News & Stories

Meet New Faculty: Kristina Ford

Posted Aug 02 2012

Kristina Ford spent many years as a planning official in New Orleans, serving most recently as chief of staff to the deputy mayor for facilities, infrastructure, and community development. Over a 35-year career, her research and teaching has taken her to a number of colleges and universities throughout the United States, from Montana to Mississippi to Maine.

What do you study?

How public policy regarding the use of land can improve the ordinary lives of people living in urban areas. How government can close the gap between aspirations of urban policies and their eventual outcomes. City plans are a case in point, and studying plans in light of how a city has actually developed invites a more general inquiry into the often disappointing results of seemingly rational public policies.

What do you teach?

Urban Public Policy and the Use of Land. The policy issues related to land use include environmental quality, equity in housing and economic opportunity, natural hazards, and the cost of providing public services to an expanding population.

Implementing Public Policy and Managing Outcomes. Implementation is a topic chronically under-emphasized in public policy courses, and yet is both crucially important to the success of policy and also – rather unexpectedly – a very dramatic and fascinating subject for graduate students.

What do you consider today’s most pressing global issue?

Accommodating population growth within and among countries whose citizens have confounding, even bewildering, differences in their abilities to prosper and to lead satisfying lives.

What professional achievement are you most proud of?

Winning the Desire/Florida Area Community Council’s “Efforts to Unite the City of New Orleans Award” in 2003. The Desire/Florida Area lies in New Orleans 9th Ward, and at the time I won this award, was anchored by two large, largely vacant, bleak and dangerous public housing communities. The effects of Hurricane Katrina finally forced Desire/Florida Area to be re-imagined and rebuilt.

Why did you choose to come to SIPA?

How couldn’t I make this choice! To join a faculty engaged in important urban policy issues facing cities from New York to Delhi to Singapore, and to work with students eager to take on the complicated, contradictory (and ultimately rewarding) aspects of formulating public policy and seeing it realized successfully.