Education
Owen Gutfreund is an Associate Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College. Previously, he was on the faculty at Columbia University, where he taught urban history, urban planning, and international affairs, and served for many years as Director of the joint Barnard-Columbia Urban Studies Program. A specialist in urban history, Owen has published 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: The Transformation of New York (W.W. Norton, 2007). He is an Associate Editor of the forthcoming 2nd edition of the Encyclopedia of New York City, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Urban History. He is currently working on Cities Take Flight: Airports, Aviation, and Modern American Urbanism, a book about the impact of airports and air travel on American cities. Before earning his doctorate, Professor Gutfreund was a Vice President at the investment banking firm Lazard Freres & Company, where he worked in public finance, assisting states, cities, and government agencies in financing infrastructure projects. Professor Gutfreund’s areas of specialization, besides general American urban history, include transportation policy, suburbanization, sustainable development, sprawl, public finance, and comparative urbanization. He is a widely acknowledged expert on urban issues, and has appeared on PBS and NPR, in the New York Times and in other major media outlets. He has been invited to speak at Middlebury College, NYU, Columbia, University of Delaware, Ohio State University, the Municipal Arts Society, the Center for Architecture, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the New America Foundation. He has also presented his research to a wide range of academic groups, including keynote addresses to the Conference on the Small City and to the International Forum on Metropolitan Development (in Shanghai), and has been a plenary speaker for the Urban History Association.