City of Bellevue selected as 2018-2019 UW Livable City Year partner

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The University of Washington Livable City Year program has selected the City of Bellevue to be the community partner for the 2018-2019 academic year.
The year-long partnership connects city staff with students and faculty who will collaborate on projects to advance the Bellevue City Council Vision Priorities, specifically around livability and sustainability.
In the upcoming year, city staff will work with University of Washington’s Livable City Year program participants on a variety of possible projects that range from trail-oriented development and urban forestry best practices to potential public/private partnerships and multi-family community outreach strategies. Projects encompass many of the council’s strategic target areas of Economic Development, Transportation and Mobility, High Quality Built and Natural Environment, Great Places You Want to Be, Achieving Human Potential, and High-Performance Government.
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Originally posted on UW News
New book ‘City Unsilenced’ explores protest and public space

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Jeff Hou is a professor of landscape architecture and adjunct professor of urban design and planning in the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments. His research, teaching and practice focus on community design, design activism, cross-cultural learning and engaging marginalized communities in planning and design.
Hou has written extensively on the agency of citizens and communities in shaping built environments. His newest book is “City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy,” co-edited by Sabine Knierbein, associate professor for urban culture and public space at the Vienna University of Technology. The book examines the roles of public space in the rising number of protests around the world and as possibly a vestige of democracy.
Hou states, “with public space playing such an important role for freedom of speech and assembly and for holding institutions accountable to the public, the fight for public space is also a fight for democracy that protects equity and justice around the world.”
Hear from Hou in this interview with UW News.
Originally posted on UW News by Peter Kelley
What city ants can teach us about species evolution and climate change

By Yair Haklai (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Acorn ants are tiny. They’re not the ants you’d notice marching across your kitchen or swarming around sidewalk cracks, but the species is common across eastern North America. In particular, acorn ants live anywhere you find oak or hickory trees: both in forests and in the hearts of cities.
That’s why they’re so interesting to Sarah Diamond, a biology professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “We’re comparing this little forest island within a city to traditional forest habitats,” she says. Specifically, she and her colleagues are looking at how well city ants can tolerate higher temperatures compared to their rural cousins. The experiment is made possible by what’s known as the urban heat island effect, which describes the tendency of the built-up infrastructure of cities — think heat-absorbing concrete and asphalt, for example — to create a hotter environment than less developed areas.
Marina Alberti, professor in UW’s Department of Urban Design and Planning, explains how cities are a microcosm of the changes that are occurring at a planetary scale on an urbanized Earth.
Read more at Undark.
This story was published in Undark by Matthew R. Francis.
Birds versus buildings: Rural structures pose greater relative threat than urban ones

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About one billion birds are killed every year when they unwittingly fly into human-made objects such as buildings with reflective windows. Such collisions are the largest unintended human cause of bird deaths worldwide — and they are a serious concern for conservationists.
A new paper published in June in the journal Biological Conservation finds that, as one might suspect, smaller buildings cause fewer bird deaths than do bigger buildings. But the research team of about 60 — including three co-authors with the University of Washington — also found that larger buildings in rural areas pose a greater threat to birds than if those same-sized buildings were located in an urban area.
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Originally published by Peter Kelley on UW News
First UW Livable City Year project reports delivered to the City of Auburn

Image Credit: UW Livable City Year
Teams of University of Washington students have been working throughout this academic year on livability and sustainability projects in the City of Auburn. The yearlong Livable City Year partnership has given students a chance to work on real-world challenges identified by Auburn, while providing Auburn with tens of thousands of hours of study and student work.
Livable City Year connects UW faculty with projects based in Auburn, which are then incorporated into their classes. The program started this year, partnering with Auburn for the 2016-2017 year. This fall marked the first quarter for the program, when students in seven courses tackled 10 separate projects. The final reports from these projects are now complete.
“The very first Livable City Year projects were a success due to the hard work of our students and faculty, along with crucial guidance from Auburn city staff. It’s been an exciting process of co-creation,” said Livable City Year faculty co-director Branden Born of the Department of Urban Design and Planning. “The student teams working on these projects have worked to provide real benefits for the residents of Auburn, while also gaining real-world experience and a connection to the community.”
Students in Livable City Year courses spend at least one quarter working on a specific project identified as a need by Auburn. The student teams work with Auburn staff and community stakeholders as they conduct research and work on the projects.
Fall projects included assessments of Auburn’s work in reducing homelessness among the community, educational strategies to reduce pet waste and improper household items in wastewater, cultural city mapping, city values outreach, work on community place-making, and more.
“The projects that these students have taken on are at the core of many of our city’s major initiatives,” Auburn mayor Nancy Backus said. “Their work and dedication through the Livable City Year program has helped us make major strides forward in areas that are critical to the health, safety and happiness of our residents.”
After the quarter’s research work is completed, a student or student team works with Livable City Year’s editor and graphic designer to prepare a final report for the city, including any recommendations or possible future steps. By having several coordinated student teams across disciplines working on various projects, the Livable City Year program provides the City of Auburn with ways to enhance sustainability and livability elements within existing and future projects and programs.
The UW’s Livable City Year program is led by faculty directors Branden Born with the Department of Urban Design and Planning and Jennifer Otten with the School of Public Health, in collaboration with UW Sustainability, Urban@UW and the Association of Washington Cities, and with foundational support from the College of Built Environments and Undergraduate Academic Affairs.
While the fall project teams have completed their reports, this winter students have been working on projects including reducing food waste in school cafeterias; researching the costs, challenges and benefits of low-impact development stormwater technology; and better connecting Auburn’s residents socially, culturally, and economically.
Senior Ariel Delos Santos was one of the students in Born’s fall class which looked at connectivity and community place-making in Auburn.
“Working with the LCY program brought a novel component to our educational experience. Instead of a standard classroom setting where our homework is only seen by the professor, our final products were intimately tied to the city and its community members - which greatly motivated us to do more work and be more attentive to those who will be affected,” said Delos Santos, a senior double major in Community, Environment & Planning and Aquatic Fishery & Sciences. “As a student, I loved how closely I was able to work with my peers regularly and the camaraderie that we built. I definitely learned how to maintain professional relationships, accountability, communication, and my natural role in team settings.”
For more information, contact Born at bborn@uw.edu or 206-543-4975; LCY program manager Jennifer Davison at jnfrdvsn@uw.edu or 206-240-6903; and Jenna Leonard, Auburn’s climate and sustainability practice leader, at jleonard@auburnwa.gov or 253-804-5092.
This story was written by UW Livable City Year
Honoring Women Collaborators at Urban@UW

credit: Jessica Hamilton
In honor of International Women’s Day, we are highlighting just some of UW’s brilliant female professors, scholars, and and change-makers with whom Urban@UW is proud to collaborate. Click on their names to explore their work.
Leadership:
Thaisa Way, Executive Director, Urban@UW; Department of Landscape Architecture
Executive Committee:
Margaret O’Mara, Department of History
Susan P. Kemp, School of Social Work
Steering Committee:
Marina Alberti, Department of Urban Design and Planning
Sally Clark, Director of Regional and Community Relations
Sara Curran, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
Kim England, Department of Geography
Alexes Harris, School of Sociology
Anne Taufen Wessells, Department of Urban Studies
UW Leadership:
Mary Lidstrom, Vice Provost of Research
Ana Mari Cauce, President
Staff and Student Assistants:
Shahd Al Baz, Jackson School of International Studies
Avanti Chande, the Information School
Jen Davison, Urban@UW
Jess Hamilton, Department of Landscape Architecture
Collaborators, Thought Partnerse and Co-Conspirators:
Rachel Berney, Department of Urban Design and Planning
Erin Blakeney, School of Nursing
Ann Bostrom, Evans School of Public Policy and Governance
Sara Breslow, Center for Creative Conservation
Heather Burpee, Department of Architecture
Anat Caspi, Computer Science and Engineering
Seema Clifasefi, School of Medicine
Susan E. Collins, School of Medicine
Kristie L. Ebi, Center for Health and the Global Environment
Kelly Edwards, Graduate School
Sarah Elwood, Department of Geography
Josephine Ensign, School of Nursing
Claudia Frere-Anderson, UW Sustainability
Rachel Fyall, Evans School of Public Policy and Governance
Lisa Graumlich, College of the Environment
Amy Hagopian, School of Public Health
Shannon Harper, West Coast Poverty Center
Judith A. Howard, School of Sociology
Janine Jones, College of Education
Lisa Kelly, School of Law
Victoria Lawson, Department of Geography
Hedwig E. Lee, School of Sociology
Lynne Manzo, Department of Landscape Architecture
Linda Nash, Department of History
Paula Nurius, School of Social Work
Jennifer Otten, School of Public Health
Michaela Parker, eScience Institute
Gundula Proksch, Department of Architecture
Jennifer Romich, West Coast Poverty Center
Aiko Schaefer, School of Social Work
Amy Snover, Climate Impacts Group
Sarah Stone, eScience Institute
LuAnne Thompson, School of Oceanography
Edwina Uehara, School of Social Work
Rachel Vaughn, Carlson Leadership and Public Service Center
Jan Whittington, Department of Urban Design and Planning
Reflections on Urban Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Change

Photo by: David de la Cruz
On November 7th and 8th Urban@UW, in collaboration with the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group (CIG), hosted a symposium to begin transdisciplinary conversation on the multifaceted dynamics and consequences of Urban Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Change (UEJ). Below are some reflections from this event, and a sample of the resources we’ll be sharing from our time together.
Urban environmental justice has been impacting cities for centuries, if not millennia, where unequal power distribution creates disparate living conditions that typically fall along racial, ethnic, and class lines. Climate change is expected to accelerate already existing injustices in vulnerable communities. Flooding islands and coastlines, drought conditions, erosion, aridity, and soil loss are already impacting multitudes of marginalized as well as traditionally subsistence and agricultural communities.
Jacqui Patterson, Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, argued during her Walker-Ames lecture that these communities are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, but that impacts will not be isolated to such communities. Rather, given time and continued inaction, people of all races and classes will invariably experience the hardships wrought by the adverse conditions of climate change.
Given the scale of impacts of these challenges, a major goal of the UEJ symposium was to gather community leaders, academics, and the public to begin learning from each other on the topic of urban environmental justice: what are you studying, what are you finding, what’s working and what’s not, what partnerships could be made? Perhaps most critically, how does academia engage with communities and institutions in a way that is not only respectful, but collaborative and community-driven?

While academics have been working on environmental justice issues for decades, this work too often tends to operate within the confines of the academy and overlooks stakeholder input. Speakers at the UEJ symposium, experts in this field, explained that this tendency leads to insulated input from those most affected, and further confines data and analysis to traditional quantitative information such as geospatial data, census results, and other forms of ‘hard data.’ This pattern thus restricts the inclusion of “non-traditional” forms of data, notably those understandings drawn from the lived experiences of those most affected. Therefore the goal is not simply to include more types of information, but to combine quantitative and qualitative data through collaboration between researchers and communities in order to more robustly and comprehensively document injustices in a way that allows legibility, participation, and engagement of a greater diversity of people, scholars, and community members.
A further challenge comes in addressing the deep structural issues of racism, sexism, and classism that pervade the behavior of some communities as well as larger social and political institutions. Tom Goldtooth, director of Indigenous Environmental Network, spoke to us via live audio feed from Standing Rock and made clear to the audience that although the scale of this particular protest may be significant, this is just an example of the repeatedly lived experiences for disenfranchised peoples wherein the needs and actions of state actors and/or corporations are able to avoid repercussions of land seizure, pollution, or treaty infringements.
Furthermore, the scope of injustices is not simply urban. While cities have increasingly been the focus of a trove of writing on the topic, a more accurate perspective must recognize that urban does not simply mean “city” – but should better refer to the regions that urban, peri-urban, and rural communities all participate in. While cities may have denser populations, environmental justice persists across the entire spectrum of environments. Julie Sze, professor and Chair of American Studies at UC-Davis, explained the demarcations of neighborhood, town, or city all fail to account for the scale of consequences of climate change effects and environmental injustices, and argued for the necessity of deep, inclusive collaboration and communication.
Many visiting scholars and panelists, including Mia White, Rachel Morello-Frosch, Kim Powe, and Jill Mangaliman, indicated that environmental injustices are not rooted in isolated moments of conflict, but rather are the result of a sustained conflict where market forces and structural disenfranchisement may repeatedly infringe upon sovereignty, food systems, human health and well-being, and environmental integrity. Discovering points of action in these complex issues will require that academics and others collapse the usual barriers of collaboration and information access.
Looking forward, the conversation among scholars, activists and other attendees argued that a failure to reach across usual lines—of discipline, sector, class, race, gender, and other differences—will effect the continued, critical loss of skills and experiences for both students and scholars, that may be compounded by a collective loss for the academy and their communities to know and learn from each other. Scientists, policymakers, community members and others can make it so their work is not only collaborative, but inclusive and broadly informed.
Below is a selection of readings from the speakers who joined us for this event. More resources, including video from the event, will be published soon.
- Tom Goldtooth, Why REDD/REDD+ Is Not a Solution, No REDD Papers Volume 1, edited by Hallie Boas,13-25, Indigenous Environmental Network and Carbon Trade Watch, 2011.
- Rachel Morello-Frosch, The Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Health of Everyone: The Relationship Between Social Inequality and Environmental Quality
- Jacqueline Patterson, Climate Change is a Civil Rights Issue. The Root, 2010.
- Julie Sze, “Exploratory Concepts, Case Studies and Keywords for Teaching Environmental Justice and Climate Change from the Humanities”,Teaching Climate Change in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Stephanie LeMenager, Stephen Siperstein and Shane Hall, 184-190. Routledge, 2017.
- Mia White, “Gender, Race, and Place Attachment: The Recovery of a Historic Neighborhood in Coastal Mississippi.” In The Women of Katrina, 157-68. Vanderbilt University Press, 2012.
Urban@UW hosted the Urban Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Change Symposium together with the Climate Impacts Group, and was a sponsor for the Graduate School’s Walker Ames lecture featuring Jacqui Patterson.
Cars vs health: UW’s Moudon, Dannenberg contribute to Lancet series on urban planning, public health

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Automobiles — and the planning and infrastructure to support them — are making our cities sick, says an international group of researchers now publishing a three-part series in the British medical journal The Lancet.
University of Washington professors Anne Vernez Moudon and Andrew Dannenberg are co-authors of the first of this series that explores these connections and suggests several planning alternatives for better health.
The Lancet published the series on Sept. 23 and launched it that day during an event at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Titled, “Urban Design, Transport and Health,” the series involved researchers in several nations and fields.
Moudon is a professor emerita of urban design and planning and architecture in the UW College of Built Environments. Dannenberg is an affiliate professor of environmental and occupational health in the School of Public Health and in urban design and planning.
“Most of the negative consequences of city planning policies on health are related to the high priority given to motor vehicles in land-use and transportation planning,” said Moudon. “City planning policies supporting urban individual car travel directly and indirectly influence such risk exposures as traffic, air pollution, noise, physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, personal safety and social isolation.”
Moudon is second author and Dannenberg a co-author on the first of the three papers, titled “City Planning and Population Health: A Global Challenge.” Billie Giles-Corti and Mark Stevenson of the University of Melbourne are lead authors of the series, and Corti is lead on this paper, together with several international experts in public health and transportation planning as co-authors. Over two years, the team reviewed 20 years of literature as well as their own research on the health impacts of city planning through transportation mode choice in cities.
The verdict of their lead article: Automobiles are central to the problem of urban planning and human health.
Individualized motor travel in cities is the “root cause,” Moudon and fellow authors write, “of increases in exposures to sedentarism, environmental pollution, social isolation and unhealthy diets, which lead to various types of injury and disease outcomes.”
The lead paper suggests eight major interventions that city and transportation planning can employ to make cities more “compact” and promote health.
At the local urban design level, these ideas include walkable and bikable environments, shorter distances to common daily destinations, mixing housing with commercial developments and services and making common destinations more readily available to citizens. Parking demand would be managed by reducing its availability and increasing its cost.
“Together, these interventions will create healthier and more sustainable, compact cities,” the authors write, “that reduce the environmental, social and behavioral risk factors that affect lifestyle choices, levels of environmental pollution, noise and crime.”
Stevenson is the lead author on the second paper, which focuses on the links between land use, transport and health benefits in compact cities. The third paper, whose lead author is James Sallis of the University of California, San Diego, looks at using science to guide city planning policy and practice for healthy and sustainable cities.
Overall, the series quantifies the health gains that could be achieved if cities incentivize a shift from private car use to cycling and walking, and promote a city model in which employment and amenities — including public transportation — are within walking distance.
Series author Giles-Corti placed the multinational research into historic and global perspective, noting that with world population heading to 50 billion by 2050 — and three-quarters of people to be living in cities — city planning must be part of a comprehensive solution to adverse health outcomes.
“City planning was key to cutting infectious disease outbreaks in the 19th century through improved sanitation, housing and separating residential and industrial areas,” Giles-Corti said. “Today, there is a real opportunity for city planning to reduce non-communicable diseases and road trauma and to promote health and wellbeing more broadly.”
Other co-authors on the first paper in the series are from the University of California, San Diego; Washington University in St. Louis; Pontifical Catholic University of Parana and Federal University of Parana, in Brazil; Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia; the University of Western Australia in Perth, Australia; and the Australian Catholic University, Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute and Swinburne University of Technology, all of Melbourne, Australia.
Funders for the paper authors included Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council and Centre for Excellence in Healthy Liveable Communities, the Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, the Hospitals Contribution Fund of Australia, VicHealth, as well as the U.S. National Institute of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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For more information, contact Moudon at 206-276-3133 or moudon@uw.edu or Dannenberg at 404-272-3978 or adannen@uw.edu.
The series is available at http://www.thelancet.com/series/urban-design.
(Originally published by UW News and Peter Kelley.)
First Livable City Year projects underway; kickoff event Oct. 6

Jen Davison, Urban@UW, University of Washington
Not even a week has passed since the start of the quarter, and already a group of University of Washington public health students is deep into discovering the cultural flavor and identity of each neighborhood in a nearby city.
The project is a sizeable challenge: Students will pour over census and public health data, interview residents, photograph neighborhoods and summarize their findings in a report. The end result will help officials in Auburn, Washington, know how to best engage and communicate with the culturally diverse populations in the city.
The neighborhoods endeavor is one of 10 initial projects in the UW’s inaugural Livable City Year program, which pairs university professors and students with Auburn staff to advance the city’s goals for livability and sustainability. The idea is to give students real-world experiences while addressing current needs identified by city leaders.
The program will formally celebrate the start of its first year at 10 a.m. Oct. 6 at wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House on the UW’s campus in a kickoff event open to all. Professors leading Livable City Year courses this fall will talk about their projects, followed by a time for Q&A.
“My students are really excited to be part of a larger initiative,” said India Ornelas, a UW assistant professor of health services who is teaching the class that will profile each Auburn neighborhood.
“They get to do something they really know will be valued and practice their professional skills to engage with each community.”
The new program is a cross-university collaboration led by faculty directors Branden Born with the Department of Urban Design and Planning and Jennifer Otten with the School of Public Health, in collaboration with UW Sustainability and Urban@UW, and with foundational support from the College of Built Environments and Undergraduate Academic Affairs. The program is also working with the nonprofit organization Association of Washington Cities.
The projects in Auburn this fall include addressing homelessness issues, building awareness of city values, understanding wastewater discharge, managing pet waste and evaluating the success of a buy-local program. UW undergraduate and graduate students in six different courses spanning environmental and public health, sociology, and urban design and planning will deliver reports and recommendations to city leadership at the end of the quarter.
Sociology professor Kyle Crowder is tackling three separate projects on homelessness in Auburn with his upper-level undergraduate course on cities and neighborhood dynamics. One will assess and prioritize Auburn’s plans for addressing homelessness, and another will develop innovative strategies for understanding the size, change and distribution of the city’s homeless population.
A third project will focus on finding incentives to maintain the city’s relatively affordable older homes in the midst of expensive residential expansion.
“These are neat projects in that they allow students to work on things that are practically important, but there’s also, in a way, a ‘dream big’ element,” Crowder said. “There are great tools and resources at this university, so the more we can bring those to the community, the better off everyone will be.”
Several projects from this quarter will continue with Auburn for the rest of the academic year, and a half dozen new ones will begin winter and spring quarters. Other cities around Washington can apply to work with the UW through the Livable City Year program in future years.
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For more information, contact Livable City Year program manager Jennifer Davison at jnfrdvsn@uw.edu or 206-240-6903.
(Originally published by UW News & Michelle Ma)
August Sees New Grants, Project Launches, and Original Research and Writing

