Campbell’s research focuses on community and place-making at different scales and in different settings. He is particularly interested in the social aspects of place-making and the intersection of built form, social behavior, and culture. With a background in cultural sociology and theory, he is fascinated with how people and groups create meaningful places out of ordinary urban spaces, and how these meanings in turn shape social life and personal identities. He has applied these ideas to studies of neighborhood in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Russia, to investigations of historical trauma among indigenous populations, and to the creation of community in high rises and other “vertical environments”. He teaches primarily in the undergraduate program, Community, Environment, and Planning (CEP), but also works regularly with Master and Ph.D. students on thesis work and other research. He is especially interested in alternative forms of teaching, and has been nominated for or received five teaching awards at the UW. As an administrator, he has served as the CEP Director since 2010. He was a member of the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Academic Affairs administrative team from 2008-2013 where he developed campus-wide undergraduate policy and programming. He was appointed Director of the MUP program and Chair of the Department of Urban Design and Planning in summer 2014.
Department: Urban Design and Planning
Branden Born
Let’s assume that planning can be roughly divided into two general lines of thought: consideration of the physical and built environment, and the societal aspects of the processes of human development. Within that artificial binary, Born’s interests lie in the societal more than the physical.
While he considers himself a bit of a land use planner, he is really focused on how we make decisions as a collective society. Thus, he is interested in the planning process: who is at the table, who is not, and why; as well as who benefits and who suffers from decisions that planners make. In that context, he studies planning processes and regional governance and specifically focuses on the food system as a lens by which we can examine and understand broader conditions. Questions of state-community interaction, the changing role of the state, democracy, and the influence of corporatism and neoliberalism at all scales of development permeate his thinking.
With interests that span theory and practice, he tries to develop or participate in opportunities for creative governance. He sits on the Puget Sound Regional Council’s Regional Food Policy Council, an organization he helped found. He is also a founding member of the Washington State Food System Roundtable. He has collaborated with researchers, community members, and local governments on several healthy community initiatives in King County, Washington. As example of the professional theory-practice tension that he enjoys, he co-authored the American Planning Association’s Planning Advisory Service Report on Planning for Community and Regional Food Systems, and wrote with his colleague, Mark Purcell, a well-known piece in the Journal of Planning Education and Research critiquing the unquestioning emphasis of localism in early food system research and practice.
He also maintains a research and class connection to Oaxaca, Mexico, where he tries to visit with students for a class on Food Sovereignty and the Roots of Migration each summer.
Most recently, he helped start and currently co-directs the University of Washington’s Livable City Year program, a community engagement project that pairs the university and a community for an academic year. In that time, about 20 classes from across the schools and departments at the university work on projects proposed by the city to serve the broad concepts of livability and sustainability.
Rachel Berney
Berney’s primary interests include community sustainable design and development in an international context; urban design and planning history and theory with an emphasis on social and environmental factors; and qualitative and quantitative research methods for evaluating the efficacy of urban form, including challenges of cross-cultural research. Specifically, she focuses on the history and contemporary conditions of urbanism and development in the Americas, with an emphasis on public space and the public realm. In particular, she examines the narrative roles that built landscapes play in: politics and society, ecology, and human health and well-being. Thus, first, her work on pedagogical urbanism in Latin America and the United States examines the use of public space to front city regeneration projects. Second, her work on visible ecology critiques and directs the development of eco-literacy in community design and development practices. Finally, her work on human health and well-being is currently being developed through her Mobile Cities project centered on public space investment and community mobility planning in metro transit station projects. These themes are linked by a focus on understanding, reading, critiquing, and modifying narratives in the built environment. Of particular interest is the concept of legibility, or comprehensibility, and whether legible environments are capable of shaping sustainable urban places, practices, and policies.
Christine Bae
Christine Bae is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Southern California. Her primary areas of interest are transportation and the environment; land use, growth management and urban sprawl; urban regeneration; environmental equity and justice; and international planning and globalization. She recently co-authored an article on measuring pedestrian exposure to PM2.5 in the Seattle, Washington, International District. She teaches a course “Mega City Planning”, in which she leads a group of students to Seoul, South Korea for two weeks in spring quarter. She is currently the West Representative for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, and a Board Member for the Western Regional Science Association. She is also the recipient of an on-going Sea Grant for The Economic and Environmental Impacts of Moorage Marinas in the West Coast.
