Planning the future: Chakraborty is driving cities forward

For Arnab Chakraborty, planning is a way to serve those who are often overlooked.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor of urban and regional planning kicked off his career by receiving a bachelor’s in architecture from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.

An early internship at a design firm led him to realize that his real interest was in “working with the community at a larger scale.”

He went on to receive his master’s and doctorate degrees in urban planning from the University of Illinois at Chicago and University of Maryland, College Park, respectively.

Chakraborty is putting his expertise on land use and transportation to work in the joint Illinois Center for Transportation and Illinois Department of Transportation project, “R27-211: Policy and Design Guidelines to Plan for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles.”

Here Chakraborty is teaming up with Lindsay Braun, UIUC assistant professor of urban and regional planning, to investigate the uncertainties and expected community impacts around connected and autonomous vehicles.

Key to the effort is scenario analysis — a tool that analyzes possible outcomes of future events, such as changes to traffic technology, zoning laws and housing.

“Scenario analysis lets us create stories about what combination of these uncertainties are possible and what impact they might have on the future of our communities,” Chakraborty said.

The team is researching trends and ongoing planning efforts in this area to understand the most effective strategies.

They will also survey rural residents as well as city dwellers to find out their preferences on autonomous vehicles.

“One of our project outcomes is to think about how this matters to those communities that are often not the full focus of research or even the ones driving public decisions,” he said. “Those publics are often overlooked or underemphasized in many of these efforts elsewhere.”

From their findings, researchers will be able to provide guidance to regional planning agencies, local municipalities and industry experts on the best courses of action moving forward.

Chakraborty’s other projects involve planning for climate change in Chicago and Mumbai.

He and his teams are focusing on the impact of extreme heat on vulnerable populations such as the elderly, low-income communities and racial and ethnic minorities.

By figuring out how to measure vulnerability and identifying who the most vulnerable populations are, urban planners will be able to better serve communities.

“Overall, I see them (the projects) connected in the way we’re trying to make these communities better prepared for future uncertainties as well as better able to manage current challenges,” he said.

Chakraborty is grateful for the chance to pair his urban planning expertise with civil engineers at ICT.

“In urban planning, a lot of us have the expertise and experience in thinking about how the structures that civil engineers build and other activities impact communities beyond those structures,” he said. “There are really big societal problems where we have shared interests but often in the past, our research has been more silent.”

“ICT has been a great venue to do this kind of work, especially in its openness to planning research,” he added. “ICT has been and has the opportunity to be even more of a venue where folks with different interests come together.”