About

Chingwen Cheng is the director of the Stuckeman School at Penn State University, having assumed the role on July 1, 2023. She previously served as the program head and associate professor of landscape architecture, urban design, and environmental design at the Design School at Arizona State University. Cheng is a climate justice design educator and advocate for climate actions through co-designing nature-based solutions with communities. Her research focuses on evaluating social-ecological landscape performance, sustainable and resilient urban water systems, and green infrastructure for climate justice. She founded and directed the Hydro-GI Lab, which evaluates design processes and outcomes of nature-based solutions for climate justice, integrating theories of social vulnerability and environmental justice to develop the “Climate Justicescape” assessment framework. Cheng has published extensively in high-impact journals and collaborates across disciplines and international networks to advance urban resilience and climate justice. She is a registered professional landscape architect, LEED-Accredited Professional, and has received numerous awards for her research, teaching, and professional contributions.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Environmental planning
• Environmental science
• Environmental resource management
• Geography
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Ecology
• Computer Security
• Business
• Economics
• Economic growth
• Biology
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Energy Transition and Climate Action in Galapagos: Policy Evaluation and Guiding Principles

  Social and ecological interactions in the Galapagos Islands · 2026-01-01

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• A Preliminary Conceptual Framework for Integrating Inclusive Development into Urban Flood Resilience

  2026-01-14

  book-chapter

  Cities located in low-elevation and other flood-prone zones continue to grapple with recurrent pluvial flooding and the looming risk of more extreme flood events driven by climate change. These hazards disproportionately affect socially vulnerable populations, and their impacts are often intensified by urban governance models that prioritise exclusive approaches. While flood resilience emerged as a well-intentioned, ecologically friendly solution, it usually inherits these exclusionary practices. This chapter explores the intersection of inclusive development and urban flood resilience to understand how principles of inclusive development can be systematically integrated into flood resilience thinking and practice. Drawing on an extensive review of both bodies of literature, the discussion reveals that, although inclusive development has gained traction across development research, and urban flood resilience has become a prominent theme in climate adaptation studies, the deliberate synthesis of these concepts has remained underdeveloped. We argue that while there are no metrics for measuring inclusive development as articulated by scholars, its guiding principles offer practical entry points for application and assessment. Building on these insights and on established approaches for evaluating flood resilience, the chapter proposes a preliminary conceptual framework for integrating inclusive development into urban flood resilience. This framework is intended to stimulate further scholarly refinement and to support practitioners working in flood-prone urban settings to transition from exclusionary planning toward more integrated, socially responsive, and socio-ecological approaches that promote and strengthen inclusive flood resilience.

  PublisherDOI

• Assessing Urban Flood Resilience in the Low-Elevation Capital, Georgetown, Guyana: A Principal Component Analysis-Driven Census-Based Index

  Land · 2026-03-14

  articleOpen access

  Urban flood resilience has emerged as a holistic citywide approach for mitigating flood hazards and navigating the impacts of extreme weather patterns induced by climate change. This is particularly pertinent for high-risk, low-elevation coastal cities like Georgetown, Guyana. However, while the literature on Georgetown includes assessments, analyses, modeling, vulnerability, and the socio-political history of flooding, we found no evidence of flood resilience assessment for the city. Therefore, this study presents a data-driven evaluation of flood resilience at the sub-district level in Georgetown. To accomplish this, we constructed flood resilience indices (FRIs) using the aggregated weighted mean index approach and census-based indicators across physical, social, and economic dimensions. Principal component analysis (PCA) was employed to generate these weights and, subsequently, to perform dimensionality reduction and determine a linear regression model for the FRI values. To evaluate the stability of the constructed indices, robustness tests were conducted using alternative normalization and weighting schemes to demonstrate the consistency of resilience rankings across specifications. The results show that (a) economic resilience is lowest, (b) there is notable clustering and sharp disparities in the physical and social dimensions, and (c) the social dimension has the strongest correlation with the total FRI, which is generally heterogeneous. PCA-derived principal components explained 77.347% of the variation in the FRI values, enabling dimensionality reduction and three-dimensional graphical presentations. Our findings provide urban planners with insights into the distribution of flood resilience needs across the city. This study enables informed decision-making, serving as a pathway to achieve equitable resource allocation and build the city’s resilience.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Enabling “barrio” innovation: a grassroots approach for centering community initiatives in just sustainability transformations

