In memoriam: Professor Emeritus of City & Regional Planning Michael Teitz, institution builder
The College of Environmental Design was saddened to learn of the death of Professor Emeritus of City & Regional Planning Michael B. “Mike” Teitz, who passed away December 17, 2025, at the age of 90.
In a long and varied career, Teitz served as department chair, rejuvenated the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (serving as president), chaired the UC Berkeley Academic Senate, and helped form the Public Policy Institute of California as a solidly nonpartisan policy research organization, among many other ventures. He was a self-described “institutionalist.” As he explained in a 2017 oral history conducted by the Bancroft Library: “Our institutions are not there by accident; we make them.”
Teitz’s successes, especially as an institution-builder, drew on his incisive intellect, clarity of communication, sense of humor, and unfailing civility and kindness. With his enduring respect for and curiosity about people, Teitz attracted countless students, collaborators, and friends into his extensive and dedicated social network.
He treasured not just this community, but the very notion of community as central to the field of city planning and its quest for a better way for people to live. Nonetheless, he held a deep and abiding conviction that a nonideological and analytical approach needed to coexist with community and idealism in order to plan efficiently and equitably.
His most impactful intellectual contributions helped legitimize planning as a science. Two early papers, “Heuristic methods for estimating the generalized vertex median of a weighted graph” (Teitz and Bart 1968, in Operations Research) and “Toward a theory of urban public facility location” (Teitz 1968, in Papers in Regional Science) addressed problems in location theory. The pieces addressed social equity via rational planning, advancing a theory of how facility location could serve the entire population most efficiently, rather than simply maximizing profit.
LIFE & UC BERKELEY CAREER
Born to a working-class family in East London in 1935, Teitz’s early years were shaped by World War II. He spent five years of his early childhood evacuated to a farm in the town of Thorley (Hertfordshire) while his parents continued working in nearby cities. Channeled into an economics track in high school, he transitioned easily into the London School of Economics.
He came to the U.S. on a Fulbright for a Master of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in geography; subsequently, Walter Isard offered to support his PhD in regional science at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1964, Teitz received one of the first PhDs in that discipline. He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in the Department of City & Regional Planning in 1963.
Teitz soon assumed the role of anchor and consensus builder across a diverse set of faculty and students. For Teitz, one of his most meaningful accomplishments as chair was bringing the first women into the department after the untimely death of Catherine Bauer Wurster (1905–1964).
Teitz helped to reorganize the curriculum into a tripartite structure – physical planning, systems, and policy – with a common core of theory and methods. His scheme eventually evolved into the concentrations that are now prominent in planning pedagogy across North America today. He built a variety of quantitative methods into the curriculum, perhaps most notably the regional compendium, a thick description of regional economies. Working closely with students, he also introduced the first local economic development course. Along the way, Teitz taught most of the courses in the department, concluding with planning history. Teitz served on more than 90 dissertation committees over the course of his career and was one of the most influential planning educators to date.
Teitz was appointed chair of the Academic Senate in 1992–1993. His contributions to campus and the Department of City & Regional Planning earned him the Berkeley Citation upon his retirement from UC Berkeley in 1998.
Working with colleagues from across the U.S., Teitz engineered the establishment of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) as an independent institution and instituted the annual meetings. Teitz served as ACSP president from 1981 to 1983 and won the Distinguished Educator Award in 1998.
PLANNING BEYOND Bauer Wurster hall
Long consulting stints, first working with the Rand Corporation in New York on rent stabilization and then in Saudi Arabia, kept Teitz engaged in applied policy and planning practice. At home in Berkeley, Teitz co-founded Berkeley Planning Associates (with City & Regional Planning colleague Fred Collignon) and played an active role in it for almost two decades.
In 1995, David Lyon (PhD in City & Regional Planning 1972) recruited Teitz to the new Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) to develop its strategic plan. As the inaugural research director, Teitz developed a broad initial program with research on demography, inequality, social policy, education, and public finance, among other areas. In 2004, Teitz stepped down from his leadership role at PPIC, remaining an adjunct senior fellow.
In the early 2000s, he advised the founding administration of UC Merced in the creation of an integrated science and humanities undergraduate program. He served on the board of the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) from 2008 to 2016 and continued advising other state and local planning organizations informally into the 2020s.
Teitz’s life and work touched an extraordinary number of people and institutions. In his oral history, he reflected: “When the world is deeply uncertain, you take nothing for granted. On the other hand, the present is always there, and you act within it, and you deal with it as it comes.” Perhaps his motto, as he frequently exhorted people, was “Carry on.”
Contributed by Karen Chapple (PhD in City & Regional Planning 2000), Professor Emerita of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley and Director of the School of Cities, Professor of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto
A memorial service is being planned by the family for Saturday, March 28, at 2 p.m. in the Bauer Wurster Hall auditorium (room 112). In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in Mike’s memory to the Mechanics’ Institute Library of San Francisco or The Michael B. Teitz Fellowship Fund at UC Berkeley. For the latter, please make checks payable to the UC Berkeley Foundation and send to UC Berkeley Gift Services at 1995 University Avenue, Suite 400, Berkeley, CA 94704-1070. Include “IMO Mike Teitz, FW5403000” in the check memo line.