Laura Wolf-Powers

Laura Wolf-Powers
Born	Anna Laura Powers
💼 Occupation	Academic, urban planning scholar
Title	Professor of Urban Policy and Planning
🏅 Awards	G. Holmes Perkins Award for Distinguished Teaching (2011) Philadelphia Athenaeum Art & Architecture Book Award (2022, co-winner) ACSP-Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Best Paper Award (2019)

Laura Wolf-Powers is an American scholar of urban policy and planning. She is Professor of Urban Policy and Planning in the Department of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY), and a member of the doctoral faculty in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research addresses neighborhood revitalization, urban and regional economic development, workforce development, and the political economy of land valuation and taxation, with emphasis on how community development operates under structural inequality.

She is the author of University City: History, Race, and Community in the Era of the Innovation District (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022; paperback 2024), which co-won the 2022 Athenaeum of Philadelphia Art & Architecture Book Award. Wolf-Powers also serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association and as co-editorial director of Metropolitics.org, an international online journal of public scholarship on cities and urban politics.

Early life and education

Wolf-Powers received a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies from Yale University in 1990, graduating summa cum laude. She received the Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for the best senior essay in American Studies. Following her undergraduate studies, she served as a New York City Urban Fellow, gaining early exposure to urban governance and policy before pursuing graduate education. She earned a Master of Public Affairs (MPA) with a certificate in urban planning from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1997.

Wolf-Powers completed her doctoral studies at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, receiving a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Policy Development in 2003. Her dissertation, The Effect of Labor Market Intermediaries on Career Opportunity for Non-College-Educated Workers: A Supply- and Demand-Side Analysis, was supervised by economic geographer Ann Markusen and funded in part by a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant. The dissertation received two major awards: the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Barclay Gibbs Jones Award for Best Dissertation in Planning (2004) and the Susan S. Fainstein Award for Outstanding Doctoral Scholarship from Rutgers University (2003).

Academic career

Early teaching positions (1998–2002)

While completing her doctorate, Wolf-Powers served as an Instructor at the Rutgers Bloustein School (Fall 1998–Fall 2000), teaching Introduction to Urban Studies and Development and Theory of Urban Planning. She simultaneously held an adjunct position at the Milano School of The New School (Fall 2000 and Fall 2001), teaching Political Economy of the City.

Pratt Institute (2002–2007)

Wolf-Powers joined Pratt Institute's Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE) in 2002 as an Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning. She was promoted to Department Chair in 2005, a role she held until 2007, overseeing three master's degree programs in city planning, environmental management, and historic preservation. During this period she published an influential study of up-zoning in New York City's mixed-use neighborhoods that remains highly cited for its analysis of property-led economic development.

University of Pennsylvania (2008–2014)

In 2008 Wolf-Powers moved to the University of Pennsylvania School of Design (now the Weitzman School of Design) as an Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning. She taught courses on community and economic development, metropolitan labor markets, and urban and regional economics, and served as Assistant Chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning (2011–2012) and chair of the PennDesign Curriculum Committee. In 2011 she received the G. Holmes Perkins Award for Distinguished Teaching from Penn's School of Design. Her years in West Philadelphia provided the primary research context for what would become her book University City.

Visiting positions (2015–2017)

After leaving Penn, Wolf-Powers served as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center (2015–2017). During the same period she was a Visiting Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Spring 2016), where she taught Public and Private Development, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (Spring 2017), teaching Social Entrepreneurship and the Urban Built Environment.

Hunter College, CUNY (2017–present)

Wolf-Powers joined the Department of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College in 2017 as Associate Professor and was promoted to full Professor in 2023. In Spring 2024 she was appointed to the doctoral faculty in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she co-taught \"Technology and the City\" with Professor Emerita Sharon Zukin. At Hunter she teaches core courses including Planning for Economic Development, Economics of Real Estate Development, Community Planning in NYC, Planning Studio, and History and Theory of Planned Urban Development. She also holds a position as Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto's School of Cities.

