09-18-09

 

Contact:

Gerardo Sandoval, Community and Regional Planning, (515) 294-6764, gsando@iastate.edu

 

ISU planning professor honored for outstanding doctoral dissertation

 

AMES, Iowa -- Gerardo Sandoval, assistant professor of community and regional planning at Iowa State University, will receive the 2009 Barclay Gibbs Jones Award for Best Dissertation in Planning from the American Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) in October.

The award recognizes superior scholarship in a doctoral dissertation. The selection committee sought a thesis that was original, well written, employed methods elegantly, offered lessons pertinent to central issues in the field of planning, and provided guidance about how planners or governments should make choices.

 

Sandoval will be honored for his doctoral dissertation, "The Catalytic Gaze: Co-evolutionary Adaptation in an Emerging New Mesoamerican Neighborhood in Los Angeles." It examines a large-scale redevelopment project in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles, and how immigrants in that neighborhood were able to take advantage of the type of top-down revitalization effort that often undermines such communities.

The award will be presented at the opening plenary session of the 50th Anniversary ACSP Conference, Oct. 1, in Crystal City, Va.

Sandoval joined the community and regional planning department at Iowa State in August 2008. He received a bachelor of science in community and regional development from the University of California, Davis, and master's and doctoral degrees in city and regional planning, both from the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of economic and community development in immigrant, rural and inner-city neighborhoods, particularly the revitalization of immigrant low-income communities.

Sandoval's book based on his dissertation research, "Immigrants and Revitalization: A Case Study of MacArthur Park in Los Angeles," is forthcoming from Cambria Press.

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