Philip R. Berke is a Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, and Director of the Institute for Sustainable Communities at Texas A&M University. He holds an appointment as Research Professor, Department of City & Regional Planning in the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.
His research centers on the relationship between community resilience to hazards and climate change with a focus on methods, theory and metrics of planning and implementation. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and 10 books. He is the lead co-author of an internationally recognized book, Urban Land Use Planning (5th Edition), which focuses on integrating principles of sustainable communities into urban form, and co-author of a book, Natural Hazard Mitigation: Recasting Disaster Policy and Planning, which was selected as one of the “100 Essential Books in Planning” of the 20th century by the American Planning Association Centennial Great Books. Two of his publications have received the Best Article Award and one an Honorable Mention Award from the American Planning Association. He received the National Research Council/National Academies of Sciences Service Award, the Faculty Award for Excellence in Doctoral Student Mentoring from the UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate School, and Outstanding Alumni Award from TAMU, College of Architecture.
He developed the Plan Integration for Resilience project funded by the Department of Homeland Security, which allows for evaluating degree of integration of resilience in plans that impact the community vulnerability to hazards and climate change. Multiple cities in the U.S. and Netherlands are now active in applying the scorecard.
Berke currently serves on multiple advisory boards including the Urban Institute’s Global Evaluation of the Rockefeller Foundation Global 100 Resilient Cities, National Science Foundation’s Social Science Extreme Events Reconnaissance Platform, and Planet Texas 2050 Technical Advisory Board of UT-Austin.