Research

My lab investigates how the structure, function, and governance of urban social-ecological systems shape the distribution of environmental benefits and risks across cities. We use spatial analysis, GIS, remote sensing, and increasingly machine learning to ask how cities can become more sustainable, just, and resilient in the face of climate change, rapid urban growth, and persistent social inequity. Most of our fieldwork is in Philadelphia, with comparative and global work in collaboration with partners across the United States and Europe. Across all four themes, we attend to how environmental burdens and benefits are distributed along lines of race, income, and historical disinvestment.

Research themes

Urban form, heat, and air quality

Urban Structure and the Environment

How does the way buildings, vegetation, and pavement combine at the block scale shape what residents breathe and the heat they experience? With colleagues in Berlin, Leipzig, and Philadelphia, we developed the Structure of Urban Landscapes (STURLA) classification to capture three-dimensional urban form, and now use it across cities to ask how composition shapes temperature, air quality, and ecological function.

Spatial data, AI, and community knowledge

Urban Flooding and Green Infrastructure

Urban flooding is becoming more frequent and severe under climate change, with disproportionate consequences for socially vulnerable communities. With civil engineering colleagues at Villanova and transportation researchers across the country, we ask how cities can use spatial data, community knowledge, and AI to plan stormwater and adaptation strategies that are both effective and equitable.

Community gardens and the right to urban space

Community Gardens and the Urban Commons

Vacant land is a persistent structural feature of US cities. Rather than treating vacancy as failure, we conceptualize urban vacant land as a generative space in which communities exercise creative rights, most visibly through community gardens and urban agriculture. As founding member and technical lead of the Philadelphia Garden Data Collaborative, my lab builds and maintains the only authoritative GIS dataset of active community gardens in Philadelphia.

Parks, urban nature, and the social-ecological framing of cities

Urban Ecosystem Services and Wellbeing

Urban ecosystem services have framed my program from the start. With collaborators across the United States and Europe, my lab studies who benefits from urban green space and on what terms: access to parks, the everyday interactions between people and urban nature, and the foundational social-ecological framing that anchors the rest of the research program.