Bethany Bingham

Beth Bingham is an urban planner whose research focuses on environmental justice, sustainability and community-based initiatives. Since 2011 she has been on faculty at Pratt Institute School of Architecture, teaching across disciplines in the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment. She also teaches Economics at SUNY’s Harry Van Arsdale Center for Labor Studies. Her teaching and professional practice highlight how historical development has shaped current cities and she uses research to support community-led initiatives that meet local challenges. 

She is currently a Presidential Research Fellow at the City University of New York, where she is a PhD candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences. Her research at the CUNY Graduate Center focuses on community practices of democracy and environmental stewardship in large-scale urban environmental remediation projects, where reparative planning is centered.

Before pursuing her doctorate, Beth’s public scholarship served open space and historic preservation advocacy organizations helping to shape policy around urban planning and the preservation of places and spaces in NYC. As the Director of Research & Planning at New Yorkers for Parks that included the annual Report Cards on Parks, the Open Space Index and Council District Profiles for every neighborhood in the city.  While pursuing her masters degree she worked on preserving Brooklyn’s waterfront industrial heritage at the Municipal Arts Society, and she was a Policy Fellow at the Pratt Center for Community Development. Earlier Beth spent a decade working in New Orleans, where the catastrophic flooding of the city after Hurricane Katrina exposed the extreme vulnerabilities wrought by the intersection of historic development, environmental injustice, racial capitalism and climate change, and set her on this path. There she worked as an archeologist and architectural historian, using research to develop site and neighborhood-level preservation plans for State and local agencies.

Beth has been awarded a Dean’s Office Research Award and Taconic Faculty Fellowship from Pratt. The work of her students has been profiled on Prattfolio and Pratt News in recent years.

PhD Earth & Environmental Sciences (ABD – in progress) City University of New York

M.A. Environmental Psychology, City University of New York

M.S. City and Regional Planning, Pratt Institute