Melissa Keeley: Scholarly Interests

Currently a Fellow of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and visiting faculty at the University of Maryland’s National Center for Smart Growth Education and Research, my research examines the environmental impacts of land-use—specifically, urban “green infrastructure”— with a focus on applications for policy and planning for urban sustainability, in a comparative, international context. , I received my doctorate from the Institute for Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the Technical University of Berlin in 2007. As a Graduate Research Fellow of the U.S. National Science Foundation, my doctoral training at the TU Berlin, internationally renowned for its focus on the urban environment, was bolstered by a year at Harvard University, which included graduate coursework in environmental planning, economics, and law.

With a fellowship from the Robert Bosch Foundation, in 2002 I moved to Germany to explore northern European investment in sustainable urban planning techniques. There, green infrastructure, including street trees, vegetated areas, green roofs, porous pavements, and bioswales, provide multiple environmental services for urban areas. At the time, I worked in the Berlin environmental ministry and consulted at an NGO engaged with EU environmental policy. My dissertation grew out of these experiences, and examines these vegetative technologies and the policy and planning instruments that advance sustainable land-use in cities. Through the comparative analysis of urban case studies, my research looks at the potential for transfer and adaptation, between Europe and the United States, of innovative stormwater management policy, programs, and technologies. Some of my findings have appeared in the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA) special issue on water (Spring 2007); there I examined applications for a procedure, common in Germany, which has the potential to incentivize sustainable land-use decisions in American cities—right down to the parcel-level—by levying “stormwater fees” based on a property’s impervious surface. Another article, assessing Berlin’s use of a comprehensive environmental performance zoning approach that I call the ‘Green Area Ratio’ (GAR), is currently under review, also at JAPA.

My work addresses real and immediate environmental problems faced by US municipalities, demonstrated by the fact I am already regularly invited to consult governmental agencies such as the EPA and HUD and to advise decision-makers in cities including Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Seattle. Urban environmental challenges, such as stormwater management, urban air quality, and the heat island effect, are topics of increasing concern in US cities. Often the province of civil engineers, I argue that many of these problems could instead be averted through more sustainable land-use planning. For example, recent amendments to the Federal Clean Water Act are forcing municipalities across the country to drastically change how they manage stormwater. The cost of meeting this unfunded federal mandate through traditionally-engineered “grey” infrastructure (underground storm basins, etc.) will approach two to three billion dollars in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia. Increasingly, however, cities are recognizing that green infrastructure offers a cost-effective alternative to conventional, centralized mitigation of urban environmental problems. My work provides the necessary tools for municipalities to determine the benefits of existing green infrastructure, prioritize reinvestment areas, and develop sound, science-based mechanisms to plan for such investments.

I completed my M.S. at the University of Washington’s Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle, where my research focused on the remediation and rehabilitation of a sanitary landfill in Seattle’s city center through the use of regionally native, stress-tolerant plant species. I earned a B.S in Microbiology and German and a B.S. in Plant Pathology at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

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