Abhijeet Chavan

Abhijeet Chavan is the co-founder and former co-editor-in-chief of Planetizen.

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Full Bio

Abhijeet Chavan is the co-founder and former co-editor-in-chief of Planetizen and the executive producer of Planetizen Courses. He was also the chief technology officer of Urban Insight, Inc., the technology consulting firm that operates Planetizen. Abhijeet Chavan has over 20 years of technology consulting experience working with government, higher education, legal services, and non-profit clients. Abhijeet is the founder of OpenAdvocate and the creator of DLAW web platform, WriteClearly plain-language authoring tool and ReadClearly legal web glossaries. Abhijeet was named to the Fastcase 50 list of global legal innovators in 2017.

Abhijeet previously coordinated geographic information (GIS), software development, and data projects for the Imaging Systems Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also served as the information technology coordinator for the East St. Louis Action Research Project, a cross-disciplinary initiative of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working with residents and community groups in severely distressed urban areas.Abhijeet received his Master of Architecture (M. Arch) and Master of Landscape Architecture (M.L.A) degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Promise and Challenges of Co-ops in a Hot Real Estate Market

Limited-equity cooperatives have become a bulwark against a raging real estate market in midtown Manhattan, thanks to residents’ commitment to work together.

Urban Design For People, Not Cars

A City Councilman in Philadelphia proposes changes to the zoning code to protect the city's urban fabric in traditional rowhouse neighborhoods. Changes to requirements for provision of off-street parking are intended to encourage development.

Rebuilding New Orleans: Fiscal Conservatives and Visionaries

Fiscal Conservatives and visionaries need to work together to rebuild New Orleans.

A Community That Fails To Plan, Plans To Fail

Steve Herbaly, a former planning director, talks about how politics gets in the way of planning.

Why Open Source? Ask Massachusetts

<img src='http://www.planetizen.com/tech/files/20050922openoffice.png' alt='OpenOffice' align="right"/><br /> <br /> Open source is not just about lowering costs. It's about staying in control of your own data. For governments, it is important to specify open file formats for storing public data. Eric Kriss, Massachussets' secretary of administration and finance asks an important question about long-term archiving of public documents created with Microsoft Office. "Will those documents still be legible 10 years from now, or in 50?" The state of Massachusetts has given some thought to that question and is taking action.