Research

Wolf-Powers' research operates at the intersection of urban and regional economic development policy, community development, workforce development, and the political economy of land and property. Her work examines how urban politics are mediated through policies governing the built environment and the economy, and the role of planners and civil society organizations in advancing equity within these processes. Her current primary research focus is land valuation and real property taxation, specifically land value capture as a tool for equitable urban development.

University City and innovation districts

Wolf-Powers' principal monograph, University City: History, Race, and Community in the Era of the Innovation District (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), examines six decades of planning and redevelopment politics in West Philadelphia. The book traces how the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University, in collaboration with city officials, demolished a predominantly Black neighborhood known as the Black Bottom beginning in the late 1960s to create the University City Science Center, resulting in the forced displacement of thousands of residents. Wolf-Powers draws a line of historical continuity between mid-twentieth-century urban renewal and the contemporary rise of knowledge-economy innovation districts, arguing that both are driven by a logic of displacement and real estate appreciation over the stability of legacy communities.

The book employs archival research, economic analysis, and extended ethnographic observation to surface the voices of community activists and legacy residents, documenting what Wolf-Powers calls a \"politics of self-help\" versus a \"politics of mitigation\" in the face of institutional encroachment. The book co-won the 2022 Athenaeum of Philadelphia Art & Architecture Book Award and was reissued in paperback in fall 2024. It received reviews in the Journal of Urban Affairs, Urban Studies, Urban Affairs Review, the Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law, the Journal of American History, and Progressive City. Wolf-Powers published a related opinion piece, \"Beware the Innovation District,\" in the Chronicle of Higher Education (February 14, 2023), and has delivered talks on the book at Yale, Penn, Ohio State, the University of Toronto, the University of Illinois Chicago, Cornell, and the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Maker movement and urban manufacturing

Wolf-Powers led a major research program on the maker movement and urban entrepreneurship, funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Working with frequent collaborators Marc Doussard (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Greg Schrock (Portland State University), Max Eisenburger, Stephen Marotta, and Charles Heying, she examined maker-entrepreneurs in New York, Chicago, and Portland. Key publications from this body of work include \"The Maker Movement and Urban Economic Development\" (Journal of the American Planning Association, 2017), \"Manufacturing Without the Firm\" (Environment and Planning A, 2017), \"Industrial Inheritances: Makers, Relatedness and Materiality in New York and Chicago\" (Regional Studies, 2019), \"Opportunities and Risks of Localised Industrial Policy\" (Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society, 2019), and \"Appetite for Growth\" (Economic Development Quarterly, 2019). The Regional Studies article received the 2019 ACSP-Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Best Paper Award on Planning and Entrepreneurship. The research team also produced The Maker Economy in Action: Entrepreneurship and Supportive Ecosystems in Chicago, New York and Portland (2016), a publicly available research monograph.

Community benefits agreements and land value capture

Wolf-Powers has been a prominent voice on community benefits agreements (CBAs) and land value capture as tools for equitable urban development. Her 2010 article \"Community Benefits Agreements and Local Government: A Review of Recent Evidence\" (Journal of the American Planning Association) is among her most widely cited works. She contributed a chapter on \"Community Benefits Agreements in a Value Capture Context\" to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy's Value Capture and Land Policies volume (2012). Her 2023 article \"Dilemmas of 21st Century Land Value Capture: Examining Henry George's Legacy in a New Gilded Age\" (Environment and Planning A) critically examines contemporary land value capture mechanisms in a context of widening inequality. She has also produced policy reports with the Pratt Center for Community Development, including Our Hidden Treasure: Recovering Land Value to Repair and Rebuild (2020), with Pierina Sanchez, and Public Action, Public Value: Investing in a Just and Equitable Gowanus Neighborhood Rezoning (2019).

Workforce development and labor markets

Wolf-Powers' early career work centered on workforce development and urban labor markets. Beyond her dissertation, she co-authored \"Chains and Ladders: Exploring the Opportunities for Workforce Development and Poverty Reduction in the Hospital Sector\" (Economic Development Quarterly, 2010), with Marla Nelson, \"Who Works in a Working Region? Inclusive Innovation in the New Manufacturing Economy\" (Regional Studies, 2018), with Nichola Lowe, and \"Human-Capital-Centered Regionalism in Economic Development\" (Urban Studies, 2012). Her early articles also include \"Technology and Urban Labor Markets in the United States\" (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2001).

Community development theory and planning pedagogy

Wolf-Powers' 2014 article \"Understanding Community Development in a Theory of Action Framework: Norms, Markets, Justice\" (Planning Theory & Practice) was anthologized in Susan S. Fainstein and James DeFilippis's Readings in Planning Theory, 4th edition (Wiley, 2016), a standard textbook in urban planning graduate programs. Other notable articles include \"Food Deserts and Real-Estate-Led Social Policy\" (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2017), \"Teaching Planners to Deal: The Pedagogical Value of a Simulated Economic Development Negotiation\" (Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2013), and \"Expanding Planning's Public Sphere: STREET Magazine, Activist Planning and Community Development in Brooklyn, NY 1971–75\" (Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2008).

Planning theory and post-truth politics

In a 2025 co-edited interface in Planning Theory & Practice, Wolf-Powers and colleagues examine how post-truth politics and the erosion of social hope among political leaders endanger the planning project, arguing that planners depend on assumptions of good-faith participation that contemporary governance has increasingly corroded.

Citation metrics

As of early 2026, Wolf-Powers' work has accumulated over 1,400 citations on Google Scholar, with an h-index of 19 and an i10-index of 26. Her ResearchGate profile lists 57 publications with over 790 citations and 18,100 reads.

Publications

Books

• Wolf-Powers, Laura. University City: History, Race, and Community in the Era of the Innovation District. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022 (hardcover); 2024 (paperback). ISBN 978-1-5128-2273-1.

Selected peer-reviewed articles

• Wolf-Powers, Laura. \"Up-Zoning New York City's Mixed-Use Neighborhoods: Property-Led Economic Development and the Anatomy of a Planning Dilemma.\" Journal of Planning Education and Research 24(4), 2005. doi:10.1177/0739456X04270125.
• Wolf-Powers, Laura. \"Community Benefits Agreements and Local Government: A Review of Recent Evidence.\" Journal of the American Planning Association 76(2), 2010. doi:10.1080/01944360903490923.
• Wolf-Powers, Laura. \"Understanding Community Development in a Theory of Action Framework: Norms, Markets, Justice.\" Planning Theory and Practice 15(2), 2014.
• Wolf-Powers, Laura; Doussard, Marc; Schrock, Greg; Heying, Charles; Eisenburger, Max; Marotta, Stephen. \"The Maker Movement and Urban Economic Development.\" Journal of the American Planning Association 83(4), 2017. doi:10.1080/01944363.2017.1360787.
• Wolf-Powers, Laura. \"Food Deserts and Real-Estate-Led Social Policy.\" International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41(3), 2017.
• Wolf-Powers, Laura; Doussard, Marc; Schrock, Greg; Eisenburger, Max; Marotta, Stephen; Heying, Charles. \"Industrial Inheritances: Makers, Relatedness and Materiality in New York and Chicago.\" Regional Studies 53(9), 2019.
• Wolf-Powers, Laura; Lowe, Nichola. \"Who Works in a Working Region? Inclusive Innovation in the New Manufacturing Economy.\" Regional Studies 52(6), 2018.
• Wolf-Powers, Laura. \"Dilemmas of 21st Century Land Value Capture: Examining Henry George's Legacy in a New Gilded Age.\" Environment and Planning A 55(8), 2023. doi:10.1177/0308518X231216534.

Selected book chapters

• With Ann Markusen and Michael Oden. Chapter in From Defense to Development? Routledge, 2003.
• \"Career-Ladder Initiatives in the Telecommunications Industry.\" In Edwin Meléndez, ed., Communities and Workforce Development. W.E. Upjohn Institute, 2005.
• \"Community Benefits Agreements in a Value Capture Context.\" In Ingram and Hong, eds., Value Capture and Land Policies. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2012.
• Chapter in Community Action and Planning. Bristol University Press, 2014.
• Chapter in Handbook of Manufacturing Industries in the World Economy. Edward Elgar, 2015.
• Chapter in The Design of Urban Manufacturing. CRC Press, 2020.
• \"Civic Mobilization and Public Land in West Philadelphia’s Lower Lancaster Corridor, 2013–2022.\" In The Politics of Land Value: Negotiating Social Futures. Routledge, 2024.

Selected reports and public scholarship

• Wolf-Powers, Laura; Sanchez, Pierina. Our Hidden Treasure: Recovering Land Value to Repair and Rebuild. Pratt Center for Community Development, 2020.
• Wolf-Powers, Laura; Cespedes, Sydney; Conte, Elena. Public Action, Public Value: Investing in a Just and Equitable Gowanus Neighborhood Rezoning. Pratt Center for Community Development, 2019.
• Schrock, Greg; Doussard, Marc; Wolf-Powers, Laura; Heying, Charles; Eisenburger, Max; Marotta, Stephen. The Maker Economy in Action: Entrepreneurship and Supportive Ecosystems in Chicago, New York and Portland. 2016.

Awards and honors

Year	Award
1990	Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for Best Senior Essay in American Studies, Yale University
2003	Susan S. Fainstein Award for Outstanding Doctoral Scholarship, Rutgers University
2004	Barclay Gibbs Jones Award for Best Dissertation in Planning, Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning
2008	First Place, Economic Development Category, National Urban Policy Initiatives Competition (with Marla K. Nelson)
2011	G. Holmes Perkins Award for Distinguished Teaching, University of Pennsylvania School of Design
2019	ACSP-Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Best Paper Award on Planning and Entrepreneurship for \"Industrial Inheritances,\" Regional Studies
2022	Athenaeum of Philadelphia Art & Architecture Book Award (co-winner), for University City

Editorial and professional service

Wolf-Powers has served as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association since 2021 (editorial board member since 2020), one of the leading journals in the urban planning field. She has been co-editorial director of Metropolitics.org, an international online journal of public scholarship on cities and urban politics, since 2016.

Additional service roles include membership on the Selection Committee for the JAPA Best Article Award (2023–present), the Selection Committee for the ACSP Rising Scholar Award (2021–2023), and Track Chair for the Regional Planning Track at the ACSP Annual Conference (2013–2017). At Hunter College she chairs the School of Arts and Sciences Social Sciences Curriculum Committee (2023–present). She is a member of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, the Regional Studies Association, the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, and the Urban Affairs Association.

Community and policy engagement

Wolf-Powers is a member of the Steering Committee of the Western Queens Community Land Trust (WQCLT), which is developing the Queensboro People’s Space project in Long Island City. The project envisions a community-owned hub for manufacturing, arts, food justice, and healthcare on a site formerly identified for Amazon HQ2.

She serves on the Advisory Board of Custom Collaborative, a New York City nonprofit that trains low-income women and gender-expansive immigrants for careers in sustainable fashion, and is a member of the New York Fashion Workforce Development Coalition. She has served as an academic consultant to the Urban Manufacturing Alliance and as an academic advisor to the Pratt Center for Community Development. She is affiliated with the Collective for Community, Culture and Environment and remains an affiliated scholar of the Penn Institute for Urban Research.

Wolf-Powers has published opinion pieces in Crain's New York Business on the Adams Administration's \"City of Yes\" housing policy (July 2024), the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Law & Political Economy Project blog. She has been cited as an expert source in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Gothamist, and The Triangle (Drexel University). She participates in policy forums including the Urban Design Forum’s \"Next New York\" series (2021) and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s expert convenings on land value capture.

External links

• Hunter Urban Policy & Planning faculty page
• CUNY Graduate Center directory page
• Google Scholar profile
• Penn Press author page
• Metropolitics author page

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