Carmelo Ignaccolo, Ph.D. joined the Bloustein School in 2024/2025 as an Assistant Professor, specializing in urban design, technology, heritage, and climate resilience. He received his Ph.D. in Urban Planning from MIT DUSP, where he was also affiliated with the Civic Data Design Lab, the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, and the Harvard Center for European Studies. Carmelo’s work bridges urban design and city planning scholarship through spatial analytics, community-based research, and historical methods. He leverages geospatial analyses and digital humanities techniques to examine the relationship between urban form and spatial inequality, focusing on neighborhood change, environmental vulnerabilities, and heritage challenges. Carmelo has published articles in Cities, Magazine on Urbanism, and Journal of Urban Technology. His digital mapping work has been featured in The New York Times and Bloomberg CityLab and exhibited at Architecture Biennials in Seoul (2019), Shenzhen (2020), and Venice (2023). Prior to joining Rutgers, Carmelo held research and teaching positions at MIT DUSP and Columbia University GSAPP, where he contributed to international projects in the Mediterranean region, East Africa, and China. Beyond academia, Carmelo practiced as an Urban Designer at AECOM in New York City and as an Urban Planner for the United Nations Habitat Programme in Kenya and Saudi Arabia. Carmelo also holds a Master’s degree in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University GSAPP as a Fulbright Fellow, and a combined Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Architecture-Engineering from the University of Catania, Italy.
Research Interests
- Spatial Inequalities
- Environmental Justice
- Urban History and Historical Cartography
- Heritage & Tourism
- Port Cities and Waterfronts
- Climate Resilience
- Digital Humanities
- Shrinking Towns
- Sensory Urbanism
- Data Co-creation and Participatory Mapping
- Mediterranean Region
Graduate Courses
- Graphic Communication and Design Representation for City Planning