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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.

Himanshu Grover

Himanshu Grover’s research focus is at the intersection of land use planning, community resilience, and climate change. Dr. Grover, is also the co-Director of the Institute for Hazard Mitigation and Planning at the College of Built Environments. Dr. Grover received his PhD in Urban and Regional Sciences from Texas A&M University. In his research, Dr. Grover examines inter-linkages between physical development, socio-economic concerns, and the natural environment. His research is primarily focused on planning for development of safe, equitable, and sustainable communities. Dr. Grover is broadly interested in climate change management (both mitigation and adaptation strategies), environmental and land use planning, social equity, urban infrastructure management, hazard mitigation, and community resilience. His research emphasizes place-based planning policies to balance economic, environmental and social priorities to achieve equitable development and enhance community resilience.

Dr. Grover has been a practicing planner for more than a decade and is a certified planner in India (ITPI), and in United States (AICP). He has received research funding from a number of agencies including National Science Foundation (NSF), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Dr. Grover is also a fellow of the prestigious NSF funded Enabling the Next Generation of Hazards & Disasters Researchers Fellowship Program (Round 4). Dr. Grover teaches courses in Research Methods, Comprehensive Planning, Land use and Infrastructure Management, Introduction to Emergency Management, and Introduction to Urban Planning. His recent research projects focus on pro-environmental decision-making, and adaptive planning for urban resilience. Dr. Grover also interested in issues related to social vulnerability, and environmental justice. More details about his ongoing research are available on his homepage.

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.

Christopher Campbell

Campbell’s research focuses on community and place-making at different scales and in different settings. He is particularly interested in the social aspects of place-making and the intersection of built form, social behavior, and culture. With a background in cultural sociology and theory, he is fascinated with how people and groups create meaningful places out of ordinary urban spaces, and how these meanings in turn shape social life and personal identities. He has applied these ideas to studies of neighborhood in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Russia, to investigations of historical trauma among indigenous populations, and to the creation of community in high rises and other “vertical environments”. He teaches primarily in the undergraduate program, Community, Environment, and Planning (CEP), but also works regularly with Master and Ph.D. students on thesis work and other research. He is especially interested in alternative forms of teaching, and has been nominated for or received five teaching awards at the UW. As an administrator, he has served as the CEP Director since 2010. He was a member of the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Academic Affairs administrative team from 2008-2013 where he developed campus-wide undergraduate policy and programming. He was appointed Director of the MUP program and Chair of the Department of Urban Design and Planning in summer 2014.

Branden Born

Let’s assume that planning can be roughly divided into two general lines of thought: consideration of the physical and built environment, and the societal aspects of the processes of human development. Within that artificial binary, Born’s interests lie in the societal more than the physical.


While he considers himself a bit of a land use planner, he is really focused on how we make decisions as a collective society. Thus, he is interested in the planning process: who is at the table, who is not, and why; as well as who benefits and who suffers from decisions that planners make. In that context, he studies planning processes and regional governance and specifically focuses on the food system as a lens by which we can examine and understand broader conditions. Questions of state-community interaction, the changing role of the state, democracy, and the influence of corporatism and neoliberalism at all scales of development permeate his thinking.


With interests that span theory and practice, he tries to develop or participate in opportunities for creative governance. He sits on the Puget Sound Regional Council’s Regional Food Policy Council, an organization he helped found. He is also a founding member of the Washington State Food System Roundtable. He has collaborated with researchers, community members, and local governments on several healthy community initiatives in King County, Washington. As example of the professional theory-practice tension that he enjoys, he co-authored the American Planning Association’s Planning Advisory Service Report on Planning for Community and Regional Food Systems, and wrote with his colleague, Mark Purcell, a well-known piece in the Journal of Planning Education and Research critiquing the unquestioning emphasis of localism in early food system research and practice.


He also maintains a research and class connection to Oaxaca, Mexico, where he tries to visit with students for a class on Food Sovereignty and the Roots of Migration each summer.


Most recently, he helped start and currently co-directs the University of Washington’s Livable City Year program, a community engagement project that pairs the university and a community for an academic year. In that time, about 20 classes from across the schools and departments at the university work on projects proposed by the city to serve the broad concepts of livability and sustainability.