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Karen Chapple, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also holds the Theodore Bo Lee and Doris Shoong Chair in Environmental Design. Chapple specializes in community and economic development, metropolitan planning, and poverty, and has published research on spatial mismatch, workforce development in information technology, regional workforce development collaboratives, the relationship between job growth and housing price appreciation, and regional fair share housing programs. In her capacity as faculty director of the UC Berkeley Center for Community Innovation, she has led research on retail revitalization, stable mixed-income neighborhoods, the arts and neighborhood change, affordable housing and transit-oriented development, industrial land supply, and the green economy.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Her latest articles appear in the Journal of the American Planning Association (on spatial mismatch), and the International of Urban and Regional Research (on the network society). Until this year, she served as co-editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research; she is on the board of Economic Development Quarterly. Chapple's current book project is on metropolitan poverty policy, and she is also researching a book about community innovation, or how nonprofit organizations embedded in the regional economy are able to organize and innovate solutions to poverty.

Chapple holds a B.A. in Urban Studies 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. 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.

In her courses, which are on community and economic development, neighborhood change, and planning methods, Chapple brings planning practice into the classroom, links scales (from the parcel to the region) and disciplines (from design to economic development), and focuses on critical, balanced evaluation of ideologies and outcomes.

Research and Scholarly Activities

I am a city and regional planner who develops alternative approaches to addressing urban poverty, based on a methodological critique of technocratic planning and policy approaches to poverty. My research centers first on the geography of metropolitan opportunity, demonstrating empirically that planners cannot engineer effective solutions to poverty through spatial fixes or metropolitan governance strategies; and second on the little understood relationship between technology and poverty, showing how innovative community-based organizations facilitate upward mobility for low-wage workers and thus dispel the conventional wisdom about the inevitable immiseration of the poor under conditions of globalization and uneven development. My long-term research objectives are thus twofold: first, to shift the field of city and regional planning away from a set of anti-poverty policies that have become dogma with little evidence of their success; and second, to show the potential for community-based approaches to addressing poverty that pose an alternative to the trajectory of occupational bifurcation and exclusive "global cities" foreseen by some economists and sociologists.

I examine the geography of metropolitan opportunity, or the ability of households to access markets and institutions equally across metropolitan areas, in a broad body of work on labor markets and housing that emphasizes the role of social networks and politics, rather than space, in shaping opportunity. This project began with an examination of inner city poverty, focusing on the role of social networks for the urban poor. It then analyzed the potential of metropolitan governance to address poverty, concluding with a call to move beyond the past thirty years of urban anti-poverty policies. I am developing these ideas into a book to be coauthored with Edward Goetz of the University of Minnesota.

A second set of projects looks at how economic development and technology policies deal with poverty. In the process, I dispel myths about how technology and globalization are shifting the US into a knowledge-based economy with opportunities concentrated only in certain regions and accessible only to those with a college education; instead, I argue that the penetration of technology across occupations and industries, as well as the rise of labor market intermediaries, has led to new opportunities for the disadvantaged.

Within the planning discipline, my work on poverty bridges the fields of community and regional economic development, but takes on the breadth characteristic of the field, touching on housing, transportation, and land use as well. The unique strength of my analytic approach is the mixing of methods; I draw freely from a range of techniques from multivariate analysis to in-depth interviews. Rather than allowing technical limitations to restrict me to one particular method, I let the research question drive the technique selected. This combination of methodological flexibility and substantive breadth has attracted the attention of research funders from the National Science Foundation to private foundations and community-based organizations.

My use of mixed methods has shaped my growing skepticism about economistic approaches to understanding poverty and pushed me towards developing a more effective applied approach. Increasingly, I build my research projects directly out of practitioner questions, using communicative and participatory methods-ongoing interaction with communities-to refine research findings into readily comprehensible recommendations. This idea of a scholarship of public engagement underpins my recent resuscitation of the Institute for Urban and Regional Development's Community Partnerships Office-now the Center for Community Innovation-historically (and increasingly again) the main vehicle for the UC-Berkeley campus's university-community partnership efforts in the arena of urban development.

Teaching

Since becoming a professor I have developed and taught 15 different classes. I have taught classes and studios in community development, local economic development, regional economic development, land use, and transportation, as well as methods classes in planning and economic analysis using both quantitative and qualitative methods. This broad familiarity with the planning field stems from my work experience as a planner, five years full time and twelve years as a consultant. In my classrooms, I typically employ the Socratic method, in which typically there is more than one "correct" answer, and more often, no clear answer at all. This creates an atmosphere in which students are encouraged to argue and think critically.

My teaching reflects my interest in the distribution of economic opportunity within metropolitan areas but adds a new dimension, a focus on the realm of the possible. Where economic theory may tell us that transformation is impossible, planning practice shows us the many possibilities for improving local opportunity structures. In my seminars on local economic development and metropolitan planning, we focus on the role of ideologies and politics in shaping policy choices, as well as the effectiveness of policy solutions. In my methods classes and studios, we apply demographic, economic, and qualitative analysis to solve local and regional planning problems.

My classes have engaged with pivotal growth and redevelopment issues in the San Francisco Bay Area. For instance, my 2002 CP 228 Metropolitan Planning Workshop conducted an analysis of potential impacts of smart growth on low-income communities for the Smart Growth Strategy/ Regional Livability Footprint Project, winning a Charter Award from the Congress for the New Urbanism. In CP 225 (Workshop in Regional Economic Analysis, Spring 2003), we analyzed the economic impact of hiring out-of-area refinery workers for the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors and Community Development Department. For the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), the same class performed an analysis of the mix and vitality of businesses in seven different low-income neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area. In CP 218/228 (Fall 2003), we worked for the Transportation and Land Use Coalition on a study assessing the potential equity impacts of transit investment and smart growth incentives under the various alternatives proposed for Measure C in Contra Costa County. In Fall 2004, CP 225 analyzed the economic impact of the proposed San Pablo Casino and examined ways in which a nearby commercial corridor, 23rd Street, could capture some of the spinoff business. In Fall 2005, students in my Seminar in Neighborhood Change at the University of Pennsylvania produced an alternative, mixed-income redevelopment plan for the Cramer Hill Community Development Corporation in Camden, New Jersey.

About the Center for Community Innovation

Launched at IURD in summer 2006, the Center for Community Innovation (CCI) fulfills a key part of UC's mission as a public, land grant institution: to disseminate "practical knowledge and technological innovations that benefit California and the nation." At CCI, we uncover the innovative practices that local actors create to address housing, community and economic development problems. Our focus is on "strong market" regions and how their economic growth and physical development patterns can become more equitable and inclusive. CCI's mission is to "nurture effective solutions that expand economic opportunity, diversify housing options, and strengthen connection to place."

Innovation involves an epistemological transformation - new knowledge - that stems from unique ways of combining resources and leads to the creation of new products and processes. At CCI, we innovate by bringing together ideas, approaches, and actors from academic and community realms, creating new ways of solving urban problems. CCI adopts a collaborative community research approach that builds an agenda out of real-world concerns, but finds answers using rigorous academic methods. We aim to make university research more accessible to stakeholders by developing research questions, crafting a methodology, and thinking through our findings together. We also build the capacity of nonprofits and government by involving leaders in professional practice and student researchers in technical assistance.