PACIFIC RIM URBAN RESILIENCE BY DESIGN Faculty
This 4-year multi-disciplinary project is a collaboration with the University of Hong Kong at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design. Below are faculty who are engaged in the collaborative research studio addressing urban resilience in Hong Kong and the San Francisco Bay Area as part of this project.
The University of Hong Kong Faculty
Cecilia Chu
Cecilia L. Chu is Assistant Professor in the Division of Landscape Architecture at the University of Hong Kong, where she teaches urban theory, urban design, and architectural and landscape history. Dr. Chu worked as a professional designer in Canada and Hong Kong and research consultant for several NGOs focusing on urban design and conservation strategies. Her areas of expertise include history and theory of architecture and urbanism, heritage conservation, urban design, and cultural landscapes in Asia. Her articles have been published in a number of anthologies and leading academic journals, including Journal of Historical Geography, Urban Studies, Geoforum, Habitat International, Planning Perspectives, Design Issues, and Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review. Full Bio.
Ashley Scott Kelley
Ashley Scott Kelly is an educator and expert in landscape planning and geographic information systems at the University of Hong Kong. His research and practice focus on scenario-building and filling knowledge gaps for environmental conservation and sustainable development in data-poor regions. He applies landscape and architecture design methods to land change and landscape ecology, with wide expertise on the manipulation of geospatial data for the study, advocacy, design and delivery of projects in ecologically complex and contested landscapes. Recent works include design guidelines for tropical road infrastructure, corridor modelling for wildlife crossing design, and a Development and Conservation Awareness Map for southern Myanmar. Key professional works range widely in scale, from new town planning to the winning entry for New York City’s 46,000-acre Gateway National Park. Ashley coordinated the Masters thesis in landscape architecture for three years and teaches design courses on regional landscape planning, infrastructure planning and design and rural development in China, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Full Bio.
Michael Kokora
Michael Kokora is an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and teaches in the Master of Architecture and Landscape Architecture programs where he has been working to develop alternative landscape development visions in Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Myanmar. He is a partner at OBJECT TERRITORIES where he leads the office together with Marcus Carter and Miranda Lee. Recent projects include an urban Greenway and Masterplan for the city of St. Louis, a park and market in Da Nang, Vietnam, a masterplan for revitalizing the Erie Canal in New York, a landscape masterplan for downtown Oakland in California, a museum and Masterplan in South Korea, a museum in Lithuania, and a winery in northern China. Prior to founding OBJECT TERRITORIES, Michael was a partner at OMA and led the office’s work in Asia. Michael’s past projects include a number of masterplanning, landscape, high-rise, residential, and cultural projects in Hong Kong, China, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Qatar, France, and the United States. Michael holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Minnesota and a Master of Architecture degree from the Yale School of Architecture where he received the Eero Saarinen Memorial Scholarship for design. Full Bio.
Eric Schuldenfrei
Eric Schuldenfrei is an Associate Dean in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. Receiving his PhD from the University of Cambridge, he has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and the Architectural Association. His most recent book, The Films of Charles and Ray Eames: A Universal Sense of Expectation, focuses on architecture, politics, cinema, and education. Schuldenfrei served as the Curator of Exhibition, Education, Film, and Media for the 2009 Hong Kong & Shenzhen Biennale and has presented his work at DLD in Moscow on the topic of Future Cities, at the V&A museum, Harvard University AsiaGSD series, the University of Cambridge, and the Royal College of Art in London. Together with Marisa Yiu, Schuldenfrei founded ESKYIU – a multi-disciplinary architecture studio integrating culture, art, community and technology. Full Bio.
