Most of my research is centered on studying processes and dynamics that lead to more just, resilient, healthy, and sustainable cities, bringing together theory from urban planning, public policy, urban and environmental sociology, and urban geography.  My projects examine the extent to which urban plans and policy decisions contribute to more just, resilient, healthy, and sustainable cities, and how community groups in distressed neighborhoods contest the existence, creation, or exacerbation of environmental inequities as a result of urban (re)development processes and policies.

My current research in divided in three streams. First, I examine processes of environmental gentrification in formerly depressed neighborhoods and the ways in which such processes pose new challenges and paradoxes for community residents and environmental justice activists, and seem to transform them into new forms of locally unwanted land uses (LULUs).

Second, in collaboration with researchers from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, colleagues from the Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development at the University of Amsterdam and from the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA, and students at ICTA, I explore the variety of approaches that cities engaged in adaptation planning take to protect the lives, housing, and livelihoods of historically marginalized groups exposed to climate risks and impacts. This research specifically looks at how municipalities approach issues of socio-spatial vulnerability, adaptive capacity, inclusion, equity, and resilience. Particular attention is paid to the equity impacts of land use planning interventions for climate adaptation.

Last, I am engaged as UAB-PI in a collaborative H2020 European project NATURVATION, which takes a transdisciplinary, internationally comparative approach to 1) advance assessment approaches to capturing the mutiple impacts and values of Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) in cities to deliver a robust evidence base for decision-making, 2) enable innovation to identify the most promising governance, business/finance, and participation models and overcome the systemic conditions that currently limit their use to support systemic integration, and 3) generate momentum to realize the potential of NBS through co-design, co-development, and co-implementation of new partnerships, knowledge, recommendations, processes and tools required to build capacity, enable replication, and foster cultural change.