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August was a busy month at the University of Washington and the Seattle region when it comes to urban research, writing, and project launches. Take a look at what’s been happening.
- Urban@UW will be running a half-day workshop as part of the Eighth International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2016.) Our workshop seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners to explore how we can apply urban data science to the challenges of urban homelessness. Our workshop deadline is October 1, 2016.
- CoMotion began developing a new incubator space for augmented and virtual reality startups.
- Urban@UW published an piece looking at sidewalks and disparities regarding mobility and safety across different communities and user groups.
- The Department of Urban Design and Planning‘s Marina Alberti published a new book, “Cities that Think Like Planets: Complexity, Resilience, and Innovation in Hybrid Ecosystems.” Alberti was interviewed by UW News about her book and recent thinking.
- Thaisa Way, Urban@UW’s executive director and associate professor in the Landscape Architecture department, was appointed chair of the Dumbarton Oaks Fellows in Garden and Landscape Studies.
- The eScience Institute‘s Data Science for Social Good (DSSG 2016) research fellows concluded their summer with a rich symposium of research and strong media responses, including: The Seattle Times and ORCA card data, TechCrunch overviewed each project, GeekWire profiled the ORCA project and OpenSidewalks, and Geekwire published another piece showcasing connections made between Amazon reviews and food safety.
- Crosscut concluded a very well-done 3 part series on Seattle’s homeless.
- The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded $179,000 to fund a 2017 summer institute focusing on western cultural conceptions of urban/nature dynamics by using Seattle’s complex environmental history as a focal point to examine broader implications for global justice and health.
- Urban@UW, the School of Public Health, UW Sustainability, College of Built Environments, and Undergraduate Academic Affairs are proud to be working with the University of Washington and the City of Auburn in the Livable City Year program. This new initiative combines the talents of civic and academic institutions to work collaboratively work towards actionable solutions.
- The Department of Architecture‘s Chris Morris published an online book about Nordic lighting design during his Valle Fellowship in Scandinavia.
Urban@UW compiles monthly recaps highlighting the urban research happening across the University of Washington.
University of Washington and City of Auburn launch first Livable City Year partnership

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The University of Washington has begun a yearlong partnership with the City of Auburn, under the new Livable City Year program. UW students and professors will work with the City of Auburn to advance the city’s goals for livability and sustainability throughout the upcoming academic year.
In this inaugural year, UW faculty will lead classes to work on 15 to 20 projects identified by the City of Auburn. Students will provide tens of thousands of hours of study and production toward specific projects identified by Auburn, while benefiting from the opportunity to apply classroom lessons to real-world problems.
“This partnership represents the very best kind of UW student experience by creating opportunities for community engagement, practical problem-solving and interdisciplinary study,” said University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce. “The UW could not be prouder to partner with the City of Auburn through the Livable City Year program to combine education with making positive change in a Washington community.”
The Auburn City Council voted unanimously Aug. 29 to enter into an agreement with the UW for the program.
The UW’s Livable City Year program is a cross-university collaboration led by faculty directors Branden Born, an associate professor in the College of Built Environments, and Jennifer Otten, an assistant professor in the School of Public Health, in collaboration with UW Sustainability and with foundational support from Urban@UW, the College of Built Environments and Undergraduate Academic Affairs. The program connects local governments with UW classes to address community-identified areas of need. The coordinated, cross-discipline approach provides the local partners with a new option to enhance sustainability and livability elements within existing and future projects and programs.
“I think the most powerful thing about Livable City Year is that it allows UW to connect with communities throughout the state using this field-tested and mutually beneficial model,” said program manager Jennifer Davison, who also manages Urban@UW. “This partnership with Auburn will be fully supported every step of the way by the program, from project identification and connection with faculty and courses, to student experience and final delivery of meaningful work to the city. It’s really exciting to see it coming together.”
Auburn’s government and administration were early champions of the program, and the city’s willingness and preparedness to take on this opportunity helped move the program forward from an idea to a reality.
“We are incredibly honored and excited to be partnering with the University of Washington on these projects and to be part of this ground breaking year for the program,” Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus said.
“This program is an incredible example of what higher education can do for our community,” said Auburn Deputy Mayor Largo Wales. “Not only does this give students a unique hands-on learning opportunity, it provides the city with the opportunity to complete valuable projects that we would not have been able to otherwise.”
Livable City Year is based on the University of Oregon’s Sustainable City Year Program and is a member of the Educational Partners for Innovation in Communities Network.
“By connecting many courses over one academic year to projects that address the partner city’s specific goals, Livable City Year can have broad impacts that are difficult for faculty to achieve on their own,” Born said. “Livable City Year gives faculty across many disciplines a chance to work together in a fully collaborative UW effort.”
As part of the Livable City Year process, Auburn directors and staff identified almost 50 different possible projects for consideration. UW faculty will select 15 to 20 of these projects as subjects for classes in a variety of disciplines. Students will work on the projects in conjunction with Auburn staff for a meaningful end result. Projects were identified over a wide range of topics, such as public works, innovation and technology, urban planning and more.
“This program provides students with an opportunity to tackle meaningful and challenging real-world problems,” Otten said. “Projects addressed in these UW class and city collaborations directly affect the health and well-being of the city’s population. Students will gain an introduction to the civic process and get an opportunity to become better engaged with local communities.”
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For more information, contact Born at bborn@uw.edu or 206-543-4975; Davison at jnfrdvsn@uw.edu or 206-240-6903; and Jenna Leonard, Auburn’s climate and sustainability practice leader, at jleonard@auburnwa.gov or 253-804-5092.
Marc Schlossberg, co-director of the University of Oregon’s Sustainable Cities Initiative, is available to talk about this similar program: schlossb@uoregon.edu or 541-346-2046.
The Livable City Year program will hold a kickoff event highlighting the projects UW students will be working on during the fall quarter on Oct. 6 at 10 a.m. in the wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House at the University of Washington.
(Originally published by UW News and Daimon Eklund)
NEH Awards $179,000 for Urban-Nature Summer Institute at UW

