FRIEDMANN, JOHN

Professor Emeritus

School of Public Affairs, UCLA

Honorary Professor
School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia

Born in Vienna, Austria, John Friedmann has taught at MIT, UCLA, the University of Melbourne, the National University of Taiwan, and is currently Honorary Professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Throughout his long life, he has been an advisor to governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Mozambique, and China where he was recently appointed Honorary Foreign Advisor to the China Academy of Planning and Urban Design.

He is the author of 20 books and over 150 articles on a wide range of topics, including regional planning, urbanization, social development, and planning theory, and his work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Farsi. Among the many honors he has received are a Guggenheim Fellowship and Honorary doctorates from the University of Dortmund and the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago, Chile.  He was the first person to receive the prestigious Distinguished Planning Educator Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in and in 2006 was nominated for the UN-Habitat Lecture Award for lifetime achievement in the service of human settlements.

His most recent publications include The Prospect of Cities (2003) and China’s Urban Transition  (2005) both with the University of Minnesota Press, as well as the prize-winning essay, “Globalization and the Emerging Culture of Planning,” which appeared in Progress in Planning (2005). He is currently engaged in research on Chinese governance practices at the neighborhood level in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province.

In the Fall of 2008 he will be the Harvey S. Perloff Visiting Professor in the Department of Planning, School of Public Affairs, UCLA