Faculty affiliates

Robert Goodspeed

Assistant Professor of Urban Planning

Robert Goodspeed, PhD, AICP, is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of geographic information systems (GIS), collaborative planning, urban informatics, and scenario planning theory and methods. Within these areas, he has investigated how urban practitioners can effectively use new information technologies, the effectiveness of new practices like online civic crowdfunding, and how urban scenarios can be used to manage uncertainty. He holds a Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.C.P. from the University of Maryland, and a B.A. in history from the University of Michigan. His dissertation, which examined the use of planning support systems in spatial planning, received the 2013 Donald Schön Award for Excellence in Learning from Practice from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. His undergraduate thesis, a case study of Detroit's Gratiot Area Redevelopment Project from the early 1950s, sparked his interest in cities and urban planning. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP), and serves as a board member of the Consortium for Scenario Planning, and initiative of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.