Lawrence Vale

Associate Dean Lawrence Vale is Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT, where he served as Head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning from 2002 until January 2009.  He has taught in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning since 1988, and he is currently the director of the Resilient Cities Housing Initiative (RCHI), affiliated with the School’s Center for Advanced Urbanism. He served as president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History for 2011-2013. Vale holds degrees from Amherst College (B.A. in American Studies, summa cum laude), M.I.T. (S.M.Arch.S.), and the University of Oxford (D.Phil.), which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author or editor of thirteen books and more than sixty articles examining urban design, housing and planning. His most recent book, The Equitably Resilient City: Solidarities and Struggles in the Face of Climate Crisis, co-authored with Zachary B. Lamb, was released by MIT Press on October 1, 2024 and is available for purchase, as well as downloadable on an Open Access basis from the MIT Press website. This book draws on a decade of work with the RCHI team, and is a follow-on to earlier work on the politics of urban resilience, including an article, "The Politics of Resilient Cities: Whose Resilience and Whose City" (2014), and The Resilient City:  How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster, co-edited with Thomas J. Campanella (Oxford University Press, 2005). He is currently working on several new book projects examining the relationship of urban design and politics--including work on  the design-politics of capital cities; the racial politics of contested monuments; and sensory urbanism, examining the multifaceted ways that the built environment can signal and facilitate either inclusion/belonging and exclusion/rebuff.

Much of Professor Vale's published work has examined the history, politics, and design of American public housing. The initial books include From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (2001 "Best Book in Urban Affairs"); and Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods (2005 Paul Davidoff Award). That research was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has also received the Chester Rapkin Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, an EDRA/Places Award for “Place Research,” and the John M. Corcoran Award for Community Investment. Since then, completed another trio of books on public housing. Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities (University of Chicago Press, 2013) focuses on Atlanta and Chicago, comparing the slum clearance era that yielded the first public housing with the current spate of public housing demolition and redevelopment. This book has received "best book" awards from both the International Planning History Society (2014) and the Urban Affairs Association (2015). He is also co-editor, with Nicholas Bloom and Fritz Umbach, of Public Housing Myths: Perceptions, Reality and Social Policy (Cornell University Press 2015; 2016 Best Edited Book Award, International Planning History Society). His latest book on public housing, published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, is After the Projects:  Public Housing Redevelopment and the Governance of the Poorest Americans. This explores the variation of HOPE VI public housing redevelopment practices across the United States, with a focus on New Orleans, Boston, Tucson, and San Francisco. 

Prior to his work on public housing, Professor Vale was the author of Architecture, Power, and National Identity (1992), a book about capital city design on six continents, which received the 1994 Spiro Kostof Book Award for Architecture and Urbanism from the Society of Architectural Historians.  A revised, 2nd edition of the book was published by Routledge in 2008. More recently, he revisited this topic in his Gordon Cherry Memorial Lecture, "The Design-Politics of Planning Equitably Resilient Capital Cities," delivered in 2022.  He is also the author of The Limits of Civil Defence (Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 1987), a book based on his dissertation.

Additionally, Vale is co-editor, with Sam Bass Warner, Jr., of Imaging the City:  Continuing Struggles and New Directions (2001);  co-editor, with Bish Sanyal and Christina Rosan, of Planning Ideas That Matter: Livability, Territoriality, Governance, and Reflective Practice (MIT Press, 2012; 2014 Best Edited Book in Planning History, IPHS); and co-editor, with Justin Steil, Nicholas Kelly and Maia Woluchem, of Furthering Fair Housing: Prospects for Racial Justice in America’s Neighborhoods (Temple University Press, 2021). Finally, he is the author of a monograph about the history of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Changing Cities:  75 Years of Planning Better Futures at MIT (SA+P Press, 2008).

Over the years, Vale's work has been supported by Graham Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (where he is currently the PI for MIT's Policies for Action Hub, focused on "Healthy Communities for Housing Justice," based in DUSP's CoLab).

At MIT, he has won the Institute’s highest award for teaching (MacVicar Faculty Fellowship), and the Institute's highest award for graduate student advising (Frank Perkins Award), as well as multiple departmental awards for advising and service to students. He is the 2022 recipient of the Laurence Gerckens Prize from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, “awarded to a scholar-teacher who has demonstrated sustained excellence and educational leadership in the field of planning history.”