Environmental Design Library @ UC Berkeley

Biographical Information on City Planners

Biographical Information on City Planners is a bibliographic research guide to UC Berkeley library and web resources for biographical information on city and regional planners, both historical and contemporary. For additional assistance please consult the reference staff of the Environmental Design Library, 210 Wurster Hall.

General Sources
Finding Books
Finding Journal & Newspaper Articles
Obituaries
Bibliographies
Collective Biographies

UC Berkeley faculty, registered students, and staff who are off campus may use items marked UCB Only or UC Only by using The Library's off-campus access services.

Contents reviewed: June 2010. Compiled by Deborah Sommer.

General Sources

In addition to titles listed here, visit The Library's home page→ Electronic Resources→ Biographies for a list of links to full-text biographical sources on the web.

• Biography and genealogy master index - UCB Only Index to Who's Whos and other biographical directories.
http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BGMI
• Biography index via SilverPlatter - UCB Only Indexes books, biographical dictionaries, periodicals, diaries, obituaries, etc. Name & occupation indexes and bibliographic citations.
Online ed.: July 1984--
Print ed.: 1946/49-- ; Doe Refe CT28 B5 Biographies
• Biography reference bank - UCB Only An easy-to-search large database which includes some full text articles and other listings. Can serve as a bibliography of works by and about a particular person.
Online coverage: Varies
Print equivalents:
-----. Biography index. Indexes books, biographical dictionaries, periodicals, diaries, obituaries, etc. Coverage: 1946/49--. Doe Refe CT28 B5 Biographies
-----. Current biography, H.W. Wilson. Includes the usual biographical data plus: subject's own views, attitudes and opinions, references to additional sources of information, and more. Coverage: 1940-- Cumulative index: 1940-1996. Doe Refe CT100 C8 Biographies
• Current biography, H.W. Wilson. Includes the usual biographical data plus: subject's own views, attitudes and opinions, references to additional sources of information, and more.
Doe Refe CT100 C8 Biographies 1940-- Cumulative index: 1940-1996
• Lexis-Nexis academic - UCB Only Includes biographical index, which indexes current biographical information in a broad range of academic, popular, business, and other journals.
  http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/
• World biographical index 12. Contains 3.5 million short biographical entries. The Library owns the microfiche editions of the archives containing the complete texts of the biographical descriptions. Library locations for the microfiche archives and the print indexes can be found by searching OskiCat.

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Finding Books

In the library catalogs try the following subject headings to locate either individual or collective biographies about city planners. To find contemporary biographies, see the author descriptions that often accompany journal articles and books.

[personal name: last name, first name]
Autobiography: f pn [personal name] and tw autobiography
City planners -- [place name] -- Biography
City planners -- [place name] -- History
City planners -- Bibliography
City planners -- Correspondence
City planners -- Interviews
Regional planners -- [place name] -- Biography
Women city planners -- [place name] -- Biography

Modify these searches with the addition of descriptive terms (subheadings). The following subheadings may be especially useful:

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Finding Journal & Newspaper Articles

Biographies may be found in journal and newspaper articles. In addition to the indexes listed here, some newspapers are available full-text on the web; information regarding archives of older issues is sometimes available at these sites. SeeThe Library's home page→ Find Information→ Electronic Resources→ Electronic Resources by Types A-Z→ News Databases for a list of links to online full-text local and international newspapers.

To boost your article retrieval skills take a drop-in class at Moffitt Library. See also City Planning Indexes & Abstracts for a more complete list of journal article indexes. For UCB Only or UC Only indexes and databases, go to The Library's home page→ Find Information→ Articles.

• City planning indexes & abstracts (UC Berkeley, Library) An annotated list of journal article indexes for city planning. Includes some newspaper indexes.
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/ENVI/planning_articles.html
• Alternative press index online via FirstSearch/OCLC - UCB Only Citations are drawn from roughly 380 alternative, radical, and left publications. Most journals aren't indexed elsewhere.
Online ed.: 1991--
Print ed.: 1969-- ; Main Stack HM101 A12 A55
• America's newspapers - UCB Only Full-text database of articles from 500+ regional, national, and international newspapers and newswires.
Coverage: 1996--
• C19: the nineteenth century index - UCB Only Some full text. Comprehensive coverage of 19th books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers, and archives. Draws on the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index, Poole's Index, Periodicals Index Online, and other sources to create integrated bibliographic coverage of over 1.4 million books and official publications, 64,891 archival collections and 15.6 million articles published in over 2,500 journals, magazines and newspapers.
Coverage: Varies (1770-mid-1900s).
• Historical newspapers online via Chadwyck - UCB Only Contains four major historical resources:
  • Palmer's Index to the Times (1790 to 1905)
  • Palmer's Full Text Online (1785-1870), which provides access to the full articles referenced in Palmer's index to the Times
  • The Official Index to the Times (1906 to 1980)
  • The Historical Index to the New York Times (1851-1923) via
    http://historynews.chadwyck.com/
    Lexis-Nexis academic - UCB Only Includes full-text newspapers. Coverage: Varies