Marina Alberti
Marina Alberti is Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning in the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington. She is Director of the Urban Ecology Research Lab and PI of the NSF Funded Research Collaboration Networks on Urban Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics. She teaches courses in Urban Science, Urban Ecology, Environmental Planning, Research Design, Geographic Information Systems, and Group Dynamic and Conflict resolution. Alberti’s research interests are in urban ecology and evolution. Her studies focus on the interactions between urban patterns and ecosystem function, urban signatures of evolutionary change, and the properties of cities that enhance their resilience and transformative capacity. She also leads research on urban ecological modeling, scenario planning, and urban ecological metrics to monitor progress and inform policy-making and planning. In her book Cities That Think like Planets (UW Press 2016), Alberti advances a science of cities that work on a planetary scale and link unpredictable dynamics to the potential for socio-ecological innovation.
Dan Abramson
Dan Abramson approaches the discipline of planning through urban design, historic preservation and planning history, methods of socio-spatial analysis and public participation, and qualitative study of the politics and cultures of development decision-making. His experience in community-engaged planning, research, and design – mostly with immigrant, low-income, indigenous, or otherwise marginalized communities – ranges from Boston to the American and Canadian Pacific Northwest, and from Poland to China and Japan.
Currently Abramson focuses on community resilience and adaptive planning in disaster recovery and hazard mitigation, as well as periurban and rural responses to rapid urbanization. Students at all levels of undergraduate and graduate education join his work, through course projects, community-engaged studios as well as thesis and dissertation research. Projects in Asia have included six China Village Studios with academic partners from Chengdu and Taiwan; a six-month Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship in recovery planning after the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake in Sichuan; and a collaboration with Kobe University to use participatory GIS for urban neighborhood earthquake recovery. Projects in Washington integrate studios with FEMA- and NSF-funded research on new protocols for state agencies and communities to envision earthquake- and tsunami-resilient development.
Beside his appointment in Urban Design & Planning at UW, he is adjunct in the Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and a member of the China Studies and Canadian Studies faculty. Before teaching at UW, he held a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Human Settlements, where he initiated the first Ford Foundation-funded urban community-based planning project in China, in Quanzhou, Fujian. His degrees include a B.A. in History from Harvard University; dual masters in Architecture and City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and a doctorate in Urban Planning from Tsinghua University in Beijing. (He was the first American to earn a degree in urban planning from a Chinese university, and possibly the first American to earn any mainland Chinese graduate-level degree.) In 2005-2009, he served as Secretary on the founding Board of the International Association for China Planning (IACP) and remains an active member. He have also served on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Planning Association and am currently an editorial board member for Planning Perspectives.
Ken Yocom
Ken Yocom is Department Chair and Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. He also has an adjunct appointment in the Department of Urban Design and Planning, serves on the steering committee of the PhD in the Built Environments Program, and is core faculty for the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Urban Design and Planning within the College of Built Environments. He primarily teaches seminar and studio courses in theory, ecology, and urban design.
Trained as an ecologist and landscape architect with professional experience in the environmental consulting and construction industries, he is a graduate of our MLA program (2002). Ken also earned his PhD from the Program in the Built Environments (2007), where he researched nature and society relations through the contemporary context of urban ecological restoration practices.
Ken’s current research, teaching, and practice explore the convergence of urban infrastructure and ecological systems through adaptive design approaches that serve to demystify emerging strategies and technologies for sustainable and resilient development. More specifically, he investigates how water –in all its forms- shapes the past to future functions and patterns of our built environments. He has written extensively on the themes developed from his work including two books, Ecological Design (with Nancy Rottle, Bloomsbury, 2012) and NOW Urbanism: The Future City is Here (with Jeff Hou, Ben Spencer, and Thaisa Way (editors), Routledge, 2014). He has also written for professional practice and scholarly publications on issues of global biodiversity, urban environmental governance, ecological design, and contemporary nature and society relations in the urban context.