Ivan Valin
Ivan Valin is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Landscape Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. His ongoing research and design is seated in a multidisciplinary background and explores urban and environmental design at the intersections of strategy, technology, and detail. Valin’s design work has been exhibited internationally with the National Building Museum, Housing for Humanity, the International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam, and the Hong Kong and Shenzhen Biennale. Ivan received his B.S. with distinction in Architecture from the University of Virginia and his professional degrees (M.Arch & MLA) form the University of California, Berkeley, where he was the recipient of the G. Hoshi Prize and the J.K. Branner Travelling Fellowship. Ivan has worked for more than ten years in private practice, most recently as a designer with Tom Leader Studio in Berkeley California and AECOM Planning and Design in Hong Kong where he frequently addressed ideas of urban and ecological intervention, hydrological frameworks, and ‘open’ programming. Full Bio.
Chris Webster, Dean
Prof. Chris Webster has degrees in urban planning, computer science, economics and economic geography and is a leading urban theorist and spatial economic modeller. He has published over 150 scholarly papers on the idea of spontaneous urban order and received over US$20M grants for research and teaching and learning projects. He was co-editor of Environment and Planning B for ten years. Books include Webster and Lai (2003) Property Rights, Planning and Markets, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar; Glasze, Webster and Frantz, (2006) Private Cities, London, Routledge; Wu, Webster, He and Liu, (2010) Urban Poverty in China, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar; and Wu and Webster (Editors) Marginalisation in Urban China. London: Palgrave McMillan; and Sarkar, Webster and Gallacher (2014) Healthy Cities: Public Health Through Urban Planning. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Professor Webster has five prize-winning academic papers on urban theory. His present professional mission is to change the way cities are planned in China and his current research agenda is to establish systematic evidence for the relationship between urban configuration (planned and spontaneous) and individual health. Full Bio.
College of Environmental Design Faculty
Renee Chow
Renee Chow is Chair of the Department of Architecture at CED and Professor of Architecture and Urban Design. Both her practice and her research focus on the intersection between architecture and its locale. One problem for contemporary design is to link the structure of the city and landscape with its individual pieces — to design how each affects and is affected by the other. In making pieces of our cities — highways and streets, parks and buildings — our current architectural culture too often strives for a degree of formal autonomy from surrounding circumstances. The experience of a city becomes a cacophony of competing markers. The local experiences of neighborhood textures, district orientations, and collective practices of dwelling disappear as our design practices increasingly lose the tools to make them. Urban challenges of the 21st century — increasing density, reducing resource consumption, and intensifying urban diversity — require solutions that are locally rooted. Professor Chow has developed analytic and generative design tools for integrating urban and architectural systems across sites and individual buildings. These tools are directed toward encoding and extending local conditions, increasing urban legibility and identity, differentiating agency and time, embedding resource strategies at a community scale and facilitating design collaboration. To re-shape the discourse about the forms of urbanism both in suburbs and cities, Professor Chow has written Suburban Space: The Fabric of Dwelling (2002) and Changing Chinese Cities: The Potentials of Field Urbanism (2015). Full Bio.
Nicholas de Monchaux
Nicholas de Monchaux is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), an architectural and urban history of the Apollo Spacesuit, winner of the Eugene Emme award from the American Astronautical Society and shortlisted for the Art Book Prize, and Local Code: 3,659 Proposals About Data, Design, and the Nature of Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016). With Kathryn Moll, he is principal of Modem. His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Biennial of the Americas, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Lisbon Architecture Triennial, SFMOMA, and the Chicago MCA. de Monchaux received his B.A. with distinction in Architecture, from Yale, and his Professional Degree (M.Arch.) from Princeton. Prior to his independent practice, he worked with Michael Hopkins & Partners in London, and Diller, Scofidio + Renfro in New York. de Monchaux's work has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Hellman Family fund, the Macdowell Colony, the Santa Fe Institute, and the Smithsonian Institution. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Full Bio.
Iryna Dronova
Iryna Dronova is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architexture and Environmental Planning at CED. Her research investigates diverse aspects of landscape ecology and its potential to inform sustainable, multi-functional landscape-designs, and decision-making in environmental planning. Her work combines field ecological methods with remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial analysis to perform analyses of multi-scale structure of ecosystems, to facilitate scaling of ecological processes from local to regional levels and to develop remote sensing-based monitoring approaches for vulnerable areas and sites with limited field access. Full Bio.
