PROVIDENCE, R.I. — April 15, 2010 — John Landis, Crossways professor and chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of City and Regional Planning will speak at the 4th Annual Marcia Marker Feld Lecture on Social Justice and the City.

The lecture, “Sustainable Urban Development: The Case For Rhode Island,” will be held on Tuesday, April 20 at 7 p.m. in the Paff Auditorium at the University of Rhode Island Feinstein Providence Campus, 80 Washington Street. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Professor Landis received his B.S. from MIT and his Ph.D. from Berkeley. He taught at URI during the 1980s, and was very popular with students and colleagues alike. He subsequently taught at Berkeley and Georgia Tech, moving to Penn in 2007.

His interests span a variety of urban development topics; his recent research and publications focus on growth management, infill housing, and the geography of urban employment centers.

Together with several generations of doctoral students, Landis developed the California Urban Futures series of urban growth models. He is currently engaged in a National Science Foundation-funded project to model, forecast, and develop alternative spatial scenarios of U.S. population and employment patterns and their impacts on travel demand, habitat loss, and water use through 2050. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Planning Association and Housing Policy Debate, and is a member of the Urban Land Institute.

The annual Marcia Marker Feld Lecture on Social Justice and the City honors Feld’s lifelong contribution to furthering urban social justice. Professor Emeritus of URI’s Center for Urban Studies and Research, Feld is a pioneer who paved the way for women in planning, a visionary who recognized the potential of university-community partnerships, a tireless advocate for this country’s urban areas and the people who live there.