  Ecology and Society · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Sustainability transformations are most meaningful when communities take ownership of their collective futures and guide transformative processes that are rooted in their local traditions and value systems. Yet, researcher–community collaborations aimed at facilitating meaningful transformations can fall short of their objectives if they do not explicitly recognize bottom-up transformative processes that already exist in the community that enable grassroots ways of knowing and addressing sustainability challenges prevalent in the community. This paper addresses this gap in researcher–community partnerships by illustrating a transdisciplinary collaboration that emerged among researchers, educators, and advocates in South Phoenix, Arizona that sought to center recognitional and epistemic justice from the start. These collaborations led to the co-designing and execution of school curriculums in three learning centers in South Phoenix aimed at developing researcher capabilities among learners for exploring the pasts, presents, and futures, and contributing to transformative action in their community. This paper outlines the approaches that this group of collaborators, who are all co-authors in the paper, took toward forming reciprocal relationships and facilitating just transformations in the community. First, we describe our collaboration process, which was mindful of activating existing spaces of community leadership as well as cultivating spaces of reciprocal knowledge exchange and reflection among the collaborators. Next, we outline our approach toward facilitating just transformations, which we call “barrio” innovation, which is based on principles of embracing a mindframe of abundance, enabling transformative pathways, and focusing on the micro-scale. We further illustrate, through case studies, how our approaches to collaborations and transformations manifested in different learning centers and with different collaborators in South Phoenix. We conclude with our collective reflections and the practices that worked for us toward facilitating just transformations through meaningful researcher–community collaborations.

  PublisherDOI

• Towards the Conceptual Framing of Inclusive Urban Flood Resilience

  Climate · 2025-06-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  The governance of cities in low-elevation zones faces many challenges. Notable among these are losses associated with regular pluvial floods and, more so, the threat of impending extreme floods due to climate change and their impacts on residents, especially amongst socially vulnerable groups. This is exacerbated by the reliance on traditionally exclusive approaches to governance. This paper discusses the flood resilience aspect of urban planning by examining the extent of emphasis on inclusiveness in urban flood resilience literature. We relied on the synthesis of inclusive development and flood resilience literature. The findings suggest that, while inclusive development is a burgeoning aspect of development research, and studies on evaluating urban flood resilience are commonplace, the concept of inclusive urban flood resilience is still in its infancy. Furthermore, we found that while inclusive development is neither static nor finite to allow for measuring it in absolute terms, it can be applied or assessed through any or all of its guiding principles. Consequently, together with the well-established methods of implementing and assessing urban flood resilience, we present a preliminary framework for inclusive urban flood resilience as a guide for future scholarly contributions to this composite field. Scholars and practitioners of urban planning in low-elevation zones are encouraged to move away from top–down siloed approaches that result in exclusions and rely more on integrated, inclusive, and socio-ecological pathways to preserve the integrity of cities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Nature-Based Solutions Scenario Planning for Climate Change Adaptation in Arid and Semi-Arid Regions

