Historic preservation planning and policy, community development, urban revitalization, social sustainability
Research Theme: Land Use & Planning
From the scales of the building to the region; includes transportation, housing, infrastructure, community, ecology
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.
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.
Washington Center for Real Estate Research
Established in 1989 through two legislative programs, the WCRER compiles real estate sale transaction data, rental market statistics, and development metrics throughout the State of Washington. From this, the WCRER also develops affordable housing metrics for the state with data published in quarterly Washington State Housing Market Reports, a twice yearly Washington State Apartment Market Report, and the Washington Housing Market Data Toolkit. The WCRER also provides bespoke data driven research, educational outreach programs, and policy guidance to professional organizations consistent with its public service mandate.
The Washington Center for Real Estate Research (WCRER) was initially established by the Board of Regents at Washington State University (WSU) to provide a bridge between academic study and research on real estate topics and the professional real estate industries. It served that mission at WSU until merging with the Runstad Center at the beginning of 2012. WCRER works with faculty to ensure their rigorous research is accessible and easily usable by industry participants, the media and the general public, regardless of their statistical sophistication.
WCRER aims to provide credible research, value-added information, education services and project-oriented research to real estate licensees, real estate consumers, real estate service providers, institutional customers, public agencies, and communities in Washington state and the Pacific Northwest region.
The Washington Center for Real Estate Research is a key provider of real estate research and data across the State of Washington. The Center is primarily funded by the State, hence its central role in the provision of quality and robust data and market reports. Among its core activities are the Quarterly Washington State Housing Market Report and the semi-annual Apartment Market Survey for the State Department of Licensing.
The Center is active across a range of other research projects and works closely with stakeholders both across the University of Washington with the public and private sectors.
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.
Urban Ecology Research Lab
The Urban Ecology Research Laboratory (UERL) is an interdisciplinary team of University of Washington researchers and Ph.D. students studying cities as urban ecosystems. The lab studies urban landscapes as hybrid phenomena that emerge from the interactions between human and ecological processes, and the interactions between urban development and ecosystem dynamics.
As part of the University of Washington’s innovative leadership in urban ecology research and education, the UERL transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries to address some of society’s most challenging problems. UERL research interests include: complexity and resilience in coupled natural and human systems, urban landscape patterns and ecosystem function, urban ecosystem management, modeling land cover change, adaptation and scenario planning. The UERL assists planners, decision makers and non-governmental organizations in making informed decisions about urban development in a rapidly changing environment.
The Urban Ecology Research Laboratory is directed by Professor Marina Alberti, and includes interdisciplinary PhD students, post-doctoral research associates, research scientists, and affiliate faculty from diverse disciplines who collaborate to study coupled natural and human systems.