The 21st Century City: Striving Toward a More Equitable & Sustainable Future

Oswald Schmitz studies the linkage between two important components of natural systems: biodiversity and ecosystem services. These issues are examined using field experimentation guided by formal mathematical theory of species interactions. His research explains how predator and herbivore species determine the species composition and productivity of plants in ecosystems, and ensuing ecosystem processes such as nutrient and carbon cycling. Research also focuses on elucidating how important environmental disturbances, such as global climate change and natural resource exploitation, alter the nature and strength of species interactions in ecosystems and ensuing ecosystem services. The scientific insights aid efforts to conserve vital services that species in ecosystems provide to humankind. His research evaluates how to rethink conservation strategies by considering species as part of a natural portfolio. This portfolio represents a wealth of potential alternatives to contemporary technologically intensive and expensive approaches in environmental management. His book “The New Ecology: Rethinking a Science for the Anthropocene” encapsulates much of his thinking about biodiversity and ecosystems and, heavily inspired by the writings of Aldo Leopold, makes ecological science accessible to a broader readership.

Timothy Papandreou is the founder of Emerging Transport Advisors providing strategic guidance to clients to prepare for the active, shared, electric and automated disruptions to the transport system and broader society. As the former strategic partnerships manager at Google X and Waymo, he collaborated with cross-functional teams to prepare the commercialization and launch of the world's first fully self-driving ride hailing service, while being fully immersed in the technology. Timothy co-founded City Innovate, a smart city platform matching governments and startups to accelerate innovation, and served as the Chief Innovation Officer for San Francisco’s transportation agency.

Professor Schleicher is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School and is an expert in election law, land use, local government law, federalism, state and local finance, municipal bankruptcy, and urban development. His work has been published widely in academic journals, including the Yale Law Journal and the University of Chicago Law Review, as well as in popular outlets like The Atlantic and Slate. His scholarship focuses on state and local elections, the relationship between local government law and agglomeration economics, and pathologies in land use politics and procedure. He has been called “the most important thinker we have on the subject of local government” and “ingenious” by National Review and one of the “most interesting writers on land use” by Washington Monthly. His work has been described as “interesting” by the Nation, “clever” by The Economist, “neat” by Slate, “prescient” by City Observatory, “excellent” by Forbes, and discussed extensively in The Atlantic, National Affairs, Reuters, and a number of other places.

Schleicher was previously an Associate Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law, where he won the university’s Teaching Excellence Award. He has also taught at Georgetown, Harvard, and New York University. He is a 2004 magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School. He also holds an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and an AB in Economics and Government from Dartmouth College.

Dr. Rubin is Associate Professor of Urbanism, with a secondary appointment in American Studies. His work bridges the urban disciplines, focusing on the built environments of nineteenth and twentieth-century cities, the history and theory of city planning, urban geography and the cultural landscape, transportation and mobility, architectural preservation, heritage planning, and the social life of urban space. Rubin is the author of Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape (Yale University Press, 2012) which received Best Book awards from the Urban History Association and the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH). He is co-founder of the documentary film company American Beat and has produced a trilogy of films about social history and cultural landscapes in New Haven, among other projects. As a professor at Yale, he has initiated a range of community-based teaching, research, and representation projects, including “Interactive Crown Street,” the “New Haven Building Archive,” and “Excavating the Armory,” which cultivates public reflection on the preservation and adaptive reuse of the Goffe Street Armory.

Professor Harms is a social-cultural anthropologist specializing in Southeast Asia and Vietnam. His ethnographic research in Vietnam has focused on the social and cultural effects of rapid urbanization on the fringes of Saigon—Ho Chi Minh City. His book, Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), explores how the production of symbolic and material space intersects with Vietnamese concepts of social space, rural-urban relations, and notions of “inside” and “outside.”

