A. Bruce Dotson

BA, Cornell (1966);
PhD, Cornell (1970)

Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Academics

His research interests include land use, growth management, dispute resolution and consensus building. His most recent works examine the efforts of communities to contain development within urban growth boundaries. His studies include Portland, Oregon; Boulder, Colorado; Lexington, Kentucky; Montgomery County, Maryland; and similar US communities that serve as benchmarks for other localities. His most recent research is a US-UK comparison with particular attention to the pattern, or footprint, of rural development and the degree to which it is contained within villages and towns as compared to a scattered pattern of sprawl. The major finding is that US communities have done a better job than the English of containing development in a dominant urban center but the English have done a much better job of containing rural development in rural towns, villages and hamlets leaving the countryside much less disturbed. He has also joined with scholars from a number of other universities to study the ways that conservation design subdivisions have been applied in different states to protect open space and to cluster development. As Senior Associate at Institute for Environmental Negotiation, he has been active for many years in collaborative planning and consensus building projects.

Bruce Dotson is a former member of the Albemarle County Planning Commission. He served on the county’s “in-fill strategy committee” that examined strategies for compact growth. He recently completed his term on the County’s Affordable Housing Committee. He recently served as a member of a team of planners and designers who proposed a form-based zoning code for the village of Crozet, a designated growth center in Albemarle County.