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Covers of the Carolina Planning Journal

The Carolina Planning Journal and our blog, ∆NGLES, is housed in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill. We are the oldest student-run planning journal in the nation, founded in 1974, and publish both a print volume and a blog, Carolina Angles.

Mission: The Carolina Planning Journal provides a high-quality forum for planners, academics, and students to discuss challenges and strategies for planning in North Carolina, the South, and beyond.

Vision: The Carolina Planning Journal aims to generate cutting-edge content, inspire practitioners through examples from other places, help students learn from real-world insights, and bring timely research from the university to the planning community.


 

The original idea for Carolina Planning was developed by Nancy Grden, Jim Miller, and Lee Corum, three UNC planning graduate students, in 1974. Modeled after the tradition of student-edited law reviews, the trio secured a two year grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation to fund the concept, seeing the effort as crucial to the professional and academic development of the planning field. Then-Chairman of the Department of City and Regional Planning (DCRP) George Hemmens was a strong proponent of the concept from the early days. Grden, who served as the journal’s first editor, laid out the objectives of the publication from the outset, which have remained remarkably consistent over the years:

1) To provide a forum for the discussion of planning problems, issues, and techniques related to the practice of planning in North Carolina;

2) To enhance the awareness public officials have about planning in North Carolina and elsewhere; and

3) To provide for the improvement of exchange of planning information between the Department of City and Regional Planning and other governmental and academic institutions in the state and nation.

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John A. Parker, founder and first chairman of DCRP.


Ongoing support from DCRP and the North Carolina Chapter of the American Planning Association (NCAPA) can be credited with sustaining Carolina Planning through lean budget years when many other student planning publications around the country folded. Professor David Godschalk served as faculty advisor from 1975 until his retirement in 2004 and acted as a crucial bridge between each year’s student editorial staff. DCRP provides editorial assistantships from the John A. Parker Trust, a fund created by alumni and friends of the department in honor of DCRP’s founder and first chairman. NC-APA pays for a group subscription for planning departments across North Carolina and UNC Student Congress is another recent source of printing funding.


Today, the Carolina Planning Journal remains vibrant, publishing one print volume each year. Additionally, the Carolina Angles blog, founded in 2015, publishes student work several times each week.

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CPJ Editors and Board Members at DCRP’s 70th Anniversary Celebration in April of 2016. Photo Credit: Mia Candy.