Records of the Pratt Center for Community Development

The Pratt Center was founded in 1963 and is the oldest continuously operating university-based community planning organization in the U.S. The Pratt Center, originally known as the Pratt Center for Community Improvement, set out to fundamentally reimagine the nature of citizen participation in urban renewal projects. Rather than impose programs on communities, the Pratt Center made it its mission to educate and assist community members in carrying out improvements in their neighborhoods. This shift, and the inception of other organizations like the Pratt Center, represents the birth of the community-based development movement that the Pratt Center has continued to champion.

Between 1963 and 1967, the Pratt Center pursued this emerging mission in three key ways: technical assistance, education and advocacy at the city-level, and direct participation in grass-roots activities. At this time, technical assistance meant project coordination, circulating reports, or interaction with city officials on behalf of community leaders, agencies, and civic associations working in communities targeted for urban improvement, such as Bedford-Stuyvestant, where the Pratt Center was particularly active in its early days. To pursue education and advocacy, the Pratt Center organized conferences and published material on any subject related to the new field of community development. Finally, the Pratt Center engaged in what it called a “participant education process,” focused on bringing both technical and leadership knowledge to grass-roots programs. In these early years, the Pratt Center remained focused on urban renewal, but its education and advocacy projects pointed towards the evolution of new methods for empowering communities.

The renaming of the Pratt Center to the Pratt Center for Community and Environmental Development in 1968 signaled how exactly the Pratt Center’s programming would evolve under the direction of Ron Shiffman. In many ways, the method, offering technical assistance, training, and information services to community groups, remained the same. However, the scope of offerings and communities served broadened significantly from 1968 to the end of the century. Technical assistance came to include architectural and development services; research and public policy analysis became more prominent parts of the Pratt Center’s portfolio; and the Pratt Center began producing publications, like the magazine City Limits, as part of its information services.

During this time, the Pratt Center undertook wide ranging projects. In the 1980s the Pratt Center used the money from grants from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation to conduct multiple analyses of housing policy in New York City. The Pratt Center’s work contributed to the enactment of inclusionary zoning policies, a topic that remains an active area of advocacy for the Pratt Center today. On the technical assistance front, the Pratt Center provided both architectural and development support to the Magnolia Tree Earth Center of Bedford-Stuyvesant for the construction a new facility for the organization, which is still active in the community today. In 1983, the Pratt Center launched an education and training program, the Pratt Community Economic Development Internship, which formalized the Pratt Center’s ongoing efforts to train community organization leaders to lead the revitalization of their own neighborhoods. In 2003, a graduate of that program, Brad Lander, became the director of the newly renamed Pratt Center for Community Development.

In 2010, Adam Friedman, previously the director of the New York Industrial Retention Network (NYIRN), succeeded Brad Lander as director of the Pratt Center. The merger of NYIRN with the Pratt Center at this time highlights how concerns around environmental justice, manufacturing, and transportation, among others, have become essential to the Pratt Center’s current mission. The Pratt Center continues to support programming in geographically diverse communities, ranging from Cypress Hills to the South Bronx, while remaining active in communities it has served historically, such as Bedoford-Stuyvestant. Notable projects undertaken by the Pratt Center in the past 20 years include a partnership with the Southern Bronx Riverfront Waterfront Alliance to mitigate the environmental impacts of the Sheridan Expressway, studies of manufacturing industries in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a major effort to retrofit residential homes. At the city-wide level, the Pratt Center produced important policy critiques of the city’s displacement evaluation toolkit and used spatial data analysis to advocate for the expansion of bus rapid transit services. By documenting these initiatives and partnerships, many of which are ongoing, the collection presents a clear trajectory from the beginning of the community development movement to present-day implementations of technical assistance, policy analysis, and community education.