News

Urban@UW launches the Research to Action Collaboratory, with initial funding from the Bullitt Foundation, to help collaborations achieve greater impact The new accelerator program for research teams aims to build collective capacity to increase sustainability and resilience across urban areas and the Pacific Northwest. The Research to Action Collaboratory (RAC), seeded by a catalytic $500,000…

Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center has been a feature in Tim Lehman’s life since he was 9 years old, when his family moved to the Seattle area. “I’m Northern Arapaho. My tribe, my people, my reservation is in Wyoming, yet I reside in Seattle. So where do I go for that cultural connection?” He found…

The stainless-steel blob in an airport. The oversized, poured-concrete nothing in a plaza. The whimsically rendered, locally iconic animals — salmon for Seattle, pelicans for Pensacola — garnishing a park. It’s no secret: Most public art is depressingly perfunctory. Which is to say: If you care about getting it right, public art has to be…

To support tribal communities in the Pacific Northwest with a variety of technical transportation needs, from administering public transit to enhancing safety and infrastructure, a new center will be headquartered in UW Civil & Environmental Engineering. Funded by a $3.7 million U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) grant awarded over the course of five years, the…

Starting in 2023, the City of Tacoma and UW Tacoma will host community conversations on homelessness. The council approved $20,000 on Dec. 20 from its contingency fund to sponsor the conversations. The conversations will be focused on immediate actions to address homelessness and coming up with solutions to housing and supportive services. John Burkhardt, communications…

It is not news that there were racial covenants built into the foundations of Spokane’s neighborhood developments during the middle decades of the past century. But a new state-funded research project is in the process of identifying every such covenant in Eastern Washington — and the tally is significant. The man who initially opened the…

In their book, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, the University of Washington professor Gregg Colburn and the data scientist Clayton Page Aldern demonstrate that “the homelessness crisis in coastal cities cannot be explained by disproportionate levels of drug use, mental illness, or poverty.” Rather, the most relevant factors in the homelessness crisis are rent prices…

The University of Washington will welcome back Tent City 3 — an organized tent-city community — to its Seattle campus for 90 days during winter quarter 2023. Move-in is scheduled to begin Dec. 17, 2022. The UW previously hosted Tent City 3 in winter 2017 and winter 2021 in parking lot W35, situated between John M….

Taking advantage of the non-rainy days, many people go out for a walk, ride their bikes, or take their dogs out on the twisting paths of the Washington Park Arboretum, part of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens (UWBG). With the implementation of new staff in the past year and a half, and new practices…

New modeling by the University of Washington of the impacts of a major Cascadia earthquake offers a less dire picture of the aftermath of the so-called “Big One” — specifically when it comes to highway bridges. Previous earthquake preparedness exercises have assumed that Interstate 5 and the highways to the Pacific Northwest coast would be…