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The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded nearly $180,000 for a new summer institute on the urban environment at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington.
The institute, City/Nature: Urban Environmental Humanities, examines how Western cultures have historically viewed city and nature as separate—and how a more integrative understanding can serve an increasingly urbanized world. It uses Seattle’s complex environmental history as a window into broader questions of global justice and health.
Urban landscape historian Thaisa Way, urban ecologist Ken Yocom, and literary scholar Richard Watts will lead the institute, which includes field trips along with literary readings and discussions, public lectures, dinner conversations, and dedicated research time. They will assemble a diverse cohort of 25 faculty from two-year and four-year colleges and universities nationwide. Application information will be available in fall 2016, and the institute runs June 26 to July 14, 2017.
The course recognizes that the humanities offer tools for thinking about climate change, poverty, political injustice, and other wicked problems that converge in 21st century cities.
“Nature and the city—or culture and the natural world—have, for centuries, been cast as opposites,” said Way. “An intellectual and a perceptual rift suggesting that cities are separate from the natural world is persistent both among scholars and in the public imagination.
“When nature has been identified in the city, it is largely recognized in the parks and gardens, in other words in the greenness of the grass, shrubs, and trees. Nature is rarely acknowledged in the stormwater that runs down the streets and into the sewer, the wind that blows through the urban canyons, or the weeds that grow in the cracks of the sidewalk.”
Undoing the city-nature dichotomy has been a fertile project for the field of environmental humanities. Course readings and guests will include scholars who have demonstrated integrative thinking and research.
“By pushing the boundaries of scholarship and teaching in the urban environmental humanities, participants will contribute to a more robust reading of the impact of an increasingly urban world that is facing significant environmental changes,” said Way.
Field trips will visit the Brightwater Sewage Treatment Center, downtown Seattle (built on former marshes), Gas Works Park, and a Superfund site on the Duwamish River.
“These site visits force us to confront the coexistence of built and natural environments at the city’s core,” said Way.
Way, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, brings a history of leading complex, discipline-spanning projects. She directs the Urban@UW initiative launched in 2015 and co-leads the Lake Union Laboratory collaboratory research project. She also co-led, with Margaret O’Mara (History), an intensive, year-long Sawyer Seminar, “Now Urbanism: City Building in the 21st Century and Beyond,” underwritten by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, at the Simpson Center.
Watts, Chair & Associate Professor of French & Italian Studies, is a literary scholar who approaches the texts of former French colonies through the lens of the environmental humanities. His recent work examines water in the urban contexts of Fort-de-France, Port-au-Prince, Dakar, Algiers, and Ho-Chi-Minh City. In 2013, he co-organized the 2013 conference The Future of the Environmental Humanities: Research, Pedagogies, Institutions, and Publics at the UW.
Yocom, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, brings the perspective of a scientist and urban designer. He has taught a field course, “Reading the Elwha,” that tracks the ecological and cultural shifts created by the largest dam removal in US history. He is co-editor of Now Urbanism: The Future City is Here (Routledge, 2015).
UW guest speakers will include María Elena García (Comparative History of Ideas), Anne C. Huppert (Architecture), Linda Nash (History), and Sarah Culpepper Stroup (Classics). Additional visiting guest speakers will give lectures that are open to the public.
Participants will receive a $2,700 stipend to attend. An application process will begin in the fall, with a deadline of March 1, 2017. For more information, please contact citynat@uw.edu.
(Article courtesy of the Simpson Center for Humanities.)
New book ‘Cities that Think Like Planets’ imagines urban regions resilient to change

Wikimedia Commons and Gindelis
Marina Alberti is a professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning, which is part of the University of Washington College of Built Environments. Alberti directs the college’s Urban Ecology Research Laboratory and the Graduate School’s interdisciplinary doctoral program in urban design and planning.
She answered some questions about her new book, “Cities that Think Like Planets: Complexity, Resilience, and Innovation in Hybrid Ecosystems,” which was published in July by University of Washington Press.
This book seems a summing-up of elements of your career so far — including your views on the powerful effect of humans on ecosystems — as well as the work of many others. How long was this book in the making and how did it come about?
M.A.: I have been curious, since my early days as a student, about the role of imagination in scientific thinking. I believe that scientific progress is achieved through the discipline of observing and listening — without judgment — to both what it is and what can be. The book begins by imagining the future.
The way we think about the future has significant implications for the choices we make in the present — the strategies we devise to address new emergent problems. Imagine New York City — or London or Beijing or Ho Chi Minh City, or Seattle. Our present decisions as citizens and as planners will depend on whether we envision a future that follows the current trajectory of development, characterized by continuing growth; or one that predicts crossed thresholds, tipping points, and irreversible regime shifts triggered by climate change; or whether we imagine that we will be able to adapt to climate change by investing in green energy and infrastructure.
And how would our decisions differ, if we could imagine our city able to reinvent itself by redefining its relationships with natural processes?
I suggest that by navigating through time, we can uncover our biases about what we know and challenge the too-often-implied notion that scientific discovery has reached its end or that we’ve exhausted our capacity to learn. I propose that we can learn from the future. And more importantly, we can learn by asking what it is that we are unable to imagine.
What do you mean by “navigating through time” in this context?
M.A.: You do not need to travel very far in time to uncover the bias that past observations can place on our predictions. Current climate variables are very well outside the historical variability. Humans are changing the environment outside the range of values and conditions that Earth’s ecosystems have experienced throughout their evolution. And our past experience can also limit our imagination. Imagine you were among the first Seattle dwellers. Could have you imagined the current trajectories of urban growth?
The emergence of a new urban science that aims to uncover universal rules of how cities work and the remarkable availability of real time data and new sensors are key to envisioning such transformation. But science and data answer questions we are able to formulate. To build sustainable, resilient cities requires that we both refine our predictions and expand our imagination. Expanding the imagination is what made Einstein envision gravitational waves one hundred years before they were detected.
Your notion of “thinking like a planet” builds on ecologist Aldo Leopold’s idea to expand the scale of land conservation by “thinking like a mountain.” How have you built on that, and what does it mean, briefly, for a city to “think like a planet”?
M.A.: I suggest that we need a new ethic: to “build cities that think like planets,” so that we might face the challenge of cities in the context of planetary change. For Aldo Leopold, “thinking like a mountain” meant expanding the spatial and temporal scales of land conservation by incorporating a mountain’s dynamics. I suggest that we need to build on Hirsch and Norton’s idea of “thinking like a planet” (“Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future,” 2012, MIT Press) to expand the time and space dimensions of urban design and planning to the planetary scale.
Cities that think like planets are cities:
- where humans are key players in nature’s game
- where humans bio-cooperate with, not simply bio-mimic, natural processes
- that operate on planetary spatial and time scales
- that rely on “wise” citizens, not simply smart technologies
You depict a hypothetical city planner saying it’s helpful to imagine varied futures, even knowing none will come true: “As we prepare our city for every collectively imagined scenario, we shape ourselves into a resilient city able to withstand whatever our ultimate reality delivers.” What role might human creativity and ingenuity play in preparing cities to meet the future?
M.A.: Cities are where innovation has historically occurred. The key role that cities have played in the development of science and technology and in the generation of inventions and innovations — intellectual and material, cultural and political, institutional and organizational — has been well documented by scholars in a diversity of disciplines.
While rapid urbanization accelerates and expands human impacts on the global ecosystem, it is the close interactions of diverse peoples that make cities the epicenter of both social transformation and technological innovation. Yet innovation is tightly linked to the capacity of urbanizing regions to adapt and evolve in a changing environment. For human civilization to achieve its full potential, it is essential to place technological innovation and social transformation in the context of local and global environmental change.
“If we are to think like a planet, we must deal with scales and events that are far removed from the everyday human experience,” you write. This implies “expanding the scale of design and planning” from decades to centuries, and from a human scale to considering ecologies of whole regions. Do examples already exist of this type of long-term, unfettered planning?
M.A.: Throughout history, people in societies faced with the prospect of deforestation or other environmental changes have successfully engaged in long-term thinking. Consider, for example, the Tokugawa shoguns, Inca emperors, New Guinea highlanders and 16th-century German landowners or, more recently, the Chinese efforts at reforestation and their bans on logging of native forests.
Many European countries and the United States have dramatically reduced their air pollution while increasing their use of energy and their combustion of fossil fuels. Humans have the intellectual and moral capacity to do even more when they tune in to challenging problems and engage in solving them.
Several Northern European cities have adopted successful strategies to cut greenhouse gases, combining these strategies with innovative approaches that allow the cities to adapt to the inevitable consequences of climate change.
One example is the Copenhagen 2025 Climate Plan, which lays out a path for Copenhagen to become the world’s first carbon neutral city through efficient zero-carbon mobility and building. They’re building a subway that will place metro stations within 650 yards of 85 percent of the city’s residents. Nearly three-quarters of Copenhagen’s emissions reductions will be realized as people transition to less carbon-intensive ways to produce heat and electricity: biomass, wind, geothermal and solar. Copenhagen is also one of the first cities to adopt a climate adaptation plan that will reduce vulnerability to the extreme storms and rising seas expected over the next century.
The Netherlands, also, is exploring ways to allow people to live with the inevitable floods. Strategies include floating communities and adaptive beach protections that take advantage of natural processes. New York is setting an example for long-term planning too, by combining adaptation and transformation strategies into plans for building a resilient city.
What do you think cities that “think like planets” will look like?
M.A.: Although I have ventured to pose this question in the book, I do not attempt to provide an answer. In fact, no single individual can. The answer resides in the collective imagination and evolving behaviors of peoples of diverse cultures who inhabit the vast array of regions across the planet. Humanity has the capacity to think in the long term.
A city that thinks like a planet is not built on previously set design solutions or planning strategies. Nor can we assume that the best solution would work equally well across the world, regardless of place and time. Instead, such a city must be built on principles that expand its drawing board and on collaborative actions to include planetary processes and scales that integrate humanity into the evolution of Earth.
Such a view acknowledges the history of the planet in every element or building block of the urban fabric — from the skyscraper to the sidewalk, from a backyard to the central park, from residential side streets to mega-highways.
It is a view that is curious about understanding who we are and about taking advantage of novel patterns, processes and feedbacks that emerge from human and natural interactions.
It is a city grounded in the here and the now and simultaneously in the different temporal and spatial scales of human and natural processes that govern the Earth. A city that thinks like a planet is simultaneously resilient and ready to change.
For more information about “Cities that Think Like Planets,” contact Alberti at malberti@uw.edu. Follow her on Twitter at @ma003.
(Originally published by Peter Kelley and UW News.)
Data Science for Social Good 2016

