Jennifer Wolch received her doctorate in Urban Planning from Princeton University and has been a member of the USC faculty since 1979. She is Professor of Geography and Urban and Regional Planning, and Director of the USC Center for Sustainable Cities. In the 1980’s her work focused on problems of service-dependent and homeless people in American cities, social policy and human service delivery, and the role of the voluntary non-profit sector in the Americn welfare state. Between 1987 and 1994, she was Director of the Los Angeles Homelessness Project (funded principally by the National Science Foundation). During the 1990’s, she conducted research on welfare reform and its implications for American Cities, serving as principal author of Los Angeles in an Era of Welfare Reform: Implications for Poor People and Community Well-being (1997, with H. Sommer, Assisted by J. Handler and M. Stoner). Professor Wolch has won a number of awards from the American Planning Association, has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, received the USC’s Raubenheimer Award for Faculty Excellence in Research, Teaching and Service, and was also awarded a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggnheim Foundation.
Michael Dear is also Professor of Geography and Director of the Southern California Studies Center at USC. He was educated in England and received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author/editor of more than a dozen books, including most recently The Postmodern Urban Condition (Blackwell, 2000). He has received awards from the USC Associates, Raubenheimer, the Golden Key National Honors Society, and the Association of American Geographers for his research and teaching. His most recent work has focused on the “LA School” of urbanism, and the cultural geography of the US-Mexico borderlands.
