City & Regional Planning welcomes Ken Salo, Joshua Muldavin as visiting professors
Theodore B. and Doris Shoong Lee Chair in Real Estate Law and Urban Planning Ken E. Salo and visiting professor Joshua Muldavin bring deep experience and expertise in global urban issues: Muldavin is an Asia expert and Salo focuses on international law and urban governance in racialized subaltern urban collectives in South Africa, Northeast Brazil, and the American Midwest.
Lee Chair Ken Salo is an expert in environmental racism, law and international policy, and justice movements
The Department of City & Regional planning is pleased to announce the appointment of Ken E. Salo as Theodore B. and Doris Shoong Lee Chair in Real Estate Law and Urban Planning for fall 2026. He retired from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in August 2026 as a clinical associate professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, where he taught the courses International Institutions, Law, and Urban Conflicts; Social Inequalities and Planning Practices; and Race, Social Justice, and Cities.
Established by an endowment from Theodore B. “Ted” Lee (1932–2021) and Doris Shoong Lee (1919–2018), founders of the real estate investment firm Urban Land Company, the Lee professorship aims to support work at the intersection of real estate, urban planning, and land use/environmental law. Holders of the Lee Chair teach a joint course between real estate law and urban planning.
Salo is an expert in the areas of environmental racism and justice, law and international environmental policy, global justice movements, international development and planning, and negotiation and conflict management. His current research focuses on, among other topics, international human rights, including food security, water sovereignty, agrarian movements, and sustainable agriculture.
He continues to collaborate with racialized subaltern urban collectives in South Africa, Northeast Brazil, and the American Midwest to redress persistent inequalities and forge trans-local solidarities through a praxis of Building Race and Immigration Dialogs on Global Exclusions (BRIDGE) and Writing Manifestos for Human Urbanisms. He holds both a bachelor of laws and master of laws from the University of Western Cape, University of Cape Town, South Africa.
“I believe students best learn the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to question, imagine and create more just alternate futures when engaged in collaborative dialogue circles with their local and trans-local cultural others,” Salo said.
“I teach a narrative-centered pedagogy so students can uncover the concealed counter-narratives from which to curate persuasive arguments for alternate futures. I seek to create a learning space for critical dialogues to imagine and map existing and emergent modes of more just urban governance.”
This fall at UC Berkeley, Salo will teach a graduate seminar, Topics in City and Metropolitan Planning: International Law and Governance of Urban Conflicts, in which a pluralistic Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL) will be to explore the potential of subordinated sub-state resistance collectives in the Global South to use popular discourses of universal liberal rights in instituting collective norms for resolution of urban conflicts.
Asia expert Joshua Muldavin studies political economy of development
—Stephen J. Collier, Chair, Department of City & Regional Planning
The department is also pleased to welcome Joshua Muldavin as a visiting professor. Muldavin, who holds a PhD in geography from UC Berkeley, is professor of geography, environmental studies, and Asian studies and former chair of social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College. His research and teaching address global political ecology and political economy of development, urbanization, environment, and food and agriculture, with a regional focus on Asia, particularly China, Japan, and the Himalayan Hindu Kush. He is currently writing a book on the environmental, socioeconomic, and geopolitical impacts of China’s contemporary transformation.
Muldavin’s work assesses global resource acquisitions and development conflicts via China’s and Japan’s capital and aid flows to Africa, Latin America, and South/Southeast Asia. He has been the principal investigator on a number of major, multiyear research collaborations: a five-country project on comparative socialist transition funded by the MacArthur Foundation; an NSF-funded project, “Conservation, sustainability and poverty alleviation in the Himalayan Region: Do participatory environmental policies work?”; and a Social Science Research Council–funded project on Japan’s development aid flows to China. This semester, Muldavin will teach CYPLAN 180B Research Capstone Seminar in Urban Studies: Global Urbanization—Cities in the 21st Century.
“Ken and Joshua bring a wealth of experience and expertise in areas that are of great interest to our students — from international environmental law to urbanization and urban justice movements in diverse global contexts,” said Department of City & Regional Planning Chair Stephen J. Collier. “We are delighted that they are joining us for this academic year.”