Meet the Joint Venture Team

T.F. Tierney

Affiliated Researcher, Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies

T.F. Tierney, Ph.D., is an urban historian currently focused on land-use planning in Silicon Valley. She joined the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies in 2026 as an Affiliated Researcher.

A research affiliate at the University of California Berkeley and professor emerita of architecture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she is also the founding director of URL: Urban Research Lab.

Recent projects include smart cities, suburbanization, social equity, and sustainable neighborhoods. In 2013, Tierney served as a U.S. delegate to Smart & Digital Cities in France; she was selected for the quality of her research on applying new technologies to build more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable cities.

Tierney is the author of several books including The Public Space of Social Media: Connected Cultures of the Networked Society (Routledge 2013), which was a finalist for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Award (2014), and Abstract Space: Beneath the Media Surface (Routledge 2007). She is the editor of Intelligent Infrastructure: Zip Cars, Invisible Networks and Urban Transformation (University of Virginia Press 2017), and the co-editor with Anthony Burke of Network Practice: New Strategies for Architecture and Design (Princeton Architectural Press 2007).

Tierney holds a Ph.D. in Architecture (Design Theory & Methods) from the University of California Berkeley, and a B.Arch from California College of the Arts. She was a predoctoral researcher at the MIT Media Lab.