Armando Carbonell is Chairman of the Department of Planning and Urban Form at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think tank in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where, since 1999, he has been responsible for numerous books and research publications, three documentary films, a public radio series, and many programs conducted in the United States, Latin America, Europe, and China. He is also Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University, where he has taught since 2000. Carbonell has also taught annual planning studios at the University of Pennsylvania. Carbonell was recently appointed Policy and Practice editor of Town Planning Review, the journal of the Royal Town Planning Institute. He is the co-editor with Terry Szold of M.I.T. of the volume Smart Growth: Form and Consequences.

Carbonell was the founding Executive Director of the Cape Cod Commission, a regional planning and land use regulatory agency. In 1986, he directed Prospect: Cape Cod, the strategic planning initiative that led to the 1989 passage of the landmark Cape Cod Commission Act. Carbonell also served as President of Ecologia, Inc., an international consultancy that performed the definitive analysis of the controversial Bos-Nagymaros dam proposed on the Danube River and subsequently abandoned by the government of Hungary. He was a principal of TDG Ecoplan, a division of Thompson Design Group, with whom he developed the Buffalo Bayou Master Plan for 10 square miles of central Houston and the master plan for Qing Yun Shan mountain resort in Fujian Province, China. Earlier, Carbonell was land use policy director for the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection and a member of the faculty of Boston University.