Does Main Street Have a Future? Reconsidering Retail in the Era of Chain Stores and E-Commerce University of Chicago November 1-2, 2018 Participant Bios Dean Alonistiotis is an economic development practitioner who works for the City of Chicago in the Office of the City Treasurer. He is skilled in political communication, public affairs, nonprofit organizations, political strategy, and political science. He has a Master of Arts (MA) focused in Public Policy and Public Administration from Northwestern University. Luc Anselin is the Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is the founding director of the Center for Spatial Data Science, a joint initiative of the Social Sciences Division and the Computation Institute, to advance computational and statistical methods of dealing with spatial data. Anselin also serves as a Senior Fellow of NORC and chairs the Committee on Geographical Sciences. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. Heather Arnold works for Streetsense in Bethesda, MD, where she is the Managing Director of Public Sector work specializing in retail market analysis, incentive planning, and merchandising strategies for downtown environments. She also leads a multi-disciplinary team on the Vibrant Streets initiative, which provides neighborhoods with the tools and framework necessary to create thriving retail in their communities. The Vibrant Streets Toolkit has already been implemented in several municipalities, notably Washington, DC and 11 of its neighborhoods. Luís M. A. Bettencourt is Pritzker Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution and the College. He is also an External Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. He has worked extensively on complex systems theory and on cities and urbanization, in particular. His research emphasizes the creation of new interdisciplinary synthesis to describe cities in quantitative and predictive ways, informed by classical theory from various disciplines and the growing availability of empirical data worldwide. Terry Clark is Professor of Sociology and International Coordinator of the Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation Project at the University of Chicago. His extensive research on scenes proposes a framework that joins the amenities work from economics with core social and cultural processes from sociology. Clark uses the idea of a scene to help develop tools capable of analyzing the nuances of how ideas of what is right or wrong, authentic or inauthentic, and creative or boring shape people s decisions about where, how, and with whom they associate.
Kevin Credit is Assistant Director for Urban Informatics at the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago. He focuses primarily on quantitative econometric and spatial analysis approaches, including quasi-experimental regression methods, hierarchical linear modeling, spatial collocation and clustering techniques, spatial econometrics, and remote sensing approaches (geographic object-based image analysis). He has a PhD in geography from Michigan State University. Rosa Danenberg is a PhD student in the Department of Urban Planning and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. She also works at the Centre for the Future of Places in Stockholm. Her PhD research focuses on streets as public spaces, particularly main streets and ethnic entrepreneurship. She has a background in social science and urban planning. Christopher Daniel is a Researcher with the Centre for the Study of Commercial Activity at Ryerson University. His PhD research deals with Retail Planning and Smart Growth initiatives, focusing on the impact of the Places to Grow and Greenbelt legislation on commercial real estate development. His work touches on elements of urban planning, environmental management, retail change and location analytics. Anne Dodge is the Executive Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the Institute, Anne led UChicago Urban, managing the University s wide array of civic programs and nonprofit partnerships. She holds a Master s in City Planning from MIT and a BA from Harvard with a joint concentration in Visual and Environmental Studies and History. She is also a movie star (ask her). Hyesun Jeong is an architect and researcher at Urban Innovation Analysis, Inc. in Chicago. She completed her Ph.D in Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Dec 2016, and also worked as an adjunct professor in the College of Architecture, IIT. She was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago in 2017 and worked with Emily Talen. Her primary research focuses on walkable and sustainable urbanism and comparative study on the arts and bohemia in the context of US and other global cities. Colin Jones has been a Professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland since 1998. He formerly worked at the Universities of Manchester and Glasgow. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Property Research and a trustee of Shelter 1990-2007.