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Obituaries

Obituaries frequently include synopses of an individual's professional life and contributions and often appear in newspapers. See Finding Journal & Newspaper Articles in this guide for useful sources.

• Avery obituary index of architects and artists, 1st and 2nd eds. Boston, G.K. Hall, 1963, 1968. Includes citations to obituaries of city planners. Citations also available online through the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals via CSA UCB Only Combine a title search on obituary with a subject search on the name.
EnvDesign fNA40 C6 Reference & fNA8 C63 1968 Reference
• Obituaries (American Planning Association) Brief obituaries of contemporary planners.
http://www.planning.org/news/obituaries/index.htm

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Bibliographies

• Innovators in urban planning: a research bibliography with analytic framework, by Cortus T. Koehler. Chicago: Council of Planning Librarians, 1987. 3,500 citations. U.S., British, continental Europeans.
EnvDesign HT166 A12 C6a nos.196-201 Index
• Women and planning: an annotated bibliography, C. Donaldson Spagnoletti, comp. Adelaide: South Australian Housing Trust, 1977.
EnvDesign NA1997 A12 S6

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Collective Biographies

• American planner: biographies and recollections, Donald A. Krueckeberg, ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1994. Biographies of some of the leading city and regional planners in the U.S., 1890-1980. Includes overview of American regional planning.
EnvDesign HT167 A5767 1994
• Dictionary of American communal and utopian history, by Robert S. Fogarty. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Approximately half the volume is comprised of brief biographies of 140 individuals who had prominent roles in the development or leading of utopian communities. Also includes brief articles on more than 200 utopian communites. Bibliography.
  EnvDesign HX653 F65 Reference
• Encyclopedia of community planning and environmental management, by Marilyn Spiegel Schultz. New York: Facts on File, 1984. Includes brief biographies of noted planners. Includes photos, diagrams, illustrations.
  EnvDesign HD108.6 S381 1984 Reference Desk
• History of housing in the U.S., 1930-1980, by Joseph B. Mason. Houston: Gulf Pub. Co., Book Division, 1982.
  Includes many brief biographies of American planners and builders.
  EnvDesign HD7293 M325 1982
• International encyclopedia of the social sciences, David L. Sills, ed. [New York] Macmillan [1968-1991]. Vol. 18: Biographical suppl. (New York: Free Press).
  Bus & Econ H40A2 I5 Reference
• Introduction to planning history in the United States, Donald A. Krueckeberg, ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, 1983. Introduces important planners, with some detail as to their situation, background, and goals.
  EnvDesign HT167 I57 1983 Reserve
• National planning pioneers as designated by the American Institute of Certified Planners: 1986-1999. [Washington, D.C.]: The Institute, [1999]. Note that more recent "pioneeers" are celebrated in Planning magazine.
  EnvDesign HT167 A496 1999b
• Pioneers in British planning, Gordon E. Cherry, ed. London: Architectural Press, 1981.
  EnvDesign NA9185 P53 Reserve

  Urban America: documenting the planners. Catalog of an exhibition at the John M. Olin Library, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, New York, October 21-December 31, 1985. Elaine D. Engst and H. Thomas Hickerson, comps. Ithaca, N.Y.: Dept. of Manuscripts and Univ. Archives, Cornell Univ. Libraries, 1985.
  Catalog includes images and biographical texts.
  EnvDesign NA9108 E51 1985
• The Urbanists, 1865-1915, by Dana F. White. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. Includes biographical information about early American planners.
  EnvDesign HT384 U5 W46 1989
• "Women in the Australian town planning movement 1900-1950," by Robert Freestone, in Planning perspectives, vol 10: 3 (July 1995), pp. 259-277.
  EnvDesign NA9000 P59 Bound periodical stacks

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