Historic preservation planning and policy, community development, urban revitalization, social sustainability
Research Theme: Community Engagement & Advocacy
Includes community-engaged scholarship and learning, as well as applied scholarship toward societal change
Chin-Wei Chen
Climate change (adaptation & mitigation), climate governance, community-based adaptation actions, disaster risk reduction
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.
Jen Davison
Jen Davison (she/her) is the Project Director of Community Engagement for University Initiatives, leading efforts to increase and improve institutional capacity for community engagement across the UW. Until last fall, for 8 years Jen was director of Urban@UW, a UW-wide initiative that fosters cross-disciplinary and community engaged research to address urban challenges. She continues to serve as the Co-Director of Urban@UW’s Research to Action Collaboratory, an accelerator program for community-engaged research partnerships.
Davison has been building boundary-spanning infrastructure within higher education for over a decade. She joined University of Washington’s College of the Environment in 2010 and founded its science communication program, which provides opportunities, training, and support for college researchers to connect their research to non-science communities through communication, outreach and engagement. Davison joined Urban@UW in 2015, and co-led strategies and programs to address complex challenges such as housing and homelessness; urban environmental justice; and equitable smart cities. She was the founding program manager for Livable City Year in 2016, which connects faculty and students with municipal governments for collaborative projects. From 2017-2019 she co-chaired UW-Seattle’s Carnegie Classification Working Group, charged to assess the campus’ support for community engagement at all levels, from curricular programs to faculty incentive structures to fundraising processes and beyond. In 2020 Davison served as the foundational program manager for the College of Built Environments’ Applied Research Consortium, connecting faculty and students with industrial partners for collaborative research. From 2021-2022 she was the College of Built Environments’ Director of Research, charged to foster a culture of research productivity, collaboration, and engagement throughout the college.
In 2017 Davison participated in the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Community Engagement Fellowship; participated in UW’s Leadership Excellence Project in 2018; and was a Leadership Tomorrow Fellow in 2019. From 2018-2023 she served on the Board of Directors for the UW Professional Staff Organization, including as the Vice President and as the chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee. Previous to her role at University of Washington, as a published scientist Davison worked with community partners to understand how wildlife and landscapes are responding to land use and climate change, and to co-develop tools for managing ecosystems threatened by these drivers.
CBE Office of Research Updates
On September 5, Dean Renée Cheng shared exciting updates about the College of Built Environments’ Office of Research. Read below for more from Dean Cheng: The College of Built Environments’ newly revamped Office of Research aims to elevate CBE research expertise in community engagement, climate action, housing, humanities, and technology and to increase capacity for meeting urgent needs for this research to be accessible and have impact. While there is much work to be done, I believe the steps outlined…
Sound Communities
Sound Communities envisions a Puget Sound region where all of us live in vibrant, thriving communities with access to public transit and amenities, giving us the freedom to make our best lives for ourselves and our families. Our mission is to promote the development of complete, walkable, equitable and inclusive neighborhoods at scale across the Puget Sound region in concert with the region’s historic investment in transit.
Primary goals:
- Encourage, support, and enable cities and counties to create and update station area plans based on community vision to achieve complete communities based on equitable transit-oriented development
- Provide cities and counties with the capability to acquire, assemble, lease, or landbank land within and adjacent to station areas to be developed into affordable and mixed-income housing
- Provide cities and counties with the means to partner with the development community to produce affordable and mixed-income housing and related infrastructure
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…
Urban@UW
Urban@UW extends the understanding of cities—from people, buildings, infrastructure, and energy to economics, policy, culture, art, and nature—beyond individual topics to dynamically interdependent systems so that we can holistically design and steward vibrant and welcoming cities in which future generations will thrive.
A partnership between the Office of Research and the College of Built Environments, and engaging colleges, schools, and departments across all three of University of Washington’s campuses, Urban@UW amplifies UW as a leading university in urban issues. Together, we catalyze the evolution of Seattle as a model city—a boundary-pushing laboratory and knowledge hub that leverages innovation to create a place of opportunity and health for all—and build new ideas that can be used in metropolitan regions around the globe. Urban@UW leverages deep understanding, leading-edge analysis, and an ethos of partnership to create the pathway for Seattle as the city of the future.
Urban@UW works with scholars, policymakers, and community stakeholders to develop cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collaborative research. We aim to strengthen connections between research and solutions to today’s urban challenges. We do this through intellectual partnership, drawing upon the many scholars and centers on campus to cultivate new, path-breaking ideas, projects, and research-practice collaborations.
Urban@UW is a large network of scholars and practitioners with leaders and supporters engaging in different projects and initiatives across all three campuses. Supported by the Office of Research and the College of Built Environments as well as external grants and partnerships, the Urban@UW institution-wide community includes our Executive Committee, Urban@UW Fellows, and Urban@UW Affiliates.
Applied Research Consortium
The Applied Research Consortium (ARC) is rooted in the idea that collaboration across academia and industry will accelerate progress in our fields. ARC brings together an interdisciplinary group of built environment firms with faculty experts and graduate student researchers at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments (CBE) to address the most vexing challenges that firms face today. The next generation of practitioners and scholars apply their creativity and knowledge of the latest scholarship and practices, accelerating progress and preparing for future work at the leading edge of our fields.
Through the ARC initiative, built environment firms with a presence in the Seattle area partner with College of Built Environments graduate students and faculty for research that is targeted at the specific needs of the firms. Firms work with faculty to shape research priorities for the consortium based on their needs and the latest research in our fields. ARC then matches graduate student fellows with firms for multi-quarter applied research projects that directly relate to the firms’ current work. Faculty mentors and supervisors at firms work with the fellows, contributing to their academic and professional development in the program and ensuring that the projects fit with longer term research goals.
The unique set of fields under the College of Built Environments umbrella—architecture, construction management, landscape architecture, real estate, and urban design and planning—allows ARC projects to leverage creative, interdisciplinary approaches to the most vexing problems that firms–and the disciplines themselves–face today.
ARC builds on CBE’s prioritization of equity and diversity, thus ensuring that the next generation of built environments practitioners and scholars bring the broadest possible range of perspectives and experiences to their work.
Urban Commons Lab
Urban Commons Lab in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington focuses on research and public service that contribute to civic engagement and democratization of contemporary city-making. The Lab approaches Urban Commons as a spatial and social practice that embodies sharing, reciprocity, inclusion, civic engagement, and collective actions. Through research, and community design projects as well as events and publications, it seeks to engage the public and the scholarly/professional community in advancing the understanding and making of urban commons.
Locally, the Lab’s primary focus has been on working with immigrant communities in King County. Specifically, the projects have engaged underserved communities including Seattle’s Chinatown-International District in collaboration with community organizations with support from Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods and other funding sources. Through research and teaching collaboration, the Urban Commons Lab is also part of a network of community design scholars and practitioners in the Pacific Rim.
Urban Commons Lab has led and participated in projects funded by the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, National Endowment for the Arts, Landscape Architecture Foundation, Worldwide Universities Network, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the UW Office of Global Affairs, and other organizations.