Conrad Kickert is an Assistant Professor of Urban Design at the University of Cincinnati. He holds a PhD in architecture from the University of Michigan. He is an urban design scholar whose research focuses on urban morphology, downtown revitalization and the bridge between urban form, configuration and retail economics. Currently, he is studying the histories of downtown Detroit and The Hague, focusing on their relationship between buildings and public space. Julia Koschinsky is the Executive Director of the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago and has been part of the GeoDa team for over ten years. She has been conducting and managing research funded through federal awards of over $8 million to gain insights from the spatial dimensions of urban challenges in housing, health, and the built environment. She holds a PhD in urban planning from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. Elizabeth Mack is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Michigan State University where she teaches courses in economic geography. Her research evaluates the impact of information and communications technologies (ICTs) on the development trajectory of regional economies. She also focuses on broadband infrastructure deployment policy issues as well as the impacts of broadband on business location. Recent work focuses on understanding entrepreneurial ecosystems and water affordability. Robert Madnuca is a PhD student in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University. His work centers on the use of large datasets to study how (seemingly) non-economic factors shape the economic outcomes of people and places. He is especially interested in local economic development studying how cities and regions can promote sustainable and inclusive economic growth and in the analysis of administrative datasets, many of which have been released to the public as a result of the open data movement. Michael W. Mehaffy is an urbanist and design theorist and executive director of the Sustasis Foundation based in Portland, Oregon. He is also currently Senior Researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and Director of the Future of Places Research Network based there. He has been a consultant to UN-Habitat on the development of the outcome document of Habitat III, the New Urban Agenda, which has been adopted by consensus by all 193 member states of the United Nations. Vikas Mehta is an Associate Professor of Urbanism and Coordinator for the Urban Design Certificate at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Mehta s work focuses on the role of design and planning in creating a more responsive, equitable, stimulating and communicative environment. He holds a PhD from the University of Maryland and a master s in architecture from Morgan State. He is the author of The Street: A Quintessential Social Public Space (Routledge, 2013 and 2014).
Rachel Meltzer is an Associate Professor of Urban Policy at the New School in New York City. Her research is broadly concerned with urban economies and how market and policy forces can shape disparate outcomes for neighborhoods. She focuses on issues related to housing, land use, economic development and local public finance. Current projects look at how marketbased, natural disaster and policy shocks impact retail and commercial activity in urban neighborhoods. Garyfalia (Falli) Palaiologou holds a PhD in Architectural and Urban Morphology, and an MSc in Advanced Architectural Studies from The Bartlett, University College London (UCL). Falli has been an active member of the Space Syntax Laboratory, working on evidence- based approaches to spatial and urban design, street network analysis, the study of urban form, and empirical studies. Her PhD research investigated the urban transformation and street micromorphology of the London terraced house and the Manhattan row house. Jeffrey Parker is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He studies the intersection of gentrification, business interests, and reputation in cities, focusing especially on merchants as pivotal stakeholders in changing neighborhoods. His research has focused on the circumstances in which business-owners and -managers come to either embrace or repudiate gentrification in their own neighborhoods and the ways they attempt to manage those neighborhoods reputations. Michael Powe is Director of Research at the Preservation Green Lab, an arm of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Irvine. Through his work at Preservation Green Lab, he directs multiple projects aimed at building stronger local economies and healthier neighborhoods using new technology and old buildings. Irene Farah Rivadeneyra is a Research Associate at the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago. She has a Bachelor s in Political Science from ITAM in Mexico City and a Master s in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. She previously worked on poverty measurement for the Mexican government. Her current research interests are social dynamics, access to services, and urbanization. Stacey Sutton is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Policy in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs (CUPPA) at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research focuses on worker cooperatives, economic democracy, equitable development, and racially disparate effects of place-based policy and planning. She holds a joint PhD in Urban Planning and Sociology from Rutgers University, and an MBA from New York University.
Emily Talen is Professor of Urbanism at the University of Chicago. Her research is devoted to urban design and urbanism, especially the relationship between the built environment and social equity. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners. Her forthcoming book is titled Neighborhood. Matt Wagner serves as the VP of Revitalization Programs at the National Main Street Center, a subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He has more than 25 years of nonprofit management, corporate real estate, and teaching experience in the area of downtown revitalization, entrepreneurship and economic development. Matt received his PhD in Urban Affairs with a specialization in Urban Economic Development from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee.