Professor (Tenure)
Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, City Planning Program
Pratt Institute
Brooklyn, NY, USA
Email: ayonder@pratt.edu Phone: (718) 399-4323
Website
Interest in CDE Collaborative
I believe that Community Development Education should focus not only on strategies for addressing everyday life issues and strengthening community ties within a neighborhood, but also explore ways to link communities to organize together, build coalitions and influence policies at the local, national and even international level that affect their lives. This requires planners and community organizers to learn to work very closely. It requires students to learn to respect local knowledge and priorities and the political nature of community development in general. Based on my experience from abroad, I also believe in the importance of learning to facilitate peer learning and peer exchanges, among other participatory processes, such as community visioning, participatory budgeting, etc.
Quick Bio
Ayse Yonder is a tenured Professor of City Planning and former Chair of the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment at Pratt Institute, School of Architecture. Her work focuses on community development, disasters and resiliency planning, informal settlement regularization, and the role of arts and culture in urban development with a focus on gender issues. She has worked for over 20 years with the Huairou Commission, an international network of grassroots women’s organizations, on policy advocacy, technical support and community engagement. In NYC, she has worked with community-based organizations through her studio courses and the Pratt Center for Community Development and helped organize community-visioning sessions. She is also a founding member of a professional women’s collective, the Collective for Community Culture and Environment. She has a five-year Architecture degree from Istanbul Technical University, MCP from University of Pennsylvania, and PhD in City and Regional Planning from University of California, Berkeley.