About

Louise Mozingo is a professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also a member of the Graduate Group in Urban Design and the Director of the American Studies program in the College of Letters and Sciences. She holds an MLA from UC Berkeley and a BA in Biology and Art History from the College of William and Mary. Her professional background includes experience as an associate and senior landscape architect at Sasaki Associates, and she joined the department after a decade of professional practice. In 2009, she founded the Center for Resource Efficient Communities (CREC), an interdisciplinary research team dedicated to supporting resource efficiency through environmental planning and urban design. Mozingo’s research and teaching focus on urban design and planning, design history, and the social and cultural factors in landscape design. Her work emphasizes the importance of the collective public landscape—such as streets, parks, schoolyards, and wildlife corridors—and the role of landscape craft in shaping spaces that are beautiful, ecologically constructive, socially vital, and enduring. She has authored the award-winning book 'Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes,' and her articles have appeared in numerous prominent publications. Mozingo has received several honors, including the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professorship, Harvard's Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship, and the Society of Architectural Historians' Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Prize. She has lectured widely at prestigious institutions and is recognized for her contributions to landscape architecture and environmental planning.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Environmental planning
• Civil engineering
• Business
• Geography
• Environmental resource management
• Ecology
• Environmental science
• Engineering
• Transport engineering
• Psychology
• Architectural engineering
• Law

Selected publications

• Renewable Energy Communities: An Opportunity for Multi-Benefit Urban Sustainability

  Energies · 2026-03-05

  articleOpen access

  Public buildings and open spaces form key elements in an exchange system of both tangible resources (energy, water, physical spaces) and intangible assets (services, skills, time). This study presents an innovative protocol (AGAPE—Automatic GIS Assessment Protocol for Energy and environment) to regenerate metropolitan suburbs by managing common resources and support sustainable communities. It tackles energy poverty by integrating urban planning, environmental design, and economics into geographic information science. This expedites public well-being by redesigning public facilities to enhance community connections and improve bioclimatic resilience. The model test site is a peripheral suburban area, Melito di Napoli, within the Metropolitan City of Naples (Italy), characterized by high population density and ongoing suburban expansion. The protocol evaluates temporal scenarios for implementing multi-purpose solutions, supporting public agencies in strategic intervention assessments, optimizing funding allocation and community benefits. The modeling of redesigned community assets reveal key outcomes: renewed land-use opportunities, reduced spatial inequities, and increased climate change resilience. The transformation of public buildings and facilities into multi-benefit community cores catalyzes virtuous urban regeneration processes. The model AGAPE provides a replicable decision framework to transform existing settlements and to drive the transition towards more sustainable, equitable urban communities.

  PublisherDOI

• A Digital Model for Designing Safe and Accessible Spaces in Sustainable Urban Communities

  Lecture notes in civil engineering · 2025-12-10

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Urban green streets and water management safety hubs in public schools lots

  IOP Conference Series Earth and Environmental Science · 2024-10-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) represents an effective approach to enhance urban resilience to climate change, contributing to runoff regulation and localized flood risk reduction. This study examines the potential for transforming open spaces in public schools into safety hubs for stormwater management in Mediterranean urban contexts, drawing on best practices from North America. Through a methodological analysis combining Research Through Design and an international literary scoping review, case studies of schools in the Metropolitan City of Naples are presented and compared with U.S. projects implementing GSI in school areas. The results highlight the importance of strategic coordination guidelines for local administrators, designers, and school principals, aimed at planning, designing, and managing highly performant green infrastructure networks. An integrated and shared metropolitan-level approach can maximize environmental benefits, transforming schools into community centers for urban resilience education and participatory management of risks related to extreme weather events.