In his teaching, Ken emphasizes the development of a holistic and integrated approach that embraces the complexity of our built environments, yet discreetly explores the intersections and overlaps that frame our understanding and appreciation of particular places. He has a strong belief that collaboratively, the allied design professions can act as catalysts in recognizing, utilizing, and transforming the inherent potential of our built environments into places that are socially equitable, environmentally just, and economically sustainable.
Andy Dannenberg
Andy Dannenberg holds joint appointments in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and in the Department of Urban Design and Planning where he teaches courses on healthy community design and on health impact assessment. He has a particular interest in the use of health impact assessments as tools to inform community planners about the health consequences of their decisions. For the past decade, Dannenberg’s research and teaching have focused on examining the health aspects of community design, including land use, transportation, urban planning, and other issues related to the built environment.
Before coming to Seattle, Dannenberg served as Team Leader of the Healthy Community Design Initiative in the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. He has served as Director of CDC’s Division of Applied Public Health Training, as Preventive Medicine Residency Director and as an injury prevention epidemiologist on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health in Baltimore, and as a cardiovascular epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
Dannenberg completed a residency in family practice at the Medical University of South Carolina and was board certified in Family Practice (1982-1989). He is board certified in Preventive Medicine (1986-present).
Jeffrey Karl Ochsner
Jeffrey Karl Ochsner FAIA is a Professor in the Department of Architecture, where he has taught since 1988 in the areas of architectural design, urban design, historic preservation, and architectural history. He holds adjunct positions in the Departments of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design & Planning and is a member of the faculties of the CBE Preservation Certificate, Urban Design Certificate and BE Ph.D. He served as Chair of the Department of Architecture from 1996 to 2002. He served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College from 2007 to 2019. He currently serves as CBE Senior Advisor for Policy and Procedures. Professor Ochsner has twice won the College of Built Environments Lionel Pries Award for teaching excellence. He is a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects and a recipient of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Distinguished Professor Award.
Professor Ochsner is author of H. H. Richardson: Complete Architectural Works (1982), editor and co-author of Shaping Seattle Architecture: A Historical Guide to the Architects (First Edition, 1994; Second Edition, 2014), co-author of Distant Corner: Seattle Architects and the Legacy of H. H. Richardson (2003), and author of Lionel H. Pries, Architect-Artist-Educator: From Arts & Crafts to Modern Architecture (2007), and Furniture Studio: Materials, Craft, and Architecture (2012). Lionel H. Pries, Architect-Artist-Educator was a finalist for the 2008 Washington State Book Award in History/Biography. Professor Ochsner has published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, JAE: Journal of Architectural Education, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, ARCADE and other journals. From 1990 to 1994 he was member of the editorial board of JAE: Journal of Architectural Education. He was the Local Chair for the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Seattle in 1995, and he served on the Board of the Society from 2000 to 2003. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of Pacific Northwest Quarterly.
Vikram Prakash
Dr. Vikramaditya “Vikram” Prakash is an architect, architectural historian and theorist. He is Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington with adjunct appointments in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design and Planning. He received his B. Arch. from Chandigarh College of Architecture, India and his M.A. and PhD in History of Architecture and Urbanism from Cornell University.
Vikram works on issues of modernism, postcoloniality, global history and fashion & architecture. His books include Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India, A Global History of Architecture (with Francis DK Ching & Mark Jarzombek), Colonial Modernities (co-edited with Peter Scriver), The Architecture of Shivdatt Sharma and Chandigarh: An Architectural Guide. A Global History is widely used as a textbook and being translated into five languages. His next book, One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash, is due in summer 2020.
Vikram is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Built Environments. He previously served as Associate Dean for External Affairs, Chair of Architecture and Director of Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Programs. His public service includes terms on the Boards of Seattle Center and the Seattle AIA. He also directed Chandigarh Urban Lab, a series of interdisciplinary international studios.
Vikram is co-PI (with Mark Jarzombek, MIT) of three successive grants of $1.0 million (2014), $1.5 million (2016) and $1.0 million (2019) awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These resulted in the creation of GAHTC – a collective of over 200 teachers of global architectural history.
Vikram is host of ArchitectureTalk – a bi-weekly podcast based on curated conversations with invited guests. In its first two years, ArchitectureTalk received over 60,000 unique downloads and has been independently reviewed in The American Scholar.
The 2020 Annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture recognized Vikram with the title of ACSA Distinguished Professor.