Peter Marcuse

Peter Marcuse
Marcuse at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017
Born	(1928-11-13)November 13, 1928 Berlin, Prussia, Germany
Died	March 4, 2022(2022-03-04) (aged 93) Santa Barbara, California, U.S.
Nationality	German, American
Occupation(s)	scholar, lawyer, urban planner
Title	Harvey Perloff Professor of Planning, University of California at Los Angeles Professor of Urban Planning, Columbia University
Academic background
Education	JD, Ph.D.
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley
Thesis	'Home Ownership Programs for Lower Income Families: Legal and Financial Implications (1972)
Academic work
Discipline	Lawyer, urban planner
Institutions	University of California, Los Angeles, Columbia University
Website	marcuse.org/peter/peter.htm

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

Biography

Marcuse was the older son of Sophie Wertheim and philosopher and critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. He was born in Berlin, left Germany shortly after Hitler came to power, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1934. He obtained a JD from Yale Law School in 1952 and a PhD from UC Berkeley in city and regional planning in 1972. He began his career as a lawyer in New Haven and Waterbury, Connecticut, where he served as the majority leader of the Board of Aldermen from 1959 to 1963. In July 1964 he participated in the Freedom Summer 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, and earned Master's degrees from Columbia in public law and government in 1963, and from Yale in urban studies in 1968. In 1972 he completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in city and regional planning, with a thesis on the legal and financial implications of home ownership for low income families. He became a professor of urban planning at UCLA from 1972 to 1975, then at Columbia University 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.

Marcuse had three children with his wife Frances (née Bessler): novelist Irene Marcuse (1953-2021), UC Santa Barbara history professor Harold Marcuse (born 1957), and Andrew Marcuse (born 1965). He died on March 4, 2022, at the age of 93.

Books and publications

David Madden, Peter Marcuse (center), David Harvey, and Gregory Baggett at The Graduate Center, CUNY for the In Defense of Housing book launch.

• Missing Marx: A Personal and Political Journal of a Year in East Germany, 1989-1990. Monthly Review Press. 1991. ISBN 0853458278.
• Of States and Cities: The Partitioning of Urban Space. Oxford University Press. 2002. ISBN 019829719X.
• 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, Cities for People Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City. Taylor and Francis. 2011.
• Madden, David; Marcuse, Peter (2016). In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis. Verso Books. ISBN 9781784783549.
• "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

External links

• Peter Marcuse's personal page at marcuse.org.
• Critical planning and other thoughts Peter Marcuse's blog.