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Victoria Beard is a professor and director at the Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities. Her research and teaching focus on comparative urbanization and international development planning, particularly regarding urban inequality and poverty. Beard has extensively studied how planners can address these issues in cities of the Global South and how communities can engage in planning processes that account for the limitations of formal planning regulatory frameworks. She emphasizes the importance of community-based planning, especially in improving access to basic services such as water and sanitation. Her work aims at promoting sustainable city-wide transformations. Beard has held various significant roles in institutions such as the World Resources Institute and has worked over the past 20 years with organizations like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. She earned her Ph.D. in community and regional planning from the University of British Columbia in 1999, an M.A. in urban planning from the University of California–Los Angeles in 1995, and a B.A. in urban studies and planning from the University of California–San Diego in 1992.
Department of Architecture