Lincoln Lewis

University of Virginia

Based in

United States
North America

How we inhabit cities and communities is being upended by environmental change. This has to do with perplexing paradoxes associated with wicked problems – cities and communities can be the cause of a predicament and the vanguard of solutions, be it industrial pollution, the spread of a virus, or the climate crisis. Because of the existential threat of a changing climate on coastal communities, I’m interested in how those residents approach local governance decision making and community engagement processes. Researching as a planner who is a social scientist, communities with limited resources and capabilities are especially interesting to me. I’m currently based on Tangier Island – the last inhabited island in Virginia’s portion of the Chesapeake Bay – conducting ethnographic research on how the community of approximately 300 residents is planning for its future.

Lincoln Lewis is the Climate Equity Doctoral Fellow with the University of Virginia’s Equity Center. He works on the Coastlines and People (CoPe) project for Virginia’s Eastern Shore funded by the National Science Foundation. Lincoln previously was a staff member of the World Bank’s Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience, and Land Global Practice based in Washington, DC where he sat in the joint social-urban global unit. His time with the international organization began in the Singapore office and over a period of 10 years based in the city-state he was also a civil servant with the Ministry of National Development focusing on urban policy, a researcher at the Future Cities Laboratory studying Central Java, Indonesia, and he practiced as an architect designing and implementing campus plans, institutional buildings, and housing projects in Southeast Asia. Lincoln obtained a Master of Advanced Studies in Architecture, Urban Transformations in Developing Territories, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH) and a professional Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Kansas where he graduated with highest distinction and was awarded the Thayer Medal, the Alpha Rho Chi Medal, and was a member of Studio 804.