Stephen Ramos
Professor
Professor Stephen Ramos is an international scholar of urban planning and design. His research focuses on port cities, energy transition, logistics, and planning history.
Ramos’s first book, Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography (Ashgate, 2010) received wide acclaim for its contribution to infrastructure studies, and it continues to be an important reference for Gulf urban research. Its second edition was published in 2016 by Routledge, and it was voted one of the “90 books about cities that everyone should read” by the National Science Foundation-sponsored “The Nature of Cities” webpage.
Ramos received his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), where he co-founded the journal New Geographies. He was also co-editor of Infrastructure Sustainability and Design, as part of the GSD’s Zoftnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure. The book brought together top international engineering and planning firms and thinkers to develop evaluative criteria for a sustainability framework for large technical systems.
Ramos’s interest in the port-city relationship continued in his work on the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project. With over $100,000 research support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Ramos explored the Savannah River corridor and the competing economic and social claims on the fragile coastal and riparian ecologies.
Ramos was part of the “Global Petroleumscape” research initiative at TU Delft, inspired by the idea that energy transition proposals are only possible if we engage with the full spectrum of oil integration in international material culture. During a teaching residency at TU Delft, he also explored the northern Dutch Eemshaven energy port and traced the biomass wood pellet feedstock in the Netherlands back to South Georgia tree plantations and farms. Ramos has also written on logistics and immigrant detention in a special themed issue on logistics in the TU Delft architectural journal Footprint.
Ramos is an active member of the international planning history scholarly community, serving as Editor for the Americas of Planning Perspectives, the U.K.-based journal of the International Society of Planning History, for which he is also Vice President-Elect.
Ramos also serves as an International Advisory Board Member and active participant in the Port City Futures research consortium among Leiden, TU Delft, and Erasmus Universities in the Netherlands. Ramos is active in the international arts and urbanism collective Port Futures + Social Logistics, which he co-founded with faculty from the UGA Lamar Dodd School of Art in 2020. The collective’s first online exhibition, PFSL 01, was live streamed internationally at art centers in Japan, Taiwan, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Professor Ramos’s current research focuses on the planning history of Howard W. Odum, Southern Regionalism, and U.S. Regional Planning. His forthcoming book, Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism, will be published with the University of North Carolina Press in 2025.