  PublisherDOI

• Environmental Design on Site-Specific Energy Solidary Communities around Public High Schools in the Metropolitan Area of Naples (Italy)

  Energies · 2024-05-07 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Renewable energy communities (RECs) around photovoltaic systems on public buildings are optimal solutions to counter energy poverty, ensuring all stakeholders access to cheap, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy systems. As the neighborhood is the minimum suitable unit for the implementation of highly sustainable settlements, this article discusses the potential and criticality of RECs at this scale in southern Italy. Starting with the concept of RECs, this study presents a methodology to size sustainable urban communities around school buildings. It integrates practical energy indicators with those defining performance in vegetation and water management. The impact of these factors is analyzed to identify the ideal community size in terms of energy efficiency, economic value, and social cohesion. An interactive scorecard ranks high school sites suitable for transformation into community hubs, taking into consideration the scale of substation distribution. The findings provide empirically validated operational guidelines and best practices to support the transition to smart, efficient, and socially inclusive communities. At the urban scale, the analysis evaluates different urban morphologies, microclimates, characteristics and density of buildings, and population around each assumed community hub. The study provides valuable guidance to local designers, planners, and administrators for the implementation of sustainable technologies by preparing a map of potential RECs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Case Study in Southern Italy to Estimate the Effectiveness of GSI for Quality Life Improvement in an Urban Context

  2023-08-03

  article

  The effect of climate change on the Mediterranean landscape requires environmental restoration projects based on interdisciplinary research methods that consider the integration of different evolving aspects mainly in urban contexts where the increase of severe rainfalls is significantly impacting citizen behaviour. Starting from a case study of Strada Statale 7 bis in South Italy (a boundary between four municipalities: Melito di Napoli, Sant'Antimo, Giugliano in Campania, and Aversa) in which flooding, since last twenty years, exposed the road system fragility, composed by a main road and its sidewalks to allow normal citizen activities. A multidisciplinary research group proposed an innovative re-design of the street aiming to improve the quality of life during stormwaters. This work explores the possibility of importing best practices from North America to Southern Italy and integrating them into the hydrological approaches suggested by Italian law for risk mitigation.

  PublisherDOI

• 14 Thailand

  2022-05-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Environmental Regeneration Integrating Soft Mobility and Green Street Networks: A Case Study in the Metropolitan Periphery of Naples

  Sustainability · 2021 · 16 citations

  • Environmental planning
  • Transport engineering
  • Business

  Public space and street networks form a significant and central determinant of urban quality. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has focused their crucial importance in the reorganisation of places that are “safe” because they allow movement through cities with minimal risk of contagion. While addressing the need for social distancing, open air exercise, and mobility without use of public transport, these measures resulted in other environmental and social benefits. Living with the coronavirus pandemic has produced a series of adaptative actions, such as barring or limiting automobile traffic, thereby expanding street space for pedestrians and bicyclists, whose impact is, as yet, difficult to fathom because of their contingent, temporary nature. In this context, this case study proposes a sustainable bicycle network to inform the future, permanent street redesign. Based on topographic, morphologic, and climatic data, it evaluates a series of contiguous road sections, defining redesign capacities and critical conditions to implement sustainable interventions to manage urban runoff, mitigate of extreme heat events, expand pedestrian paths and provide a bicycle network. This holistic approach to sustainable urban design evaluation, supported by reproducible data and parameters, serves as a replicable model for the sustainable redesign of roads in other urban settings. The extent, integration, and complexity of the study engaged an interdisciplinary framework, facilitating detailed planning and design and quantified assessments of environmental outcomes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 4. Green Street Framework for Mediterranean Urban Fringe Areas

  2021-01-01 · 2 citations

  article
  Publisher

• Toward sustainable stormwater management: Understanding public appreciation and recognition of urban Low Impact Development (LID) in the San Francisco Bay Area

  Journal of Environmental Management · 2021 · 51 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Environmental planning
  • Geography
  PublisherDOI

• Social studies: Landscape and the academy.

  Landscape architecture · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Renata Valente

  6 shared

• G. Mathias Kondolf

  University of California, Berkeley

  4 shared

• Roberto Bosco

  University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli"

  4 shared

• Rachael Marzion

  4 shared

• Wilasinee Darnthamrongkul

  3 shared

• Savino Giacobbe

  3 shared

• Amir Gohar

  University of the West of England

  2 shared

• Joe R. McBride

  University of California, Berkeley

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Undergr…
• Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landsca…
• 2014 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Prize from the Society of Ar…
• American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award for Com…
• Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship for Studies i…