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Sandy Fischer

Sandy’s career as a landscape architect and community planner has focused on exploring the intersections of art, ecology, landscape design and planning in theory and practice. For nearly 40 years she has advocated for livable communities, and shaped attractive places through design of enduring landscapes and creating spatial and policy plans addressing both conservation and development. She has managed her own successful consulting firms, held senior director positions in local government, and served as design and planning principal in large international and local consulting firms.

Sandy has a diverse and award winning design portfolio of projects including exquisite small gardens in the Pacific Northwest, various mixed use and resort projects in Asia, revitalized downtowns in rural communities in the Rocky Mountain region and embassies and campuses around the globe. Sandy has garnered numerous awards from professional and service organizations including American Society of Landscape Architects, The American Planning Association, the Governor of the State of Washington, The Puget Sound Regional Council and National Association of Environmental Professionals. Her work has been published in Landscape Architecture Magazine, Rural Towns Symposium, Scenic America Best of the West, Geological Society of America and others. Sandy currently serves on two Local Art Committees and two professionals Councils at the University of Washington College of the Built Environment; Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design.

She is a former board member of State of Montana Licensing and Air Quality Boards, the State of Michigan Arts Council, Washington Association of Landscape Architects Board of Directors, Council of Landscape Architects Registration Board Examination Committee. After graduating from Michigan State with degrees in Art and Landscape Architecture, Sandy practiced in Ann Arbor and Lansing prior to beginning her migration west by way of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Montana, and Seattle. In 2003 she settled on Bainbridge Island with her husband, a photographer and technologist and their two sons; Dylan and Sean who are both emerging designers of products and technology. Sandy studied at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute; the first program in the US to offer an MBA in Sustainable Business. Intellectually curious and a non-conformist by nature, Sandy is intrigued by cross discipline collaborations. With Richard, she continues and debate and explore the intersections of landscape architecture, horticulture, design, ecology and technology in her practice, community service, research, art, writing and personal garden.

Donald King

Donald King is an architect, planner and educator with over 50 years of professional experience. He is currently Principal Architect of Mimar Studio, a predevelopment planning and design consultancy. Since 2017, he has been an Affiliate Professor of Architecture in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. He is a co-founder of the Nehemiah Inititaive Seattle.

Laure Heland

Laure Heland is Affiliate Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. She has been teaching as an Associate Professor at the National School of Architecture of Paris La Villette (France) since 2007. As research faculty she participated in several national and European public funded research programs on participatory process for sustainable design and the assessment of environmental and climate change policies at regional, local and building scales.

Trained in Ecology, Urban Design and Planning, she developed her professional experience in environmental consulting and training for professionals, local authorities and regional governments. She earned her PhD in 2008, studying the neighborhood as a place for emergence, experimentation and appropriation of sustainable development, through bottom-up ecological practices and community-led participatory design.

Laure’s current research focuses on the Pacific Northwest experience and leadership on stormwater management at different scales, and more generally the social, ecological and economical consequences of implementing ecological infrastructure in dense urban environments. She is analyzing their impact on local communities, on the praxis of design professionals, and the management of ecological systems over the long term through the collaboration of various actors: local communities, NGOs, public and private professionals and agencies.

She also explores community-led ecological design projects and participatory process in various socio-cultural contexts. She is teaching a fall seminar on Perceptions of Nature in dense urban environments and she collaborated with the past two McKinley BE Studios on
interdisciplinary teaching pedagogy.

Gregg Colburn

Gregg Colburn is an associate professor in the Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. He publishes research on topics related to housing and homelessness and is co-author of the book, Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns (University of California Press). His research has been featured in leading media outlets, including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Economist, Bloomberg, and National Public Radio.

Gregg holds a B.A. from Albion College, an M.B.A. from Northwestern University, and a M.S.W. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Prior to academia, he worked as an investment banker and private equity professional. At the University of Washington, Gregg teaches classes in housing, urban economics, and finance. Gregg serves as co-chair of the University of Washington’s Homelessness Research Initiative and is a member of the National Alliance to End Homelessness Research Council.

 

 

 

Anne Vernez-Moudon

Anne Vernez Moudon is Professor Emerita of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is President of the International Seminar on Urban Morphology (ISUF), an international and interdisciplinary organization of scholars and practitioners; a Faculty Associate at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in Cambridge, MA; a Fellow of the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C.; and a National Advisor to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program on Active Living Policy and Environmental Studies.

