It is with great excitement that the UCLA Lewis Center welcomes Mike Manville back to UCLA Luskin as an assistant professor of Urban Planning. Professor Manville received both his MA and PhD in urban planning from UCLA in 2003 and 2009 respectively and afterward served as a post-doctoral researcher with the Lewis Center. Professor Manville is coming to UCLA from the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University where he taught courses on traffic congestion, urban public finance, and spatial economics from 2011-2016.
Professor Manville specializes in two main areas of research: the relationship between transportation and land use, and local public finance. On the first point, he has conducted research into the costs of parking requirements and the benefits of congestion pricing schemes. On the second point, he specifically studies the willingness of residents to finance public services as well as the tendency of local governments to increase the cost of housing through strict land-use restrictions. Professor Manville is widely published in academic journals such as the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Urban Studies, and Transport Policy as well as more popular sources such as CityLab, Atlantic Cities, the Economist, and the Washington Post. Professor Manville’s interests have also taken him outside the walls of academia; he has worked both as an advisor to government officials on transportation policy and as a consultant to the development and environmental community on land use regulations.
We warmly welcome Professor Manville back to the UCLA Department of Urban Planning.