Margaret Dewar
Margaret Dewar is professor emerita of urban and regional planning and special advisor with UM’s Poverty Solutions. Her research analyzes how planners can address issues facing cities that have experienced substantial population and employment loss. She studies remaking cities following abandonment, strengthening deteriorated neighborhoods, and reducing the harm residents experience from disinvestment in their city. Her work draws on Detroit’s experience to illuminate broader issues of improving quality of life in cities that have much smaller populations than in the past. She is investigating how residents and community-based organizations succeed in saving some neighborhoods from disinvestment, how vacant land gets reused productively in a weak market, and how homeownership by very low-income households might stabilize their housing and preserve structures. She is continuing to work with others on ways to prevent evictions and to decrease tax foreclosures. Her most recent book is The City after Abandonment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), coedited with June Manning Thomas. In all her research she works with people who can use her findings to make changes in planning and policy practice. In 2020, she received the UM President’s Award for Public Impact. Dewar earned a Ph.D. in urban studies and planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master of city planning from Harvard University, and a bachelor of arts from Wellesley College.
This faculty member is not teaching courses.