Larissa Larsen

Larissa Larsen is a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan. She teaches graduate classes in environmental planning, land use planning, and physical planning and design. Larsen teaches one required class in the Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program. The course, URP 507—Fundamentals of Planning Practice, requires students to work in teams to prepare a plan for a real community. She likes this applied class because it draws upon her experience working in professional practice and she is able to engage with many different municipalities in SE Michigan. Larsen also teaches URP 610/URP 402 Cities and Climate Change and ARCH 423/URP 423/ENVIRON 370 Introduction to Urban and Environmental Planning.

Larsen’s research focuses on the urban environmental problems of extreme heat and stormwater flooding, now exacerbated with climate change. In her research, she documents the magnitude of these environmental problems and ‘tests’ the effectiveness of different design and policy interventions. Her research is highly interdisciplinary and she incorporates many ‘physical/natural/health’ concepts and measures and works with faculty in public health, civil and environmental engineering, and urban climatology. In 2014, Larsen began a research collaboration with Dr. Kumelachew Yeshitela at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. Together, they have been studying the city’s rapid, low-density development and how this impacts the provision of water and ecosystem services. She is expanding this research beyond Addis Ababa to ask questions about patterns of urbanization and water infrastructure in other East African cities.

Larsen grew up on a farm near St. Marys, Ontario. She completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Guelph, Ontario. Larissa received her Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After completing her Ph.D., she worked as a landscape architect and urban planner for a private firm in Chicago, Illinois. She is a registered landscape architect and has a passion for native plants. Before coming to the University of Michigan, she taught at Arizona State University for two years.