Charisma Acey
Sustainable urbanism in the U.S. and the developing world; environmental justice; environmental behaviors and governance; water and sanitation infrastructure; food systems planning and food security, political economy of poverty reduction and access to basic services; social equity and participatory decision making; public participation GIS and spatial analysis.
Charisma Acey is an associate professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Her background includes work, research and travel to countries in West Africa, southern Africa and Central America. Her work focuses on local and regional environmental sustainability, with a focus on poverty reduction, urban governance, environmental justice, food justice and access to basic services. Her work relies on both quantitative and qualitative, community-based research approaches. Current and past research projects, teaching and service learning courses have focused on addressing barriers to sustainable development such as human-environment interactions at multiple scales in urban areas around the world, poverty and participation and voice in local governance and development, the financing and sustainability of publicly provided services and utilities such as water and sanitation, sustainability of local and regional food systems, and environmental justice domestically and globally.
Recent and ongoing research includes fieldwork in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda exploring sustainable household scale alternative energy solutions and access to basic services such as water and sanitation. She also has worked on participatory re-zoning for local healthy food systems, urban agriculture, and sustainability planning in the San Francisco East Bay, Columbus, Ohio, and Portland, Oregon. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Professor Acey was an assistant professor of city and regional planning in the Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University, with a joint appointment with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity where she worked on global food justice issues and mapping geographic differences in resources and opportunities at the metropolitan scale. For more than 20 years, Charisma has supported communities, non-profits, local governments, academia and industry develop interventions that improve equitable social and environmental outcomes for vulnerable, marginalized populations. Her background includes six years of international work as a senior manager for relief and development NGOs working in countries in West Africa, southern Africa and Central and South America. She has also served as a U.S. State Department Fellow in Malawi and an American Marshall Memorial Fellow to Europe.
CP 291: Graduate Studio - Infrastructure Imaginaries: Informal Urbanism, Creativity and Ecology in Lagos, Nigeria
CP 251 Environmental Planning and Regulation
CP 254 Sustainable Communities
CP 290: Special Topics: The Human Right to Water
CP 119 Planning for Sustainability
CP 291: Graduate Studio - Critical Race Consciousness, Place-Based Storytelling & Research Justice In Community Partnerships
Global Urban Humanities Faculty Fellow Regents Junior Faculty Fellow Hellman Fellow Excellence in Faculty Advising, University of California, Berkeley Faculty Award for Excellence in Community-Based Scholarship, The Ohio State University Service-Learning Initiative
Health Equity Leadership Institute (HELI) Scholar, University of Wisconsin- Madison/National Institutes of Health Julie Roque Environmental Justice Award, UCLA
Department of Urban Planning Certificate of Recognition, City of Inglewood, California, Cultural Arts Master Plan Task Force
Revisioning Weinland Park: Volume 2 Design for the Local Food in the Public Realm. Vol. 2. Edited by: Jones, Kay Bea. OSU Knowlton School of Architecture and International Poverty Solutions Collaborative. 2011. With K. Bennett, J. Boswell, K. Jones, R. Kemper, R. Love, J. Orban, M. Sabini, and E. Van Til.
The Changing Face of Black America. Kirwan Update. July/August 2010.
Africa’s urban transformation: Signs of opportunity and hope. Huffington Post. February 23. 2010.
Acey, C. 2007. Advocating for Africa’s Urban Poor: Access to Water in Nigerian Cities. The Nigerian Lawyer, September, Fall: pp. 4-5, 23.
Nigeria – The Right to Water: The Role of the Private Sector in Urban Water Sector Reform. In International Planning Case Studies (IPCS) project. University of Michigan and University of Colorado Denver. eds. Hoey, L., Rumbach, A., Shake, J. (2016).
Acey, C. 2020. Amid COVID-19, environmental injustice must be recognized, rectified