  Land · 2024-09-10 · 22 citations

  articleOpen access

  Extreme climatic conditions cause a decrease in ecosystem services, the disruption of the ecological balance, and damage to human populations, especially in areas with socially vulnerable groups. Nature-based solutions applying blue-green infrastructure (BGI) against these negative impacts of climate change have an important role in planning sustainable cities. This study aims to identify priority areas and develop scenarios and strategies for spatial planning to understand the tradeoffs in approaches and to maximize the benefits of ecosystem services provided by BGI in cities with arid and semi-arid climates, using Phoenix, Arizona, a swiftly urbanizing city in the Sonoran Desert, as the study area. Using GIS-based multi-criteria decision-making techniques and the Green Infrastructure Spatial Planning model integrated with the city’s existing water structures, this study is conducted at the US census scale. The hotspots for BGI are mapped from the combined GIS-based multi-criteria evaluation and expert stakeholder-driven weighting. In the hotspots where priority areas for BGI in Phoenix are identified, the city center area with a high density of impervious surfaces is identified as the highest priority area. It is revealed that social vulnerability and environmental risks (flooding, heat) have a positive correlation in Phoenix, and stormwater management and the urban heat island are the criteria that should be considered first in BGI planning.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Desert urban ecology: urban forest, climate, and ecosystem services

  Environment Development and Sustainability · 2024-11-30 · 9 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Assessing stormwater control measure inventories from 23 cities in the United States

  Environmental Research Infrastructure and Sustainability · 2023-03-24 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Since the 1987 Clean Water Act Section 319 amendment, the US Government has required and funded the development of nonpoint source pollution programs with about $5 billion dollars. Despite these expenditures, nonpoint source pollution from urban watersheds is still a significant cause of impaired waters in the United States. Urban stormwater management has rapidly evolved over recent decades with decision-making made at a local or city scale. To address the need for a better understanding of how stormwater management has been implemented in different cities, we used stormwater control measure (SCM) network data from 23 US cities and assessed what physical, climatic, socioeconomic, and/or regulatory explanatory variables, if any, are related to SCM assemblages at the municipal scale. Spearman’s correlation and Wilcoxon rank-sum tests were used to investigate relationships between explanatory variables and SCM types and assemblages of SCMs in each city. The results from these analyses showed that for the cities assessed, physical explanatory variables (e.g. impervious percentage and depth to water table) explained the greatest portion of variability in SCM assemblages. Additionally, it was found that cities with combined sewers favored filters, swales and strips, and infiltrators over basins, and cities that are under consent decrees with the Environmental Protection Agency tended to include filters more frequently in their SCM inventories. Future work can build on the SCM assemblages used in this study and their explanatory variables to better understand the differences and drivers of differences in SCM effectiveness across cities, improve watershed modeling, and investigate city- and watershed-scale impacts of SCM assemblages.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Transdisciplinary Co-design and Implementation of an Urban Ecological Green Infrastructure Landscape Performance Monitoring Plan

  Landscape series · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• El Paso Pedestrian Pathways

  2022-01-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  El Paso Pedestrian Pathways is a series of urban design interventions meant to strengthen pedestrian linkages to notable open spaces in the Arts District of downtown El Paso, Texas. Three key projects in the downtown area are: San Jacinto Plaza, the Mills Avenue Promenade, and Durango Street Improvements. Mills Avenue Pedestrian Promenade (2013) was the first project completed, and it created a pedestrian promenade through a small commercial area to connect to San Jacinto Plaza, a historic park.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Timon McPhearson

  New School

  9 shared

• Aditi S. Bhaskar

  University of Colorado Boulder

  8 shared

• Kristina G. Hopkins

  South Atlantic Water Science Center

  6 shared

• Lauren McPhillips

  Pennsylvania State University

  6 shared

• Amber Pulido

  Colorado State University

  6 shared

• Benjamin Choat

  6 shared

• T. Meixner

  University of Arizona

  5 shared

• Robert L. Ryan

  5 shared

Education

• PhD in Regional Planning, Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning

  University of Massachusetts

  2013

• MLA, Landscape Architecture

  University of Michigan

  2001

• BS, Horticulture and Landscape Architecture

  National Taiwan University

  1998

Awards & honors

• Knowledge Enterprise Honorable Mention (outstanding research…
• Diversity Virtual Travel Awards (mentor), 2021 IALE-North Am…
• U.S. EPA Campus RainWorks Challenge 2019, Second Place, Demo…
• Educator of the Year, Arizona Chapter American Society of La…
• Director’s Choice Award for Services, The Design School, Ari…