News

For Washington’s hobby gardeners, late winter and early spring are often times to dream of summer blooms and yards. But with a pandemic poised to kill more Americans than have died in world wars, some are repurposing their personal plots into a new generation of victory gardens — symbols of self-reliance, food production and community resilience not seen since wartime. While…

As the first weekend of spring began, nearly 100 million Americans had just been ordered to stay home to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Even the most stringent stay-at-home orders in the U.S. currently allow people to go outside, which is providing multitudinous benefits in this time of great uncertainty. Taking a short walk, roll,…

Most mornings in the last decade, travelers on the West Seattle Bridge could see a menagerie of box trucks delivering food, 25-ton buses aligned nose to tail, flatbeds of steel rebar and hordes of cars, vans and pickups. It turns out, we may have loved the concrete span to death. The Seattle Department of Transportation…

Urban planning is in itself an interdisciplinary field, but UW Community, Environment, and Planning (CEP) senior Aury Banos is pushing its interdisciplinary lens even further. For her senior project Aury is connecting hip hop lyrics and artists to urban planning and the built environment. “I was inspired by Michael Ford’s lecture on hip hop and…

Jennie Romich, associate professor at the University of Washington School of Social Work and director of the West Coast Poverty Center, discusses how different economic classes are able to respond to the coronavirus pandemic: For a lot of low and moderate income families, the primary economic concerns of this pandemic are keeping enough food in the…

Mayor Jenny A. Durkan announced today that starting this afternoon the Seattle Department of Transportation is converting on-street parking spaces near restaurants to temporary loading zones to facilitate curbside meal pickup.The first locations to receive temporary loading zones are areas with high concentrations of restaurants on blocks that do not otherwise have enough loading options….

Urban@UW is a proud partner in The Doorway Project. Below we share their quarterly update: Like everyone else, we at the Doorway Project are practicing flexibility to quickly-changing systems and environments as a result of the covid-19/coronavirus global pandemic. Because of these changes, we have prioritized the health and safety of our Community Advisory Board…

Under typical conditions, Seattle has some of the most congested traffic in the nation. To prepare for when things return to normal, University of Washington researchers are carrying out a research project to investigate reasons for these delays. While a bus could be late for many reasons, one holdup is that it has to compete…

On March 11, KUOW’s That’s Debatable highlighted a goal, based on the state’s own policies and recommendations — “Washington State Can Decarbonize in a Decade” — and featured Schwartz, Simonen, and local youth activists Julia Barnett and Sarah Starman. The event was broadcasted live from the KUOW studios at 7 p.m. The event was originally…

Tyler Sprague is an assistant professor of architecture who studies and teaches structural design and architectural history. A former structural engineer himself, Sprague is the author of “Sculpture on a Grand Scale: Jack Christiansen’s Thin Shell Modernism.” The book, published in 2019 by University of Washington press, is a study of the life and work of…