Sustainable urbanism, urban design and public health, homeless and human service delivery, animal-society relations.
Jennifer Wolch, Distinguished Professor Emerita of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, is an urban geographer and planner. She has served in various administrative roles, including Chair, USC Department of Geography, Dean of Graduate Programs, USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences; and as William W. Wurster Dean, UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, from 2009 to 2019.
Wolch's past research focused on urban homelessness and the delivery of affordable housing and human services for poor people. She has also studied urban sprawl and alternative approaches to city-building such as smart growth and new urbanism. An early investigator of animal-society relations in cities, she has studied attitudes toward animals, controversial animal practices, and strategies for human-animal co-existence in an urbanizing world. Her most recent research analyzes connections between city form, physical activity, and public health, and develops strategies to address environmental justice issues by improving access to urban parks and recreational resources. In addition, she served as co-director of the UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative/Future Histories Lab, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities program, from 2013-2024.
Wolch has authored, co-authored or co-edited 7 books and over 148 academic journal articles and book chapters. She was also a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study Center, and other prestigious honors.
ED 4C Future Ecologies (with K. Hill and S. Ubbelohde)
ED 198 Leadership in Sustainable Environmental Design
Up Against the Sprawl: Public Policy and the Making of Southern California. J. Wolch, M. Pastor, P. Dreier. University of Minnesota Press. 2004.
Animal Geographies: Place, Politics and Identity in the Nature/Culture Borderlands. J. Wolch, J. Emel. Verso. 1998.
Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City. J. Wolch, M. Dear. Jossey-Bass. 1993.
The Shadow State: Government and Voluntary Sector in Transition. J. Wolch. Foundation Center. 1990.
The Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life. J. Wolch, M. Dear. Unwin Hyman. 1989.
Landscapes of Despair: From Deinstitutionalization to Homelessness. J. Wolch, M. Dear. Princeton. 1987.