• Bio:

    Owen Gutfreund, Associate Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning, is the author of Twentieth Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (Oxford University Press, 2004), and was one of the authors of Robert Moses and the Modern City (W.W. Norton, 2007). His areas of specialization include transportation policy, suburbanization, sustainable development, public finance, and comparative urbanization (with an emphasis on cities in developing countries, as well as Canada and Australia). He was an Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of New York City, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Urban History. Owen is currently working on Cities Take Flight, a book about the impact of airports and air travel on American cities and towns.

    For many years, he was the Director of the Barnard-Columbia Urban Studies Program. He is on the on the board of the Skyscraper Museum, was chair of the Columbia University Seminar on the City, and of the New York Council for the Humanities. Before earning his doctorate in history at Columbia, Owen was a Vice President at Lazard Freres & Co., where he worked in public finance, assisting states, cities, and government agencies in raising capital for a wide range of purposes.