Gian-Claudia Sciara

Illustration by Whitney Sherman ©2022 

Gian-Claudia Sciara is Associate Professor and Ph.D. Program Director in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin. She also serves as Nonresident Senior Fellow in Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution. Throughout her career in planning research and practice Dr. Sciara’s work has been driven by her commitment to understand, challenge, and enhance the institutional context undergirding transportation. Many institutional frameworks that shape contemporary planning — including governance and decision-making structures, funding and finance arrangements, and planning practices — originated when private automobility seemed limitless, its climate consequences were unknown, and metro regions were emergent nodes in a global economy. Dr. Sciara’s work seeks to critically examine and reorient these inherited frameworks so that the regional plans and investments they enable can more efficiently and effectively stem transportation’s climate impacts, reduce car dependency, enhance access, and support more livable and equitable communities.  

Regional transportation governance is a longstanding focus of Dr. Sciara’s scholarship. Her work on metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), which direct billions of dollars of U.S. transportation investment, has ignited scholarly interest in and dialogue about these understudied planning bodies. Her research highlights how these entities are uniquely positioned to advance sustainable regional land development and transportation and yet how serious institutional impediments keep them from doing so.

Dr. Sciara also focuses her institutional lens on the role of state legislatures in transportation planning and finance. State governments (and their local government partners) provide nearly 75% of total U.S. expenditures on transportation, and that share has been increasing over time. Dr. Sciara’s work shows how traditional revenue generation and allocation practices in transportation conflict with some states’ policies to enhance climate-action and energy transition in the sector.  Further, state legislators themselves see climate change and decarbonization as less important issues than road repair and capacity.  

Funding for Dr. Sciara’s current work comes from the National Highway and Transit Cooperative Research Programs of the National Academies of Sciences, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the California Air Resources Board. Her research portfolio has also been supported by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, California Department of Transportation, and Hewlett Foundation.

Before joining The University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Sciara was a professional researcher at the University of California-Davis Institute of Transportation Studies. She has also held roles as Senior Consultant at Parsons Brinckerhoff (WSP) and key staff at public and non-profit transportation organizations, including Transportation Alternatives and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign in New York City. She was born and raised in Queens, New York, and earned a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from U.C. Berkeley, an M.A. in Urban Planning from UCLA, and a B.A. in history and German from Columbia University.

EDUCATION

• University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., City and Regional Planning
• University of California, Los Angeles, MA, Urban Planning              
• Columbia University,  BA, History, German Studies