Urban Issues

Michael Southworth's recent co-authored book is titled Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities (Island Press, Second Edition, 2003). His research interests include: new forms of urban public space, the evolving form of the American metropolis, urban design theory and analysis, environmental interpretation and the design of educative environments, and environmental mapping. His work has included planning and design for the Lowell Urban National Cultural Park, the Boston Discovery Network, the Detours children's guide to the Boston Subways, the Oakland Explorers program, and the Smart Maps project. Other relevant publications include “The Evolving Metropolis: Studies of Community, Neighborhood and Street Form at the Urban Edge” and “Landscapes for Learning: Studies in Environmental Interpretation and Exploration”, both publications of IURD (1992). Southworth has also published “Wastelands in the Evolving Metropolis” (IURD 2001)

Ananya Roy is the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and co-editor of Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America (Lexington Books, 2004). Her current research project is entitled Povertyscape: The New Global Order of Aid, Debt, and Development (Routledge, forthcoming). The project has already received several prestigious awards including the Hellman Faculty Award and the Prytanean Faculty Award, the latter being a research and leadership award given to one junior woman faculty member on the UC Berkeley campus each year. Roy teaches in the fields of comparative urban studies and international development. She currently serves as chair of the undergraduate Urban Studies major.

City planning professor David Dowall assumed leadership of the IURD in 2004. He has worked with IURD since joining the Berkeley faculty in 1976. Over the years, his research has focused on both domestic and international land management, housing policy, economic development strategy and infrastructure planning and finance. Internationally, Dowall has carried out policy research and designed technical and financial assistance strategies for cities and regions in over 40 countries. Although he is known for his empirical and analytical work on urban land economics and infrastructure finance, he has spent over 20 years working with governments and nongovernmental organizations on neighborhood and urban development projects. He is author of Spatial Transformation in Cities of the Developing World: Multinucleation and Land-Capital Substitution in Bogota, Colombia (IURD, 1990).

A specialist in developing indicators for urban sustainability, Judith Innes’ research includes collaborative processes in urban planning and land-use decisions. Relevant books include: Knowledge and Public Policy: The Search for Meaningful Indicators (Transaction Books, 1990), Indicators for Sustainable Communities: A Strategy Building on Complexity Theory and Distributed Intelligence (IURD, 1999) and Metropolitan Development as a Complex System: A New Approach to Sustainability.

John Landis' recent research has focused on a wide variety of housing and growth policy issues, including transportation and land use, housing production and affordable housing, the environmental impacts of urban growth, and the extent and causes of urban sprawl. His article, "Imagining Land Use Futures," won the 1995 award for best feature article in the Journal of the American Planning Association. He has also published a number of book chapters on the use of GIS in urban planning, including “Using GIS to Improve Urban Activity and Forecasting Models: Three Examples”(with Ming Zhang) in Spatial Models and GIS: New Potential and New Models (Taylor-Francis, London, 2000). He is Chair of the Department City and Regional Planning, where he teaches courses in planning history, housing, project development, land use planning, and computer mapping.

Manuel Castells was one of the intellectual founders of what came to be known as the New Urban Sociology. His main publications in this field are The City and the Grassroots, a comparative study of urban social movements and community organizations based on his field work in France, Spain, Latin America, and California, that received the C.Wright Mills Award in 1983, and The Informational City (Blackwell, 1989), an analysis of the urban and regional changes brought about by information technology and economic restructuring in the United States. In 1983 Castells undertook the study of economic and social transformations associated with the information technology revolution. The results of this work were published in his trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Blackwell): 1st volume, The Rise of the Network Society (1996, revised edition 2000); 2nd volume, The Power of Identity (1997); 3rd volume, End of Millennium (1998, revised edition 2000). The trilogy is translated into Spanish, French, Swedish, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Croatian, Bulgarian, Turkish, and German. In 1998, Manuel Castells received the Robert and Helen Lynd Award from the American Sociological Association for his lifelong contribution in the field of community and urban sociology.