Stephanie Wakefield, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor,
Department of Urban and Regional Planning
swakefield@fau.edu
(561) 766-7627 | Office: SO 284
Curriculum Vitae
Stephanie Wakefield is Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida Atlantic University and holds a PhD in Geography from the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, where she also taught urban and environmental studies and planning for many years including at Queens College and The New School.
Dr. Wakefield is an urban geographer specializing in urban sustainability and resilience, social-ecological systems thinking and design, and critical infrastructure studies. Her research explores the social, technical, and environmental transformations of urban theory, planning, and design in the Anthropocene, and the challenges and opportunities of resilience building in coastal cities. She is interested in how such climate change mitigation efforts can reinvent city-environment relations and transform urban life. Her early New York City-focused work explored how the exigencies of climate change and problems of 20th century urban planning have led urban designers and governments to formulate resilience as an innovative planning paradigm based in reconnecting cities with natural environments and harnessing nature’s inherent vital capacities. Funded by an Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and the National Science Foundation’s Florida Coastal Everglades Long-Term Ecological Research Project, whose Cultural and Economic Values Working Group she co-leads, for the past several years she has explored the environmental, social, and technical dimensions of sea rise and flood adaptation designs in Miami, Florida.
Extending her focus on transformative urban resilience design, Dr. Wakefield’s current research focuses on coproduction of blue and green infrastructures such as living shorelines, marine architecture, foodscapes, urban tree canopies, and various ‘living with water’ and biophilic design solutions in South Florida and coastal cities worldwide. Her current work also examines the critical infrastructures and imaginaries involved in planning ‘resilience 2.0’ adaptation solutions such as climate refuges, floating communities, and future cities.
Dr. Wakefield is co-editor of Resilience in the Anthropocene: Governance and Politics at the End of the World (Routledge) and author of Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space (Open Humanities Press), as well as numerous articles in academic journals including Urban Studies, Urban Geography, Political Geography, Geography Compass, Geoforum, and Environment and Planning E: Nature and Place. Her forthcoming book, The City in the Anthropocene: Resilience, Infrastructure, and Imagination in Miami, under contract with University of Minnesota Press, explores experimental sea rise adaptations in Miami, Florida and, through these, suggests new challenges and possibilities for critical urban theory and design in the age of the Anthropocene.