Karen Chapple, PhD, is a Faculty Research Affiliate at the Terner Center. She is Professor Emerita of City & Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where she held the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Urban Studies and served as department chair. She is currently the inaugural Director of the School of Cities and Professor of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. 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). In 2020, Chapple launched the Department of City & Regional Planning’s new urban data science training program focused on housing and transportation.

Chapple holds a Bachelor’s in Urban Studies (Phi Beta Kappa) 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.