CHUCK WOLFE is a multinational urbanism consultant, author and influencer, Visiting and Guest Scholar in Scotland and Sweden (2014 and 2017-22), a recent Fulbright Specialist in Australia for an award-winning project, and a long-time American environmental/land use lawyer. In addition to his law degree from the University of Oregon, he holds a graduate degree in regional planning from Cornell University. He has 38 years of experience in environmental, land use, and real estate law. He has held leadership positions in both the legal and planning professions. He has represented public and private clients in property redevelopment, regulatory entitlements, drafting, and brownfield remediation issues in Washington State and other venues.
He is the Founder and Principal Advisor of Seeing Better Cities Group practiced at several law firms and lived abroad from 2017-2022. At the UW, he has taught land use law and contributed to major research efforts addressing urban center and brownfield redevelopment. He has served on the Board of Futurewise. He is the former Vice Chair, Fund Development and former Treasurer of the Northwest District Council/Urban Land Institute and served on its Managing and Advisory Boards. He has been a frequent radio and podcast guest in several countries. He has written regularly for many publications, including The Atlantic, The Atlantic Cities/CityLab, Governing, CityMetric, Planetizen, The Huffington Post, Grist, and Crosscut. He blogs at myurbanist.com and sustainingplace.com.
He is the author of Sustaining a City’s Culture and Character (Rowman and Littlefield (2021), the third in a trilogy of books addressing how to determine the intrinsic identities of cities and urban places. He is also the author of Seeing the Better City (2017) (finalist for a 2018 UK National Urban Design Award), and Urbanism Without Effort (rev. ed. 2019), both from Island Press.
Revisiting the Common Sense Elements of City Life
Chuck Wolfe revisits five instances of how we can learn from the urbanism we already have.
The Underlying Patterns of Urban Street Design
Based on empirical study, J. Alexander Maxwell and fellow University of Strathclyde researchers, in collaboration with Chuck Wolfe, argue for recalling historic patterns of pedestrian city settings in contemporary urban design and policies.
Why Urban History Matters
Chuck Wolfe's recent reconnaissance of Edinburgh provides a foil for his rallying cry: Going forward, let’s not discount the influence of history’s recurring themes in how we redevelop the urban realm.
Placemaking Lessons Learned from Seattle's Super Bowl Parade
Last Wednesday, an estimated 700,000—more than the city's population of 635,000—welcomed the Seahawks home, without major incident. Writing in The Atlantic Cities, Chuck Wolfe describes five lessons for placemaking through words and photographs.
The Mythical Search for 'Congruity' in the City
In the eighth installment of the Urban Juxtapositions series profiled in Planetizen on January 16, Chuck Wolfe asks if we are using the right language when it comes to densifying urban spaces.