Specialization: Land Use and Environmental Planning
ys@email.unc.edu
319 New East
919-962-4761

Accepting PhD students

Dr. Yan Song’s research interests include low carbon and green cities, plan evaluation, land use development and regulations, spatial analysis of urban spatial structure and urban form, land use and transportation integration, and how to accommodate research in the above fields by using planning supporting systems, such as GIS and other computer-aided planning tools.

Dr. Song’s current research projects address domestic and international issues in the areas of impetus of urbanization and urban growth, tools of low carbon and green city developments, efficacy of land and housing markets, effects of urban growth management regulations, and integration of urban land use and transportation plans. Song’s current research projects also document the evolution of China’s urban land and housing policies and urban spatial structure in the era of China’s transition toward a market economy. She directs the Program on Chinese Cities (PCC), a new initiative within DCRP and the Center for Urban & Regional Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. PCC conducts research and training aimed at better understanding the impacts of rapid urban growth on China’s built and natural environments and explores ways to make this process more equitable, transparent, and socially and ecologically sustainable. Dr. Song’s research projects have been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Dr. Song has served as a Research Affiliate at the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland and a Faculty Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. She has also served as a consultant on urban planning for the city government of Shenzhen, and a consultant on land use and transportation integration for Beijing Municipal Institute of City Planning and Design in China. For more recent and frequent updates on her research projects in Chinese, click here.

 

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Affiliations: Center for Urban and Regional Studies, Program on Chinese Cities

Specialization: Housing and Community Development
quercia@email.unc.edu
315 New East
919-962-4766

Accepting PhD students

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Affiliations: Center for Community Capital, Center for Urban and Regional Studies

Specialization: Transportation Planning
noreen@unc.edu
206 New East
919-962-4781

Accepting PhD students

 

Professor McDonald’s work focuses on how infrastructure investments and technology changes influence travel and the downstream impacts on road safety and public health. She is an internationally-recognized expert on the travel behavior of youth and young adults. Her work on children’s travel has shown that improved pedestrian and bicycle facilities can increase travel by foot and she has documented how to improve school planning through coordination with land use planning. She has assessed the causes of changes in driving in the US and UK especially among young adults. Her most recent work explores the impacts of rising small package delivery on road safety and looks at how to improve access to healthcare.

McDonald is currently working on several projects including:

• identifying strategies to improve non-emergency medical transport especially for groups with low transport mobility,
• measuring trends in injury rates for parcel delivery drivers,
• examining how development approval processes can better anticipate and provide for delivery needs,
• analyzing the travel of young adults, i.e. the millennial generation, to understand the potential transport and energy impacts, and
• assessing the multi-modal costs of school transportation.

 

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Affiliations: Carolina Transportation Program, Center for Urban and Regional Studies

Specialization: Land Use and Environmental Planning
bendor@unc.edu
304 New East & 231B Davis Library (Odum Institute)
919-843-5990

Accepting PhD students

 

Dr. Todd BenDor is the Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Community Design in the Department of City and Regional Planning and the UNC Institute for the Environment. He is the Director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Sciences. Dr. BenDor’s research and teaching focus on improving our understanding of the impacts that human activities and development can have on sensitive ecological and environmental systems. His research uses qualitative, statistical, and simulation modeling methods to improve: 1) implementation of environmental markets, such as those used domestically to improve water quality and protect and restore wetlands 2) our understanding of the environmental impacts of urban growth and change 3) policies aimed at urban resilience, including floodplain buyouts and flood insurance 4) how we approach and engage in environmental conflict resolution.

 

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Affiliations: Center for Urban and Regional Studies, Program on Chinese Cities, Institue for the Environment, Odum Institute ‏, Environment – Ecology & Energy Program (E3P)

Specialization: Land Use and Environmental Planning
nkaza@unc.edu
314 New East
919-962-4767

 

Dr. Kaza works at the intersection of urbanization patterns, local energy policy, and equity. He takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying how institutional innovations help or hinder cities, how organizations achieve their energy and environmental goals, and how these innovations might have a differential impact on different groups. Lately, he has been wrangling large spatial and non-spatial datasets to better understand how urban systems and institutions co-evolve in different parts of the world.

His larger intellectual project is to strengthen the foundational justifications of planning. Understanding how, when, and why multiple agents endowed with distributed authority, capabilities, and limited foresight plan challenges the conventional wisdom that plans are blueprints of the future made by governments. In urban settings, these agents are governments, private firms, organizations, coalitions, and ephemeral groups. We can only understand the efficacy of planning in the networks of mutual commitments of these agents.

Other hallmarks of his research program are the use of large datasets and cheap computational power to explore salient questions associated with urban systems. For example, he has developed an urban growth pattern monitoring program for all of the conterminous United States using LandSat satellite imagery. Using high resolution employment and transportation datasets, he also examines the relationship between economic opportunity, travel accessibility, and environmental impacts. He is currently developing machine learning algorithms to identify and characterize irregular settlements in India using high-resolution satellite imagery. A recent collaboration with private sector partners and colleagues at other universities examines how to create water conservation programs using high-resolution (temporal) data from smart meters. These projects directly feed into a critical examination of the “smart city” concept.

Dr. Kaza’s interdisciplinary training in architecture, mathematics, and planning allows him to enjoy fruitful collaborations with researchers from different fields, including economics, computer science, civil engineering, geography, and political science. His research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Institute for Market Transformation, World Bank, the Urban Institute ,and Omidiyar Network, among others. He joined UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of City and Regional Planning in 2009 after doing post-doctoral training at the University of Maryland and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois.

In addition to his work, he enjoys rock climbing, squash, skiing, and mountain biking. The Triangle area provides excellent opportunities to pursue most of these interests.

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Schedule an Appointment

To schedule an appointment with Dr. Kaza, please use his calendar. 

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Affiliations: Carolina Transportation Program, Center for Community Capital, Center for Urban and Regional Studies, Institue for the Environment, Environment – Ecology & Energy Program (E3P)