Faculty Research & Creative Scholarship

Research by Seth Asare Okyere, CAPLA visiting assistant professor of urban planning, and Louis Kusi Frimpong, Matthew Abunyewah and Stephen Kofi Diko, show that digitalization initiatives in Ghana need to take local factors and engagement into account if they’re going to succeed.

Kelly Eitzen Smith supports CAPLA and UArizona in a variety of important roles, from assessment coordinator to research specialist. Learn more about Smith, who worked in the Drachman Institute from 2010 to 2017 and joined the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning in 2017.

Sharon Collinge shares her experiences working at the interface of land use and climate change in the context of building resilient ecosystems and communities in this CAPLA Lecture Series lecture.

A recent paper by Seth Asare Okyere, CAPLA visiting assistant professor of urban planning, and Stephen Kofie Diko, assistant professor at the University of Memphis, argues that the solutions residents in poor, marginalized, informal and crowded urban areas come up with to make everyday urban life livable are a form of social innovation.

CAPLA Heritage Conservation Program Project Director Helen Erickson and graduate students Sarah McDowell and Teresa DeKoker have been instrumental in efforts to preserve Camp Naco, a borderlands Buffalo Soldier camp located near Bisbee, Arizona, resulting in awards for their story map and new funding to preserve the site.

A UArizona team led by CAPLA Assistant Professor Ladd Keith is collaborating with researchers from Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University on a $25 million project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, to study the impact of climate change on Arizona's urban areas.

June Williamson lectures on the urgent challenges produced by northern American suburban form and showcases urban design strategies to mitigate and address these challenges.

Senior Lecturer in Architecture Oscar Lopez, who joined CAPLA in 2016, teaches undergraduate and graduate architecture studios while practicing architecture and conducting research on what he calls the haptics of place, "essentially, combining both the real and the unreal qualities of architecture."

University of Arizona researchers, including CAPLA's Ladd Keith, are furthering their efforts to examine how water, aridity and heat impact communities in the American Southwest thanks to a $6 million grant from NOAA's Climate Adaptation Partnerships program.

This spring, MS Urban Planning student Glenn Ingram, recent MLA graduate Mattea Wallace and Associate Professor Philip Stoker, working with UArizona East Asian Studies Professor Jiang Wu, created the “Regional Religious Systems in Hangzhou China” story map using GIS. This fall, Ingram's poster from the project won an award.

UArizona Hispanic Serving Institution Fellow Sandra Bernal Cordova, who joined CAPLA in 2018 as a lecturer, uses her built environment research, community service and cross-campus collaborations to inform the classes she teaches and co-teaches, which include Water Efficiency in Building, Equitable Cities and the Sustainable Built Environments Capstone.

Seth Okyere lectures on "Walking the Unwalkable City," a discussion which brings forward conditions and experiences of a walking city that is not walkable and, most importantly, resident improvisations to minimize walking inequities.