Despite a dwindling budget, the College of Architecture and Planning stretched its wallet to add nationally renowned transportation and urban development professor Reid Ewing to its faculty.
Ewing’s placement caps the completion of an initiative to build up the city and metropolitan planning department. Brenda Scheer, dean of the College of Architecture and Planning, said the department has grown 300 percent in response to the addition of four new nationally acclaimed faculty members in the last three years, of whom Ewing is the last.
“We’re trying to have excellence in this department,” Scheer said. “The budget cuts hit us when we were confirming with Ewing.”
Scheer said Ewing’s timing helped, but his placement speaks to campus administration’s commitment to develop the department.
Ewing is highly optimistic about his move from the University of Maryland to the U.
“I commuted between south Florida and initially Rutgers University and then the University of Maryland for 12 years. Up and back I spent about a day per week commuting,” Ewing said. “I would see my wife on the weekend, and I never really became a part of the community at home and at work.”
Ewing said living in Salt Lake City has helped him achieve consistency with his research, which advocates urban design that facilitates a small commute for its residents.
“I bet my (vehicle miles traveled) is now probably a tenth of what it was traveling to and from the airport in southern Florida,” he said. “I’m realizing the dream.”
Ewing, one of the leading scholars on transportation’s impact on urban development patterns, is a fresh addition to the department this semester, said Brad Baird, spokesman for the department.
“I’d never taught undergraduates before and that was a shock,” Ewing said, about teaching his first course at the U. “The undergraduates pay more attention than the master’s students.”
A new doctoral program is in the works for the planning department.
“The research and presence of doctoral students allows you to multiply your efforts,” Ewing said. “Their dissertations become co-authored papers and that’s not an opportunity that typically comes with master’s students.”
Scheer and planning professors hope that Ewing and the doctorate program will contribute to making the department a top-ranking program nationally. Ewing shares this sentiment.
“To go from tiny and underfunded to highly ranked in the period of three to four years is rare and that is a real possibility here,” he said.
Thomas Sanchez, a planning professor, echoed Ewing’s ambition.
“Dr. Ewing will help us become one of the top-ranked planning programs in the United States, if not the top-ranked program in the West,” Sanchez said in a statement. “That is our goal.”
Ewing, who is also an associate editor at the Journal of the American Planning Association, recently co-authored Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change with Keith Bartholomew, a U professor also in the planning department.
For his first foray into local government and community building, Ewing will join other planning professors this week to meet with the Downtown Development Committee to provide technical assistance about transit-oriented development for Salt Lake City’s metropolitan area. Ewing said Salt Lake City’s commitment to a light rail is special, and as a city resident and researcher he hopes to help the city maximize the benefits of its light rail transit system.
Reid Ewing