Ryan Thomas Devlin

Ryan Thomas Devlin is an assistant professor of city planning and community development at Temple University in Philadelphia, USA. He also co‑leads urban planning studios as an adjunct professor at Columbia University in New York. Ryan’s research focuses on urban informality in cities of the Global North. He is specifically interested in informal placemaking strategies of immigrant groups in US cities, how planners, urban designers, and public administrators respond to such actions, and how participation and engagement with informal users of space can help build inclusive processes of co‑production. Ryan is a community-engaged scholar who works closely with a variety of activist groups supporting informal workers such as the Street Vendor Project in New York City and Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), an international non‑governmental organization. His most recent engagement projects have worked with street vendors in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York City, and with informal fruit vendors doing business across New York City.