Professional Life
In New York City, Briggs helped develop the now widely emulated "quality-of-life" planning approach to neighborhood revitalization, and in 1996 his work with the Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program in the South Bronx won the first President's Award of the American Planning Association. He began his teaching career at Harvard, took a leave to work in the Clinton Administration from 1998 to 2000, returned to Harvard and, in 2005, moved to MIT. He is also a faculty affiliate of The Urban Institute, a leading nonpartisan policy research organization in Washington, DC.
Briggs' research centers on economic opportunity, racial and ethnic diversity, and democratic problem-solving in cities worldwide. His dissertation, on housing desegregation and the social networks of poor young people, won the 1997 best dissertation prize of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. In 2002, he was appointed a Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Scholar at MIT. His edited book, The Geography of Opportunity (Brookings, 2005), won the top book award in planning in 2007 (the Paul Davidoff Award), and 'Democracy as Problem Solving' (MIT Press, 2009) was a finalist for the coveted C. Wright Mills book award. He is the founder of two online tools for self-directed learning in the field of civic leadership and local problem-solving: The Community Problem-Solving Project @ MIT, sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and Working Smarter in Community Development, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. In March 2010, he and co-authors Susan Popkin and John Goering published 'Moving to Opportunity: The Story of An American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty' (Oxford University Press), a CHOICE "highly recommended" title and the culmination of more than a decade of work on housing opportunity and the effects of high-risk neighborhoods on poor children and their families.
He has been an adviser to the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, and other leading organizations and is a member of the Aspen Institute's Roundtable on Community Change. Briggs has served as an expert witness for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in civil rights litigation. His views and research have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Salon.com, National Public Radio, and other major media.
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