Project Directors

  • Meghan Gough, associate professor and chair, teaches applied courses in community planning, civic engagement and sustainability planning in the Urban and Regional Studies and Planning Program. Her research is focused on the role of community partnerships and collaborative decision-making in planning for sustainable communities. She has particular interest in how diverse stakeholders inform sustainability planning approaches, and ways that cross-sector partnerships bring the public, private and philanthropic interests to the table to achieve meaningful outcomes for communities.

    Gough’s current projects include a book project, titled "Public Gardens and Community Revitalization: Partnerships for Positive Social Change" (Cornell University Press), which analyzes ways in which municipalities, nonprofits and private sector organizations partner with public gardens to revitalize communities and increase the livability of urban places and spaces. She is also examining the public engagement process and outcomes of the U.S. Department of Housing and. Urban Development Sustainable Communities Initiative, which funded 74 multi-year regional sustainability planning processes across the U.S. In addition, Gough is working on a more recent project, funded through VCU’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis, to investigate the livability of communities for aging populations the implications for planning.

    In addition to her faculty and administrative role in the Wilder School, Gough serves on VCU’s Council of Community Engagement. In this capacity, she contributes to initiatives that build long-term community-university partnerships and advance coordinated interdisciplinary research opportunities with community partners. She also advises on the proliferation of Community-Engaged Research methods for scholars and implementation within the University community.

  • Kathryn Howell is the director of the National Center for Smart Growth and an associate professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland. Prior to coming to NCSG, she was the co-founder and co-director of the RVA Eviction Lab and an associate professor of urban and regional planning at Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. Howell’s research unpacks concepts of physical and cultural displacement and power in changing communities and investigates ways that policy and planning can be used to address these issues.

  • Andrea Roberts is an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning and Faculty Director of the School’s Center for Cultural Landscapes at the University of Virginia’s (UVA) School of Architecture. The Center is now home to The Texas Freedom Colonies Project. Since 2014, the Project has spatialized historic African American sites’ histories, structures, and commemorative landscapes through participatory action research methods, including oral history interviews, counternarrative construction, and archival recovery. She has received awards for her work from The Vernacular Architecture Forum and the Urban Affairs Association. Roberts was a 2020-21 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow, an African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund grant recipient, and a 2020 Visiting Scholar at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, Abolition, and was Co-Project Director for the 2022 NEH Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty—"Towards a People's History of Landscape: Part 1: Black & Indigenous Histories of the Nation's Capital.” She is currently authoring a book, Never Sell the Land, about her experiences recording Black placemaking histories and historic preservation practices that foster cultural resilience for The University of Texas Press. Roberts is also a member of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation’s Experts Advisory Committee. She was a Spring 2023 Visiting Garden and Landscape Studies Scholar at Dumbarton Oaks. Roberts holds a PhD in community and regional planning from The University of Texas at Austin (2016), an MA in government administration from the University of Pennsylvania (2006), and a BA in political science from Vassar College (1996).

  • Thaisa Way FASLA, FAAR (BS UC Berkeley, M’ArchH UVa, PhD Cornell University) is the Director for Garden & Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, a Harvard University research institution located in Washington DC. She is the PI for a Mellon Urban Humanities Initiative, “Democracy and the Urban Landscape: Race, Identity, and Difference” She is Professor Emerita in Landscape Architecture, in the College of Built Environments, University of Washington and teaches at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Dr. Way was awarded the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in 2016 and invited as a Scholar at the AAR in 2023. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and serves on the CEO Roundtable, the Society of Architectural Historians Board of Directors, and as the leader of the Dean’s Equity and Inclusion Initiative that engages 39 design schools to mentor early career BIPoC faculty. Dr. Way served as the founding Director of Urban@UW, an initiative of the University of Washington. Her publications foreground questions of history, gender, and shaping the landscape. Her book, Unbounded Practices: Women, Landscape Architecture, and Early Twentieth Century Design (UVa Press, 2009/213) was awarded the J.B. Jackson Book Award. Her book From Modern Space to Urban Ecological Design: the Landscape Architecture of Richard Haag (UW Press 2015) explores the narrative of post-industrial cities and practices of landscape architecture. She co-edited with Ken Yocom, Ben Spencer, and Jeff Hou Now Urbanism: The Future City is Here (Routledge 2014). River Cities/ City Rivers (Harvard Press 2018) is a collection of essays contributing to urban and environmental history. Her book GGN 1999-2018 (Timber Press, 2018) is a foray into descriptions of design as process in the land. Her most recent book is co-edited with Eric Avila, Segregation and Resistance in the Urban Landscape(2022) . Dr. Way seeks to challenge the canon of landscape architecture to engage with the inscriptions of race, gender, and class on the profession, practice, and pedagogy of the field.

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