This summer we are thrilled to be supporting the eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program.
Modeled after similar programs at the University of Chicago and Georgia Tech, with elements from eScience’s own Data Science Incubator, sixteen DSSG Student Fellows have been working with academic researchers, data scientists, and public stakeholder groups on data-intensive research projects. This year’s projects specifically focus on Urban Science, aiming to understand and extract valuable, actionable information out of data from urban environments across topic areas including public health, sustainable urban planning, education, transportation, and social justice.
Topics being addressed this summer include a community based approach to improving accessible pedestrian way-finding, mining online data for early identification of unsafe food products, enhanced transit system operations and planning, and tool development for effective poverty estimation. For more information on the work being done this summer check out the DSSG project descriptions.
Now entering their 5th week, students with backgrounds ranging from applied math and data visualization to international relations and landscape architecture, are not only learning new approaches to data challenges, but interdisciplinary collaboration. Student fellows have been exploring new data science tools, as well as a broad range of ethical considerations with support from the Human Centered Data Science Lab. Read more about the fellows, and their reflections on the program as it moves forward on the DSSG blog.
Office Hours with Britton Shephard

Britton Shephard & Hailey Mackay
Britton Shepard is a Masters student in Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington, and will be graduating this June. He is currently wrapping up his thesis project, Site 1121: Field Notes, a public site exhibition of an abandoned lot that explored the history and identity of a landscape in an urban setting. The week-long installation took place in the U District at 1121 NE 45th St. March 21- 25, 2016, with support from the Washington State Employee’s Credit Union (WSECU), the owners of the vacant site. His thesis is an example of the unique urban research happening at UW every day.
(This article is part of a series of interviews exploring the work and perspectives of Urban@UW community members.) Urban@Uw: Britton, could you give us the one sentence version of your thesis. Britton: What happens when you open a gate on an abandoned site and invite people simply to explore what what is there, what does a shift in focus to experiencing a place as is rather than a new final product offer us? Urban@UW: Britton, you pursued a rather non-traditional approach to both your site and your thesis project. How did you decide on this abandoned lot? Britton: I had looked at other sites but this one kept emerging as the perfect opportunity: an abandoned site in a high density area by the University. I drove by this site, rode the bus past this site—I was frequently exposed to it in my everyday experiences. As I was working out my thinking regarding an urban field study, this seemingly abandoned and fenced off site in a busy area seemed like the best place to challenge assumptions about access and agency. Urban@UW: You mention ‘urban field study’—what do you mean by that? Britton: The approach was partially driven by ideas of a dig on an archeological site. The goal was to reveal: to minimize the introduction of new elements and curate what was already there. And I was deeply fascinated by slow, in-depth site work that engages people in the process instead of just a finished product.

