Karen Chapple, PhD, is the Director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto, where she also serves as Professor in the Department of Geography & Planning and is cross-appointed as Professor in the Faculty of Information. She is Professor Emerita of City & Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as department chair. In 2023, Chapple received the Regional Studies Association’s Sir Peter Hall Award for Lifetime Contribution to the Field.
Chapple studies inequalities in the planning, development, and governance of cities and regions in the Americas, with a focus on economic development and housing. Her recent books include Planning Sustainable Cities and Regions: Towards More Equitable Development (Routledge, 2015), which won the John Friedmann Book Award from the American Collegiate Schools of Planning;Transit-Oriented Displacement or Community Dividends? Understanding the Effects of Smarter Growth on Communities (with Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, MIT Press, 2019); and Fragile Governance and Local Economic Development: Theory and Evidence from Peripheral Regions in Latin America (with Sergio Montero, Routledge, 2018). With the School of Cities Data Visualization team, she co-authored the open source textbook Urban Data Storytelling, Analytics, and Visualization in 2025.
Her most recent publications use mobile phone data to analyze post-pandemic recovery patterns and household mobility datasets to identify the impacts on displacement of new transit, infill development, and upzoning. Her research on transit-oriented development, accessory dwelling units, employment lands, and urban displacement have spurred policy shifts in California, the U.S., and internationally. At the School of Cities, she leads the Downtown Recovery and Mapping Tariffs research projects, among others.
In Fall 2015, she co-founded the Urban Displacement Project, a research portal that she still directs which examines patterns of residential, commercial, and industrial displacement, as well as policy and planning solutions. Also in 2015, Chapple’s work on climate change and tax policy won the UC-wide competition for the Bacon Public Lectureship, which promotes evidence-based public policy and creative thinking for the public good. Chapple also received the 2017 UC-Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Research in the Public Interest. She received a 2017-18 Fulbright Global Scholar Award to explore expanding the Urban Displacement Project to cities in Europe and Latin America, and has been a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analytics, Polytechnic University of Madrid, the University of Sydney, the University of Buenos Aires, and the Universidad de los Andes. In 2018-19, she served as the senior faculty advisor in UC-Berkeley’s Division of Data Sciences.
Funded by a variety of philanthropic and government sources, Chapple is currently engaged in many research projects related to inequality and sustainability planning, with a focus on residential and commercial/industrial displacement. Since 2006, she has served as faculty director of the UC Berkeley Center for Community Innovation, which has provided over $2 million in technical assistance to community-based organizations and government agencies. This has included research on the potential for gentrification and displacement near transit-oriented development (for the Association of Bay Area Governments); more effective planning for affordable housing and economic development near transit (for the Great Communities Collaborative); the relationship between the arts, commercial, and residential revitalization in low-income neighbourhoods; and the role of green jobs and industrial land in regional economies. She also led a national contest sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation to generate ideas for local and state job creation targeting disadvantaged communities. Chapple has worked on regional and local economic development research projects in Mexico, Spain, Thailand, Israel, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Guatemala, Colombia, the United Kingdom, and Abu Dhabi. She provides policy advice to many local, state, and national elected officials and has also served on the Berkeley Planning Commission.
Chapple holds a B.A. in Urban Studies (Phi Beta Kappa) from Columbia University, an MS in City and Regional Planning from the Pratt Institute, and a PhD 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 held the Theodore Bo and Doris Shoong Lee Chair in Environmental Design from 2006-09 and the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Urban Studies from 2018-21. 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.