Eugenie L. Birch
Biography
A.B., Bryn Mawr College
M.S.U.P., Columbia University
Ph.D., Columbia University
Professor Birch is the Lawrence C. Nussdorf Chair of Urban Research and Education. She teaches courses in community and economic development as well as planning history.
Professor Birch has been active in the field's professional organizations and in academia in the United States and abroad. In 2000, she was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners and made a member (honorary) of the Royal Town Planning Institute. She is a member of the Planning Accreditation Board, having served as its chair from 2004-2006. She has been President of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning; President, Society of American City and Regional Planning History; and co-editor, Journal of the American Planning Association. She serves on the executive committee of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and of the International Planning History Society.
She is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Journal of Planning History, Planning Theory and Practice and Planning Perspectives.
She has been Visiting Scholar, Queens University, Foreign Scholar, University of Hong Kong and Visiting Professor, University of the Witswatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
The Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning has given her the Margarita McCoy Award, "in recognition of her outstanding contribution to furthering the advancement of women in the planning academy" (1994) and the Jay Chatterjee Award for Distinguished Service that "recognizes an individual whose exceptional service, actions and leadership have had a lasting and positive impact on the ACSP"(2006).
Professor Birch's civic commitments include serving on the board of trustees of the Municipal Art Society of New York and Scenic Hudson, Inc. In the early 1990s she was a member of the City Planning Commission, New York City and in 2002, she served on the jury to select the designers for the World Trade Center site.
Work/Research
Projects include: co-editor, Journal of the American Planning Association, Centennial Issue (2009), co-editor of special issue, Annals of American Academy of Social & Political Science (2007), held in conjunction with the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences; Urban Design After the Age of Oil, conference organizer with PennDesign and PennIUR (2008); and Globalization in the 21st Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), publication of proceedings of the Innovation for an Urban World, A Global Urban Summit, Bellagio, Italy, 2007.
Publications
Professor Birch has published widely in planning history and contemporary urban revitalization. In 2009, Routledge published the Urban and Regional Planning Reader (that she edited) and the International City/County Management Association and the American Planning Association issued Local Government Planning or the "Green Book" (co-edited with Gary Hack, Paul Sedway and Mithcell Silver). Other recent books are Growing Greener Cities, Urban Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century (2008) and Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster, Lessons from Hurricane Katrina (2006), both edited with Susan M. Wachter. Mitchell Silver).
Dr. Birch is currently developing a book based on research published in "Hopeful Signs:Urban Revitalization in the 21st Century" (Gregory K. Ingram and Yu-Hung Hong, eds., Issues in Urban Development, 2007), "Special Report on Anchor Institutions (The Next American City, 2007), and "Who Lives Downtown?" (The Brookings Institution, 2005). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Journal of Planning History, Journal of Urban History and Planning Magazine.
Courses
Dr. Birch teaches Introduction to Planning History and oversees the Doctoral Seminar.Centers & Progams
Dr. Birch is the founding co-Director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research.
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