Q&A with Alumna Katie Coyne
After graduating from the School of Architecture in 2015 with dual degrees in Community & Regional Planning and Sustainable Design, alumna Katie Coyne has established herself as a leader in Austin’s environmental and equity landscapes. In addition to her role as Principal at Asakura Robinson and Lead of their Urban Ecology Studio, she serves on the boards of many local non-profits, including The Trail Foundation, Austin Outside, and Equality Texas. She is also Vice-Chair of both the City of Austin’s Environmental Commission and the City’s Joint Sustainability Committee and has played a key role in developing one of the most equity-driven climate plans in the country. In 2019, Coyne received the Austin Under 40 Award in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction category; was named one of the top 25 women leaders in Austin by the Austin Business Journal; and, in 2020 received the Central Texas Planner of the Year Award.
We caught up with Coyne about her experience before, during, and after her time as a UTSOA student to learn more about her career trajectory and the ways in which she is building upon the foundations she started here as a dual degree student.
TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOURSELF AND YOUR BACKGROUND BEFORE COMING TO UTSOA?
My first job was as a counselor and lifeguard at my local Girl Scout camp in South Florida – Camp Welaka. The strength of the sisterhood I experienced in that role and the value of connecting with nature continue to be driving forces in my life today. When I got to the University of Florida, where I completed my Bachelor of Science in Wildlife Ecology, I had a bit of an existential crisis – How did my women’s studies and sociology classes line up with the other classes I loved in ecology and environmental science? My advisors certainly didn’t see the connection at the time, and this really started my journey to find space to honor the intersection of my passions.
After college and a brief stint researching coastal fisheries ecology at a Mote Marine Lab field station on Pine Island, Florida, I served in the Peace Corps as an environmental volunteer in Fiji and worked with rural villages on marine protected areas management, mangrove restoration, and coral reef impact assessments. Secondarily, I worked with the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement to teach about concepts of ecofeminism and the connection between women’s rights, civil rights, and environmental degradation.
Before I started evaluating opportunities for an advanced degree, I spent two years teaching AP Environmental Science and Chairing the Science Department at a performing arts high school in Florida. I was reminded how much I loved mentoring and found myself sponsoring the school’s gay-straight alliance. I met my wife Lauren in 2012 in my hometown, and when I found out I got into UT for the dual degree program in Sustainable Design and Community and Regional Planning, Lauren and I decided to take the plunge together and move halfway across the country to Austin. We’ve since acquired two high-maintenance doggos, got married in 2016, and bought our first house in Austin in 2018.
WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO GET A DEGREE IN COMMUNITY & REGIONAL PLANNING AND SUSTAINABLE DESIGN? WHAT APPEALED TO YOU ABOUT UTSOA AS A SCHOOL?
I didn’t know planning existed as a career path until I started researching Sustainable Design programs across the country. It was the first course of study that I found that built interdisciplinary thinking into the core of the profession. My search for opportunities to think about social, economic, and environmental systems in tandem finally landed at home with the UT CRP + SD programs at the School of Architecture.
WHAT CLASSES, PROFESSORS, OR EXPERIENCES FROM YOUR TIME HERE WERE PARTICULARLY MEMORABLE, OR THAT INSPIRED OR PREPARED YOU FOR YOUR CAREER?
In my first year of study, after years of work focused more on ecology, I found myself looking for opportunities to expand my knowledge base. I ended up working with Dr. Elizabeth Mueller and Dr. Barbara Brown Wilson (now at UVA) as a research assistant, where I analyzed and summarized policies and programs in cities across the country focused on affordable housing, specifically targeting innovative ideas for green retrofits. This was out of my comfort zone but much of the baseline understanding I gained in that experience carries through to my work today.
I also thrived in and later TA’d (twice!) for Dr. Rachael Rawlin’s Planning Law class. Her loss this year is crushing to say the least – she genuinely and deeply cared about her students, in addition to making a course focused on what most would consider a dry topic, dynamic and exciting. It was an honor to learn from such an accomplished academic and caring mentor.
Dr. Steven Moore certainly gets a shout out – his course Society, Nature, and Technology was one of the hardest but most thought-provoking classes I’d ever taken. Finally, Dr. Sarah Dooling was my first foray back into ecological thinking and became my most vital advisor and friend in the rest of my academic pursuits and beyond. The way she framed thinking about vulnerable people, places, and ecosystems deeply affirmed that I was indeed in the right place, and her thinking and writing about ecological gentrification is foundational to my practice and to this field.
TELL US ABOUT YOUR WORK IN THE URBAN ECOLOGY STUDIO AT ASAKURA ROBINSON
Early on in my time at Asakura Robinson, I saw an opportunity to expand our thinking and practice as a firm and across design disciplines globally. With great support, I built the Urban Ecology Studio, which aims to integrate more science and data into our equity-driven practice. This framing is unique in our field and has led to substantive studio and firm-wide growth.
