The Chester Rapkin Award for the best article to appear in this year’s Journal of Planning Education and Research goes to Urban Planning Professor Donald Shoup for “Graduated Density Zoning.” A shorter version of the article has also been published in Zoning Practice.

According to the awards committee the article “presents a potentially very important innovation in zoning, which could have significant application in practice. It also constitutes a theoretical advance in the idea of zoning, which remains a key part of land use planning. In form, the paper is a model for how to write an academic paper within a professional domain. It is persuasive, elegant, and economical. The author uses examples and ingenious figures to make its message clear, and it is beautifully written. In sum, this paper provides lessons for all of us, both in our search for ways to improve planning, and in how to present our work.”

The award will be presented at the annual ACSP awards luncheon which will take place in Arlington, VA, October 3, 2009.

Shoup and co-authors Jeffrey Brown and Daniel Baldwin Hess, received this award in 2004 for their article on “Fare-Free Public Transit at Universities“.

The Chester Rapkin Award for the Best Paper in JPER was established in 1987 to honor Professor Rapkin at his retirement. It is intended to encourage the submission of high quality papers. Award-winning articles reflect the scope of Rapkin’s work and have ranged from multi-attribute evaluation to the challenges of participatory planning.