Karen Chapple

Karen Chapple, Ph.D., is the Director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto, where she also serves as Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning. She is Professor Emerita of City & Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as department chair and held the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Urban Studies. Chapple studies inequalities in the planning, development, and governance of regions in the U.S. and Latin America, with a focus on economic development and housing. 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 use of big data to predict gentrification (in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science), the impact of big tech on local housing markets (in Economic Development Quarterly), the fiscalization of land use (in Landscape and Urban Planning), urban displacement (in the Journal of Planning Literature and Cityscape), competition in the electric vehicle industry (in Local Economy), 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 served as the senior faculty advisor in UC-Berkeley’s Division of Data Sciences, and from 2019-2021 was an affiliated faculty member at Berkeley’s School of Information. Chapple holds a B.A. in Urban Studies from Columbia University, an M.S.C.R.P from the Pratt Institute, and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. She has served on the faculties of the University of Minnesota and the University of Pennsylvania, in addition to UC Berkeley. From 2006-2009, she held the Theodore Bo and Doris Shoong Lee Chair in Environmental Design. She is a founding member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Building Resilient Regions. Prior to academia, Chapple spent ten years as a practicing planner in economic development, land use, and transportation in New York and San Francisco.

Publications 

Chapple, Karen and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris. 2019. Transit-Oriented Displacement? Understanding the Effects of Smarter Growth on Communities. Cambridge: MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/transit-oriented-displacement-or-communit...

Montero, Sergio and Karen Chapple. 2018. Fragile Governance and Local Economic Development: Theory and Evidence from Peripheral Regions in Latin America. Oxford, UK: Routledge.

Chapple, Karen, and Jae Sik Jeon. 2021. “Big tech on the block: Examining the impact of tech campuses on local housing markets in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Economic Development Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912424211036180

Chapple, Karen, Ate Poorthuis, Matthew Zook, and Eva Phillips. 2021. “Monitoring streets through tweets: Using user-generated geographic information to predict gentrification and displacement.” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F23998083211025309