Planning Archives to Be Housed at CSUN

Oviatt Library at Cal State Northridge will be the new home for thousands of documents related to California urban planning, campus officials said.

The California Planning Foundation and the California Chapter of the American Planning Assn. said they will donate their archives of California planning history to CSUN.

Dating from the early 1930s, the documents deal with land-use planning, roads, freeways, environmental protection, zoning and public participation. Totaling almost 60 linear feet of plans and reports, the archives represent one of the country’s largest holdings of planning records, school officials said.

Robert Marshall, the archivist for CSUN’s Urban Archives Center-University Archives, said the university will take possession of the documents sometime this summer.

“The association’s collection covers urban planning for all of the major cities of California,” Marshall said. “If you are taking classes in the Urban Studies Department, then this will be an excellent resource that will be available right on campus.”

Frank Wein, a CSUN graduate who heads the university’s North Campus development and also serves as the president of the local chapter of the planning association, helped to arrange the donation.

Wein said now that CSUN has been selected as the permanent location for the archives, the chapter will seek additional donations of historic material from all over California.

“These archives will be of interest to historians and urban planners up and down the state,” Wein said. “It will help to put our urban studies department on the map.”

CSUN officials said the association and the foundation--its educational arm--will also donate close to $10,000 to help the university preserve and catalog the archives.