About Us

1963

Pratt Center is the oldest university-based community planning organization in the U.S.

In 1963, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund awarded Pratt’s Planning Department a grant by to establish an urban extension center that would provide technical assistance, information services, advocacy planning, and leadership training to communities requesting it. One of Center’s first major projects was to help local civil rights leaders in Bedford Stuyvesant evaluate the impact of a proposed urban renewal plan on their neighborhood. The planning model which grew out of that endeavor integrated housing, economic and social planning considerations. This collaborative effort attracted the attention of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and led to the establishment of one of the first Ford Foundation funded community development corporations in the country—the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation.

1965

1967 - Pratt Planning Papers

The cover page for the Pratt Planning Papers issue from January 1967. The cover is blank apart from the title and date information in black lettering.

The Pratt Planning Papers were a series of publications on progressive urban planning put out by the Pratt Department of City Planning in the 1960s and ’70s. Pratt Center compiled this issue, which featured two articles by Senator Robert F. Kennedy on the importance of community planning and urban renewal in light of the country’s accelerating urban blight and poverty challenges. It reflects on the community development movement in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, providing an early look at the innovative community programs and initiatives that partially grew out of the recommendations in Pratt Center’s first report two years earlier.

1970

1970s - Community Development

Construction underway as seen from inside a gutted three story row house looking outside.

We built on this experience in the 1970s, fighting successfully to ensure that federal community development assistance was invested in poor neighborhoods amidst the fiscal crisis. As residents of the South Bronx, Harlem, central Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side faced a wave of disinvestment and arson, we launched an architectural practice that worked with neighborhood housing groups to reclaim their buildings. Pratt Center’s architects pioneered the conversion of abandoned tenement shells into safe and decent housing for residents who refused to leave.

1974

1974 - PICCED, a history

A page from PICCED, A History. It includes the title alongside a cartoon drawing of a two story building. Below are several paragraphs of text arranged in two columns.

This history from the Fall ’74 issue of STREET Magazine documents Pratt Center’s first decade of pioneering community development work in New York City, noting our focus on “providing communities with tools to fight their own battles more successfully, augmented by the technical expertise of staff, students and faculty members.” We’ve added another four decades to our story, and it's because of the generous, unwavering support of our partners, like those original seed grants from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that our purpose remains unchanged.