Rachel Meltzer, “What We Miss When We Look at Everything: Global Shocks and Local Impacts”

Cities are not monoliths—they are made up of many, diverse neighborhoods. This neighborhood-scale often gets obscured by global or aggregate approaches to policy and economic analysis that wash over the wide range of localized responses.

Scale matters; and space matters.

In her GSD lecture, Rachel Meltzer, Plimpton Associate Professor of Planning and Urban Economics will draw on examples from her research to demonstrate how local impacts from broad-based events and interventions—what Meltzer characterizes as global shocks—can be quite uneven at the neighborhood scale. When this local variation is missed, policy and planning can be at best crude and at worst the source of persistent disparities across communities.

Samuel (Sam) Plimpton MBA ’77, MArch ’80 and Wendy Shattuck, provided a generous gift in 2019 to establish the Plimpton Professorship of Planning and Urban Economics. For Plimpton, a partner emeritus and senior advisor at the Baupost Group, LLC, and member of the GSD’s Dean’s Leadership Council, the gift was part of a long partnership with the GSD. He and Professor William Poorvu MBA ’58 previously established the Plimpton-Poorvu Design Prize, which honors and recognizes students whose work produced at the GSD exemplifies both feasibility and excellence in design. Plimpton received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and worked as an independent advisor, developer, and investor in real estate ventures. He held a research appointment in Real Estate at Harvard Business School from 1978 to 1980 and was an early supporter and founding member of the Harvard Real Estate Academic Initiative, a cross-faculty initiative from 2002 to 2015. Plimpton and Shattuck’s vision for the chair, informed by Plimpton’s extensive experience in urban real estate, was to position the GSD at the forefront of the emerging field of urban economics, which has transformed as cities move from industrial to service-based economies.