About

Rachel Berney is an urban designer and scholar whose research examines the social, political, and spatial dimensions of public space in cities across the Americas. She focuses on how the built environment shapes community development, equitable urban development, sustainability, and everyday life. Her work explores the use of public space to promote belonging and investigates the impacts of mobility and transit infrastructure on public health and well-being. A central aspect of her research and teaching involves community-engaged work that supports more just and inclusive planning practices. Her interests include the legibility of urban environments—how invitations to use public space and their imaginaries communicate meaning, foster inclusion, and support more equitable urban futures. She is also the Director of Urban@UW and an Associate Professor at the University of Washington, where she teaches courses related to urban design and mobility. Her contributions include publications on pedagogical urbanism, public space transformation, and urban equity, emphasizing the importance of community participation and social justice in urban planning.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Public administration
• Law
• Economic growth
• Geography
• Engineering
• Medicine
• Environmental planning
• Civil engineering
• Visual arts
• Archaeology
• Economics
• Art
• History

Selected publications

• How Right-of-Way Adaptations Support Urban Resilience: Pandemic Streateries and Social Interactions in Seattle’s University District

  Journal of the American Planning Association · 2026-02-18

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Mindsets and actions: Shifts in equitable and sustainable development in U.S. cities

  Urban Studies · 2026-04-21

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Cities face interconnected challenges for health equity, including structural racism, inadequate housing, and climate change. Due to past failures to achieve positive development outcomes for low-income and marginalized communities, many U.S. cities now emphasize equitable planning and community engagement. However, practitioners often lack the tools to implement just, equitable, and health-promoting policies effectively. Through semi-structured interviews with 23 professionals in sectors like community development, planning, transportation, and housing—primarily in local government and nonprofits—we observed a shift toward more equitable practices, explicitly naming the role of racism in urban planning and the adoption of new strategies and frameworks for equitable planning that support health. We document approaches used to overcome opposition to healthy, equitable, and sustainable development, including building trust and employing strategic communication framing. Community-led initiatives emerged as powerful drivers of equity and sustainability, though greater public sector support for these potentially transformational efforts is needed. Further progress could benefit from a deeper understanding of cultural mindsets that hinder equitable transformation.

  PublisherDOI

• Cheaper and Safer to Build a Community than a House

  2025-12-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Urban designers should feel a keen sense of urgency to help address broad societal concerns. Writing about their recovery work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Gans and Dart conclude that “it is cheaper and safer to build a community than a house” (2011, 124). This chapter addresses unsettledness and how progressive urban design practice can respond.

  PublisherDOI

• Faith-Based Organizations

  2025-09-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  As recently as the early 2000s, Seattle’s Central District was home to many Black churches. That number has been cut in half as some have closed and others relocated. This chapter explores how one faith-based, anti-displacement initiative, the Nehemiah Initiative Seattle (NI), serves local Black churches. Faith-based organizations have become leaders in the fight against gentrification and displacement. This chapter asks what happens when othered communities embrace rights-based urbanism to aid the redevelopment of their property in the face of these challenges. This chapter focuses on the NI’s ongoing collaborations, though an on-the-ground community design and development case that considers how local projects and the broader realms of policy and planning can mutually benefit and inform each other. This chapter reveals an in-depth, community-focused, and locally centered process that productively leverages oppositional and coopting forces to advance faith-based and anti-displacement insurgent processes. Through an iterative process and “scale jumping” (see Stiphany, this volume), the NI provides an example of how to drive progressive urban design forward and harness relationships, resources, and scale jumps to create an urbanism of belonging that celebrates and supports the continuity and/or return of Black spaces and populations in cities.

  PublisherDOI

• Advancing Active Transportation Through Mobility Justice and Centering Community