More recently, his work has focused on the uses and abuses of “culture” and “urban civility” in urban Vietnam, and how this civilizing discourse entwines with spatial action in ways that legitimize broad-scale privatization. This new research explores how the study of social space can reveal unspoken relationships of power and ideology in post reform-era Vietnamese cities. While grounded ethnographically in Vietnam, his research and teaching seeks at all turns to connect with larger world-historic processes, unraveling the interaction between culture and politics, and the ways in which everyday acts are informed by larger political agendas. Harms offers a rotating mix of courses on Southeast Asian area studies, postwar Vietnam, urban anthropology, as well as theories of space, time, and social action.

Professor Harms is currently completing a three year NSF Funded study of the demolition and reconstruction of the urban landscape in two of Ho Chi Minh City’s New Urban Zones. The research will illuminate how this dramatic urban transformation both responds to and transforms official and popular Vietnamese conceptions of “urban civilization” (văn minh đô thị). In order to understand the symbolic, ideological, and material consequences of “urban civilization,” the project will document physical transformations of urban space in these two New Urban Zones and produce a detailed ethnographic record of how local residents conceive of and respond to those changes.

Dr. Cooney's research uses institutional theory to study the intersection of business and social sectors. Current work focuses on the cross-country comparisons of new social business legal forms, corporate supply chain transparency, social return on investment methods and inclusive economic development strategies in the American city. To understand how hybrid organizations are shaped by commercial and institutional isomorphic pressures, she has studied commercialization in the nonprofit sector, social enterprise, workforce development programs, and the emergence of new social business legal forms. She has also written broadly about market based approaches to poverty alleviation the negotiation of competing institutional logics in social enterprise organizations. Projects underway include CitySCOPE podcast, a series examining inclusive economic development in American Cities (Listen to Season 1 Charting the Opportunity in Opportunity Zones) and a MacMillan Center funded grant titled Consumer Activism and Supply Chain Transparency: Anti-Slavery Movements in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Prior to joining the faculty at Yale SOM, Dr. Cooney was on the faculty at Boston University teaching courses on nonprofit management, urban poverty and economic development, and community and organizational analysis. Kate Cooney currently serves on the Board of Directors of Dwight Hall at Yale, Center for Public Service and Justice.

Christina Rosan, MCP, Ph.D., teaches in the Geography and Urban Studies Department at Temple University. She is particularly interested in how we make cities more sustainable and just. Rosan is the author of Governing the Fragmented Metropolis: Planning for Regional Sustainability (Penn Press, 2016) and a co-editor of Planning Ideas that Matter (MIT Press, 2012). She is the co-author of Growing a Sustainable City: The Question of Urban Agriculture? (University of Toronto Press, 2017), with her colleague, Dr. Hamil Pearsall, about the politics of urban agriculture in Philadelphia. She is writing a co-authored book with Stephen Wheeler from UC Davis tentatively called, Asking Radical Questions about Sustainable Cities. The book aims to provide examples of policies that are working to promote sustainability. She holds a Master’s in City Planning and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT). Rosan is active in the Philadelphia sustainability community and is eager to use research to inform practice.

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is a Professor of Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics. Dr. Mobarak is the founder and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). He holds other appointments at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, the International Growth Centre (IGC) at LSE, and Innovations for Poverty Action.

Dr. Mobarak has several ongoing research projects in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, India, Indonesia, Kenya and Malawi. He conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare improving. He also examines the implications of scaling up development interventions that are proven effective in such trials. His research has been published in journals across disciplines, including Econometrica, Science, The Review of Economic Studies, the American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Demography, and covered by the New York Times, The Economist, Science, NPR, Wired.com, BBC, Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, and other media outlets around the world. He received a Carnegie Fellowship in 2017.

Albert Ko, MD, is a Department Chair and Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and of Medicine (Infectious Diseases); Department Chair, Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases. Dr. Ko’s research centers on the health problems that have emerged as a consequence of rapid urbanization and social inequity. He coordinates a research and training program on urban slum health in Brazil and is conducting prospective community-based studies on rat-borne leptospirosis, dengue, meningitis and respiratory infections. His research particularly focuses on understanding the transmission dynamics and natural history of leptospirosis, which is as a model for an infectious disease that has emerged in slum environments due to the interaction of climate, urban ecology and social marginalization. Current research combines multidisciplinary epidemiology, ecology and translational research-based approaches to identify prevention and control strategies that can be implemented in slum communities. More recently, Dr. Ko and his team has mobilized the public health research capacity at their site in the city of Salvador, Brazil to investigate the on-going outbreak of Zika virus infection and microcephaly. Dr. Ko is also Program Director at Yale for the Fogarty Global Health Equity Scholars Program which provides research training opportunities for US and LMIC post and pre-doctoral fellows at collaborating international sites.

An urban and land change scientist, Karen Seto is one of the world’s leading experts on contemporary urbanization and global change. She uses satellite remote sensing, field interviews, and modeling methods to understand how urbanization will affect the planet, including land change, food systems, biodiversity, and climate change. She has pioneered methods to reconstruct urban land use with satellite imagery and has developed novel methods to forecast urban expansion. She has conducted urbanization research in China for twenty years and in India for more than ten. Dr. Seto has served on numerous national and international scientific bodies. She was a coordinating lead author for the 2022 IPCC 6th Assessment Report and the 2014 IPCC 5th Assessment Report. For both reports she co-led the chapter on urban mitigation of climate change. She currently co-chairs the U.S. National Academies Climate Security Roundtable, established by the direction of Congress to help better understand and anticipate the ways climate change affects U.S. national security interests. She also co-chairs the U.S. National Academies Subcommittee on U.S.- China Scientific Engagement. From 2000 to 2008, she was faculty at Stanford, where she held joint appointments in the Woods Institute for the Environment and the School of Earth Sciences. She has received many awards for her scientific contributions, including the Outstanding Contributions to Remote Sensing Research Award from the American Association of Geographers.

Dr. Seto is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and a Fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received a PhD in Geography from Boston University.

Sara Smiley Smith, Ph.D. works to cultivate a community of engaged problem solvers seeking solutions to a diverse set of environmental challenges. She received her Ph.D. from F&ES in 2016, and completed the joint master’s degree program between the School of Epidemiology and Public Health and F&ES in 2007. Her doctoral work explored the process of envisioning and instituting complex changes motivated by sustainability within institutions, exploring both accelerators and barriers. Sara holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies with a concentration in Political Science from Middlebury College (2004). She spent her childhood on the remnants of her family’s dairy farm in the small town of Winslow, Maine.

Before to moving to the GSD in 2011, Davis served as the head of the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where she also had a term as Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. Trained as a sociologist, Davis’s research interests include the relations between urbanization and national development, comparative urban governance, socio-spatial practice in conflict cities, urban violence, and new territorial manifestations of sovereignty. Her books include Transforming Urban Transport (with Alan Altshuler) (Oxford University Press, 2018), Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Conflicts in the Urban Realm (Indiana University Press, 2011), Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2004; named the ASA’s 2005 Best Book in Political Sociology), Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Temple University Press 1994; Spanish translation 1999).
A prior recipient of research fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Heinz Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the United States Institute for Peace, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Davis recently authored a study of Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence, prepared for USAID, which examines the coping and adapting strategies adopted by citizens and authorities to push back against violence in seven cities around the world. She has just completed two separate initiatives, for which she was Principal Investigator: a three year project funded by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (VREF) focused on the role of political leadership in transforming urban transport and a three year project funded by Mexico’s national workers’ housing agency (INFONAVIT) oriented toward developing more sustainable social housing policies for Mexican cities. Founder and curator of the Mexican Cities Initiative at Harvard’s GSD, Davis is Chair of the David Rockefeller Center’s Faculty Committee on Mexico, member of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA) Executive Committee, and a contributing editor for the US Library of Congress, Handbook of Latin American Studies (Sociology: Mexico). She has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Planning Education and Research, City and Community, and the Journal of Latin American Studies.