Dr. Raymond Burby is professor emeritus in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Burby has research interests in state and local land-use management approaches to natural hazard mitigation, watershed protection, and other environmental problems. His publications deal with these topics, as well as report the results of earlier work on building code enforcement, energy conservation, new community development, and low-income housing.

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Dr. David Brower’s research interests included growth management, coastal zone management, integrating the impacts of natural hazards, sustainable development, and environmental ethics. His students have worked closely with North Carolina officials to revise local hazard mitigation plans. The foundation of the state’s current risk assessment plan, based on research conducted by Dr. Brower and his students, provides valuable information to local planners on the best way to proactively mitigate natural hazards before they strike.

Dr. Brower also had an active planning consulting practice and was admitted to practice law in several states and before the U.S. Supreme Court. He hasdserved as an officer and on the boards of several state and national organizations including the American Planning Association and the Growth Management Institute.

*Deceased.  David John Brower died on December 8, 2018 in Chapel Hill North Carolina. (Obituary)

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Dr. Dale Whittington is a Professor of Environmental Sciences & Engineering, City & Regional Planning, and Public Policy, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since 1986, he has worked for the World Bank and other international agencies on the development and application of techniques for estimating the economic value of environmental resources in developing countries, with a particular focus on water and sanitation and vaccine policy issues. He has designed and carried out valuation studies in Haiti, Guatemala, Mexico, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Pakistan, Nepal, China, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Bulgaria, and Ukraine.

His current research focuses on the following four areas: 1) the development of planning approaches and methods for the design of improved water and sanitation systems for the rapidly growing cities of Asia, 2) the design of municipal water tariffs in developing countries, 3) estimating the economic benefits of vaccines for malaria, typhoid, cholera, and HIV/AIDS, and 4) Nile water management issues. Dr. Whittington is the author (with Prof. Duncan MacRae) of a graduate textbook on public policy analysis, Expert Advice for Policy Choice.

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Affiliations: Center for Urban and Regional Studies

Accepting PhD students

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Affiliations: Center for Urban and Regional Studies

Dr. Danielle Spurlock’s work focuses on plan and policy implementation and addresses policy questions in the areas of planning, public health, environmental and social justice, and dispute resolution. Her research explores the relationships among land use, the environment, human behavior, and structural inequality on a variety of research projects including: social stratification and its impact of the siting of hazardous land uses; social vulnerability and emergency preparedness; and the impact of land use decisions on ecosystems services. Dr. Spurlock’s most recent research investigates plan and policy implementation and the land use decision-making process at the parcel level.

IN THE NEWS

Recognized as a Nancy Weiss Malkiel Scholar

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Affiliations: Center for Urban and Regional Studies

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

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.

In the News

Building resilience for storm-battered N.C.

An Infrastructure Package could help America’s Economy – and the Environment

Agent-Based Modeling of Environmental Conflict

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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)

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.

In the News

Carolina Tracker: A Resource for Recovery

RESPONSE TO THE PANDEMIC: SURVEILLANCE

Making “PUBLIC” Economic Data Accessible

Tackling coronavirus hotspots in city slums hindered by lack of data

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)