In his scholarship, Hess explores metropolitan form and urban planning practice and policy, sometimes interactively and sometimes separately, but always as a means to improve city functions and urban life.

His research contributes to discussions that seek to re-evaluate relationships between transport and land use to address various pressing societal concerns, including pollution, congestion, and metropolitan sprawl. He accomplishes this by focusing his intellectual inquiry on connections between transportation and land use planning and resulting impacts on health, environment, and social aspects of community. Through spatial analysis of urban phenomenon, he examines connections between urban public policy, population groups, and built environments with a focus on equity in access to transportation, housing and essential services. 

Hess’s research spans urban planning history and post-socialist urban space, which he has developed in Estonia and the Baltic States as a Fulbright Scholar in 2011 and in 2016-2017 as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Centre for Urban and Migration Studies at the University of Tartu, Estonia. During his time there he researched how the legacy of town planning and the wide-ranging effects of various occupations affect local and national planning systems and planning practice. Additionally he has sought to understand housing systems and historical and current population dynamics to explore the effects of inherited segmentation from Soviet times.

He is the author of countless peer-reviewed articles and co-editor of Springer: Housing Estates in Europe: Poverty, Ethnic Segregation and Policy Challenges (Springer, 2018). He is also co-editor of the journal Town Planning Review (Liverpool University Press).