Biography

Trained in planning and architecture, Ann Forsyth is a professor of city and regional planning at Cornell. From 2002-2007 she was a professor in both architecture and landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota, directing the Metropolitan Design Center. She has also taught at Harvard Design School (1999-2002) and at the University of Massachusetts (1993-1999) where she was co-director of a small community design center, the Urban Places Project. She has held short -term positions at Columbia, Macquarie, and Sydney Universities.

Ann Forsyth’s work focuses on the social aspects of physical planning and urban development. The big question behind her research and practice is how to make cities more sustainable and healthy. Forsyth's contributions have been to analyze the success of planned alternatives to sprawl, particularly exploring the tensions between social and ecological values in urban design. Several issues prove to be the most difficult to deal with in planning better places and provide a focus for some of her more detailed investigations: suburban design more generally (sense of place, overall layout) and other aspects of healthy places (walkability, social diversity, housing, green space, food).

Ann Forsyth’s biography and key interests are described on her faculty page at Cornell. Her research and publications are described elsewhere on this site. The Design for Health web site provides more information about individual projects. 

Editorships and Web Sites

Forsyth has been review editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research, a co-editor of Planning Theory journal, and a co-editor of Progressive Planning magazine. She is currently on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Transportation and Society, Urban Design International, Journal of Transport and Land Use, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Journal of Urban Design, and Journal of Architectural and Planning Research. She has been involved with making several web sites including www.designforhealth.net and an earlier version of www.housinginitiative.org. She has a monthly Planetizen blog focused for advice for planning students and beginning planners. She also blogs about the Healthy Metropolis at http://healthymetropolis.blogspot.com/.

For more information about these sites see the section on Other Media.

Awards

She has won over fifty awards, citations, and fellowships for individual and collaborative professional and research work. These include national awards for professional and research projects from the American Planning Association (APA), American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP), American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), Planning Institute of Australia (PIA); and state level awards from APA, ASLA, and PIA. Publications have received awards, honorable mentions, and been listed as official finalists or in top ten lists by the Association for European Schools of Planning (AESOP) Best Paper Prize, PIA, Australian Peter Harrison Memorial Prize, Journal of the American Planning Association, and Planetizen as well as state-level awards from the APA, PIA, and ASLA.

Projects and publications receiving at least four awards, commendations, or official finalist statuses have included both individual and collaborative work:

• The book Constructing Suburbs (1999)
• The advocacy work of the Urban Places Project (UPP, 1995-2000)
• A specific UPP project, the YouthPower Guide communicating work by El Arco Iris in Holyoke and developed by UPP (1998-2000)
• The publications and programs of the Metropolitan Design Center (that Forsyth directed in the mid-2000s)
• The Corridor Housing Initiative’s early work (2003-2007), a collaborative MDC project led by the Center for Neighborhoods and now by LISC;
• Design for Health (2006-); and
• Consulting work including collaborating on some award winning projects led by the innovative and boundary-pushing practitioner, Wendy Sarkissian.

Professor Forsyth's research has been funded by such groups as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Federal Highway Administration, USDA Forest Service, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Lincoln Land Institute, and Graham Foundation. Forsyth has also been a Fulbright scholar.

Publications

Academic and Professional Publications
Other Media
Tools, Manuals, and Methods