Paz Gutierrez
Paz Gutierrez is a registered architect and researcher focused on nature and multifunctional material organizations. In 2008 she founded BIOMS, a new interdisciplinary research initiative intersecting architecture and sciences as bioengineering to integrate principles of design and biophysics. BIOMS develops next-generation material systems through funded research on biologically inspired technologies developed in collaboration with bioengineering and civil/environmental engineering. She is recipient of various research grants from organizations such as the National Science Foundation, DOE, and EPA in the area of sustainable building systems innovation. Full Bio.
Kristina Hill
Kristina Hill is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at CED. Professor Hill studies urban ecology and hydrology in relationship to physical design and social justice issues. Her primary area of work is in adapting urban districts and shorezones to the new challenges associated with climate change. In the past, she helped to develop new ideas for urban water system design that support salmon health in the Pacific Northwest. Her involvement as a citizen in urban system advocacy led her to serve as the head of a transit agency in Seattle, after helping to found that agency as a volunteer board member. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she became a member of the Dutch-American engineering and design team that developed New Orleans water management strategy. She continues to collaborate internationally to understand the potential for designs to help protect coastal communities as sea levels rise. Professor Hill currently focuses her research on adaptation and coastal design in the San Francisco Bay Area, but engages in comparative studies in the US Mid-Atlantic, Europe, and Hawaii. Professor Hill lectures internationally on urban design and ecology. Before coming to Berkeley, she served as chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Virginia. Her book, Ecology and Design: Frameworks for Learning, was published by Island Press in 2002, and her current book project proposes adapting urban waterfronts to climate change while incorporating productive ecosystems. Full Bio.
Elizabeth Macdonald
Elizabeth Macdonald is Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning and Professor of City and Regional Planning at CED. Macdonald studies public space design, with a focus on challenging long-standing and entrenched street design standards and norms that prioritize motorized vehicle movement over other uses, the evaluation of implemented urban design plans and projects, and designing for livability and environmental responsibility. Her recent book, entitled Urban Waterfront Promenades (Routledge, 2017), presents 38 promenade case studies, analyzing their physical form, social use, the circumstances under which they were built, the public policies that brought them into being, and the threats from sea level rise and the responses that have been made. She is also author of Pleasure Drives and Promenades: A History of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Brooklyn Parkways (Center for American Places, 2012), co-author of The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards (MIT Press, 2002), and co-editor of two editions of The Urban Design Reader (Routledge, 2007 & 2013). Full Bio.
Daniel Rodríguez
Daniel A. Rodríguez is Chancellor’s Professor of City and Regional Planning at CED. His research focuses on the relationship between transportation, land development, and the health and environmental impacts that follow. His most recent work focuses on the health and equity impacts of urban transportation policy. In a current project he is examining the impact of transportation innovations (bus rapid transit, aerial trams, protected and unprotected bicycle lane networks) on land markets and development. As a Faculty Affiliate of the Institute for Urban and Regional Development, Rodriguez is currently leading two research projects (totaling $1.1 million) related to urban health inequalities and the built environment in Latin America. In other work he has considered the land value impact of transit investment and the impact of urban form on physical activity and travelling behavior. On a regional scale, he has studied the relationship between regional policies and travel patterns and how plans can be used to strengthen the connection between transportation and land use. A majority of Professor Rodríguez’s work is driven by practical problems and finding solutions for planners and policy-makers. Working within the health, nutrition, economics, engineering, geography and public policy disciplines, he has examined how changes to the physical attributes of the environment, such as the location of bus routes, rail lines, supermarkets and trails, are related to changes in physical activity; and how land management tools can be used to encourage transit development and recapture property value increases by public action. Full Bio.
Jennifer Wolch, Dean
Jennifer Wolch is the William W. Wurster Dean of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, and Professor of City and Regional Planning. Her past work 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 proposed strategies for human-animal co-existence in an urbanizing world. Her most recent work 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. Wolch has authored or co-authored over 125 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. Full Bio.