Mastracci said she hopes to increase the level of participation in ASPA by managers and administrators in government throughout the Chicagoland area.

Mastracci's research and teaching focuses on labor markets for workers without college educations. She also looks at the role of gender, occupational segregation, nontraditional occupations for women, and the impacts of economic change on employment and wages.

Her 2004 book, "Breaking Out of the Pink Collar Ghetto: Policy Solutions for Non-College Women," received national attention for its suggestion that women without college

educations should move into the trades, finance, law enforcement and other traditionally male-dominated fields.

Mastracci serves on the faculty advisory board of the UIC Center for Research on Women and Gender and is a faculty affiliate of the UIC Center for Urban Economic Development.

www.uic.edu/cuppa/pa

UIC’s Urban Planning and Policy Program hosted the annual conference of Planners Network, June 8-11.

"Tending the Garden: From Grassroots to Green Roofs" brought together planning practitioners, organizers, policy analysts, faculty and students from the United States, Canada and elsewhere who will explore the history and future of planning as a progressive profession.

Dozens of presentations and workshops were featured.

Activists from New Orleans conducted a panel discussion about their work before and after Hurricane Katrina. Local activists led city tours focusing on public housing transformation, community-based public art, Chicago labor history, sustainable and green development, Uptown gentrification, and bicycling in Chicago.

The goal of the conference was to "create equity that cuts not only across social barriers, but also across generations," said Lee Deuben, MUPP ’04, conference organizer.

Planners Network is an association of professionals, activists, academics, and students involved in physical, social, economic, and environmental planning in urban and rural areas who promote fundamental change in our political and economic systems.

www.uic.edu/cuppa/upp/pn/index.html

Today's cars are loaded with computers, roads are laden with sensors for real-time traffic monitoring, and high-tech portable devices are at the ready to help make travel a breeze. So why are we still stuck in traffic?

University of Illinois at Chicago doctoral students from a variety of disciplines including engineering, urban planning, and information and decision sciences will try to answer this and other questions as part of a five-year, $3.1 million National Science Foundation-funded Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program. If successful, these scholars will mark the beginning of a new breed of expert: computational transportation scientists.

Students and faculty will develop software for hand-held computers that will analyze real-time variables such as traffic conditions, public transit location information and known ride-sharing opportunities to provide, for example, quick and agile multi-modal commuting options or less congested routes.

Piyushimita (Vonu) Thakuriah, associate professor of Urban Planning and Policy and interim director of the Urban Transportation Center, said her doctoral students "will focus on traveler behavior and traffic management aspects of surface transportation.” She hopes the program will lead to breakthroughs in intelligent transportations systems research, especially traveler information systems.

UIC co-investigators include Peter Nelson, professor and head computer science, Robert Sloan, associate professor of

computer science, Aris Ouksel, associate professor of information and decision sciences, and Thakuriah.

www.utc.uic.edu/

Day laborers across the United States experience police harassment, wage theft, physical abuse by employers and dangerous working conditions, according to the first national study of day labor, conducted by the Center for Urban Economic Development in CUPPA with UCLA and New York's New School.

Over three years, the researchers surveyed 264 hiring sites in 143 municipalities in 20 states and the District of Columbia. Interviewers asked about the workers’ educational backgrounds, family lives, occupational histories and experiences as day laborers.

" Coming into the study, we knew that the low-wage market is rife with violations of basic labor standards, but we still found the statistics shocking and disturbing," said Nik Theodore, an assistant professor of urban planning and policy and director of UIC's Center for Urban Economic Development.

"The goal was to document a population that, though quite visible on the corners of U.S. cities, is poorly understood by the public and by policy makers. We hope to inform policy debates so that decision-makers can devise thoughtful and effective strategies for resolving many of the problems that day laborers face," he said.

The researchers call for greater worker protections, better monitoring of safety conditions, increased access to legal

services, and strategies to help day laborers move into better jobs. They advocate immigration reforms such as normalization of the immigration status of undocumented workers.

The study was funded by the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region’s Washington Area Partnership for Immigrants, and UCLA’s Center for the Study of Urban Poverty.

www.uic.edu/cuppa/uicued/

Albert Schorsch's colleagues in CUPPA agree that he walks the talk when he describes his work.

After 12 years of service to UIC, Schorsch was awarded the University of Illinois at Chicago Chancellor's Academic Professional Excellence Award, which honors outstanding academic professional employees.

"My job is to bring out the magic in others," says Schorsch, CUPPA associate dean.
He describes his job as using his knowledge of urban development, computing, telecommunications and human organization to draw together diverse teams of people to "make things happen" in urban public policy.

Schorsch’s family has owned a realty and development company since 1911. One of their early projects, the Schorsch Irving Park Gardens bungalow district, earned recognition on the National Register of Historic Places.

His early career in social services put the physical design of the city in context.

"Working as an intern at a City of Chicago mental health center in 1974 led me to reflect that large historic events, social disruptions and poverty had significant influence on a population's general mental health," Schorsch says.

"Coming from a real estate family and understanding how a city is built and maintained, I began to think and read in great detail how the physical environment and organization in a city affect health and quality of life for citizens.

“Since policy affects planning and real estate, I studied policy, among other things."

"Other things" included management, computing, real estate development and psychology. Along the way, he worked as a construction laborer, switchboard operator, cab driver, truck driver, musician, realtor, home builder, high-school teacher, computer consultant and printing firm manager.

Then there's his volunteer work. For decades he worked with the homeless at Friendship House, a pre-gentrification day shelter in Wicker Park run by “radical Catholics,” as he called them in a journal article. In the early 1990s, Schorsch founded the Gang Ministry Research Project at Loyola University's seminary.

He credits his family for his balanced approach to life.

"My dad was trained as both an engineer and an attorney. My mom is a wonderful storyteller, oil painter and lover of literature and music," he says. "From my earliest years I have been interested in both science and art.

"Computing takes both logic and imagination. An interest in music can complement one's facility with computing technology. It's also important for an urban planner to think spatially in several dimensions, and to have insight into the complexity of human interactions."

The colleagues who recommended Schorsch for a CAPE award agree that he is a Renaissance man who gives generously of his time and intellect and avoids taking credit.

"It is not surprising to me that the chancellor will seek his views on some topics, students will seek his views on their development, workmen struggling with construction challenges in CUPPA Hall will seek his advice, and faculty will turn to him for insights on how to negotiate the bureaucracy, " writes Robin Hambleton, the college’s dean.

Hambleton quotes a faculty member: "He doesn't want any accolades. He just wants to get good things done."

In Schorsch’s remarks during the CAPE Award Ceremony on October 31, 2005, he described the university as a place of truth and transformation, two characteristics, which keep him coming to work each day.

“Universities have an historic mission to seek the truth. And despite everything, amazingly sometimes we find it. All of us in a university have the chance to become better than we were. A university has the power also to transform itself and its very environment, including the community around it,” Schorsch said, “These two things, truth and transformation, are what, despite all the complex problems and difficulties of a university, keep me here. These two missions each of us can share together, whether we are teachers, or staff, or researchers, or accountants, or tradespeople, or health workers. We each can assist others in searching for the truth and in transforming their lives and our lives.”