Xavier Briggs

Xavier de Souza Briggs (born 1968) is an American sociologist and planner, known for his work on social capital and community building, as well as the concept of the "geography of opportunity," which addresses the consequences of race and class segregation for the well-being and life prospects of the disadvantaged. He is Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is also a former faculty member of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He was a presidential appointee in the Clinton Administration, serving as a senior policy official at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Born in Miami, Florida, Briggs spent the early part of his life in Nassau, Bahamas, where his family--with roots in the Black Seminole nation, Brazil, and Europe--has lived since the early 19th century. Raised by his mother, Briggs moved back to the U.S. in 1976, several years after The Bahamas secured independence from Britain. In Miami he attended Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, a Catholic high school with strong ties to Cuba and the Cuban-American community. He later received a BS in engineering from Stanford University, worked with the innovative planning firm of Moore Iacofano Goltsman, and won a Rotary Scholarship to study education and community development in Brazil, living in Salvador, Bahia. In 1993 he earned a Master in Public Administration (MPA) from Harvard University. In 1996 he earned a PhD in sociology and education from Columbia University, where he studied under Robert Crain, Herbert Gans, Charles Kadushin, and other scholars.

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 top 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 and inequality, 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. He is the founder of two popular online resources 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.

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.

Key publications:
* 1996 - (With A. Miller and J. Shapiro) Planning for Community Building, American Institute of Certified Planners Casebook
* 1997 - (with E. Mueller and M. Sullivan) From Neighborhood to Community: Evidence on the Social Effects of Community Development (New York: Community Development Research Center, New School for Social Research).
* 1998 - "Brown Kids in White Suburbs: Housing Mobility and the Multiple Faces of Social Capital," Housing Policy Debate 9(1).
* 1999 - "In the Wake of Desegregation," Journal of the American Planning Association
* 2003 - "Community Building," The Encyclopedia of Community, edited by K. Christensen and D. Levinson (Sage Publications).
*2004 - “Civilization in Color: The Multicultural City in Three Millennia”, City & Community 3
*2005 - The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press)
*2007 - “Some of My Best Friends Are: Interracial Friendship, Class, and Segregation in America. City & Community 6.
*2008 - The Three-City Study of Moving to Opportunity, Policy Briefs (Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, March).
*2008 - Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities across the Globe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

References and external links

* http://dusp.mit.edu/p.lasso?t=5:1:0&detail=xbriggs
* http://sap.mit.edu/resources/portfolio/briggs/
* http://www.urban.org/projects/mto.cfm
* http://www.brookings.edu/press/Books/2005/geographyofopportunity.aspx
* http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/friendship-1228.html
* http://www.npr.org/search.php?text=xavier+briggs
* http://web.mit.edu/workingsmarter/
* http://www.community-problem-solving.net/
* http://planning-research.com/xavier-de-souza-briggs-on-failed-urban-policy-and-proposals-to-tear-down-hud/