Rebecca Walker

Rebecca Walker Biography

Rebecca Walker is an Assistant Professor who teaches courses in social-ecological systems, environmental planning, and environmental justice. She considers the intersection of housing policy, environmental planning, and climate resilience to understand how environmental injustices are produced, maintained, and unmade through policy and grassroots activism. She is particularly interested in the historic and contemporary politics of urban greenspaces and has studied topics related to green gentrification, green resilience infrastructure, parks and racial equity, planning history, and climate justice.

She is a community-based researcher and draws on models of co-production and collaboration with community partners.  Her most frequent collaborators are environmental justice and housing justice grassroots community organizers, but she has also partnered with local governments on work to support climate and environmental justice planning.  Her research is place-based and works to advance environmental and racial justice in her community, focusing primarily on Minneapolis and the surrounding Twin Cities Metro Area, as well as new work in Chicago.  She works to center the voices, knowledge, and perspectives of communities historically marginalized by city planners and by the academy.

Rebecca Walker received a PhD in urban and regional planning from the University of Minnesota with a specialization in environmental planning and a minor in geography and geospatial analysis. She also holds a master’s degree from the University of California, Davis in ecology with a specialization in spatial modeling of ecosystem processes and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia in environmental sciences and anthropology.