Ryan Thomas Devlin

Ryan Thomas Devlin is a Visiting Professor in the Historic Preservation Program within Pratt's Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment. Devlin’s scholarship focuses on urban informality, particularly as it occurs in immigrant communities in cities of the Global North. He is interested in how informal practices emerge, and how policy makers and planners respond to and manage examples of informal urbanism. His work attempts to bridge gaps between the study of informality in the Global North and South in order to inform a more ethnographically grounded and social justice oriented policy and planning approach to informal activities. 

Devlin holds a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and a Master’s in Urban Planning from Columbia GSAPP. In addition to teaching at Pratt, he currently teaches in the Urban Planning Program at Columbia. He has also taught urban policy and public administration at John Jay College (CUNY) and the Milano School of Policy, Management and the Environment, part of the New School.