Julian Wolpert


Julian Wolpert is Bryant Professor Emeritus of Geography, Public Affairs, and Urban Planning at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, where he taught from 1973-2005 and chaired the Program in Urban and Regional Planning. He was previously a member of the Regional Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, MS & PhD. He served as a US Navy officer from 1956 to 1959. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and AAAS. He has been a fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral and Social Sciences, and the Woodrow Wilson Center and has been a Guggenheim fellow. Wolpert is a nationally cited scholar in the fields of location theory, urban development, migration, public and social services, and the analysis of charity, philanthropy, and the nonprofit sector, and has testified before Congress about the regulation of philanthropy. He has challenged conservatives who advocate for charitable rather than public service approaches to social policy. Wolpert served as Vice President, then President of the Association of American Geographers and Vice President of the Regional Science Association and the American Geographical Society and was elected to the American Institute of Certified Planners.
Wolpert's earliest research focused on testing social, behavioral, and economic theory based upon spatial data, productivity gaps related to environmental risk and imperfect information, the migration decision, spatial sampling, the relation between commuting and migration, siting and closing amenity and "nimby" facilities, and disaster evacuation, and the effects of sprawl on regional development. More recently, his studies concerned the nonprofit marketplace in cities, nonprofit service representation and saturation of neighborhoods, locational variations in generosity, distributional effects of foundations, the fiscal viability of nonprofits, and methods for planning and evaluating nonprofit organizations and foundations.

Selected publications