News
Accordino to Serve as Guest Professor in Germany
By Pamela Stallsmith
John Accordino, Ph.D., FAICP, professor in the Wilder School’s Urban and Regional Studies and Planning program, will be a guest professor at Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, during the upcoming winter semester.
Bauhaus will host Accordino through a grant from the European Union’s Erasmus+ program, which supports faculty and student travel and accommodations for exchanges in Europe. Accordino will serve as a guest professor from November through January, lecturing on urban revitalization policy and planning, affordable housing analysis and planning, and the American urban and regional planning system in the context of globalization.
He will teach students in undergraduate and master’s programs in urban studies and architecture, bringing the American perspective to planning. While there, he will conduct research on efforts to improve the linkages between the economies of small, rural localities and larger cities.
Accordino, who’s fluent in German and Italian, has taught community revitalization policy and planning theory and practice for more than 30 years at VCU. He’s also been actively involved in several study abroad programs at VCU: he established student exchanges with Bauhaus and with the University of Kaiserlautern, Germany, and he has partnerships with two universities in Italy.
“This will be a great opportunity to strengthen our longtime partnership with Bauhaus and to build upon the relationships between our faculty and students,” Accordino said. “It is an honor for me to be invited to serve as a guest professor and to be able to share ideas with faculty and students there.”