the literature on CBAs is focused on local organizing coalitions’ inclusivity and political strategies, or on the legal aspects of the agreements, providing only limited information to planners who encounter advocacy for CBAs. Purpose: I aim to …
Human-capital-centred Regionalism in Economic Development: A Case of Analytics Outpacing Institutions
Drawing on the case of the Delaware Valley Innovation Network, a regional consortium funded under the US Department of Labor, the paper argues that sophisticated analytical tools developed to facilitate workforce- and occupation-led economic development are running ahead of the institution-building required to put new approaches into practice. There are two main reasons for this. First, tensions persist around the role of the public-sector workfo…
Teaching Planners to Deal: The Pedagogical Value of a (Simulated) Economic Development Negotiation
This paper describes a classroom exercise in which students apply negotiation and project finance skills in a simulated economic development negotiation. The goal of the exercise is that students’ experience of negotiating a deal will lead them to constructively explore concepts of “good process” and “just outcomes.” Public–private development dominates redevelopment practice, and its vocabulary—that of negotiation and contracting—has gained asce…
The Maker Movement and Urban Economic Development
Problem, research strategy, and findings: The maker movement is placing small-scale manufacturing development on mayoral agendas across the United States and promises to reinvigorate production economies in central cities. To make effective policy, planners need more knowledge about the entrepreneurs at the center of this phenomenon. Here we present a qualitative investigation of urban maker economies. We draw on semistructured interviews with fi…
The servant class city: Urban revitalization versus the working Poor in San Diego
The servant class city: urban revitalization versus the working Poor in San Diego." Urban Geography, 38(7), pp. 1111–1112
Who works in a working region? Inclusive innovation in the new manufacturing economy
Scholars have documented economic gains for regions that promote manufacturing through co-location of innovation and production activities. But it is unclear whether the production jobs created in this new context remain inclusive of workers with limited formal education. This paper compares US states that specialize in biopharmaceuticals to understand who participates in a so-called working region. While some state policy-makers have privileged …
Food Deserts and Real-Estate-Led Social Policy
Since the early 2000s in the United States, food deserts-neighborhoods in which households have limited geographic access to full-service supermarkets or grocery stores- have become conceptually central in public policy research on food security. Analyzing this phenomenon from a 'policy mobility' perspective, this article traces the food desert's emergence in policy discourse, locating it within an entrepreneurial social policy paradigm that priv…
User fees and the permeability of public space at municipal pools and bathhouses in New York City, 1870 – present
This paper examines fees for access to New York City’s public swimming and bathing spaces from 1870 to the present. We argue that, beyond generating revenue and rationing space, charges for admission to public bathing spaces have served to condition how permeable those spaces were to various groups of potential users. Municipal actors involved in administering baths and pools have used fees to maintain and order these spaces; to distinguish betwe…
Manufacturing without the firm: Challenges for the maker movement in three U.S. cities
Participants in the U.S. maker movement generate market-worthy consumer goods from the bare bones of novel ideas and simple production equipment. For cities and policymakers, making thus represents the opportunity to develop new manufacturing industries and employment. For makers to transform themselves into large-volume producers, however, they must negotiate significant financing, production and distribution barriers without recourse to the cap…
Opportunities and risks of localised industrial policy: The case of “maker-entrepreneurial ecosystems” in the USA
Efforts in US cities to support the emergence of the “maker economy” could take urban-level industrial policy in a new direction. Optimistic projections about the potential of the maker economy for urban manufacturing revitalisation, however, downplay an enduring tension in local economic development between efforts to build endogenous capabilities and pressures to facilitate property value growth. Exploring maker industrial policy efforts in New…
Industrial inheritances: Makers, relatedness and materiality in New York and Chicago
As policy-makers and advocates seek to harness the ‘Maker movement’ for regional innovation and economic development, attention is turning to the role of regional ‘entrepreneurial ecosystems’ in supporting Makers’ growth potential. Through interviews with 92 Maker enterprises across three industry subsectors in two regions, the paper demonstrates how the materiality of manufacturing processes, products and end markets influences Makers’ growth tr…
Real Estate Development and Economic Development Planning Education: Pragmatic Turn or Trojan Horse
Development planning agencies seek professionals who understand the real estate process, which has led to an interest in real estate development courses within planning programs; however, educators are skeptical of conflating the two because real estate development is often at odds with the economic development field’s focus on social equity. How should economic development planning educators approach real estate? This article extends the discuss…
Uneven innovation: The work of smart cities , by Jennifer Clark
Uneven innovation: The work of smart cities, by Jennifer Clark." Journal of Urban Affairs, 43(4), pp. 607–608
Dilemmas of 21st century land value capture: Examining Henry George's legacy in a new Gilded Age
This essay reviews 20th century applications of Henry George's thought by local and national policy makers in the Anglo-American context with the goal of better interpreting contemporary debates about land value capture (LVC). Proponents of LVC mechanisms argue that incentive zoning, planning obligations/exactions, special assessments, transfers of development rights, density bonusing, and tax increment financing can rebalance public and private …
Nihilism, Post-Truth and the Moral Future of Planning: Edited by Andrew Zitcer
Political science (14 works) · Economics (12 works) · Business (10 works) · Engineering (10 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (5 works) · Economic growth (5 works) · Geography (5 works) · Law (5 works)