Peter Marcuse

Peter Marcuse studied at Yale Law School and University of California, Berkeley. The recorded working language is German and English. The field of work recorded is law and urbanism. Places of work recorded in the authority are New York City. Employment is recorded with Columbia University and University of California, Los Angeles.

• Name — Peter Marcuse • Born — 13 November 1928 • Birthplace — Berlin, Prussia, Germany • Died — 4 March 2022 • Place of death — Santa Barbara, California, U.S. • Occupation — scholar, lawyer, urban planner • Title — Harvey Perloff Professor of Planning, University of California at Los Angeles Professor of Urban Planning, Columbia University • Discipline — Lawyer, urban planner • Education — JD, Ph.D. • Alma Mater — University of California, Berkeley • Thesis Title — Home Ownership Programs for Lower Income Families: Legal and Financial Implications • Thesis Year — 1972 • Workplaces — University of California, Los Angeles, Columbia University • Website — marcuse.org/peter/peter.htm

Marcuse was the older son of Sophie Wertheim and philosopher and critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. He was born in Berlin, in a highly assimilated Ashkenazi family, and left Germany shortly after Hitler came to power, immigrating to the U.S. in 1934. Marcuse obtained a JD from Yale Law School in 1952. He earned master's degrees from Columbia in public law and government in 1963 and from Yale in urban studies in 1968. He completed a PhD at UC Berkeley in city and regional planning in 1972 with a thesis on the legal and financial implications of home ownership for low income families.

Marcuse began his career as a lawyer in New Haven and Waterbury, Connecticut, where he served as majority leader of the board of aldermen from 1959 to 1963. In July 1964 he participated in the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, publishing a series of articles about his experience there. He was a member of the Waterbury City Plan Commission from 1964 to 1968. Marcuse was a professor of urban planning at UCLA from 1972 to 1975, then at Columbia University from 1975 to 2003. He wrote extensively on gentrification, various forms of ghettoization (imposed ghettos, "enclaves," and "citadels"), the right to the city and the Occupy movement.

While a Los Angeles City planning commissioner and professor at UCLA, Marcuse strongly opposed proposals in the 1970s to build a rail transit system in Los Angeles. He argued in 1974 that rail transit primarily benefitted the middle-class and wealthy real estate owners, promoted sprawl, and was funded by regressive sales taxes. The office of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a strong proponent of a rail system in Los Angeles, considered Marcuse's public criticisms of the mayor's proposals to be damaging.

In 2008, Marcuse criticized New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's PlaNYC, a strategic plan to prepare New York City for one million more residents by expanding housing, enacting congestion pricing, repairing infrastructure, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Marcuse called the process of participation a "sham", and said the plan focused narrowly on infrastructure and environmental threats without comprehensively evaluating the city's economic and racial inequalities. In the 2016 book In Defense of Housing (co-authored with David Madden), Marcuse argues that zoning changes and policy changes cannot solve the housing crisis unless housing is de-commodified and removed from the market entirely.

Marcuse had three children with his wife, Frances (née Bessler): novelist Irene Marcuse, UC Santa Barbara history professor Harold Marcuse, and Andrew Marcuse. He died on March 4, 2022, at the age of 93.