Title

Placing Transportation, an Urban Metabolism View of Land Use and Transportation

Time

1:40 p.m. – 3:00 p.m

Location

1605 Tilia, Room 1103, West Village

Abstract

With AB 32 and SB 375, there has been yet another round of interest in the link between transportation and land use, now through the lens of greenhouse gas emissions. Yet the land use part still seems to be seen as a substrate that is useful for transportation rather than the vessel for all urban activities, including moving about. Urban metabolism analysis, coupled with life cycle assessments, offers the potential for looking at complex urban systems longitudinally with the embedded infrastructure costs – including transportation – and impacts going forward.

Biographical Sketch

Stephanie Pincetl is Adjunct Professor and Director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA. Dr. Pincetl conducts research on environmental policies and governance and analyzes how institutional rules construct how natural resources and energy are used to support human activities. She is expert in bringing together interdisciplinary teams of researchers across the biophysical and engineering sciences with the social sciences to address problems of complex urban systems and environmental management.

Dr. Pincetl has written extensively about land use in California, environmental justice, habitat conservation efforts, water and energy policy. She has received funding from the National Science Foundation to conduct collaborative research with biophysical scientists on urban ecology and water management in Los Angeles, as well as from the California Energy Commission PIER program to develop a methodology to understand energy use in communities in California using urban metabolism methods coupled with social policy considerations. Her book, Transforming California, the Political History of Land Use in the State, is the definitive work on land use politics and policies of California. She is the leading author of the urban section of the Southwest Technical Report to the National Climate Assessment and a contributing author of the urban section of the National Climate Assessment.

Dr. Pincetl has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from and teaches at UCLA. She spent 10 years working in the nonprofit environmental justice sector and has taught in the Masters of Public Affairs at the Institut de Sciences Politiques in Paris. Pincetl is the Faculty Director of the Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability (LARC), a Los Angeles regional organization dedicated to working across jurisdictions to achieve a better future. She was instrumental in making the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA its institutional home.