Urban@UW: Tell us a little bit about the fence—it’s such a clear marker in a city that this is a place not to be trespassed, how did you negotiate that? Britton: The fence was very important. The status quo of a rectangle of fencing says, “Stay out—this is off limits.” Your access to space has already been decided for you. But I didn’t want to take the whole thing down—I believed that placing a few strong design elements—the boardwalks and work tables, moving existing things around and having humans in there would offer a way in—it would be an unusual form of agency. Urban@UW: How did you get access in the first place? How did you find an owner and get permission? Britton: King County Parcel Viewer was a great resource and eventually I found out that WSECU had purchased the site. I took a look at their branding and they seemed very people-oriented. Their work made them seem like a possible, relevant partner to be able to assist and even expand the project. So, I went to the branch across the street, walked up to a teller and asked if I could talk with someone about the possibility of a temporary installation at the site. They were open to the idea and passed my name on to Ann Flannigan, VP of Public Relations. Ann got in touch with me and I explained my idea and we discussed deadlines, purpose, and possibilities, particularly how I thought those lined up with their interests. They were interested in a neighborhood collaboration with the University, and even though it was a pretty unorthodox ask, they didn’t say no and we kept talking. Opening up a place like this meant that we had to be realistic about risk and insure safety. All told the process took 2-3 months from contact to full approval. But I have to say, I was never nervous. Things don’t always work out in life but this site was of high value to me and so we kept moving forward and eventually got there! I spent a lot of time prepping and exploring the site to make things legible and accessible. Urban@UW: How did the interactive part of the urban field study unfold? Britton: I approached fellow students in the Landscape Architecture department asking for their help as participants in the field study. I knew the success of the project depended on their being there! WSECU helped as well, promoting the project and setting up an employee volunteer schedule. Ultimately, we opened the gate, placed the boardwalks and signage to indicate something public was happening—and people just ended up coming in. Peoples’ response was a great experience to take part in.

Urban@UW: What did you find? Britton: Well, there are so many of these sites in transition in Seattle—and as much as we build we rarely take the time to look at what’s already there. We found your normal detritus—needles, beer cans, trash—but we also found over 35 different plant species, tools, and railroad hardware. We created an artifacts table of found objects, converted the old foundation’s ruins into a gallery space, and put together a sofa out of sandbags. WSECU and UW volunteers also helped act as docents and diggers. It was sort of funny, frequently people who came to the site would ask, “Did you find anything valuable?” But we weren’t thinking in that way. When you take things like garbage, plants, or old hardware off the ground and arrange them they become something so much more. People start to see potential narratives. So, while we didn’t find anything of monetary value, people were finding valuable connections, experiences and questions once they came in and explored. Urban@UW: How do you see this project relating to broader urban issues? Britton: Exploring different ways of working with landscape demonstrated how energizing new ways of interacting with places can be. Curating a landscape by showing its process, history, and previous identities really “invited” activity into a place rather than “installing” it. The project showed the difference between designing surfaces for specific outcomes and working for a unique form of public engagement—for me that makes design and landscape architecture seem so much broader with possibility. Urban@UW: What does the site look like now? Britton: Well, all of the plants continue to grow in. The pearly everlasting is starting to bloom, joining the red clover and sow thistle. Only the sandbags remain on site from the installation. The site is empty, maybe even a bit lonesome. But to me it looks more familiar than it did before, and I hope that others are having the same impression.

Urban@UW: What’s next for you? Britton: I would love to work on another fallow site. One of the lessons learned from Site 1121 was how to better engage people in their visit to the site, and to record their responses, critiques, and feedback. I am researching ways to set up a sort of open-source digital archive for each site that people can visit and interact with to extend the conversations. I think it has a lot of potential not only for designing site-specific installations in land banked sites in the city, but also for a involved community design process. Urban@UW: Reflecting back on your education and what’s inspired you—what would you suggest people read? Britton: I would say Delta Primer: A Field Guide to the California Delta, by Jane Wolff. It’s beautiful. The quality of the research and clarity of the sublime hand drawings are enough for anybody to be interested in this book. But for landscape architects, this book reminds us the rules of the game are never fixed.
Written by Andrew Prindle, Urban@UW Communications Coordinator
Urban Planning and PhD Program Addresses ‘The Future City’ (5/5)

Courtesy Arup and John Robertson Architects
What kinds of cities shall we live in, and how can urban planners help make them a reality? What possible future scenarios lie ahead, and how will big data and new technologies affect science and decision-making in urban design?
The University of Washington Graduate School’s Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Urban Design and Planning’s annual symposium for 2016 will tackle such questions with panel discussions featuring faculty, industry professionals and a pair of well-known keynote speakers.
“The Future City: Emergence of a New Science” will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, May 5, at UW Intellectual House, wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ.
The symposium will comprise two sessions. Morning discussions will center on the causes of urban change and what drives innovation in the study of cities. The morning keynote speaker, Luis Bettencourt, is a theoretical physicist and professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
Students from various UW doctoral programs will feature research on urban issues in a poster session during lunch.
The afternoon session will explore possible futures and the implications of those scenarios on graduate education and the urban planning and design industry itself. The afternoon keynote address will be delivered by Carlo Ratti, an architect and engineer and director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A poster session featuring work by College of Built Environments students and faculty and a reception will follow the symposium from 4:30 to 6 p.m. in the Gould Pavilion Gallery.
The symposium is sponsored by the urban design Ph.D. program, the College of Built Environments and Urban@UW.
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To learn more, contact Marina Alberti, professor and director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Urban Design and Planning, at 206-616-8667 or malberti@uw.edu. If you were not able to attend but have any questions, let us know! (Originally published by UW Today & Peter Kelley)
10 Parks that Changed America Premieres Tonight on PBS (KCTS9)

Courtest Joe Wolf, Flickr
Tune into KCTS9 at 8:00pm to see the premier of 10 Parks that Changed America. Two of Seattle’s great parks made the list for this interesting look at the influence parks and public spaces have had on America. A packed house at Architecture Hall saw a preview a few weeks ago and it’s great! Our very own Thaisa Way along with fellow UW Landscape Architecture department professor Iain Robertson are both featured!
Learn more about this PBS special.
Reading List for Edgar Pieterse Visit 4/12

Portrait Courtesy of African Centre for Cities
In anticipation of Edgar Pieterse’s visit we thought you might enjoy a video lecture and in-depth examination to get a feel for Pieterse’s research and thinking.
- How can we transcend slum urbanism in Africa? – Edgar Pieterse, University of Cape Town - This short video delivered by Edgar Pieterse and UN-Habitat offers a very accessible overview of African urbanism and places these ideas in the context of urban theory and history. http://unhabitat.org/how-can-we-transcend-slum-urbanism-in-africa-edgar-pieterse-university-of-cape-town/
- High Wire Acts: Knowledge Imperatives of Southern Urbanisms - The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism offers us a more involved and critical look at the conditions and challenges of urbanism in Africa. This piece deftly explores theory and the challenges presented by emerging cities in the global South. http://jwtc.org.za/salon_volume_5/edgar_pieterse.htm
About Edgar Pieterse Professor Pieterse holds the South African Research Chair in Urban Policy and is founding director of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town. ACC is emerging as the preeminent interdisciplinary urban research centre on the African continent. He previously served as Special Advisor to the Premier of the Western Cape Provincial Government in South Africa and directed a number of urban policy think tanks before his brief time in government. He is consulting editor for Cityscapes—an international biannual magazine on urbanism in the global South. His most recent co-edited books are: African Cities Reader III: Land, Property & Value (Chimurenga, 2015), Africa’s Urban Revolution (Zed, 2014) and Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities (Jacana, 2013). Edgar is also on the Advisory Boards of: Indian Institute for Human Settlements, LSE Cities, the Gauteng City-region Observatory, Open Society Foundation of South Africa, among others. He has recently been appointed as co-lead author of the Urban Chapter for the International Panel on Social Progress. He serves as Chairperson of the Panel of Experts support the Integrated Development Framework of South Africa. More information at www.africancentreforcities.net.
Towards a Speculative Politics for African Cities with Edgar Pieterse - 4/12

