DOWNLOAD CV AS PDF (111 kb)

Born and raised in Eastern Ontario (Canada), Gregory D. Morrow, 32, is presently completing his doctorate at the UCLA School of Public Affairs, Department of Urban Planning. Greg came to UCLA from MIT, where he was Lecturer in Urban Studies & Planning in the City Design & Development group from 2003-2005. His interests center upon the relationship between social, political and economic forces and the physical form of cities and regions. His fields of research are the History of Urban Design & Development, Spatial Justice, and the Privatization of Urban Space with an outside field in Architectural History, Theory and Criticism. An urban designer, architect, and urban planner, Greg holds two Architecture degrees from McGill University (undergraduate and professional) and two Masters from MIT, in Architecture & Urbanism and in City Planning (professional). He is working on a book on planning history, based on work at MIT which was awarded the Architecture & Urbanism Thesis Prize and the Ralph Cram Award for multi-disciplinary work in the School of Architecture & Planning. This book uses evidence in Toronto at the turn of the twentieth century to illustrate how various ‘deviant’ behavior (as defined by the state and civil society at the time) invoked responses that he argues laid the foundations for comprehensive city planning and the tools of its invention (zoning, public housing, the neighborhoods unit, etc). Greg was previously the editor of Projections: The MIT Journal of Planning and is presently editor of Critical Planning: The UCLA Journal of Urban Planning.

Among the projects he was involved with at MIT are: an urban design plan for central Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina following the 1992-95 war, an adaptive re-use plan for industrial heritage along the Cardener River Valley in Catalonia, Spain, and a studio that explored the relationship between technological innovation and urban form in Cambridge, UK. Prior to MIT, Greg was an architect for Moshe Safdie & Associates, where he worked on the award-winning design of the Salt Lake City Public Library and helped the firm win the U.S. Institute of Peace design competition. More recently, Greg has launched democraticSPACE.com, a blog operating at the intersection of politics and space.

Greg’s present work explores the historical roots/causes of the growing worldwide tendency towards the privatization of urban space, which includes private urban regulations (covenants), private communities (gated communities) and the rise of privately-controlled “public” spaces and the corresponding disappearance of public space (shopping malls, private streets, etc.). In particular, he is interested in exploring whether racial, ethnic or cultural differences account for the origins and growth in the privatization of urban space. He is presently a Mackenzie King scholar and recipient of the University of California Chancellor’s Fellowship, the Hildebrand Fellowship for Canadian studies, and a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.