Ryan Sandwick
| Position | Assistant Professor in Urban Design & Landscape Architecture |
|---|---|
| Phone | 805.756.1340 |
| rsandwic@calpoly.edu | |
| Office | 34-215 |
| Office Hours |
Not teaching Spring 2024 |
Faculty Biography
Ryan Sandwick began teaching at Cal Poly starting fall quarter, 2023:
A southern California native, Ryan is excited to return to his home state as an Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture on a joint appointment between the Department of City and Regional Planning and the Department of Landscape Architecture after a decade away. Having been interested in cities and place since childhood, he received his B.S. in Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Davis, and moved to Scotland for his graduate studies in City Planning and Regeneration at the University of Glasgow.
After starting his career in the private sector as a Landscape Designer and Assistant Landscape Architect, over the last eight years, Ryan has evolved to academic and non-profit settings positioning design and planning as fundamental to economic development. This has directly guided his research interests in how design and planning can best be utilized to address a community’s cultural, economic, and environmental needs. Design and planning can be seen as something that is frivolous or unattainable for many rural communities. Ryan seeks to utilize his research and teaching to not only position public realm investments as a priority in these community’s but something that is also attainable and that can embody their community’s collective civic pride.
Ryan has worked within a variety of scales, from being part of a research team funded by the Scottish Government to evaluate the effectiveness of regional planning systems to organizing a pop-up disco on public transport in Chattanooga, TN. Working within these scales, Ryan’s work positions design and planning as central to addressing a community's specific needs. This impact-focused approach is embedded into his teaching, where students work on real-world projects to both help them find the path that best serves them as well as understanding how they can translate a community’s identity and priorities into the public realm.
