Willow Lung-Amam

Dr. Lung-Amam an Associate Professor in the Urban Studies and Planning Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she also serves as Director of Community Development at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education and Director of the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network. Her scholarship focuses on how urban and suburban policies and plans contribute to and can address social inequality, particularly in neighborhoods undergoing rapid racial and economic change.

Dr. Lung-Amam has written extensively on suburban poverty, racial segregation, immigration, residential and commercial gentrification, redevelopment politics, and neighborhood opportunity. Her first book, Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia (University of California Press, 2017), takes an intimate look at the everyday life and development politics in a Silicon Valley community as it transitioned from majority-White to majority-Asian American. She is currently working on a second book on equitable development politics in the Washington, DC suburbs, tentatively titled, The Right to Suburbia: Redevelopment and Resistance on the Urban Edge.

Her research has appeared in various journals, such as Journal of Urban Affairs and Journal of Planning, Education and Research, books, and popular media outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, National Public Radio, New Republic, and Bloomberg’s CityLab, and Al Jazeera. It has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Justice, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Enterprise Community Partners, Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development, and other local, state, and federal agencies and private foundations. 

Dr. Lung-Amam is a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center and a nonresident senior follow at the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program. She is also Affiliate Faculty at American University's Metropolitan Policy Center and at the University of Maryland's Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity, Department of American Studies, programs in Historic Preservation and Asian American Studies, and Maryland Population Research Center. She is a former Nancy Weiss Malkiel Scholar, Ford Postdoctoral Fellow, and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellow. Dr. Lung-Amam serves on boards of the National Housing Law Project, Society for American City and Regional Planning Historians, and Journal of the American Planning Association, and advisory committees for Poverty & Race Research Action Council, Mellon Urban Landscape Studies Initiative at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks, and the Purple Line Corridor Coalition.

Dr. Lung-Amam teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in urban inequality and diversity, social planning, and community development. Prior to joining the UMD faculty, she worked professionally on master-planning projects in low-income communities, and with non-profits, public agencies, and private firms on issues of public housing and community development.