Alan Altshuler

Alan A. Altshuler is a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus and the Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, Emeritus. His teaching and research focus on urban politics, planning, and public investment.

Altshuler’s prior appointments include dean of the Graduate School of Design, director of the A. Alfred Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, academic dean of the Kennedy School, dean of NYU’s Graduate School of Public Administration, and Professor of Political Science and Urban Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Altshuler also served as secretary of transportation for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from 1971 to 1975.

Altshuler has written or co-authored several books including The City Planning Process: A Political Analysis; Community Control: The Black Demand for Participation in Large American Cities; The Urban Transportation System; Innovation in American Government: Challenges, Opportunities, and Dilemmas; The Future of the Automobile; Regulation for Revenue; The Political Economy of Land Use Exactions (with GSD Professor José A. Gómez-Ibáñez); Governance and Opportunity in Metropolitan America and Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (with David Luberoff).

Altshuler received his BA from Cornell University and his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago.