Dr. Newell's research can be divided into two primary areas of interest. The first, Metabolisms of Urban Infrastructure and Form, focuses on structural features of the urban form (e.g. built environment, transport, energy, and water infrastructure) that due to their durability have long-term implications for resource consumption patterns and processes within and outside of urban areas. The second research area, "Ethical" Urban Consumption and Commodities, focuses on the interrelationships between the consumption of consumer products, our responsibilities as global ‘green’ urban citizens, and the role of governance mechanisms and frameworks (including local institutions) in regulating product consumption. His research approach is often multi-scalar and integrative and, in addition to theory and method found in geography and urban planning, he draws upon principles and tools of industrial ecology (e.g. footprinting and life-cycle analysis), and spatial analysis (e.g. land use/land cover change).
- 2011 SG: Research Roadmap for Urban Sustainability
- A Green Energy Village in Detroit Eastern Market: Establishing a Strategy for Scalability and Integrated Assessment
- Advancing the Science of Infrastructure Ecology by Exploring and Explaining Universal Regularities of Urban Sustainability Indicators
- Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: The FEW-Meter model to measure and improve urban agriculture, shifting it towards circular urban metabolism
- Doctoral Dissertation Research: Perspectives of and Preferences Towards Stormwater Management
- FEW Workshop: "Scaling Up" Urban Agriculture to Mitigate Food-Energy-Water Impacts
- Integrated Energy-Economy-Environment (3E) Modeling for Clean Vehicle Development in China
- LCLUC SYNTHESIS: Forested Land Cover and Land Use Change in the Far East of the Northern Eurasia Under the Combined Drivers of Climate and Socio-Economic Transformation
- Livable Communities through Sustainable Transportation: Integrated Assessment of Infrastructure Greening within Detroit for Improved Sustainable Transportation, Water Quality and Health
- M-CUBED 2.0: Uncovering the Food-Energy-Water Nexus for Urban Sustainability
- M-CUBED: Innovatively Planning for Technological Innovation: Water, Infrastructure, and Sustainability
- MASTER'S PROJECT: Enhancing Sustainability at Lower Huron Metropark
- MASTER'S PROJECT: Innovations for LEAP GI: Green Infrastructure Analysis, Design and Application in Detroit’s Lower East Side
- MASTER'S PROJECT: Michigan Green Communities
- McIntire-Stennis 2015
- McIntire-Stennis 2016
- Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Cyber-Enabled Public Services to Achieve Healthy Communities in America's Changing City Regions
- Spatial Planning for Urban Green Infrastructure that Couples Stormwater Mitigation with Enhanced Socio-Economic Resilience
- SRN: Integrated Urban Infrastructure Solutions for Environmentally Sustainable, Healthy and Livable Cities
- Sustainability and Development Conference - Enterprise Funds
- The Sustainability Hoofprint of Cities: A Spatial Model to Assess Transboundary Urban Consumption
- Tokyo's Urban Metabolism
- U.S.-China: Integrated Systems Modeling of Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Nexus for Urban Sustainability
- Water Scarcity Risk for the Global Trade Network
- Water Supply Scarcity in Southern California: Assessing Water District Level Strategies
- "Norilsk, Russia" in Green Cities: An A-to-Z Guide
- A Political-Industrial Ecology of Water Supply Infrastructure for Los Angeles
- Accounting for Forest Carbon Pool Dynamics in Product Carbon Footprints: Challenges and Opportunities
- Cows, climate, and the media
- Defining Urban Resilience: A Review
- Developing a political-industrial ecology: The case of Los Angeles’s water supply metabolism
- Developing a Science of Infrastructure Ecology for Sustainable Urban Systems
- Factors Predicting the Capacity of Los Angeles City-Region Recreation Programs to Promote Energy Expenditure
- Geographical Delimitation For Carbon Footprint Modeling In The Global Paper Industry
- Global Drivers of Russian Timber Harvest
- Globalized Urban Commodity Teleconnections: Using Big Data to Track Corporate Actors across Time-Space
- Green Alley Programs: Planning for a Sustainable Urban Infrastructure?
- Infrastructure Ecology: A Conceptual Model For Understanding Urban Sustainability
- Infrastructure Ecology: An Evolving Paradigm for Sustainable Urban Development
- Infrastructure ecology: an evolving paradigm for sustainable urban development [Proceedings]
- Life-Cycle Emissions from Port Electrification: A Case Study of Cargo Handling Tractors at the Port of Los Angeles
- Political-industrial ecology: An introduction
- Quantifying the Urban Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Nexus: The Case of the Detroit Metropolitan Area
- Resilience and Complexity: A Bibliometric Review and Prospects for Industrial Ecology
- Russia’s Forests in a Global Economy: How Consumption Drives Environmental Change
- Scaling Up Agriculture in City-Regions to Mitigate FEW System Impacts
- Spatial planning for multifunctional green infrastructure: Growing resilience in Detroit
- Sustainability Strategies for Consumer Products in Cities
- The Boundaries of Urban Metabolism: Towards a Political-Industrial Ecology
- The Energy and Emissions Burden of Water: A Spatially- Explicit Life Cycle Assessment of Urban Water Consumption in Southern California
- The energy and emissions footprint of water supply for Southern California
- The Forgotten and the Future: Reclaiming Back Alleys for a Sustainable City
- The ‘Geographic Emission Benchmark' Model: A Baseline Approach to Measuring Emissions Associated with Deforestation and Forest Degradation
- Urban Green Space, Public Health, and Environmental Justice: The Challenge of Making Cities 'Just Green Enough'
- Urban Resilience for Whom, What, Where, When and Why?
- Water Supply Scarcity in Southern California: Assessing Water District Level Strategies
- Why data for a political-industrial ecology of cities?
- ’Story-Networks’ of Livestock and Climate Change: Actors, the Artifacts, and the Shaping of Print Media
- “Dematerialization” in Green Business: An A-to-Z Guide
- “Papering" Over Space and Place: Product Carbon Footprint Modeling in the Global Paper Industry