James Buckley is an academic expert in historic preservation, city planning, housing and community development. At the University of Oregon, he is an associate professor of historic preservation. James is an urban historian and a practicing city planner with more than 25 years of leadership in th...
James Buckley is an academic expert in historic preservation, city planning, housing and community development. At the University of Oregon, he is an associate professor of historic preservation. James is an urban historian and a practicing city planner with more than 25 years of leadership in the fields of housing and community development. He is the founding director of UO’s Historic Preservation program in Portland, Oregon. His teaching focuses on courses in architectural and cultural history, city planning, and urban development. His academic interests include the study of vernacular architecture (or architecture that uses local materials and knowledge) and cultural landscapes.
His forthcoming book City of Wood: Redwood Lumber and the City of San Francisco, 1850-1929 (University of Texas Press, 2020) explores urban development in Northern California as a product of the harvesting of California’s vast natural resources. James has written several articles on heritage conservation in minority communities, including a study of LGBTQ heritage conservation in San Francisco and an investigation of the cultural landscape of Latinos in California’s Central Valley. In 2015, he served as a Fulbright Senior Fellow at the Universidad Politécnica Madrid studying new approaches for “urban regeneration” in historic neighborhoods in Spanish cities. In 2018, James received a Tinker Hatfield Research Award from UO’s College of Design to carry out an interdisciplinary research project on the built environment of Portland’s historically black Albina neighborhood. He is also a director of UO’s Collaborative on Inclusive Urbanism.