With the deepest sadness, the International Planning History Society (IPHS) mourns the passing of Prof. Stephen J. Ramos on 20 January 2026. Prof. Ramos was a distinguished scholar of planning history and urbanism, an internationally respected voice on port-city development and infrastructure, and a generous colleague whose intellectual range and personal integrity shaped communities of scholarship and practice across planning, design, and history.

From 2011, Prof. Ramos served on the faculty of the University of Georgia’s College of Environment + Design (CED), where he is remembered for his dedicated teaching, research, and service, as well as for his commitment to student success.

Prof. Ramos’s academic formation was notably interdisciplinary: he earned a Doctor of Design from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design; master’s degrees in Community and Regional Planning and in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin; and bachelor’s degrees in English and Spanish from Gettysburg College. These foundations informed a teaching practice that treated planning not as a narrow technocratic craft but as a historically conscious, culturally literate, and ethically demanding vocation.

Across a career spanning more than three decades, Prof. Ramos’s scholarship moved smoothly between the material and the institutional: how ports, logistics systems, and energy networks organise territory, and how planning ideas and narratives travel, sediment, and reappear in new forms.

His publications reflect this distinctive synthesis. He authored Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography (Ashgate 2010; Routledge 2016), a widely referenced study of engineered geographies and urban futures shaped through maritime infrastructures. He also co-edited Infrastructure Sustainability and Design (Routledge 2012) and served as a founding editor of New Geographies (Harvard GSD/Harvard University Press), helping to expand the intellectual vocabulary available to planners and urbanists grappling with planetary-scale systems.

Most recently, he published Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism (University of North Carolina Press, November 2025), turning his planning-historical lens toward the interwar South and the entwined politics of region, race, and planning ideology.

Prof. Ramos’s service was as consequential as his scholarship. He served as Editor for the Americas for Planning Perspectives, the journal affiliated with IPHS, helping to steward scholarship, mentor authors, and sustain the intellectual base of the field. As part of the core editorial team, he also played a key role in the scrutiny and approval of prospective special issues of the journal.

Within IPHS itself, he contributed to the Society’s awards and recognition work, the Planning Perspectives Prize committee, and the IPHS PhD writing workshops in Amsterdam (2023) and Florence (2025). He played a leading role in initiating and convening the 21st IPHS Conference (Atlanta, 19–23 July 2026) alongside colleagues at Georgia Tech and elsewhere. At the time of his death, he was Vice President-Elect of IPHS, which would have led to Vice President in July 2026 and President in 2030. His death thus represents a major loss to the Society.

Beyond IPHS, his standing in adjacent scholarly networks was likewise evident. The Regional Studies Association listed him as an EiC for the Regions & Cities book series and described his ongoing work on ports, infrastructure, and logistics, while also noting his significant editorial and leadership roles within the international planning history community.

IPHS extends its heartfelt condolences to Prof. Ramos’s family, colleagues, students, and friends at the University of Georgia and across the global community of planning historians. He is survived by his wife, Nuria, and his two children.  In the forthcoming 21st IPHS Conference in July 2026, an event is going to be organised to remember Prof. Ramos.