I am a German-American environmental urbanist who believes in the crucial importance of “getting cities right.” My current focus is on urban naturescapes and ecological restorYation.
You can access my faculty web page at Soka University of America here.
My work seeks to meaningfully contribute to the creation of more socially just and environmentally sustainable human settlements. My experience combines decades of environmental advocacy and consulting for non-profits and major international institutions such as UN Habitat and the World Bank with an even longer transatlantic career in research and academic teaching. My main academic background is in urban planning and policy development but I have additional graduate training in international affairs and urban design. The broad unifying question in my scholarship is the creation of sustainable and equitable human settlements – and how these are defined in different geographical contexts.
For a long time, my core emphasis was on the key role different transportation infrastructures play in shaping cities and regions. The high-carbon footprint created by sprawling, automobile-oriented cities has negative repercussions for all 21st-century life on this planet. I served on the UN Habitat Academic Advisory Board for the 2009 and 2011 Global Reports on Sustainable Cities and Climate Change and wrote the Gender and Transport Background Study for the 2013 Global Report on Sustainable Transport.
I am also a passionate advocate of “active” non-motorized transportation (i.e. biking & walking) and have published important internationally comparative studies on high-speed rail, rail stations, intermodal transport and paratransit. I typically employ qualitative social science methods with a focus on in-depth case study research.
My writings and teachings are also frequently infused and intertwined with my personal place-based experiences. I spent the majority of the 1990s as a graduate student and bike activist in New York City. When I moved back to my native Germany in the early 2000s, I became fascinated with the rapid urban change that its capital Berlin was undergoing post-reunification. Los Angeles, meanwhile, will always be part paradise and part dystopia. As a region, Southern California clearly continues to fail to adequately and equitably respond to climate change-related threats such as sea-level rise, droughts, and heightened fire threats while important socioeconomic stressors such as housing cost and congestion remain high on locals’ list of worries.
There are no easy solutions to any of these challenges, of course. As a comparative urbanist and planning theorist, I have sought to step away from simple normative definitions to focus instead on re-problematizing many of the concepts and categories planners often take as given (e.g. “sustainability” “rationality” “global cities” “gentrification” “nature”). I frequently rely on discourse analytical strategies to highlight the complexities of local and regional planning and policy controversies.
More recently, I have begun to trace debates over the unequal access to and awareness of “nature” in the city as well as new directions in outdoor education and the design of natural playscapes. I understand urban environmentalism as a rebalancing act that sees and seeks to reestablish diverse forms of nature in the metropolitan realm, foregrounding efforts towards ecological resilience with a strong awareness of the habitat needs of many different humans and other species. During my recent sabbatical, I started work on a monograph tentatively titled “The Spliced City” that explores the complex dimensions of what I call “ecological restor(y)ation.” My initial focus was on the controversies over the restoration of the coastal Ballona Wetlands adjacent to my current home in Los Angeles and on the recently completed renaturalization of the Emscher river in my German hometown of Dortmund.
I published my award-winning dissertation, Planning for a Sustainable Europe, as a monograph with the Technical University of Berlin back in 2006. Since then, I have published ten co-edited books on a wide variety of planning-related subjects, along with a multitude of journal articles, book chapters, major research reports and other diverse writings in English and German. Most of them are hyperlinked on the ‘Publications’ tab of this page. Alternatively, try my ResearchGate,GoogleScholar or ORCID pages. More recently, I have gravitated to ArcGIS StoryMaps to engage in more multi-medial, multi-sensory environmental (geo)storytelling. Another aim for my future work is to foster truly interdisciplinary collaborations across the sciences, humanities as well as the creative and performing arts. A recent example of this is the “Listening to Ballona” Symposium and Sound Installation I co-organized with the composer and sound artist Daniel Rothman at SUA in early 2025.
