Michael Woo

"Remember that saying, 'Think globally, act locally'?" says Michael Woo, a former Los Angeles city councilman who is now an adjunct professor in the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development. "When I first heard that now-famous phrase"—uttered by Rene Dubos at a United Nations Conference on the Environment in 1972—"I didn't think it applied to me, because I didn't plan to work overseas and didn't think that international issues would be relevant to my career."

"Besides," says Woo, who was a graduate student in urban planning at the time, "when I was in my 20s, I thought of myself as an urbanist, not an environmentalist. It only took me 30 years to understand the connection between urbanization and the use of natural resources."

As a planning expert who has worked in the for-profit, nonprofit, and government sectors, Michael Woo is committed to improving communities both at home and abroad. He has been a key figure in major planning efforts in Southern California, authoring the Hollywood Redevelopment Plan and helping plan the route of the MetroRail Red Line. He also finds time for community leadership roles; Woo is chairman of the nonprofit group that runs the Hollywood Farmers Market (which he started 14 years ago as a city councilman) and serves as governing board chairman of Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. He helped create the Hollywood Community Housing Corporation and has helped raise money from banks and foundations to create affordable housing. Recently, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa appointed Woo to the L.A. City Planning Commission, bringing the former city councilman back into the thick of the planning process.

"I think of it all going back to when I was the age of the students I now teach, when I was motivated by a sense of idealism," says Woo. He recalls that, in the 1960s and 70s, when urban violence and racial inequality were hot-button issues across the country, he was one of many young Americans searching for ways to change society. Urban planning was the path he found.

After spending years in the local political trenches, Woo says he started to see the urban problems that he was familiar with in the U.S. becoming major public controversies in developing countries—problems such as traffic, air pollution, and the widening gap between the haves and have-nots.

As a result, Woo, a native Angeleno, has in recent years gained an international perspective on planning—a perspective that has a profound impact on his ideas and actions today. Several years ago, he began traveling to China, where he witnessed an unprecedented rate of development in its cities, which are expected to hold 60 percent of China’s population by 2025—up from 38 percent today.

In the spring of 2005, Woo and SPPD professor Tridib Banerjee traveled to Beijing with 31 graduate students to partner with an equal number of Peking University students in a two-week intensive study of planning and transportation issues in one of the city’s main shopping districts. He says that the trip was eye-opening for many of the American students, some of whom have made China the focus of their studies.

"It's important to be aware of what’s occurring globally, because the level of interdependence in the world is much greater than ever before," Woo says. "For SPPD, there exists a genuine opportunity to help shape future generations of urban planners in China."

Woo is continuing his China involvement by organizing training programs for Chinese officials to learn about "smart growth" alternatives such as transit-oriented development, incentives of reducing automobile use, and closer coordination of land use and transportation objectives.

For Woo, urban planning is inextricably connected to politics. After earning his master's degree in city planning from UC Berkeley, Woo worked as an aide to California Senator David Roberti (a USC Law School graduate) in Sacramento. After four years, Woo returned to L.A., where he ran for a seat on the city council.

"After working in the state government, I came to the conclusion that being an elected official did not require superhuman powers," says Woo. "Politicians are mostly normal people who are put into extraordinary circumstances."

Although his first bid for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council in 1981 ended in defeat to an incumbent, he ran again in 1985 and won. Eight years later, he gave up his city council seat to run for mayor, falling short of the winning majority but earning 46 percent of the citywide vote in a run-off election. His persistence can be attributed partly to his interest in, and grasp of, the public decision-making process.

"The average citizen is detached from the process of governing" Woo says. "The workings of government are mystifying to many people who don’t get involved. I think we can and should do more to bring young people into the decision-making process and show them that government can address the real problems facing the city."

Michael Woo is able to provide that encouragement directly by teaching urban planning and development to undergraduates at USC.

"The students are very stimulating," says Woo. "Like many professors, I learn through my teaching—I find that, in trying to explain issues to the students, I am forced to clarify these issues in my own mind."

Above all, Woo understands that the classroom is where tomorrow's leaders forge the skills and values that they will take with them into the world.

"Teaching presents a great opportunity to influence the minds of future leaders," he says.

It also helps bring his career as an urban planner full circle, from being a student who thought and acted locally to a teacher who embraces an international perspective.

"Today I’m thinking locally and globally, and acting locally and globally," he says. "I hope that through my teaching, I can open the eyes of some students who will realize, faster than I did, the connection between global crises and local action, and instill in them the importance of taking individual responsibility for making the world a better place."