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 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.
Daniel Winterbottom, RLA, FASLA, a landscape architect with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tufts University and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington. His firm, Winterbottom Design Inc., focuses their practice on healing/restorative gardens. His research interests include the landscape as a cultural expression, ecological urban design and the role of restorative/healing landscapes in the built environment. He has been published widely in Northwest Public Health, Places, the New York Times, Seattle Times, Seattle P.I., Landscape Architecture Magazine. He has authored “Wood in the Landscape” and has contributed to several books on sustainable design, community gardens, therapeutic landscapes and community service learning.
He has developed several programs including the participatory design design/build program in 1995 where with his students he works with communities to design and build projects that address the social and ecological concerns of the community. He has completed projects in Seattle, New York City, Bedford Hills New York, Mexico, Guatemala, Bosnia/Herzegovina and Croatia. In 2006 he developed the Healing Garden Certificate program at the University of Washington.
Lynne Manzo, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. She teaches in both the BLA and MLA programs. Dr. Manzo is also an Affiliate Faculty member in the PhD Program in the Built Environment and the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Urban Design and Planning, and an Adjunct Professor in the UW School of Social Work.
As an Environmental Psychologist by training, Manzo specializes in the study of the interrelationships between people and their physical surroundings. Her view of the environment includes not only natural and built settings, but also the socio-cultural and political milieu that shape the appearance, meanings and uses of space.
Manzo’s interests and areas of research focus on people-place relationship in urban space through a social justice lens, with particular attention to place attachment, place meaning & identity, as well as the politics of place. She has spent years conducting housing research and participating in advocacy efforts for affordable housing. This includes investigations of grassroots organizing and building rehabilitation efforts among residents of landlord-abandoned buildings in Harlem and the South Bronx, and conducting research for the Seattle Housing Authority, the King County Housing Authority and the Bremerton Housing Authority to understand the impacts of public housing demolition and redevelopment on low-income communities.
Currently, Manzo’s work focuses on place change, displacement and anti-displacement strategies. In one of her research projects, she is working with the non-profit, community-based organization Wa Na Wari, which “creates space for Black homeownership, possibility, belonging, and artistic creativity” in Seattle’s historically Black Central District, to conduct research that supports their ongoing anti-displacement organizing work. Related to this, in the Spring of 2020, Manzo led an advanced, graduate-level research studio on anti-displacement strategies with King County as the client, focusing on the diverse communities of Skyway-West Hill and White Center/North Highline (report forthcoming). These majority minority communities are currently under serious threat of gentrification and displacement.
Elizabeth Golden is an architect and an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, where she teaches in the areas of design, materials, and building technology. Her teaching, academic research, and creative work are dedicated to revealing the systemic complexities that shape our physical and cultural realities. Golden investigates the relationship between people and their environments, both at the micro and macro scales, analyzing architecture as an index to its larger cultural context.
Golden is a licensed architect in Washington and New York state and has practiced nationally and internationally for over 25 years. She holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University GSAPP and a Bachelor of Architecture (professional degree) from the University of Arkansas. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Education. Underpinning her practice is an ongoing analysis of the complex relationship of architecture and the built environment to systemic issues such as social marginalization and economic globalization. Together, her built and speculative work, research, and community activism demonstrate architecture’s dynamic potential to drive social change.
Research + Practice
Golden cultivates a reciprocal relationship between her research and practice, treating them as integral parts of an interconnected feedback loop. She frequently collaborates on design initiatives that combine expertise from the University of Washington, local nonprofits, governmental agencies, and other educational institutions. A recent example is the Seattle Street Sink and Clean Hands Collective, a community effort to promote hand hygiene in the midst of COVID-19. Her collaborative projects have received numerous honors including a National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), an Award of Merit from AIA Seattle, and an R+D Award from Architect Magazine. They have been published internationally including features in Architectural Record, Architectural Review, and the BBC World Service.
Across her research and teaching, Golden is committed to transforming the discipline of architecture by building productive connections between academia and professional practice. Her recent book Building from Tradition: Local Materials and Methods in Contemporary Architecture (Routledge, 2018) offers a critical analysis of traditional building practices and their contemporary resurgence in the context of globalization. A belief in the power of collective intelligence drives the practice, with the expertise of local professionals, craftspeople, and user groups integral to each project. Ultimately, Golden is concerned with the mutual exchange between people and place, studying ways in which architecture can evoke our shared humanity.
Brian McLaren’s teaching and scholarship are influenced by a background in cultural history and an ongoing interest in Marxist and contemporary critical theory, as well as postcolonial studies. The broad focus of his concerns have been on the relationship between architecture and politics during the Fascist period in Italy, with particular attention to the tensions that linked modernism and regional expression.
McLaren’s dissertation research and initial publications concentrated on the colonial context of Libya, in particular the relationship between modern architecture and local culture under the auspices of tourism. These publications include an edited collection with D. Medina Lasansky, Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place, and a completed major book project, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism. More recently, this research has appeared in the Journal of Architecture and Giovanni Arena.
McLaren’s current research is related to a new book project, Modern Architecture, Colonialism and Race in Fascist Italy, 1935-1945, which was presented at the Annual Conference of the College Art Association in New York (February 2015) and Society of Architectural Historians in Chicago (April 2015). It is also published in abbreviated form in a themed issue of Architectural Theory Review (Fall 2015). McLaren is a member of the Race and Modern Architecture Project, a research collaborative co-directed by Professors Mabel Wilson (Columbia University), Charles Davis (University of North Carolina – Charlotte) and Irene Cheng (California College of the Arts).