Lisa Redfield Peattie (born March 1, 1924) died peacefully at home on December 13, 2018. She was a Professor Emerita of Urban Anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning with a Ph.D. from University of Chicago in 1968. She was one of the first women to gain tenure at MIT. In 1999 she received the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Distinguished Educator Award. She is best known for her place in advocacy planning, a type of urban planning which seeks social change by including all interests and groups in the planning process. She published extensively of slums and squatter settlements.
Among her many publications was the much-heralded The View from the Barrio, an informal study of the planning process as experienced by those in a squatter neighborhood in Venezuela. She was a tenacious rabble-rouser and activist, protesting frequently against the Vietnam War during the 1960s and early 70s, and against nuclear proliferation in the 1980s and 90s.
She raised four children: Christopher Peattie (Denise Hood), who predeceased her in 2011, and Sara Peattie, Miranda Clemson, and Julia Peattie. She also leaves two grandchildren, Chris Clemson and Ella Beaver. She is survived by her brother, James Redfield and his wife, Kathy Atlass. She also leaves beloved nieces and nephews: Stephanie, Ethan, Emily, Robert, James and Claire. Widowed young in a foreign country with four children, she continued to approach life with zest and courage, traveling overland up the Pan-American Highway from Panama to New England in a Jeep with her children and a parrot. She later remarried, twice, the second time eloping to Arizona at the age of 73. Lisa was a woman capable of enthralling a class of graduate students, planting a vegetable garden, baking bread and painting the bedroom ceiling all in the same day. Often exasperating, she was never dull. She threw great parties and was a mean dancer. In later years her body flagged but her spirit, never. Her curiosity about the world never dimmed.