Elliott Sclar

Elliott Sclar is Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at GSAPP and the Columbia University Earth Institute. He directs the Earth Institute’s Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD), one of ten global centers of excellence in Future Urban Transport established by the Volvo Foundations of Gothenburg, Sweden. He works on issues of socially equitable and environmentally sustainable urban public transportation.

An economist and urban planner, his research and writings explore the impact of finance and governance on the land use-transport connection that determines urban form. Sclar teaches courses on planning history, physical structure of cities, urban sustainability and urban transport economics.

Sclar coordinated the Taskforce on Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers, one of the ten task forces established by the UN Millennium Project to aid the implementation of the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals. He was one of the lead authors of its 2005 report A Home in the City published by Earthscan.

Sclar is a nationally recognized expert on privatization: his book You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization (Cornell, 2000) won two major academic prizes: the Louis Brownlow Award for the Best Book of 2000 from the National Academy of Public Administration and the 2001 Charles Levine Prize from the International Political Science Association and Governance magazine for a major contribution to public policy literature.