Spring Speaker Series: Karen Chapple

Public lecture by Dr. Karen Chapple from UC Berkeley entitled “The Urban Displacement Project: Urban Data Science for Policy Change” from 12:00-1:00pm Friday April 5th. Lunch will be provided.

Abstract: The overheating of the housing market, as well as the planning of new infrastructure systems, has led to new interest in understanding neighborhood change, specifically in the form of gentrification and displacement. Researchers have devised online “neighborhood early warning systems,” interactive maps that describe change processes and even predict future transformation. In the San Francisco Bay Area, we launched the Urban Displacement Project (UDP), which characterizes Bay Area neighborhoods (census tracts) according to their experience of gentrification and risk of displacement–and has resulted in significant policy shifts. This talk presents analytics to understand residential, commercial, and industrial displacement and explores the use of big data, open data, and real-time indicators to depict change. Using a critical GIS lens, we examine how new forms of data and analytics may shift policy-making in more – and less – equitable directions.

Karen Chapple, Ph.D., is a Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Chapple, who holds the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Urban Studies, studies inequalities in the governance, planning, and development of regions in the U.S. and Latin America, with a focus on housing and economic development. Her recent books include Planning Sustainable Cities and Regions: Towards More Equitable Development (Routledge, 2015), which won the John Friedmann Book Award from the American Collegiate Schools of Planning; Transit-Oriented Displacement or Community Dividends? Understanding the Effects of Smarter Growth on Communities (with Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, MIT Press, 2019); and Fragile Governance and Local Economic Development: Theory and Evidence from Peripheral Regions in Latin America (with Sergio Montero, Routledge, 2018). She has published recently on a broad array of subjects, including the fiscalization of land use (in Landscape and Urban Planning), urban displacement (in the Journal of Planning Literature and Cityscape), community investment (in the Journal of Urban Affairs), job creation on industrial land (in Economic Development Quarterly), regional governance in rural Peru (in the Journal of Rural Studies), and accessory dwelling units as a smart growth policy (in the Journal of Urbanism). In Fall 2015, she co-founded the Urban Displacement Project, a research portal examining patterns of residential, commercial, and industrial displacement, as well as policy and planning solutions. In 2015, Chapple’s work on climate change and tax policy won the UC-wide competition for the Bacon Public Lectureship, which promotes evidence-based public policy and creative thinking for the public good. Chapple also received the 2017 UC-Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Research in the Public Interest. She received a Fulbright Global Scholar Award for 2017-2018 to explore expanding the Urban Displacement Project to cities in Europe and Latin America, and was a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analytics, Polytechnic University of Madrid, the University of Sydney, the University of Buenos Aires, and the Universidad de los Andes. In 2018-2019, she is serving as the senior faculty advisor in UC-Berkeley’s Division of Data Sciences