Climate change (adaptation & mitigation), climate governance, community-based adaptation actions, disaster risk reduction
Department: Urban Design and Planning
Mingming Cai
Emerging transportation technologies, shared mobility and land use, interaction between human mobility based on shared vehicles and urban land uses. Spatio-temporal analysis and big data. Smart visualization methods
Lamis Ashour
Research interests: Smart cities and transportation systems, Digital transformation, Travel behavior, and Sustainable development
Abdulaziz Alqadhib
Research interests: Infrastructure Economics and Planning, Energy Infrastructure, and Urban Economics
Urban Design & Planning Interdisciplinary PhD
The Urban Design & Planning Interdisciplinary Ph.D. at the University of Washington is one of 39 Ph.D. programs in urban and regional planning in North America, and one of the oldest, founded in 1967.
This program brings together faculty from disciplines ranging from Architecture to Sociology to focus on the interdisciplinary study of urban problems and interventions. Covering scales from neighborhoods to metropolitan areas, the program addresses interrelationships between the physical environment, the built environment, and the social, economic, and political institutions and processes that shape urban areas. The breadth of this program permits students to pursue doctoral studies in the various aspects of urban design and planning as well as in a number of related social science, natural resource, and engineering areas.
The Program seeks to prepare scholars who can advance the state of research, practice, and education related to the built environment and its relationship to society and nature in metropolitan regions throughout the world. The program provides a strong interdisciplinary educational experience that draws on the resources of the entire University, and on the laboratory provided by the Seattle metropolitan region and the Pacific Northwest. The program emphasizes the educational values of interdisciplinarity, intellectual leadership and integrity, and the social values of equity, democracy and sustainability. It seeks to promote deeper understanding of the ways in which public decisions shape and are shaped by the urban physical, social, economic, and natural environment. The program envisions its graduates becoming leaders in the international community of researchers, practitioners and educators who focus on improving the quality of life and environment in metropolitan regions.
Keith Harris
Harris’ research hovers around critical urban theory and investigates the political, economic, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of the urbanization process. An erstwhile civil engineer, he writes on complex and contradictory landscapes and infrastructure, such as South Lake Union, the Elliott Bay Seawall, and the Los Angeles River, but also about grassroots urban politics in our region and he translates critical theory and fiction that relates to the built environment from French and Spanish into English. This range of research corresponds, in part, to his wide variety of teaching experiences over the last decade in all of the CBE departments (except real estate), in the School of Urban Studies at UW-Tacoma, and especially in the Comparative History of Ideas (CHID) department on our campus.
Tsunami Vertical Evacuation Project (Project SafeHaven)
Our Washington Pacific Coast is vulnerable to tsunami waves. These waves will wash over coastal communities that do not have ready access to high ground. The Institute for Hazards Mitigation Planning and Research has been working with these at-risk communities at the direction or the State Emergency Management Division to identify locations for vertical tsunami refuges. Currently, the Institute is applying an evacuation model developed by the USGS to corroborated locations suggested by residents. These suggested locations were the product of Institute research conduct over the past 8 years and which lead to the construction of structures in Tokeland and Westport, Washington.
CBE Spotlight: Rachel Berney
Rachel Berney is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning, Adjunct Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture, an Urban@UW Fellow, and author of Learning from Bogotá: Pedagogical Urbanism and the Reshaping of Public Space. Her primary interests include community sustainable design, public space, and international development in the Americas, as well as urban design and planning history and theory with an emphasis on social and cultural factors. Urban@UW sat down with her in 2019 to discuss her work and research…
Michael Lindell
Michael K. Lindell has conducted research on emergency preparedness and response for a wide range of natural and technological hazards over the past 40 years. He has conducted research or provided technical services to 40 different organizations in the public and private sectors. He has provided technical assistance on radiological emergency preparedness for the International Atomic Energy Agency, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, and nuclear utilities and also worked on hazardous materials emergency preparedness with State Emergency Response Commissions, Local Emergency Planning Committees, and chemical companies. He has served eight times as a consultant to National Research Council committees examining environmental hazards, and has been a member of three National Research Council committees—Disasters Research in Social Sciences, Assessing Vulnerabilities Related to the Nation’s Chemical Infrastructure, and Inherently Safer Chemical Processes: The Use of Methyl Isocyanate (MIC) at Bayer CropScience. In addition, he has reviewed research proposals for 20 different foreign, federal, and state agencies as well as performed manuscript reviews for over 75 different journals in the social and environmental sciences and engineering. He has written extensively on emergency management and is the author of 80 technical reports, 125 journal articles and book chapters, and nine books.
Urban Infrastructure Lab
The Urban Infrastructure Lab (UIL) at the University of Washington brings together students and faculty with a shared interest in the planning, governance, finance, design, development, economics, and environmental effects of infrastructure. Collectively, our interests span the systems critical to economic and social well-being, such as energy, water, health, transportation, education, and communications. Across these sectors, our studies integrate empirical and applied methods of research to discover the means to obtain long-run objectives, such as decarbonization, resilience, and information security, through decisions made today.