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Research, writing and practice
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Thomas J. Campanella is an urbanist and historian whose work focuses on the physical planning and design of cities and the historical development of the American landscape. He has also studied and written about the convulsive transformation of Chinese cities in the post-Mao era.

Campanella is a Fellow of the American Academy inRome. He has been awarded Guggenheim, Fulbright and James Marston Fitch fellowships and has held visiting appointments at Columbia University, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Nanjing University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He taught previously at MIT, and in 2009 was the inaugural Amacon-Beasley Scholar-in-Residence at the University of British Columbia School of Community andRegional Planning.

Campanella's most recent book is The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), a primer on contemporary Chinese urbanism which "sets the scene," writes sinologist Jonathan D. Spence, "for any further discussion of China's explosive urban growth across the last twenty years." The Concrete Dragon was a2009 Planetizen "Top Ten Book"and runner-up for the 2008 Environmental Design Research Association book award. It is among the most widely used texts on Chinese urbanism in American and European schools of architecture and planning. The book is discussed in this New York Review of Books essay.
Campanella is also the author of Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm (Yale University Press,2003), the first study of the rise and fall of that paragon of American vernacular space, "Elm Street."  The book received a Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians in 2005, and was reviewed in The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Boston Globe, which named it one of the ten best non-fiction books of 2003.

Campanella's other works include Cities Fromthe Sky: An Aerial Portrait of America (Princeton, 2001), a monograph on the development of urban aerial photography and one of its pioneers, the Fairchild Air Survey Company; and The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster (Oxford University Press, 2005), an anthology on the politics and processes of urban regeneration through history co-edited with Lawrence J. Vale of MIT. TheResilient City was a Planetizen "Top Ten Book" in 2005.

Campanella is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his essays and criticism have appeared in Orion, Metropolis, Salon, Obit, Places, Landscape Architecture and Architectural Record. He has been a guest on radio and television programs on National Public Radio, the BBC, CNN, CBC (Canada) and CCTV (China).

He holds a PhDin urban planning from MIT; a master's degree in landscape architecture from Cornell University; and a BS in environmental studies from the State University of New York. His doctoral dissertation won the John Reps Prize from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History. At Cornell, Campanella was awarded the Michael Rapuano Memorial Medal for design excellence in the College ofArchitecture, Art and Planning, and received a commendation for outstanding achievement from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Campanella has consulted on urban design and planning projects in China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, Japan, and the United States. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a wildland firefighter, EMT and fire lookout operator for the United StatesForest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and the Alaska Fire Service. He is also a licensed pilot.



Public service

Campanella served two consecutive terms as a planning commissioner for the Town of Hillsborough, North Carolina. He chaired the Hillsborough - Orange County Rail Station Task Force in 2009, and prepared the official master plan for the Hillsborough Station transit-oriented...