Dr. Moudon holds a B.Arch. (Honors) from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Doctor ès Science from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her work focuses on urban form analysis, land monitoring, neighborhood and street design, and non-motorized transportation. Her current research is supported by the U.S. and Washington State departments of Transportation, the Puget Sound Regional Council, the Federal Highway Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Her published works include Built for Change: Neighborhood Architecture in San Francisco (MIT Press 1986), Public Streets for Public Use (Columbia University Press 1991), and Monitoring Land Supply with Geographic Information Systems (with M. Hubner, John Wiley & Sons, 2000). She also published several monographs, such as Master-Planned Communities: Shaping Exurbs in the 1990 ( with B. Wiseman and K.J. Kim, distributed by the APA Bookstore, 1992) and Urban Design: Reshaping Our Cities (with W. Attoe, University of Washington, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, 1995).

Dr. Moudon has been an active participant in The Mayors’ Institute on City Design since 1992. She has consulted for many communities nationally and internationally to develop urban design guidelines for new construction which respect the character of the existing landscape and built environment and which support non-motorized transportation. She has worked with planning officials, design professionals, and neighborhood groups in the Puget Sound as well as in San Francisco, CA, Toronto and Montreal, Canada, Stockholm, Sweden, among others. She taught courses and conducted seminars in urban design, planning, and housing in Japan, Korea, China, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, France, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland.

Al Levine

As an Affiliate Faculty member of UDP since 2008 he has had the pleasure of teaching a variety of courses including Neighborhood Planning, Affordable Housing Policy and Development, Real Estate Development Studio and Real Estate Competition Prep Class.

His classroom approach is to use his forty years of experience in the public and private sectors to help students understand the realities of “real world” lessons in the context of an academic learning experience. He prefers case studies, current analyses and Internet resources as his reading choices over traditional textbooks and strives to create student engagement in the classroom.
While he does not do formal research, he is heavily engaged in Seattle’s affordable housing conversation and focuses particularly on homelessness, condominium legislation reform, transit oriented development, incentive and inclusionary zoning issues and mixed income communities.

He is an active member of the Urban Land Institute and has chaired the ULI NW Technical Advisory Committee for the past five plus years. He also serves on a number of other Boards and Commissions and regularly engages in pro bono consulting for non-profit, faith based and for profit entities undertaking projects with a social purpose. He has also been an active member of the Professional’s Council for about ten years.

Jan Whittington

Dr. Jan Whittington is Associate Professor of the Department of Urban Design and Planning, at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research applies transaction cost economic theory to networked infrastructures, such as transportation, water, and communications systems, to internalize factors historically treated as external to transactions. Her publications include methodologies for greenhouse gas mitigation and resilience through capital investment planning, examination of the efficiency of public-private contractual arrangements for infrastructure, and the evaluation of online transactions for efficiency, security, and privacy. At the University of Washington, she is the Director of the Urban Infrastructure Lab, Associate Director of the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity, and Affiliate Faculty at the Tech Policy Lab. She teaches infrastructure planning and finance, public finance, infrastructure mega-projects, science for environmental policy, planning for water, and land use planning. Her PhD (2008) is in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was advised by economic Nobel laureate Oliver Williamson. Prior to her academic career, she spent 10 years with infrastructure giant Bechtel Corporation, as a strategic planner and environmental scientist. She holds bachelor degrees in Biology and Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1987). Her master’s degree is in City and Regional Planning, from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (1993).

Qing Shen

Qing Shen is Professor of Urban Design and Planning and Chair and Director of the University of Washington Graduate School’s Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Urban Design and Planning. He holds a PhD in City and Regional Planning from University of California, Berkeley. Professor Shen’s primary areas of interest are urban economics and metropolitan transportation planning and policy. Author of numerous scholarly publications, he has developed methodological frameworks for analyzing urban spatial structure, examined the social and environmental consequences of automobile-oriented metropolitan development, and investigated the differential impacts of information and communication technologies (ICT) on various population groups. A primary focus of his current research is on the opportunities and challenges created by mobile ICT-enabled new mobility services. Exploring the paths toward more efficient, equitable, and environmentally responsible urban transportation, he is working with colleagues and graduate students to conduct innovative research on travel behavior and its connections with shared mobility services, built environments, and transportation demand management policies.

Professor Shen’s scholarly work has gained wide recognitions, which include a Horwood Critique Prize given by the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA), an Emerging Scholar Paper Award in spatial analysis and modeling specialty given by the Association of American Geographers (AAG), a Chester Rapkin Award given by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP), and a Best Paper Award by the World Society for Transportation and Land Use Research (WSTLUR). A highly active member of the academic community, he has served on the editorial boards of seven academic journals, including the Journal of the American Planning Association (since 2000; Associate Editor since 2020) and the Journal of Planning Education and Research (since 2006).

