Urban governance, poverty and inequality, planning history and theory, housing policy, urban informality, community organization
Research Theme: Policy & Law
Research aimed at influencing or assisting policymakers, as well as scholarship on laws and policy related to the built environment
Meghan Lewis
Meghan uses her background in architecture, supply chain sustainability, and life cycle assessment to pursue broad, system-wide policies and initiatives that support the vision of carbon neutral, circular building material supply chains. Meghan has been an active contributor at the Carbon Leadership Forum, and played a crucial role as a contributing editor to the Practice Guide for the Life Cycle Assessment of Buildings. She also chairs the Building Focus Group in the CLF Online Community. As a staff member she’ll be responsible for leading policy research to support Buy Clean initiatives.
She was recently the Head of Global Energy and Sustainability at WeWork, where she also launched the supply chain sustainability program in 2018 to drive efforts to source sustainable materials across their global portfolio. Before joining WeWork, Meghan was an architect at Mithun, where she worked on a range of project types and developed office-wide sustainability guidelines as part of the firm’s sustainability team. She also led internal efforts to integrate whole building life cycle assessment and low carbon material selection into the design process, through R+D and implementation on active projects.
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 Commons Lab
Urban Commons Lab in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington focuses on research and public service that contribute to civic engagement and democratization of contemporary city-making. The Lab approaches Urban Commons as a spatial and social practice that embodies sharing, reciprocity, inclusion, civic engagement, and collective actions. Through research, and community design projects as well as events and publications, it seeks to engage the public and the scholarly/professional community in advancing the understanding and making of urban commons.
Locally, the Lab’s primary focus has been on working with immigrant communities in King County. Specifically, the projects have engaged underserved communities including Seattle’s Chinatown-International District in collaboration with community organizations with support from Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods and other funding sources. Through research and teaching collaboration, the Urban Commons Lab is also part of a network of community design scholars and practitioners in the Pacific Rim.
Urban Commons Lab has led and participated in projects funded by the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, National Endowment for the Arts, Landscape Architecture Foundation, Worldwide Universities Network, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the UW Office of Global Affairs, and other organizations.
Northwest Center for Livable Communities
The Northwest Center’s mission is to enhance the livability of communities in the Pacific Northwest through applied research and outreach in the areas of land use planning, policy, and design; healthy communities; food security; and public participation and democracy.
The Center is a research and policy center focused on issues of environmental and economic sustainability, quality of life, and responsible governance using Washington as a model. Recognizing that the term “livability” has many different definitions and interpretations, the Center’s programs are focused on how the fields of urban planning and design, landscape architecture, and architecture work within this broader context to address livability factors.
The Center operates from the belief that the university should, in cooperation with state agencies, local governments, and community leaders, seek to improve existing social and environmental conditions through research and innovative policy development. It advocates development strategies that focus on smart and efficient land use, strong communities, high-wage, low waste jobs and economic development and public participation and accountability in government.
Institute for Hazards Mitigation Planning and Research
The Institute for Hazards Mitigation Planning and Research is an interdisciplinary academic institute housed in the College of Built Environments. The Institute is dedicated to exploring ways to enhance Community Resilience, through integration of hazards mitigation principles across all aspects of community development. Its mission is to build a resource center that will enhance risk reduction and resilience activities through research and analysis of hazards, policies related to mitigation, and outreach to the community.
The Institute for Hazards Mitigation Planning and Research is dedicated to integrating hazards mitigation principles into a wide range of crisis, disaster, and risk management opportunities. The Institute provides expertise in disaster preparedness, response, and recovery with a special emphasis on mitigation and planning in the promotion of community sustainability. It is interdisciplinary in focus and structure, and the capabilities of the Institute are enhanced by its close relationship with other academic and research organizations. This incorporates collaboration with several other disciplines within the University of Washington.
The Institute’s faculty and researchers are involved in numerous innovative and path-breaking research initiatives with the ultimate goal of enhancing community capacity to anticipate, respond to, cope with, and recover from natural and man-made hazard events.
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.
CBE Spotlight: Heather Burpee
Heather Burpee is a Research Assistant Professor in University of Washington’s Department of Architecture and a director of the Integrated Design Lab in the Center for Integrated Design, located in the Bullitt Center. We sat down with her to discuss her work and research on high-performance buildings. What are your current research interests at the University of Washington? I am a research associate professor in the Department of Architecture, and I work in a small group called the Integrated Design Lab. We focus on ideas around high-performance buildings. What we…
Rebecca J. Walter
Rebecca J. Walter is an Associate Professor and Windermere Endowed Chair in the Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. Dr. Walter’s research is focused on policy innovation in low-income housing. She emphasizes a spatial analytical approach to examine how housing policies either expand opportunity or perpetuate inequality for low-income households. Most of her work is applied as it involves direct engagement with public housing authorities and non-profit housing providers. Dr. Walter also collaborates with criminologists to study spatial-temporal crime patterns across various types of land uses, housing developments, and commercial real estate. She examines real estate and urban planning variables (e.g., private investment, community and economic development initiatives, vacant lots, business activity) and changes in crime over time at the micro-scale (properties and street segments) to help inform policies that support the greatest crime reduction benefits.
Arthur Acolin
Arthur Acolin is an Assistant Professor and Bob Filley Endowed Chair in the Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. He obtained his Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Development from the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California in May 2017. His dissertation, titled “Three Essays on Frictions in Housing Markets” looked at various market imperfections that affect household housing choices and impact their financial outcomes. His field of research is housing economics with a focus on international housing policy and finance. His particular interest is on how housing market institutions and market designs affect household access to housing (tenure choice, housing consumption and mobility decision). Prior to completing his Ph.D. Acolin was a Research Associate in the Real Estate department of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania where he worked on housing, urbanization and economic development issues. He obtained a master in Urban Policy from the London School of Economics and Sciences Po Paris and an undergraduate degree in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.