African Centre for Cities
Join us April 12 at Kane Hall (Room 120) for Visiting Scholar Edgar Pieterse, Please Register for this Public Event
Towards a Speculative Politics for African Cities
The available frames to understand and reimagine contemporary urban politics in the African context come down two divergent pathways: 1) build the institutional infrastructure to enact the deliberative model of urban politics as imagined within the prescripts of the Habitat Agenda, or 2) enact and sustain militant refusal against the political, institutional and cultural colonization of neoliberalism until a more just and socialist dispensation can be ushered in. This is a deliberately crude stylization to establish a basis for a line inquiry able to take completely different vantage point to these pathways, whilst keeping them in view. In this talk, Professor Pieterse will situate the vexing dynamics that bear down on most Sub-Saharan African cities as a starting point for thinking about the political imaginations and horizons that we should be delineating to get anywhere near a productive framing of urban politics, planning and design of, and for, our confounding times.
About Edgar Pieterse Professor Edgar Pieterse holds the South African Research Chair in Urban Policy and is founding director of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town. ACC is emerging as the preeminent interdisciplinary urban research centre on the African continent. He previously served as Special Advisor to the Premier of the Western Cape Provincial Government in South Africa and directed a number of urban policy think tanks before his brief time in government. He is consulting editor for Cityscapes—an international biannual magazine on urbanism in the global South. His most recent co-edited books are: African Cities Reader III: Land, Property & Value (Chimurenga, 2015), Africa’s Urban Revolution (Zed, 2014) and Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities (Jacana, 2013). Edgar is also on the Advisory Boards of: Indian Institute for Human Settlements, LSE Cities, the Gauteng City-region Observatory, Open Society Foundation of South Africa, among others. He has recently been appointed as co-lead author of the Urban Chapter for the International Panel on Social Progress. He serves as Chairperson of the Panel of Experts support the Integrated Development Framework of South Africa. More information at www.africancentreforcities.net. Sponsoring Departments:
UW Graduate School UW Alumni Association Cities Collaboratory Department of Landscape Architecture Department of Architecture Department of Urban Design & Planning Department of History Department of Geography School of Social Work UW Tacoma, Urban Studies African Studies Program
Edgar Pieterse is also a Walker-Ames Lecturer and a Cities Collaboratory Speaker.
HALA Studio Publishes Research and Proposals About Housing in Wallingford

Seattle’s recent transformations have meant big changes throughout the city.
In Autumn Quarter of 2015, The HALA Studio explored how to productively engage with Seattle’s single family zoning and neighborhood development in the Wallingford neighborhood. Led by University of Washington instructor, Rick Mohler, students explored “an expansion of housing types, ownership models, and community engagement.”
The Studio examined ways to think about preserving the city’s “values of social equity and environmental stewardship” during a period of intense growth.
Check out the studio’s research, designs, and proposals in PDF format here.
(Note: that the file may take a few minutes to download depending on your connection.)
The studio adopted its name from Mayor Ed Murray’s 2014 formation of the Advisory Committee for the Seattle Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA).
Monthly Wrap up January 2016

It’s been a great start to 2016.
UW Alumni association and History Department put together a woderful history lecture series: Excavating Seattle’s histories: Peoples, politics, and place check out details and videos here>
The CBE also hosted a number of great speakers and events including SUSTAINING JAPAN: 3.11 FIVE YEARS ON lecture and panel discussion with Hitoshi Abe
Smart city leaders from around the world gathered at UW’s Seattle campus for a two-day workshop called the “NSF Visioning Workshop on Smart and Connected Communities Research and Education”
UW’s school of Oceanography is giving Google a run for it’s money when it comes to mapping the sea floor in the Puget Sound region. Learn more about the project using new multibeam sonar technology here >
SDOT‘s new DR 10-2015 goes into effect to protect pedestrians, but in general there is room for improvement in our country’s sidewalks. Read about obstacles for visually challenged pedestrians in Seattle here> and the inequality of sidewalks here>
Everyone is trying to explain what makes Seattle a hotbed of innovation from the Seattle Times and UW scholars to Microsoft representative Brad Smith at the World Economic forum.
Seattle’s public transportation system expanded with the launch of the First Hill Streetcar, and an unexpectedly under budget extension of the light rail.
Last but not least our neighborhood, Seattle’s Udistrict, enjoyed the top spot in Redfin’s Top 24 Affordable and Balanced Mix Neighborhoods Ranked by Walk Score and GreatSchools Score (followed by six other Seattle neighborhoods in the top 20!).
Coming Up! 2nd NIAC Workshop on Urban Science & Engineering

February 2-3, 2016
NHS Hall, Center for Urban Horticulture
University of Washington
Keynote Speakers:
Dr. Charles Catlett, Argonne National Laboratory/University of Chicago, Director, Urban Center for Computation and Data
Dr. Paul Waddell, University of California, Berkeley Professor of City & Regional Planning
Cities house more than 70% of the U.S. population; provide essential services for states, regions, and the nation; and are hubs for innovation. Yet, cities also face enormous challenges. They consume a major portion of the nation’s energy, produce a corresponding amount of greenhouse gases, are saddled with aging infrastructures, and plagued with traffic congestion. Cities also are vulnerable to major disruptive events (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, disease outbreaks, and cyber attacks) for which they often are ill prepared. In addition, all cities must cope with the changes wrought by climate change.
Advances in computing, communications, and sensor technologies offer the possibility of dramatically advancing our understanding of the behavior of cities, as well as fuel hopes that such knowledge can help enhance a city’s efficiency, sustainability, resiliency, and livability.
In addition to the keynote speakers, the 2nd Workshop on Urban Science & Engineering will feature presentations from the City of Seattle, Puget Sound Regional Council, University of Washington, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and other institutions in the greater Seattle area.
There is no registration fee for the event. However, as seating is limited, attendees are asked to register as soon as possible. For additional details and to register, visit: http://niac-uw.org/workshops-events/urban_workshop2016.html.
Designing Healthy Cities by Andrew Dannenberg
Presented at the June 1st Urban@UW Launch
Environmental Change - Local Impacts and Response by Himanshu Grover
Presented at the June 1st Urban@UW Launch
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