As part of our work at the Urban Ecology Studio, we have used wetland science and urban design expertise to drive ecological design for the Dallas Water Gardens. We have completed award-winning work locally on a Healthy Parks Plan for Travis, Bastrop, and Caldwell Counties that uses data and stakeholder input to understand how parks and open space investments can be leveraged equitably toward our region’s physical, mental, and environmental health. As part of the design team for the new MLS soccer stadium in Austin, we worked to ensure the site was designed to provide multiple benefits for both people and our local climate and ecologies. Our award-winning work on Resilient Houston is already being implemented to address tough urban problems at the intersection of flooding, housing, quality of life, and climate trauma. Our work on the Episcopal Health Foundation’s Healthy Places Toolkit provides cutting-edge recommendations for healthcare clinics and their partners to improve community health by addressing nine impactful topics that focus on how the built environment can influence positive health outcomes, address institutionalized racism, and combat health equity issues.
YOU'RE ALSO VERY INVOLVED IN THE COMMUNITY AND CITY OF AUSTIN. TELL US ABOUT YOUR COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT OUTSIDE ASAKURA ROBINSON
Since childhood, community service has been ingrained in me as a core component of a fulfilling life and I spend much of my time away from my work at Asakura Robinson serving in various volunteer leadership capacities, including serving as a Board Member for The Trail Foundation, Austin Outside, and Equality Texas. This year, as a part of my Equality Texas board service, I worked as a part of the Organizing Committee for the Queer Texas Crisis fund, which helped raise and grant out almost $50,000 in emergency funding for LGBTQ+ serving nonprofit organizations providing emergency relief to communities disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and then "further-exposed" to health and racial justice inequities in our state and country.
My work with the City of Austin began in earnest in late 2017, when Council Member Jimmy Flannigan nominated me to serve on Austin’s Environmental Commission. I have since been appointed to serve on the City’s Joint Sustainability Committee and now serve as Vice-Chair of both. In my work with the City, my two greatest accomplishments have included:
- Working with Austin’s City Council to pass a resolution directing staff to work toward creating a holistic resilience plan for the city – Resilient Austin, now in progress at a City staff level; and,
- As an extension of my work on the Joint Sustainability Committee and through my role as co-chair of the Steering Committee for the Austin Climate Equity Plan – helping to create one of the most equity-driven climate plans in the country, which will likely go to City Council later this year.
As part of the process of developing the Austin Climate Equity Plan, we've built back trust with key stakeholders who have previously felt disenfranchised in City planning processes, leading with a level of empathy and respect that is unparalleled. We've reinvented how to do equity-driven planning for the City – every participant attended a Climate Justice training together; we created an Equity Framework and Tool to help guide technical Advisory Committees in their decision-making; and, we developed a novel program that offered stipends for community members to participate (after a transparent and equitable recruitment process) as Climate Ambassadors. The successes and lessons learned are leading other City departments to explore how to integrate principles from our process into their future planning. All-in-all, despite a few speed bumps, we finished with the same amount of empathy and trust that we began it with. I couldn't ask for more than that.
WHAT DO YOU SEE AS SOME OF THE MAJOR CHALLENGES FACING THE DISCIPLINE AND PRACTICE OF PLANNING?
First – planners and the communities we work with all too often fall into the trap of binary thinking. Often planning work frames equity as a potential “co-benefit” of strategies proposed. This framing essentially says: “If we can find a way to promote equity that is not at the expense of other project goals, we’ll do it.” Taking this work a step further, many planning projects frame equity as a lens, which basically means: “We’ll run every component of a plan through an equity lens that allows us a better understanding of both the positive and negative externalities, then we’ll make more informed decisions that balance equity and other goals.” The way this framing allows us to better understand that the externalities of our actions is essential for doing better work.
However, our ultimate goal in this and all processes, is to frame equity as a core driver: “No plan is successful without equity at its core and every action must also be either neutral or positive in its equity impact.” The first two ways of thinking are problematic because they perpetuate binary thinking. The third way of thinking is the equivalent of the saying, “No one is free until we are all free.” If we don’t throw binary thinking out the window, we miss big opportunities to advocate for multifunctional systems that are absolutely vital to creating more equitable and resilient cities.
Second – we absolutely do not value empathy in our work enough.
WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE TO SHARE WITH OUR STUDENTS AND RECENT GRADUATES?
It’s a balance of two things that sometimes seem contradictory:
- Use any privilege you do have to advocate, to change systems, and to make space for others, every. damn. day…
- Recognize that if you aren’t doing things to refill your own tank, you can’t help others to your full potential.