I study how various actors shape the "rules of the urban development game," and in turn the relationships between urban planning processes and outcomes. 

Broadly, I study how communities engage, contest, and repurpose urban plans and policies, and the resultant composition of cities, regions, and territories. I draw on mixed-methods research, institutional analysis, urban planning history and theory, and planning law. My research lies at the intersection of public policy, democracy, and equitable urban development, focusing on the everyday local state through on-the-ground institutions of urban planning, housing, land use, and transportation. Geographically, I focus on the United States (and in particular Denver and Colorado), and post-apartheid South Africa.
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A primary strand of research explores demands for "equitable development" in the United States and specifically in Denver and Colorado. I investigate equitable-development opportunities and imperatives through policy debates about housing, land use, and transportation planning projects, and the links between them. I am currently working on research projects about land use as a tool of urban geopolitics and about building-code regulations as a driver of housing affordability challenges, and I recently published an article related to urban planning processes and outcomes along Denver's East Colfax Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor. 

 

An active, second strand of research considers resident tactics of bottom-up accommodation, negotiation, and resistance to apartheid-era spatial planning practice in the post-apartheid era. My dissertation examined one former South African "Bantustan" capital city, a non-white receiving site of widespread forced relocation, Mmabatho and today Mahikeng, North West, South Africa. My Columbia University dissertation, available to read and engage in Columbia Academic Commons here, considered specific tactics of repurposing in Mahikeng. To engage such processes such as repurposing, I draw on institutional analysis and mixed methods including archival research, semi-structured interviews, and a close analytic readings of built sites. I find that residents' responses to public architecture and planning themselves remain subject to contestation, disruption, repurposing, and innovation. These responses of repurposing stem from healing, but also for both universal and contextually specific demands for human dignity, economic equality, and social justice.

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Broadly, my research considers the ways in which land, law, and property condition urban planning, and how planning is embedded, historicized, and institutionalized within specific community contexts, power relations, public policy regimes, and socioeconomic struggles. 

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