We are thrilled to introduce a series of great interviews with authors talking about their new books on cities, planning, and the urban environment.  Julian Chambliss and Walter Greason encouraged us to set up impromptu interviews with historians and planning scholars in the publishers’ hall of the Society of American City and Regional Planning History Conference in Cleveland last October.  These are fun conversations, at least for people who are big dorks for urbanism and public policy.  Alex Sayf Cummings (GSU), Julian Chambliss (Rollins College), and Meredith Drake Reitan (USC) conducted the interviews over three days.

We apologize in advance for the sometimes rocky sound quality, as we were recording in a busy hall where authors, editors, and other conference attendees were enthusiastically chatting in the background.  We did it for the ambiance!  We also sincerely apologize for Alex’s many SACRPH jokes. They are legion.

Our first talk is with Barbara Brown Wilson, an assistant professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia.  She is discussing her great new book Resilience for All: Striving for Equity through Community-Based Design, out next month from Island Press.  The most delightful aspect of the discussion is the fact that it has to do with positive, proactive ways that communities are organizing to find political power and guide their own fates in the here and now and the recent past.