My research is focused on the management of public park and recreation services in urban areas. I am particularly interested in the role of the modern green space manager and the way in which our public park services are delivered in the face of extreme poverty. Public parks are on the frontline in our cities responding to complex social and environmental challenges. This role is likely to get more important in the future. Short-term, broken window styles of park management that try to control and sanitize park use are not sustainable. I am exploring the application of an ethic of care to the delivery of park services, what this could entail and how this would change current practice.
Research Theme: Land Use & Planning
From the scales of the building to the region; includes transportation, housing, infrastructure, community, ecology
Ziyang Liu
Research Interests: Urban resilience, disaster risk reduction, climate change, community engagement.
Keisha Bharath
Research Interests: Urban Sustainability Indicators, Small Island Developing States, Climate Change, Natural Resource Management, Urban Design.
Living Landscapes Incubator receives research funding
Living Landscapes Incubator is a recently awarded project led by School of Environmental and Forest Sciences‘ Joshua Lawler along with Co-Principal Investigators Dan Brown (Director, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences), Jen Davison (Director, Urban@UW, Assistant Dean of Research, College of Built Environments), Ken Yocom (Chair, Landscape Architecture; Interim Faculty Director, Urban@UW), and Mike Yost (Chair, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences). In the last year, the global pandemic and the restrictions that have followed have shown how important…
Urban@UW Publishes Report on the Lessons and Levers for University Collaborations with Governmental and Community Partners
Jennifer Davison, Director of Urban@UW & Assistant Dean for Research of the College of Built Environments here at UW, and Thaïsa Way, Founding Director of Urban@UW, current Director of Garden & Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections, Harvard University, and Professor in UW’s Department of Landscape Architecture, have published a report titled, Lessons and Levers for University Collaborations with Governmental and Community Partners: A Synthesis of the Bullit Foundation’s Thought Leadership and Innovation RFP. This report, developed…
Qing Shen’s proposal among those selected for funding by PacTrans
The Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans) announced in January 2021 the project proposals selected for funding. Qing Shen, Professor of Urban Design and Planning and Chair of the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Urban Design and Planning is among those selected for project funding. Shen is working alongside Co-Principal Investigator Catherine (Casey) Gifford–Innovative Mobility Senior Planner–on the applied research project titled “Supplementing fixed-route transit with dynamic shared mobility services: a marginal cost comparison approach”. The project goal is to address a…
Sunho Choi
Historic preservation planning and policy, community development, urban revitalization, social sustainability
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
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.