Charles Wolfe

Affiliate Associate Professor

CHUCK WOLFE is a multinational urbanism consultant, author, Visiting and Guest Scholar in Scotland and Sweden (2014 and 2017-22), recent Fulbright Specialist in Australia for an award-winning project, and long-time American environmental/land use lawyer. In addition to his law degree from the University of Oregon, he holds a graduate degree in regional planning from Cornell University, and has 38 years of experience in environmental, land use, and real estate law. He has held leadership positions in both the legal and planning professions. He has represented public and private clients in property redevelopment, regulatory entitlements, drafting and brownfield remediation issues in Washington State and other venues.

He is Founder and Principal Advisor of Seeing Better Cities Group, practiced at several law firms, and lived abroad from 2017-2022. At the UW, he has taught land use law and contributed to major research efforts addressing urban center and brownfield redevelopment. He has served on the Board of Futurewise. He is former Vice Chair, Fund Development, and former Treasurer of the Northwest District Council/Urban Land Institute and served on its Managing and Advisory Boards. He has been a frequent radio and podcast guest in several countries, and has written regularly for many publications, including The Atlantic, The Atlantic Cities/CityLab, Governing, CityMetric, Planetizen, The Huffington Post, Grist, and Crosscut. He blogs at myurbanist.com and sustainingplace.com.

He is the author of Sustaining a City’s Culture and Character (Rowman and Littlefield (2021), the third on a trilogy of books addressing how to determine the intrinsic identities of cities and urban places. He is also the author of Seeing the Better City (2017) (finalist for a 2018 UK National Urban Design Award), and Urbanism Without Effort (rev. ed. 2019), both from Island Press.