Research interests: Smart cities and transportation systems, Digital transformation, Travel behavior, and Sustainable development
Research Theme: Infrastructure & Transportation
Includes both management/policy and design/building aspects
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.
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
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.
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.
Urban Form Lab
The Urban Form Lab (UFL) research aims to affect policy and to support approaches to the design and planning of more livable environments. The UFL specializes in geospatial analyses of the built environment using multiple micro-scale data in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Current research includes the development of novel GIS routines for performing spatial inventories and analyses of the built environment, and of spatially explicit sampling techniques. Projects address such topics as land monitoring, neighborhood and street design, active transportation, non-motorized transportation safety, physical activity, and access to food environments.
Research at the UFL has been supported by the U.S. and Washington State Departments of Transportation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and local agencies.
The Urban Form Lab is directed by Anne Vernez Moudon, Dr es Sc, a leading researcher and educator in quantifying the properties of the built environment as related to health and transportation behaviors. Philip M. Hurvitz, PhD, a veteran of geographic information science and data processing, leads data management and GIS work.
Green Futures Research and Design Lab
Green Futures Lab is dedicated to supporting interdisciplinary research and design that advances our understanding of, visions for, and design of a vital and ecologically sustainable public realm. The Lab’s goal is to develop green infrastructure solutions within a local and global context.
The Green Futures Lab explores and promotes planning and design for active transportation, including cycling and pedestrian environments; conducts research and design projects that aim to improve the ability of public spaces to build community and provide recreation and revitalization; works to improve the health of our water bodies and sustain our water resources through green infrastructure innovations, ecosystem restoration, and open space protection; innovates strategies for creating quality habitat, particularly within urban environments where it is most limited; and explores low-carbon urban design solutions to mitigate climate change.
Working with the University of Washington, local communities, and international partners, the lab provides planning, design, and education for healthy, equitably accessible, and regenerative urban and ecological systems.
Center for Asian Urbanism
The Center for Asian Urbanism was established to promote and undertake interdisciplinary and collaborative research of urban conditions and processes in Asia and the “Global Pacific”, for example, the relevance of cities and city-regions in Asia to each other, to the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., and to the world at large.
The Center integrates research and action-oriented activities in the field to develop new knowledge and inform policy, decision-making and professional development. It provides a platform locally and internationally for critical discussion of urban issues in Asia and beyond.
The Center serves as a platform to explore the intersection of architecture, construction, landscape architecture, and urban design and planning. It is also the goal of the collaborative to establish the University of Washington as a national and international leader in the field of urban research in Asia. The College, together with other units at the University of Washington, including especially the Jackson School of International Studies, the Asian Law Center and the Foster School of Business’s Global Business Center, currently has one of the strongest concentrations of scholars on Asian cities and urbanization in the United States.
Ahmed Abdel-Aziz
Aziz is an Associate Professor with the Department of Construction Management and Adjunct Associate Professor with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Aziz is known for his experience in the public-private partnership (PPP) alternative project delivery system; he has participated in committees, given presentations and talks, wrote book chapters, and published technical articles in leading academic journals in the USA, Canada, and the UK. Along with PPP, and with experience in construction project management, Aziz teaches project planning, scheduling, and control, Primavera and MS Project, estimating, life-cycle cost modeling for project economics, and quantitative risk analysis techniques. Aziz holds the UW honor of being a P. D. Koon Endowed Professor of Construction Management. He also works as Associate Editor for the Canadian Journal of Civil Engineers.