Zachary Lamb joins CED as Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Adaptive Urban Transformation

We are excited to welcome Zachary Lamb, an accomplished designer, planner, scholar, and environmentalist, to the CED community. His research focuses on the role of urban planning and design in shaping uneven vulnerability and resilience in the face of climate change. With experience teaching undergraduate and graduate students at MIT, Princeton, and Tulane, Assistant Professor Lamb will teach a variety of courses at CED including urban design studios, the history and theory of urban form, and environmental design research methods. Assistant Professor Lamb will introduce new urban design courses focused on transformational climate adaptation, in alignment with the CED’s commitment to incorporating climate issues in design education.

In 2018, Professor Lamb completed his PhD at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. His dissertation focused on the role of design in shaping urban flood infrastructure and the changing spatial politics of urban flooding through two case study cities, New Orleans, Louisiana and Dhaka, Bangladesh. His current book project, Making and Unmaking the Dry City, focuses on the historical evolution and contemporary problems of flood mitigation in these two cities. After completing his PhD, Professor Lamb was selected to be a Princeton Mellon Fellow in Urbanism and the Environment. Professor Lamb is also the co-founder of Crookedworks, a design-build firm that uses collaborative design and building projects to tackle complex urban challenges, including food security, cross-species living, and climate-change hazards. Professor Lamb completed his Masters of Architecture at MIT in 2010 and received his Bachelors of Art in Art History and Practice and Environmental Studies from Williams College in 2002.

Lamb writes:

“I am delighted to join the DCRP faculty this summer. Over the years, I have learned a tremendous amount from the humanistic urban design research and writing of past and present CED faculty members. I am very excited to be a part of one of the world’s great institutions of public higher education, with its complexity, diversity, and commitment to service. Finally, I expect that the Bay Area will be a generative environment for my teaching and research because many of the most important contemporary challenges of planning and design – from inequality and housing affordability to transportation equity and climate vulnerability – are pressing areas of debate and policy innovation here.

“The posting for my position was entitled ‘assistant professor of urban design for adaptive urban transformation.’ I take the call for “adaptive urban transformation” as a serious personal and collective challenge. The contemporary crises of grotesque inequality, climate change, and, now, global pandemic, make abundantly clear that many of the systems that structure our cities and our lives need to be reimagined and rebuilt. Planners and designers can and should be a part of this transformation.”