Scholars and practitioners have increasingly paid attention to the changing nature of American suburbs, with emphasis on the decline in the nation's older suburbs near central cities. Do first-tier suburbs share the same fate as central cities, and what can public policy and planning do to promote reinvestment and sustainable growth? Understanding suburban decline has important implications for urban politics, urban policy, and urban planning. This project seeks to explain the process of suburban decline by uncovering the social, economic, political, and cultural aspects of the evolution of change in socioeconomic status of the suburban population.

In an influential book, the French urban geographer Jean Gottmann coined the term Megalopolis to describe the US Eastern Seaboard as "an almost continuous stretch of urban and suburban areas from southern New Hampshire to northern Virginia and from the Atlantic shore to the Appalachian foothills." Through a study of the highly-urbanized region of Megalopolis, this collaborative project (with Bernadette Hanlon and John Rennie Short) measures and explains these patterns and processes in a global urban region that has undergone profound change over the past fifty years.

This project critically reflects on the "new town" planning movement in the US by revisiting the case of Columbia, Maryland - the nation's quintessential new town. The early vision of master planner James Rouse, Columbia was envisioned to be a new type of suburb in an era that was defined by cookie-cutter, banal suburban developments of the 1960s. As Columbia turns 40 years in 2007, this new town has evolved into a drastically different place from what Rouse originally envisioned. This project charts the growth and decline of this new town and critically analyzes the prospects for America's oldest "new town" and other developments of this nature throughout the nation.

Local economic development, in large part, is a political process. The fiscal health and well-being of residents in cities and suburbs depends on successful economic development policies that improve the conditions of both people and places. This project critically analyzes a series of economic redevelopment projects, and then it explains the role that politics played in the process of policy formulation and implementation.