Professor Shen was educated in China (Zhejiang University) and Canada (University of British Columbia) before coming to the United States. He started his academic career at MIT as an assistant professor in 1993 and was promoted to associate professor in 1999. That was followed by his tenured faculty appointment in 2000 at the University of Maryland, College Park where he also served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. He joined the University of Washington as Professor and Department Chair in 2009. In addition, he has served as a visiting professor at several leading universities in China. In 2005, he was appointed by the President of Nanjing University as the first holder of Siyuan Chair Professorship, an endowed visiting position. In 2009, he was appointed as a visiting Tongji Chair Professor at Tongji University. In 2014, he was appointed by the President of Southwest Jiaotong University as the Oversea Dean of the School of Architecture and Design, a visiting advisory position. He was a primary founder and former Chairman of the International Association for China Planning (IACP).

Mark Purcell

Purcell’s work explores the possibility and potential of democracy. He is interested in how democracy can be an idea that inspires resistance to neoliberalism and austerity, but, more than that, he is interested in how it can help us flee those forms of life, how we can use it to create different forms, new ways of being together, other communities in which people make decisions for themselves, collectively. In short, he is searching for ways to think democracy radically. In that project, he spends a lot of time with and draw lots of ideas from the work of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Marx, Bakunin, Nietzsche, Deleuze & Guattari, Hardt & Negri, Lefebvre, Castoriadis, Ranciere, Virno, and Laclau & Mouffe. He also dabbles in some Arendt, Agamben, Abensour, Badiou, Nancy, Rosanvallon, Clastres, Foucault, and Debord. His plan is to engage more closely in the near future with Butler, Bifo, and (maybe) Dewey. (Then he’ll retire.)

He is particularly interested in democracy as it exists in cities. He wants to know more about how urban inhabitants are creating new forms of urban life, forms of life in which they manage the production of urban space themselves, without the State and without capitalist corporations. In this context, he works particularly closely with Henri Lefebvre, and especially with his ideas of urban society, autogestion, and the right to the city.

Manish Chalana

Chalana engages urban planning through the lenses of urban design, historic preservation, urban & planning history and equity & social justice. He has degrees in Architecture (B’Arch –Mangalore University; M’Arch from the School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi), Landscape Architecture (M’Larch from Penn State) and Urban Planning (Ph.D. from University of Colorado). Besides his appointment in Urban Design & Planning at UW, he is adjunct in the Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and a member of the South Asia Program in the Jackson School of International Studies (JSIS). Before teaching at UW, he taught as a graduate student/ lecturer in the University of Colorado and Pennsylvania State University. He has worked in India with the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and Housing and Urban Development Corporation of India (HUDCO). Additionally, he consults on international projects mostly around historic preservation. He is one of the two founding directors of the Center for Preservation and Adaptive Reuse (CPAR), which strives to connect academia to practice of historic preservation. He is also affiliated with both the Graduate Certificates in Urban Design and Historic Preservation and both the PhD programs in our College; PhD in the Built Environment; and the Interdisciplinary PhD in Urban Planning.

He has offered a variety of courses ranging from study abroad; lectures; seminars and studios. He teaches graduate seminars in American Urban History and Introduction to Historic Preservation. Additionally, he teaches Urban Form and Communication and Analysis in the MUP core curriculum; and the Race and Social Justice Seminar. His studios have typically been on urban design and historic preservation topics engaging sites in the Pacific Northwest. For his study abroad classes, he has brought students for a quarter long programs to Chandigarh, India (co-led with Prakash) and month long exploration seminars to the Kumaon region in the upper Himalayas to study topics of urban design, planning and preservation. He has also co-taught study abroad classes in China and Japan along with his colleagues Dan Abramson and Bob Freitag on topics of hazard mitigation and cultural resilience, among others. He has been twice honored with the CBE’s Lionel Pries Distinguished Professor Award.

He is interested in topics of diversity and social justice in the context of historic preservation and urban planning. He engages these topics in his teaching and through my service. As a member of the Historic Preservation Advisory Committee (HPAC) of the 4Culture, Cultural Services Agency for King County, he mentors the diversity intern who works on uncovering systemic biases in the listing of historic sites in King County to the exclusion of under-represented minority communities. He has served on the UW Diversity Council’s Campus Climate Committee, which encouraged him to start the UDP department’s Diversity Committee (with Branden Born) that has worked for the last 10 years toward creating a welcoming environment for the underrepresented minority students in the College of Built Environments. Additionally, he has volunteered to serve on a committee of the National Council of Preservation Educators (NCPE) to understand the diversity of students enrolled in preservation programs in the country to better understand the accessibility and openness of the programs to underrepresented minority students.

He publishes on topics of urban design, planning history and preservation in a variety of journal including Future Anterior, Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of American Planning Association, Journal of Planning History and Planning Perspectives. He has co-edited a book on the topic of urbanism in Asia (along with Jeff Hou) – Messy Urbansim: understanding the “other” cities of Asia. He recently completed working on another edited volume (along with Ashima Krishna) on the status of preservation practice in India.