  Health Equity · 2024-05-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Objectives: We established a community-academic-policy partnership to examine mobility challenges and opportunities by centering members of a diverse South Seattle neighborhood. Methods: = 10); and (c) mobility audits. We also engaged extensively in community dissemination and advocacy. Results: Four major themes emerged: experiences with the built environment; conflicting views on promoting active transportation; experiences of danger, violence, and racism while moving in the community; and pride and connections within the community. Mobility audit findings reinforced many community member messages about needed infrastructure changes. Participants consistently expressed the need for neighborhood and city-wide structural improvements to support transportation and mobility, including enhanced public transportation; better lighting, crosswalks, sidewalks, pavement, and curb cuts; and maintenance of a neighborhood mixed-use trail. Participants shared the importance of community connection while walking, rolling, or using public transit and wanted to maintain this experience. Conclusions: Collectively, findings identified ways to increase nonmotorized transportation and public transit access, safety, and resilience, centering solutions on communities of color. We disseminated and amplified community recommendations to advance mobility justice in South Seattle via a community forum, developing a website, holding meetings with local leaders, and writing through print and electronic media. A key, novel strength of our project was the addition of community organizations, community-academic partners, and government leaders from the project's inception. Local leaders should engage in mobility justice-focused community engagement to advance equity.

  PublisherDOI

• Building equity into public park and recreation service investment: A review of public agency approaches

  Landscape and Urban Planning · 2024-04-06 · 13 citations

  review
  PublisherDOI

• Whose City?: Invitations and Imaginaries and the Nehemiah Initiative’s Example for Seattle

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Public Space Versus Tableau: The Right-to-The-City Paradox in Neoliberal Bogotá, Colombia

  2021-03-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  For the past twenty-five years, the city of Bogotá, Colombia, has labored to overcome its dystopian image as the world drug capital. Prior to this effort, the city environment was so hostile that residents were used to negotiating life only in their own self-interest. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the city combatted this individualism by re-imagining public space as an educational ground for citizen interaction and learning. Civic administrations sought to integrate dispersed territories within the city, humanize public space and encourage socio-economic integration. Establishing orderly spaces was paramount to the success of these strategies to reinvent public space and citizenship. In support of this effort, citizens’ right to public space was codified into the 1991 Colombian Constitution, and urban interventions in Bogotá’s public spaces focused on improving equity of access. While officials focused diligently on expanding access to the city, they also created programs to scrutinize and direct behavior in public spaces.

  PublisherDOI

• Not quite a block party: COVID-19 street reallocation programs in Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC

  SSM - Population Health · 2021 · 26 citations

  • Political Science
  • Geography
  • Political Science

  The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed mobility inequities within cities. In response, cities are rapidly implementing street reallocation initiatives. These interventions provide space for walking and cycling, however, other mobility needs (e.g., essential workers, deliveries) may be impeded by these reallocation decisions. Informed by mobility justice frameworks, we examined socio-spatial differences in access to street reallocations in Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia. In both cities, more interventions occurred in areas where people of color, particularly Black and Indigenous people, lived. In Seattle, more interventions occurred in areas where people with disabilities, on food stamps, and children lived. In Vancouver, more interventions occurred in areas where recent immigrants lived, or where people used public transit or cycled to work. Street reallocations could be opportunities for cities to redress inequities in mobility and access to public spaces. Going forward, it is imperative to monitor how cities use data and welcome communities to redesign these temporary spaces to be corridors for their own mobility.

  PublisherDOI

• Pushing Back on Displacement: Community-Based Redevelopment through Historically Black Churches

  Societies · 2021 · 17 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Gentrification and subsequent displacement are common problems in cities, and result in the removal of poor communities and communities of color from urban areas as they move to cheaper locations in the metropolitan region. Here we describe a community-based approach to redevelopment by historic Black churches that seeks to counter such displacement and cultural removal. We explain the history of a historically Black neighborhood in Seattle and the founding and rationale for a church-led project called the Nehemiah Initiative. Our perspective is that of participants in the work of the Nehemiah Initiative and as faculty and students from a local university partner supporting it. We conclude with policy strategies that can be used to support such redevelopment in Seattle, with understanding that some may be broadly applicable to other cities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Stephen J. Mooney

  4 shared

• Katherine D. Hoerster

  VA Puget Sound Health Care System

  3 shared

• Dori E. Rosenberg

  Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute

  2 shared

• Bárbara Baquero

  2 shared

• Gundula Proksch

  2 shared

• Hillary Dawkins

  1 shared

• Rebecca S. Popowsky

  1 shared

• Im Sik Cho

  1 shared

Labs

• Green Futures LabPI

Education

• BLA, Landscape Architecture

  University of Washington

• Ph.D., Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

  University of California, Berkeley

• MCP, City and Regional Planning

  University of California, Berkeley