Courtney Knapp has been named the new chair of the Pratt School of Architecture’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE) department. They will assume the role on July 1, 2025. 

“I am thrilled to welcome Courtney Knapp as the new chair of GCPE,” said Quilian Riano, dean of the School of Architecture. “Courtney brings an outstanding record of scholarship, teaching, and public engagement that reflects the best of what the department and our school stands for. Their work on environmental justice, decarceration, and critical placemaking exemplifies the kind of leadership our students, and the communities they serve, need right now.”

As chair, Knapp will oversee the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, an alliance of four programs: Historic Preservation, Sustainable Environmental Systems, Urban and Community Planning, and Urban Placemaking and Management. 

Knapp first joined the GCPE faculty in 2018 as an associate professor in City and Regional Planning and became a professor in 2023. Their scholarship focuses on decarceration, “just transition” energy planning, critical placemaking, and the politics of social and spatial repair in multiracial communities. Knapp works closely with the Latino-led environmental justice organization UPROSE to help implement the Green Resilient Industrial District (GRID) Plan, a comprehensive “just transition” energy and economy strategy for Sunset Park, Brooklyn. They previously worked in Massachusetts, New York, and California as an affordable housing, economic development, and public space planner.

“It’s an incredible privilege to step into this role and help lead GCPE into its next chapter,” said Knapp. “I look forward to building on the department’s legacy of justice-centered planning and to collaborating with our students, faculty, and community partners to shape more equitable and imaginative urban futures.”

Prior to joining the Pratt faculty, Knapp was an assistant professor in the department of Urban and Regional Planning at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (2014-2018). They are a former Board member of the Los Angeles section of the American Planning Association.

Their first book, Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie: Race, Urban Planning, and Urban Cosmopolitanism in Chattanooga, Tennessee, examines the politics of racialized placemaking and urban development over the course of the city’s three-century history. The book received the 2019 Associated Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Paul Davidoff Award. Their current book project examines four centuries of racial reckoning efforts in Richmond, Virginia, asking how Richmonders have simultaneously struggled to acknowledge and deny their local histories of settler colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow-era white supremacy, and environmental racism.

Knapp received their Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University, Master’s degrees in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning from Tufts University and Gender/ Cultural Studies from Simmons University, and Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Political Science, with minor concentrations in English and Animation/ Filmmaking, from Simmons University.