Diversity, Equity & Justice

News | October 29, 2019

‘I belong in this community.’ A new museum tells the Pacific Northwest history of Latinx identity

It’s 2 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon and the crowd at a new Mexican American cultural center in South Park is at capacity. Bailadores de Bronce, Washington’s oldest Mexican folkloric dance group, takes the stage to present two distinct traditional dances that reveal the variety within Mexican culture. “I think when I was growing up I had…

News | August 22, 2019

‘Hidden’ data exacerbates rural public health inequities

Differences in the health of rural residents compared to their urban neighbors are startling. In Washington, for instance, rural residents are one-third more likely to die from intentional self-harm or 13 percent more likely to die from heart disease. However, while statistics like these help guide public health policy and spending, they can hide even…

News | August 2, 2023

‘Silent Killer’: Experts Warn of Record US Deaths from Extreme Heat

The punishing heatwaves that have scorched much of the US could result in a record number of heat-related deaths this year, experts have warned, amid a spike in hospitalizations from collapsing workers. Among those needing hospital treatment are heat-exhausted hikers and even people who have suffered severe burns from touching blistering concrete and asphalt. Heat…

News | August 26, 2019

‘The lack of affordable housing is actually costing us’: Cantwell promotes affordable housing bill in Spokane

Had U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell stood at 1 S. Madelia St. just a few years ago, she would have been in a used car lot. But on Tuesday, she was in the the lobby of an affordable housing complex now home to more than 100 residents. Cantwell was joined by Spokane leaders on Tuesday as…

News | August 14, 2019

‘Vehicle ranching’ in Seattle: Inside the underground market of renting RVs to homeless people

Richard Winn considered himself a decent landlord, particularly in a cutthroat rental market like Seattle’s. Sometimes his tenants did not pay their $75 weekly rent, and weren’t required to sign a lease or put down a deposit. But there were trade-offs. Winn never gave residents keys to their units. Tenants were not to use the…

News | February 10, 2022

‘We have to adapt’: US Pacific north-west weighs plans to cope with extreme weather

First came the heavy snow in late December that blanketed Seattle and the surrounding area. Then the torrential rain and flooding hit in early January. One by one, four of the region’s main mountain passes were deemed impassable, and a 20-mile stretch of Interstate 5 south of Seattle was closed. It was the first time…

News | April 4, 2024

‘Work of passion:’ How Catalina Velasquez’s life led her to immigrant rights advocacy

Originally reported in The Washington State Standard by Grace Deng. Ask Catalina Velasquez anything about queer, feminist immigrant rights. She’ll have an answer. Velasquez heads Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, which is the largest immigrant-led coalition in Washington, alongside Brenda Rodriguez Lopez. A refugee from Colombia herself, Velasquez was the first transgender Latina appointed as a…

News | March 10, 2023

“Hacking Inequity” Event Discusses Barriers for Women and BIPOC Developers

Last month, housing finance professionals, community members, and University of Washington faculty, staff, and students met in Founders Hall for “Hacking Inequity in Access to Real Estate Capital: Best Practices and New Options.” This event, hosted by Foster School of Business, Runstad Department of Real Estate, Urban@UW, and ULI Northwest, sought to present strategies of…

News | October 8, 2020

163 veteran Metro bus drivers are retiring, taking 4,400 combined years of memories

You bet they have the stories. Decades of them. They’re a group with at least 4,400 combined years of memories. They’re the 163 older King County Metro bus drivers who this summer applied and were approved for a “voluntary separation” package, although that number might increase a bit. It meant saving the jobs of younger…

News | June 17, 2019

2 hours/week in nature: Your prescription for better health?

Spending just a couple of hours a week enjoying nature may do your body and mind some good, a new study suggests. The study, of nearly 20,000 adults in England, found that people who spent at least two hours outdoors in the past week gave higher ratings to their physical health and mental well-being. Most…

News | September 7, 2021

2021 Urban@UW Spark Grants awardees announced

Urban@UW is excited to announce awardees for the second round of funding through our Spark Grants program. The two projects selected address critical urban challenges, with a focus on transdisciplinary scholarship and engagement with vulnerable populations.    Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Among Vehicle Residents: A Case Study of the Seattle Public Utilities’ Recreational Vehicle Wastewater…

News | April 19, 2022

2022 PhD Symposium explores the digital dimensions of urban dynamics

Pathways toward the future: Assessing the digital dimensions of urban dynamics Who is building the cities of the future? For whom are they being built? Can big data, smart cities, and other emerging technologies contribute to a sustainable and equitable world? As we move deeper into the information age, technology has gained renewed relevance as…

News | September 14, 2022

2022 Urban@UW Spark Grants Awardees Announced

Urban@UW is excited to announce awardees for the third round of funding through our Spark Grants program. The three projects selected address critical urban challenges, with a focus on transdisciplinary scholarship and engagement with vulnerable populations. Analysis of a Food Bank Home Delivery Program Food security, defined as access at all times to nutritious food,…

News | May 2, 2023

2023 PhD Symposium: Place, Space, and Belonging

The College of Built Environments has announced that the 2023 PhD Symposium will be held on May 19.  Titled “Place, Space, and Belonging,” the symposium will feature research from scholars around the world on topics such as phenomenology, environment, transportation, housing, and trauma-informed design. Attendees are invited to attend in person in Gould Court, or…

News | October 18, 2018

4 fresh ideas to ease Seattle’s coming traffic nightmare

Seattle is doomed — at least in terms of its traffic for at least the next three years. Already, morning and evening gridlock seems to start earlier and end later. I-5 through downtown is nearly always jammed up. Overloaded buses wait through multiple light cycles attempting to inch through intersections at rush hour. And it’s…

News | June 26, 2024

A Biochar Solution for Urban Runoff

Written by Julia Davis for the University of Washington In cities around the globe, stormwater runoff remains largely untreated, collecting everything from heavy metals to pesticides before flowing into our waterways. This environmental challenge requires innovative solutions, and biochar may just be the key. CEE Assistant Professor Jessica Ray and graduate student Amy Quintanilla are…

News | August 14, 2023

A Crisis of Isolation Is Making Heat Waves More Deadly

When Donna Crawford didn’t hear back from her brother Lyle, she began to fear the worst. It was Monday, June 28, 2021, at the tail end of a blistering heat dome that had settled over the Pacific Northwest. Two days prior, daytime temperatures had soared to 108 degrees Fahrenheit in Gresham, Oregon, where Lyle lived…

News | March 10, 2018

A Homeless Camp in Our Back Yard? Please, a University Says

For months, 65 homeless people lived in tents they set up in a parking lot behind the Seattle Pacific University bookstore, with a row of portable toilets and layers of clothes to guard against the damp chill of winter. It was a homeless camp like so many that crop up along roads and ramshackle lots…

News | March 19, 2024

A New ‘Holy Grail’ in the Housing Crisis: Statewide Rent Caps

Reported in The New York Times by David W. Chen As housing costs soar, Washington State wants to limit annual rent increases to 7 percent. Oregon and California have passed similar measures.   With her husband struggling at times to find work, Ms. Horn has maxed out her credit cards to keep pace with the…

News | November 1, 2022

A new approach, not currently described by the Clean Air Act, could eliminate air pollution disparities

While air quality has improved dramatically over the past 50 years thanks in part to the Clean Air Act, people of color at every income level in the United States are still exposed to higher-than-average levels of air pollution. A team led by researchers at the University of Washington wanted to know if the Clean…

News | August 26, 2021

A new book chronicles the history of homelessness in Seattle

Josephine Ensign is a professor at the University of Washington School of Nursing and the author of a new book called “Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City.” The book digs through layers of Seattle history to reveal the stories of overlooked and long-silenced people who live on the…

News | January 25, 2021

A new investigation about who’s getting sick from heat-related illness should be a wakeup call for America

Mario Wilcox won’t set out in the summer without an emergency kit in his car trunk: a cooler with an ice pack and a blanket. He learned this improvised life saver from his time in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; ice and a wet cloth can cool down an overheated body. Now he finds it…

News | August 17, 2021

A triple whammy has left many U.S. city neighborhoods highly vulnerable to soaring temperatures

In New York City, several Hunts Point residents have lists of neighbors they’re checking on to help keep the most vulnerable alive during heat waves. The city has also subsidized 74,000 air conditioners for low-income, elderly residents and is spending tens of millions to plant trees, as part of a “cool neighborhoods” program that also…

News | November 9, 2020

A UW student’s 3D video game depicts life during COVID-19 pandemic for people of color

During the pandemic, many people have leaned into art and hobbies to ease the stress of everyday life. For Chanhee Choi, a multidisciplinary interactive artist and Ph.D. candidate in the University of Washington Digital Arts and Experimental Media department, art became a way to reflect on her experience with discrimination and racism as a Korean in America during the…

News | July 22, 2024

A week of nonstop breaking political news stumps AI chatbots

Reported by Heather Kelly For The Washington Post In the hour after President Biden announced he would withdraw from the 2024 campaign on Sunday, most popular AI chatbots seemed oblivious to the news. Asked directly whether he had dropped out, almost all said no or declined to give an answer. Asked who was running for…

News | April 5, 2022

A1 Revisited: The Seattle Times’ coverage of the 1942 removal of 227 Bainbridge residents left a harmful legacy

Sometimes the only way forward is to look back. This week marks the 80th anniversary of the first removals of Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast. Starting with 227 residents of Bainbridge Island on March 30, 1942, women, men and children were forced to leave their jobs, schools, homes and the lives they knew…

News | August 3, 2023

Access to Culturally Relevant and Healthy Foods Is Critical to Improving Health Equity in Seattle

For several months, Priyasha Maharjan traveled with a translator to the homes of Seattle Afghan community members. She’d remove her shoes, greet the women who welcomed her into their homes, and then watch them cook dinner. Maharjan ate with families, asked them about their recipes, and listened as they told stories about their search for…

News | June 7, 2016

Access To Nature In Urban Areas Is Key To Healthier Living

Mental illnesses and mood disorders are more prevalent in urban areas partly due to reduced access to nature, according to a new study. Researchers probed the rising tension between the critical role of urban areas and these cities’ debilitating aspects that disconnect people from nature – and even raise mental illnesses. “There’s an enormous amount…

News | November 18, 2020

Accessible pedestrian routing tools expand to three Washington cities

Whether navigating urban spaces with different abilities, or simply seeking a walking or biking path that prioritizes specifications other than the quickest route and shortest distance, having access to standardized, comprehensive data about pedestrian pathways offers wide-ranging benefits. However, this information is often difficult to find due to local variations in data collection, inconsistencies and…

News | June 26, 2015

Achieving Inclusivity in Visions of a Better Urban Future by Lynne Manzo

Presented at June 1st Urban@UW Launch Meeting

News | May 29, 2021

Acknowledging AAPI Heritage Month

Originally written by Adela Mu, Masters of Urban Planning Candidate ’22. Note: This was written with a UDP and Seattle audience in mind. It represents only the partial perspective of the author, not that of any other person in UDP or UDP as a whole. There is far too much to say on this topic…

Research Beyond UW | University of Pennsylvania

Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy

The principal aim of Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy (AISP) is to improve the quality of education, health and human service agencies’ policies and practices through the use of integrated data systems. Quality integrated data systems are designed to help executive leaders in municipal, county, and state government evaluate and establish effective programs for the…

Scholar

Adam Drewnowski

Degree Program

Advanced Practice Environmental and Occupational Health (Cert)

The Advanced Practice Environmental and Occupational Health (APEOH) graduate certificate is open to current graduate students or post-master’s professionals in any discipline who wish to develop advanced skills and expertise in environmental and occupational health nursing. More than a quarter of the global disease burden is attributable to environmental exposures, with children bearing a disproportionate…

Research Beyond UW | University of Cape Town

African Centre for Cities

The African Centre for Cities (ACC) is an interdisciplinary research and teaching programme focused on quality scholarship regarding the dynamics of unsustainable urbanisation processes in Africa, with an eye on identifying systemic responses. Rapid and poorly governed urbanization in Africa points to a profound developmental and philosophical crisis. Most scholarship focuses on the development challenges…

News | September 1, 2020

After push from Native organizations, King County will add tribal affiliations to its homelessness database

For the first time since government officials began collecting data on the thousands of people living homeless in King County, a new category on people’s tribal affiliations will soon be added to the system. The move comes after a years-long push from Native homeless service providers to collect better information on Native people in the county’s federally mandated homelessness database. In recent years, these providers have demanded…

News | August 6, 2020

After three decades, most polluted U.S. neighborhoods haven’t changed

If your neighborhood was among the most polluted in 1981, it probably still is. Likewise, the least polluted areas are still faring the best, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science that analyzed concentrations of fine particulate matter over more than three decades in the United States. Overall, pollution from fine…

News | August 4, 2020

After two months of protests, Seattle activists say work not done

The mass protests against police brutality and for racial equity that have dominated Seattle and the nation for the past two months are like few others in American history — a sustained, daily movement, in major cities, sleepy suburbs and rural towns, with no central organizing hub, driven by social media and word-of-mouth. Locally, the…

News | July 1, 2021

Ahead of Pride, UW’s Manish Chalana describes the changing neighborhood of Capitol Hill

As an urban historian, Manish Chalana studies how cities, and neighborhoods within cities, retain their character in the face of change. How, he says, “neighborhoods remember themselves.” Manish Chalana Kiyomi Taguchi / UW News An associate professor of urban design and planning at the University of Washington, Chalana has researched cities around the world, how development can alter…

News | February 1, 2022

Air pollution from planes, roads infiltrates schools and can be dramatically reduced with portable air filters

What started as a University of Washington-led project to measure air pollution near Sea-Tac International Airport has led to schools in the area installing portable air filters to improve indoor air quality. First, UW researchers found they were able to parse aircraft pollution from roadway pollution in the communities under Sea-Tac International Airport flight paths and map…

Scholar

Al Levine

Center & Lab

Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute

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Alexandra Harmon

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Alexes Harris

Scholar

Ali Modarres

Funding

Amazon Catalyst Grant

Amazon Catalyst’s goal is to help people develop solutions to key problems faced in the world today. Problems can be diverse, from computer security, to immigration, to climate change. Because issues like these are complex, solutions will come from many different fields and many different perspectives. Therefore, the grants are open to all disciplines, including…

News | October 3, 2019

American poverty is moving from the cities to the suburbs

For many, the stereotypical image of American poverty still resembles the infamous Cabrini-Green Homes, a housing estate completed in 1962 near the heart of Chicago. It became overrun by gangs, drugs and violence. City police, in effect, ceded control. This popular conception of poverty remains largely urban, black and ghettoised. But the stereotype is outdated….

Scholar

Amoshaun Toft

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Amy Hagopian

News | August 16, 2018

An Unfair Share: Exploring the disproportionate risks from climate change facing Washington State communities

Everyone in Washington state will be affected by climate change, but race, income and occupation influences how much risk Washington state residents and workers face from climate-related hazards like wildfires, floods and extreme heat. A new report finds that the state’s most vulnerable people are often communities of color, indigenous people and lower-income communities. “Climate…

Scholar

Anaid Yerena

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Andrea Gevurtz Arai

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Angelina Godoy

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Anjum Hajat

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Ann Bostrom

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Ann Frost

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Anne Taufen

News | September 26, 2022

Annual letter recaps urban efforts across UW, beyond

As we all head into another autumn and academic year under the COVID-19 pandemic, Urban@UW wishes to acknowledge the ongoing impacts of this and so many other acute and chronic drivers of struggle, inequality and injustice. Along with the uncertainty, loss, and weariness, we also acknowledge this community’s perseverance and commitment to co-creating cities that…

Degree Program

Anthropology (BA, BS)

Anthropology is one of those rare fields that touches on all others. It is not a "conveyor belt" to a specific job, but, rather, an avenue to reach many possible career paths. Anthropologists today don't just work in exotic locals, but are making significant contributions right here at home. They can be found working in…

Degree Program

Anthropology of Globalization

Anthropology of Globalization is a new and exciting option in the Anthropology Major that explores several aspects of today’s interconnected world, including, economic exchanges, new media, human migration, and circulating knowledge. Unique to our program is a focus not only on contemporary multicultural and global exchanges, but also the deep history of such processes over…

Center & Lab

Applied Research Consortium

The Applied Research Consortium (ARC) connects students, faculty, and industry partners for applied research. ARC brings together research, practice, and education; generates new ideas and solutions for the built environment; supports diversity and intercultural skills among student fellows; and enhances impact and connections for academic and firm partners alike.

News | September 29, 2020

Applied Research Fellows develop tool to explore population changes in King County

The 2020 Population Health Applied Research Fellows concluded their 10-week program to produce small area population forecasts at the Census tract and Health Reporting Area levels by sex, race, ethnicity and five-year age groups for King County from 2020 to 2045. Their findings, which were presented to staff from a variety of King County departments,…

Scholar

Arbella Bet-Shlimon

Degree Program

Architecture / Architectural Design (BA, CM dual degree, MArch, dual MArch-MLA, MS, Minor)

The Department of Architecture advances the discipline and practice of architecture by: Educating architects who are responsive and responsible to society, culture and the environment. Advancing architectural knowledge through research, scholarship, and critical practice. Using this knowledge to benefit local, regional, national and global communities. We value excellence in research and teaching, the traditions of…

News | August 9, 2024

Are we on the brink of a tax revolt in Washington state?

Reported by Joshua McNichols for KUOW/NPR News Cities all over the region have big property tax levies on the ballot this year. There’s a transportation levy in Seattle, a levy to modernize the fire department in Tacoma, and a levy to pay for public safety and libraries in Everett. Increasingly, elected officials rely on these…

Funding

Arnold Ventures

Arnold Ventures funds efforts to understand problems and identify policy solutions. Our giving centers on issues in Criminal Justice, Health, Education, and Public Finance, and is guided by Evidence-Based Policy, Research, and Advocacy. We have supported more than 1,000 projects since we began in 2010.

Map | Berlin

Arriving in Berlin

This map seeks to provide useful information for newcomers in Berlin and is especially meant to support refugees. “Arriving in Berlin” is a mapping project, byHaus Leo, Wohnen für Flüchtlinge (Berliner Stadtmission) and Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

News | April 3, 2017

As Central District gets whiter, new barriers to health care

Last week while lawmakers in Washington, D.C., were gnashing their teeth over what health insurance in the U.S. should look like, patients and providers in King County were wrestling with some of the same challenges they faced before the Affordable Care Act was in place.   In 2014, students in King County who are black,…

News | July 28, 2020

As districts seek revenue due to pandemic, Black homeowners may feel the biggest hit

New research bolsters the case that Black homeowners bear a disproportionate tax burden for underfunded public schools. Now those same homeowners are likely to see their property tax rates climb even higher due to the coronavirus pandemic’s economic devastation. That’s because cash-strapped school boards that oversee majority-Black school districts are expected to ask their residents…

News | December 3, 2019

As more people use RVs as homes, should cities find a place for them?

Graham Pruss is familiar with the trials and tribulations of living out of an RV. As part of his research for his anthropology PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle, Pruss bought and lived in an RV for five months. Within the first 12 hours of doing so, he says, police issued him tickets and former…

Scholar

Aseem Prakash

News | September 14, 2020

At center of police defunding debate, King County Equity Now and Decriminalize Seattle reimagine public safety

Thousands of activists and community leaders gathered June 5 in front of the decommissioned Fire Station 6 to discuss the future of Seattle. The 1930s building represented a juncture in the Central District’s past and present: Its art deco façade stood at the corner of a once-thriving Black neighborhood dating back to the 1800s that, largely due…

News | September 2, 2016

August Sees New Grants, Project Launches, and Original Research and Writing

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…

Scholar

Bára Šafářová

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Barbara Baquero

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Barbara Reskin

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Benjamin Danielson

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Benjamin de Haan

News | September 13, 2022

Benjamin F. McAdoo’s Lasting Legacy as an Architect and Activist

Enid McAdoo was only 6 when her family of five moved from the apartment above her dad’s Capitol Hill office to a brand-new custom home in Bothell. It was an impressionable age, an influential era and an exceptional place, and so her kaleidoscope of early memories reflects the still-vivid images of childhood. Enid is the…

Map | Berlin

Berlin Places I live Map

This map calculates a Life Quality Index for every location in Berlin. What is that? Life Quality Index (LQI) identifies wide scope of threads and opportunities in the social and physical environment of any given urban area. It was created to provide an overall information about neighborhoods in different cities and help their citizens to…

News | November 25, 2020

Biden’s COVID-19 strategy should prioritize low-income communities like Philly’s

As America focused on the presidential election, COVID-19 cases surged. This alarming trend underscores the task now before President-elect Joe Biden and his COVID-19 task force: to “listen to science” and implement strategies that minimize pandemic-related suffering for Americans — particularly those living in poverty. The pandemic has hit poor communities like much of Philadelphia…

News | January 26, 2017

Big data and human services workshop resources

On January 17-18 Urban@UW, UW eScience Institute, the City of Seattle, and the MetroLab Network hosted a workshop on big data and human services. Check out the presentations and videos of our conversations at MetroLab’s workshop materials page.

Center & Lab

Biodemography Laboratory

The Biodemography Laboratory, as the heart of the Biodemography Core at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE), conducts population level research in human ecology and biodemography. We specialize in developing, optimizing, and carrying out biomarker assays for large scale research projects. We merge methods and theory from biology, demography and anthropology to…

News | June 11, 2024

Bird Flu Tests Are Hard To Get. So How Will We Know When To Sound The Pandemic Alarm?

Reported by Kaiser Health News for  Patch PALO ALTO, CA — Stanford University infectious disease doctor Abraar Karan has seen a lot of patients with runny noses, fevers, and irritated eyes lately. Such symptoms could signal allergies, covid, or a cold. This year, there’s another suspect, bird flu — but there’s no way for most…

News | May 24, 2017

Black life is draining out of Seattle, census shows

South King County has long been a place where people with modest incomes could find a home. Now more people are coming, driven by high rents in Seattle. And a University of Washington School of Sociology researcher has found that African-Americans are among the most affected by this wave of displacement. Tim Thomas of the…

News | August 3, 2020

Black pastors and activists want Central District land as reparations

In the midst of ongoing protests against police brutality and the death of George Floyd, Black communities in the Seattle area have begun a push for bigger, more long-term actions toward overcoming the poverty created by decades of racist policies. “We need reparations for our Black and brown communities,” said Pastor Angela Ying of Bethany…

News | October 13, 2020

Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities hit hardest by heat waves

On average, extreme heat over the past 30 years has killed more people in the United States than any other weather event, according to the U.S. Natural Hazard Statistics. That means more lives have been lost to heat over the past three decades than to hurricanes, floods, or tornadoes — and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data shows that…

Scholar

Bonnie Duran

News | September 7, 2022

Boost in Support for Black-Owned Restaurants Short-Lived, UW Study Finds

A new study from the University of Washington found much of the outpouring of customer support for Black-owned restaurants during the summer of 2020 was short-lived. As Black Lives Matter protests sparked calls for racial justice and equity in the weeks and months following the murder of George Floyd, tech companies including Yelp, Instagram, Google…

Scholar

Branden Born

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Brian Coffey

Scholar

Brian McLaren

Funding

Bridge Funding Program

The University of Washington Provost’s Office provides bridge funding to support faculty to span the gap in critical research programs. Applications from faculty should be submitted to the applicant’s department chair, who should prioritize requests before forwarding them to the dean of the college/school. In non-departmentalized colleges/schools, applications should be submitted to the dean or…

News | July 8, 2021

Bring back corner stores to create a connected, equitable city

Originally written by Sam Kraft, principal of D3 Architects and instructor of architecture at the University of Washington.  I used to live in Ravenna in a fourplex that looked like a large single-family house. I could walk to what was then Boulevard Grocery and buy lunch. In this small one-story gabled market, originally a garage…

News | March 30, 2020

Bringing the Lens of Hip Hop to Urban Planning

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…

News | January 23, 2024

Building community resilience: A $2 million NSF grant will transform disaster response

Amy Sprague January 16, 2024 “Our advantage of being an interdisciplinary project at the University of Washington is that we are drawing from an excellent corps of researchers with complementary expertise at a University whose mission includes working for the greater good across the state of Washington and has excellent ties into our communities.” Professor…

News | April 21, 2021

Building for sustainability

For civil engineering doctoral student Nathalie Thelemaque, it’s not enough to research how to design a building or a bridge. Thelemaque wants to know the impact of infrastructure systems on the climate and marginalized communities and help create more sustainable ones. It’s an issue so important that it even helped change her mind from considering a career in…

News | September 13, 2023

Building Resilience in Children at the Start of the New School Year

As the academic year kicks off, parents and guardians across Seattle fill out last-minute paperwork, pack backpacks and lunch sacks, and remind countless children to set out their clothes the night before. While adults nudge children and teenagers to grab a sweater on their way out the door, many can forget to actively check in…

News | August 1, 2019

Burien takes a new, compassionate approach to criminal justice

At a time when angst about homelessness, drugs and other causes of arrests seems to have reached a breaking point in the region, King County officials are expanding a number of key programs meant to tackle some of society’s stickiest problems. Instead of delving further into the urban core, though, these new programs are being launched in…

News | September 17, 2018

Bus battle: Do private shuttles affect the reliability of public transit?

While many Puget Sound residents have to choose between taking public transit or personal vehicles to work, Microsoft and Seattle Children’s Hospital employees have an additional option: private commuter buses. Last year, King County Metro and the Seattle Department of Transportation started a pilot program that allowed these shuttles to pick up employees at a few public bus…

News | February 12, 2021

Campaign: TC3 stay at UW

Tent City Collective, a group of UW students, alumni, community members, and people experiencing homelessness, are working with UW faculty and staff to bring Tent City 3 to the university for the second time since 2017. Tent City 3 is a self-governing community designed to shelter and aid people without homes around Seattle. Their mission…

News | August 21, 2019

Can Project Sidewalk use crowdsourcing to help Seattleites get around?

Jon Froehlich distinctly remembers the moment when Google first unveiled Street View in 2007. The computer scientist spent hours virtually wandering through distant city streets and immersing himself in parts of the world he had yet to visit in real life. Then Froehlich had a thought: “What else could we use this for?” Within a decade, he’d developed…

News | April 14, 2020

Can Rainier Beach develop without displacing its residents?

Catch the light rail southbound, and when you erupt from the tunnel after Beacon Hill station, you see a city shifting: multicolored duplexes and mixed-use buildings. Continue, though, and development dissipates. In Rainier Beach, Seattle’s southernmost neighborhood, empty lots and old buildings flank the tracks. “Many of the things we were told would occur as…

News | November 9, 2017

Can Seattle rezone away the racial divide in housing?

For generations, Seattle was segregated through racist neighborhood covenants, deed restrictions, even banking policies designed to keep certain minorities out of largely white enclaves.Yet nearly 50 years after the landmark Fair Housing Act sought to reverse that legacy, the city remains strikingly separated along color lines. A Seattle Times analysis shows that areas dedicated to…

Scholar

Candice Rai

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Carly Roberts

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Carrie Freshour

News | October 18, 2016

Cars vs health: UW’s Moudon, Dannenberg contribute to Lancet series on urban planning, public health

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…

Scholar

Catherine De Almeida

Research Beyond UW | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Center for Advanced Urbanism

The Center for Advanced Urbanism is committed to fostering a rigorous design culture for the large scale; by focusing our disciplinary conversations about architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, and systems thinking, not about the problems of yesterday, but of tomorrow. We are motivated by the radical changes in our environment, and the role that design…

Center & Lab

Center for Anti-Racism and Community Health (ARCH)

The ARCH Center serves as a community-driven academic hub focused on the critical interrogation and disruption of racism and racialization within systems while centering those most impacted by legacies of U.S. colonization. Guided by anti-racism, critical race theory, and community-based participatory research principles, the ARCH Center’s research will focus on testing strategies to break down…

Center & Lab

Center for Education Data and Research

The Center for Education Data and Research focuses on the relationship between education and social service policies and practices. Founded in 2010, CEDR examines questions of educational opportunity, access and success, examining them through a quantitative lens. Its researchers are particularly interested in examining policies and interventions that help disadvantaged groups. One of CEDR’s strengths…

Research Beyond UW | University of California, Berkeley

Center for Environmental Design Research

The Center for Environmental Design Research (CEDR) fosters research in environmental planning and design, ranging from the local environments of people within buildings to region-wide ecosystems, from small details of building construction to large-scale urban planning, from the history of the built environment to the design process itself. Our research is highly interdisciplinary. Our researchers…

Center & Lab

Center for Global Studies

The Center for Global Studies (CGS) is dedicated to fostering language excellence, international studies expertise, and global literacy in the Pacific Northwest and throughout the nation with the overall objective of enhancing the nation’s capacity to address contemporary global challenges. The Center is especially focused on increasing the diversity of students engaged in international studies…

Center & Lab

Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHANGE)

CHANGE collaboratively develops and promotes innovative approaches to understanding and managing the risks of global environmental change. CHANGE conducts research and policy analysis, education and training, and technical assistance and capacity building, integrating health, environmental, and social sciences. CHANGE focuses on health outcomes associated with the consequences of global environmental changes, such as extreme weather…

Center & Lab

Center for Health Systems and Population Health (HSPop)

The University of Washington Department of Health Systems and Population Health (HSPop) prepares future health practitioners, managers, and researchers to conduct the work of improving the well-being of communities in the United States and throughout the world. We envision a future where systems effectively, efficiently, and equitably promote the health of all populations. We are…

Center & Lab

Center for Human Rights

The University of Washington Center for Human Rights is committed to interdisciplinary excellence in the education of undergraduate and graduate students in the field of human rights; promoting human rights as a core area of faculty and graduate research; and engaging productively with local, regional, national, and international organizations and policymakers to advance respect for…

Research Beyond UW | Technical University of Berlin

Center for Metropolitan Studies

The city is our research field. Since 2004 the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CMS) at the Technische Universität Berlin has brought together both young and experienced researchers to study the historical developments and current problems of the metropolis in its international graduate research program, the masters program in historical urban studies, and adjunct research projects.…

Center & Lab

Center for One Health Research

One Health is an integrated, transdisciplinary approach to health problems involving humans, animals and the rapidly changing environments we share. These problems are complex and interconnected. They require new scientific and professional competencies to understand and address them. One Health incorporates multiple perspectives to assess the underlying causes of these health challenges and to develop…

Center & Lab

Center for Southeast Asia and Its Diasporas (CSEAD)

The University of Washington Center for Southeast Asia & its Diasporas (CSEAD) is a National Resource Center for Southeast Asian Studies funded by the U.S. Department of Education pursuant to Title VI of the Higher Education Act (HEA). Established in 1986, the Center and the Southeast Asia Studies Program are a source of information on…

Center & Lab

Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE)

The Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE) supports population research and training at the University of Washington. It also functions as a regional center that gives population scientists at affiliated institutions in the Pacific Northwest access to cutting-edge demographic infrastructure and services. The core of CSDE consists of a large group of productive…

Center & Lab

Center for Women’s Welfare

Created to advance economic justice for women and their families, the Center for Women’s Welfare researches issues around income inequality and economic opportunity. Its primary tool is the Self-Sufficiency Standard, which measures how much income is needed to meet basic living needs without additional public or private support.

News | May 1, 2019

Central District, other Seattle legacy communities are at risk — and we all need to help save them

In a new documentary about gentrification in the Central District, “On the Brink,” an advocate of Seattle’s historically African American neighborhood talks about recent construction projects in the area digging the soul out of that community. … The CD became a nearly 80% black neighborhood in the late 1960s and early ’70s because African Americans,…

Research Beyond UW | University of Toronto

Centre for Urban & Community Studies

The Centre for Urban and Community Studies (CUCS) was established in 1964 to promote and disseminate multidisciplinary research and policy analysis on urban issues. The Centre's activities contributed to scholarship on questions relating to the social, economic and physical well-being of people who live and work in urban areas large and small, in Canada and…

Research Beyond UW | University of London

Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR)

CUCR is a well established interdisciplinary research centre within Goldsmiths' Department of Sociology with a distinguished history of collaboration with local communities and activists. It combines theoretical investigation with critical ‘local’ project implementation from Deptford to Jakarta. From its inception in 1994 as the academic partner in Deptford City Challenge regeneration initiatives, CUCR maintains a…

Research Beyond UW | University of Nairobi

Centre for Urban Research and Innovations

Centre for Urban Research and Innovations (CURI), formerly Urban Innovations Program (UIP), is a think tank based at the University of Nairobi's Department of Urban and Regional Planning. The Centre seeks to create a forum for exploring innovative methodologies for enabling planners and professionals in the built environment to be more responsive and effective in…

Research Beyond UW | University of York

Centre for Urban Research and Innovations

The Centre for Urban Research seeks to be a critical observatory, tracking important changes and developments in urban and regional economies, societies and environments in order to identify and examine the issues likely to become key challenges in the near future. A program of frequent events provide forums for diverse communities, policy-makers and academic colleagues…

News | April 11, 2017

Challenging the whiteness of American architecture, in the 1960s and today

“This book tells the story of how I got a free Ivy League education.” That’s the arresting opening sentence of Sharon Egretta Sutton‘s “When Ivory Towers Were Black,” an unusual hybrid of memoir, institutional history and broadside against the entrenched whiteness of the architecture profession in this country. The institution in question is Columbia University…

Research Beyond UW | University of Chicago

Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago

Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago has, since its inception in 1985 as a research and policy center, focused on a mission of improving the well-being of children and youth, families, and their communities. We do this through policy research—by developing and testing new ideas, generating and analyzing information, and examining policies, programs, and…

Scholar

Charles H. Lea III

Research Beyond UW | Lesley University

Child Homelessness Initiative

The mission of the CHI is to prepare Lesley University graduates---next-generation teachers, policy advocates, therapists and child care providers--with a trauma-informed asset model that enables practices and policies consistent with maximizing infant and toddler health, happiness and well-being, securing their protection from injury and insult, and advancing their educational opportunities and citizenship.

Scholar

Christian Anderson

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Christine Bae

Scholar

Christine Stevens

Scholar

Christopher Beasley

Scholar

Christopher Campbell

News | May 5, 2020

Cities and the SARS CoV2 coronavirus in the Global South: Breaking points in an interconnected system

Since COVID-19 first erupted in China in December and began spreading across the world, the pandemic’s early outbreaks have “burned hottest in the richer, globalized quarters of the world linked by busy commercial air routes—Europe and the United States.” (National Geographic, 2020a [website]) Now, four months into the pandemic, compounding factors of urban density and…

News | July 30, 2020

Cities’ summer challenge: Keep people cool while keeping COVID-19 at bay

In the age of social distancing and other efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19, cities are grappling with whether to encourage vulnerable populations to leave their homes during extreme heat and congregate under a communal air-conditioning system or stay home and hope that the summer heat doesn’t make them sick. “It’s a hard time…

News | July 15, 2021

City heat is worse if you’re not rich or white. The world’s first heat officer wants to change that

As the climate changes, everyone is feeling the heat. A historical heatwave continues to rage across the western U.S., while in Miami, the heat index—which accounts for heat and humidity—was higher in June than in any month since August 2015. It’s not just a nuisance. Extreme heat contributed to the deaths of around 12,000 people in…

Research Beyond UW | York University

City Institute at York University (CITY)

The City Institute at York University (CITY) brings together over 60 of the university’s urban scholars and scores of graduate students from fields as diverse as planning, geography, environmental studies, anthropology, sociology, political science, education, law, transportation and the humanities. This interdisciplinary institute facilitates critical and collaborative research, providing new knowledge and innovative approaches to…

Map | Melbourne

City of Melbourne Maps

This site includes information, maps and images relating to properties, features and assets located within the City of Melbourne municipal area. Map data includes childcare and schools, community facilities, development activities, historic maps, mobility information, districts, walking tours and more.

News | December 29, 2022

City of Tacoma and UW Tacoma want to start community conversations on homelessness next year

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…

Funding

Civic Innovation Challenge

The Civic Innovation Challenge, funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Homeland Security, supports partnerships between communities and universities that address mobility and resilience priorities. Teams will compete for awards of up to $1 million to support ready-to-implement, research-based pilot projects that have the potential for scalable, sustainable,…

Scholar

Cleo Wöelfle-Hazard

News | February 11, 2018

Climate change and equity – A community conversation

Join UW Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences, Front and Centered, the Climate Impacts Group, Urban@UW, and UW School of Public Health for an evening discussion about climate change and equity in Washington State on February 21st, 2018 at 5:30 PM. Front and Centered, Urban@UW, the Climate Impacts Group and the UW School of…

News | April 18, 2019

Climate change as a social justice issue in Seattle

This story was written by Urban@UW communications assistant Shahd Al Baz, as part of her research with our program. Social justice paradigms hold that structural barriers to economic development drive, and are driven by, environmental and spatial conditions. We need look no further than Seattle to see this, where patterns of environmental degradation intersect with…

News | June 5, 2023

Climate Hazards Are the Duwamish Valley’s Top Concern, Survey Finds

A new study of Duwamish Valley residents in South Park and Georgetown shows that more people list environmental impacts as one of their top-three concerns than any other problem facing the area, followed by crime and cost of living. The Duwamish Valley Climate Resilience Survey was a joint project of city agencies, university researchers and community groups…

Center & Lab

Climate Impacts Group (CIG)

The Climate Impacts Group (CIG) is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary research group studying the impacts of natural climate variability and global climate change (“global warming”). Research at the CIG considers climate impacts at spatial scales ranging from local communities to the entire western U.S. region, with most work focused on the Pacific Northwest (PNW). Through…

News | November 20, 2019

Climate Migration and Global Cities

Between 2009 and 2018, 71 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced. This includes 41 million people who have been displaced within their own country, including the majority of climate migrants (World Bank Group, 2018 [PDF]); 26 million refugees, those forced to flee because of violence or persecution; and 4 million asylum-seekers, those who are waiting for…

News | May 13, 2024

Cloud Brightening Study in California Is Halted by Local Officials

Researchers had been testing a sprayer that could one day be used to push a salty mist skyward, cooling the Earth. Officials stopped the work, citing health questions. Written by Christopher Flavelle for The New York Times. Officials in Alameda, Calif., have told scientists to stop testing a device that might one day be used…

News | August 10, 2021

Co-designing a technology intervention to support the health and development of children

The King County’s 2018-2019 Community Needs Assessment revealed that infants from racially and economically marginalized groups encounter the highest rates of infant mortality and lowest birth weights compared to any other population. King County has offered developmental screening services and virtual information to help child caregivers address this issue. However, there is growing consensus among…

Research Beyond UW | Lousiana State University

Coastal Sustainability Studio

The LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio brings together academic disciplines that typically conduct research separately—such as designers, scientists, planners, and engineers—to intensively study and respond to critical issues of coastal settlement, restoration, flood protection, and economic development. Through its integrated design and systems thinking approach, programs, and projects, the CSS builds university capacity and transdisciplinary teams…

News | August 4, 2022

College of Built Environments students help historically Black churches survive gentrification

Rev. George Davenport Jr. had a vision of using real estate to sustain his church community in its historically Black Central District neighborhood. But while the streets around the church gentrified, he struggled through the complex landscape of zoning laws, building codes and speculative funding options. Then he stumbled upon the Nehemiah Initiative and the…

News | May 18, 2022

College of Built Environments students help historically Black churches survive gentrification.

Rev. George Davenport Jr. had a vision of using real estate to sustain his church community in its historically Black Central District neighborhood. But while the streets around the church gentrified, he struggled through the complex landscape of zoning laws, building codes and speculative funding options. Then he stumbled upon the Nehemiah Initiative and the…

News | September 8, 2017

College of Built Environments’ David de la Cruz partners with communities for environmental justice

David de la Cruz has a question about power. “When we think about toxic sites and where they’re placed in relation to where people live, who’s left out of making those decisions?” “Often,” he answers, “it’s the people who live there. It’s low-income communities, working-class communities and communities of color who don’t have a say….

News | June 8, 2022

College of Built Environments’ unique Inspire Fund aims to foster research momentum in underfunded pursuits college-wide. And it’s working.

“For a small college, CBE has a broad range of research paradigms, from history and arts, to social science and engineering.” — Carrie Sturts Dossick, Associate Dean of Research Upon taking on the role of Associate Dean of Research, Carrie Sturts Dossick, professor in the Department of Construction Management, undertook listening sessions to learn about…

News | June 5, 2024

Community broadband provides a local solution for a global problem

Written by Esther Jang, Postdoctoral Fellow, Computer Science, University of Washington; Katherine Gillieson, Associate Dean, Master of Design, Emily Carr University; and Michael Lithgow, Associate Professor, Media and Communication Studies, Athabasca University Published in The Conversation. According to a 2023 study by the International Telecommunications Union, approximately 2.6 billion people are unconnected to the internet….

News | December 23, 2020

Community care research during dual pandemics: An update from Urban@UW Affiliates

This fall, with a grant from Population Health Initiative: COVID Rapid Response, the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity’s research team began a project on community care and mental health of Black/African American communities in Seattle. Led by Urban@UW Affiliates Ralina Joseph, Professor, Department of Communication and Director of CCDE; and N. Gina Aaftab, Assistant…

Research Beyond UW | University of Virginia

Community Design Research Center

The Community Design Research Center (CDRC), led by director Suzanne Moomaw, initiates, generates, and works collaboratively with partners to connect faculty, students, and community members to research and design application projects aimed at addressing systemic local, regional, national, and global challenges. Called the “wicked” problems of society, these include human settlements, sustainable ecosystems, poverty, food…

Center & Lab

Community Engagement and Leadership Education (CELE) Center

The Community Engagement and Leadership Education (CELE) Center provides students with opportunities to develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to contribute to thriving communities; building authentic community and campus partnerships drive our work. Our programs are centered around the areas of community-engaged learning, democratic engagement, leadership education, preK-12 student success and place-based initiatives. Build…

Research Beyond UW | Columbia University

Community Impact at Columbia University

Community Impact serves individuals in need in the communities of Upper Manhattan while providing meaningful volunteering and leadership opportunities for students at Columbia University and Barnard College. Community Impact oversees the operation of 27 programs that provide a variety of services for residents in the surrounding Harlem, Morningside Heights, and Washington Heights communities. Columbia and…

Degree Program

Community, Environment & Planning (BA)

Community, Environment, and Planning is a self-directed, diverse undergraduate major comprised of students, faculty, and staff engaged in holistic growth and a collaborative process of experiential and interdisciplinary learning. In our major, we develop skills, techniques, and knowledge necessary to be active leaders and conscientious planners in our communities and environments. Our values are presented…

Center & Lab

CoMotion

CoMotion is the collaborative hub for expanding the societal impact of the UW community. We deliver the tools and connections that UW researchers and students need to accelerate the impact of their innovations. We are bringing together the broader community, to stimulate the collective impact that UW students and researchers are making in the world.…

Center & Lab

Computing for Development (C4D)

Research in information and communication technologies for development (ICTD) is a relatively new and important area in computing research. When deploying systems in highly resource-constrained environment (unsophisticated users, lack of reliable power, expensive or non-existent data connectivity, etc.) they must be designed to be much more robust than when designing for the developed world. This…

Center & Lab

Consulting and Business Development Center

We accelerate student careers and grow businesses and jobs in communities where they’re needed the most. By engaging students in solving complex, unstructured, real-world challenges students learn to think strategically, develop leadership skills, and integrate knowledge across business disciplines. More than 95% of students who participate in the Center’s programs report improved job performance after…

News | March 12, 2020

Coronavirus is a Serious Threat to the Seattle Homeless Population

At a nonprofit providing health care and housing to the homeless population in the city, employees have begun a sprint to sanitize their facilities. Because the organization, the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), is located in one of the U.S.’s first hotbeds of novel coronavirus infection, workers are bracing themselves for a wave of medical…

News | March 30, 2020

Coronavirus pandemic highlights economic inequality in the US

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…

News | May 7, 2020

Coronavirus pushed Seattle to treat homelessness differently. Will those changes last?

Lola Anderson-Najera finally has a door that locks. After years of weaving in and out homelessness, sleeping “elbow-to-elbow” in shelters and sometimes outside, she’s found a tiny, temporary home. It’s small, but it has a chair to read in, an end table to hold her things, and fresh sheets. Above all, she said, there’s a new feeling of…

News | April 3, 2020

Coronavirus: Homeless families lose key support as schools close

In a typical year, homeless shelters experience the biggest surge in demand not during the cold winter months, but rather during the summer. In the summer, schools close and parents lose the usual daily eight hours of childcare and meals. With the additional burden of sleeping on the streets, parents seek out shelter more often, research…

News | July 11, 2019

Could court fines and fees be keeping people homeless?

A new University of Washington School of Public Health study sustains a long-held argument that court-imposed fees and fines may keep the most vulnerable people ensnared in a vicious cycle of poverty and incarceration. The researchers found that, among a group of adults experiencing homelessness in the Seattle area, people with outstanding legal debt spent…

News | December 22, 2022

Covenant project unearths the threads of historical housing discrimination in Washington

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…

News | August 3, 2021

Covid didn’t kill cities. Why was that prophecy so alluring?

From the moment U.S. coronavirus cases emerged in the Seattle area and then devastated New York City last spring, sweeping predictions about the future of city life followed. Density was done for. An exodus to the suburbs and small towns would ensue. Transit would become obsolete. The appeal of a yard and a home office…

News | September 24, 2020

COVID-19 testing in King County homeless shelters shows need to create safer conditions in crowded settings

Border detention facilities, prisons and refugee camps have something in common with communal homeless shelters, University of Washington School of Medicine researchers say. They’re home to “closed, crowded conditions where people have to live in small spaces and share a lot of common facilities,” said Dr. Helen Y. Chu, associate professor at the UW School…

News | January 18, 2022

COVID’s invisible toll on Seattle’s trans community

A Seattle Times analysis found that among all groups, a disproportionate percentage of trans people were on the brink of poverty, homelessness and starvation. This, in a city where over 10% of the population identifies as queer. As their social determinants for good health plummeted, so has their access to health care, a worrying development as…

News | November 26, 2024

Creating multi-sector teams to build cities where everyone thrives.

Research-to-Action Teams 2024-25 In April of 2024 two teams were selected for participation in the second cohort of the Research to Action Collaboratory. For 18 months Urban@UW will work with these teams to provide seed funds, dedicated time to building team cohesion and collaboration skills, and opportunities for peer support, shared resources, and learning. These…

Scholar

Crystal C. Hall

Scholar

Cynthia Pearson

News | December 3, 2019

Dads in prison can bring poverty, instability for families on the outside

Studies of the societal effects of prison often focus on the imprisoned: their physical and mental health, job prospects after release, their likelihood of returning to jail. A new study from the University of Washington looks instead at families of men who are, or were recently, incarcerated — specifically, at where these families live, how…

Scholar

Dan Abramson

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Danae Dotolo

News | July 7, 2016

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…

News | September 3, 2020

Data Science for Social Good fellows present their project results

This year, two interdisciplinary teams at the eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program tackled timely issues, conducting projects to identify disinformation articles about the coronavirus and detect minority vote dilution resulting from geographic boundary setting in state, city, county and school board districts. On August 19th, the DSSG student fellows presented the results of their projects, conducted with…

News | October 12, 2018

Data Science for Social Good shares its fourth year of partnership-based projects

The fourth annual Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program at the eScience Institute culminated on August 17th with final presentations from three interdisciplinary teams. The 15 DSSG Student Fellows – representing fields from public policy and sociology to biology, statistics and electrical engineering – presented their findings based on 10 weeks of full-time work with in-house data scientists…

News | September 23, 2019

Data Science for Social Good team analyzes equity of congestion pricing on Interstate 405

A team in the eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program has partnered with the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) to study the usage patterns, price sensitivities and equity impacts of congestion pricing on Interstate 405. The project utilizes data on the more than 16 million trips taken in the high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes of I-405…

News | April 7, 2020

Data suggests coronavirus is disproportionately affecting Black communities in the US

Preliminary demographic data – where available — and early anecdotal evidence suggest that poor African-Americans are contracting and dying from the coronavirus in disproportionate rates. In the state of Michigan, while blacks represent only 12% of the total population, they account for at least 40% of its coronavirus-related deaths, said the Michigan Department of Health and…

Center & Lab

DataLab

The DataLab is the nexus for research on Data Science and Analytics at the UW iSchool. We study large-scale, heterogeneous human data in an effort to understand why individuals, consumers, and societies behave the way they do. Our goal is to use data for the social good, in an ethical manner that can inform policy…

Scholar

David Blum

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Davon Woodard

News | August 18, 2022

Dean Cheng at AIA ’22

The Soul Children of Chicago, an acclaimed youth choir, delivered an energetic start to Day 2 of A’22. The group performed four songs to warm up the crowd for the impending keynote panel conversation. Moderated by Lee Bey, a Chicago-based photographer, author, lecturer, and architecture critic, the conversation featured renowned architects Vishaan Chakrabarti, FAIA, Renée…

News | December 31, 2016

December Recap – TC3, Urban Environmental Justice, Tech, and other Highlights

December concludes a complicated year. The past month has seen a variety of changes, new research, and reflections on life in Seattle, the tech world, urban environmental justice, and our campus. Urban@UW and Climate Impacts Group collaborated on the Urban Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Change symposium. Urban@UW published a reflection on the…

News | May 14, 2019

Delivery bots could make cities more accessible for everyone

Last week, Washington’s governor Jay Inslee signed a bill allowing robots to roll through the state, delivering goods and food orders. Washington joins seven other states that have legalized bot deliveries, and other cities and college campuses have allowed companies to pilot their services. Perhaps new tech could be what spurs more accessible city design, creating more navigable public spaces…

News | December 5, 2019

Denver mayor signs minimum wage increase into law

Before Mayor Michael Hancock signed the minimum wage ordinance into law on November 27, there was pushback from small-business owners and restaurants who don’t agree with the increase. “Nothing’s easy,” Hancock said. “This is not an easy ordinance.” But before controversy in Denver, Seattle had the same worries in 2015. “We got involved initially by…

Scholar

Derek Jennings

Center & Lab

Design for Digital Inclusion (DDI)

The DDI group researches diversity and technology from a design perspective. The group focuses on technology development for resource constrained environments in order to counteract what could be called a failure of imagination in terms of how devices, software, and services are designed. With the advent of newer, smaller, and cheaper technologies, the user base…

News | May 31, 2019

Designing for resilience

Seattle is one of the fastest growing cities in the country– a hub of innovation with a thriving economy. Yet this rapid growth challenges the capacity of the city to adapt without damaging its current communities. Students from The University of Washington’s College of Built Environments responded to these and other challenges through the Winter…

Scholar

Diana Pearce

Map | Nairobi

Digital Matatus, Nairobi

Digital Matatus shows how to leverage the ubiquitous nature of cellphone technology in developing countries to collect data for essential infrastructure, give it out freely and in the process spur innovation and improved services for citizens. Conceived out of collaboration between Kenyan and American universities and the technology sector in Nairobi, this project captured transit…

Degree Program

Disability Studies (Minor, Major, and Graduate Certificate)

Disability Studies is a multi-disciplinary field that investigates, critiques, and enhances Western society’s understandings of disability. The Disability Studies Program's Minor, Major, and Graduate Certificate will introduce you to a critical framework for recognizing how people with disabilities have experienced disadvantages and exclusion because of personal and societal responses to impairment, and for exploring how…

News | October 4, 2018

Disaster response needed to bring homeless people inside, says King County health board

The King County Board of Health is urging local governments to use emergency homeless shelters in anticipation of the quickly approaching cold weather. The board of health this week unanimously approved board member Bill Daniell’s proposal to call homelessness a public health disaster and advise local governments to do whatever is necessary to get people inside. The board’s…

Center & Lab

DO-IT Center

The DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology) Center is dedicated to empowering people with disabilities through technology and education. It promotes awareness and accessibility—in both the classroom and the workplace—to maximize the potential of individuals with disabilities and make our communities more vibrant, diverse, and inclusive.

News | July 2, 2020

Don’t be fooled by Seattle’s police-free zone

Seattle’s police-free “autonomous zone” is coming to an end. After two largely peaceful weeks, shootings over the last several days near the Capitol Hill Organized Protest area, CHOP for short, left a 19-year-old man dead and three others wounded. Mayor Jenny Durkan announced on June 22 that the city would retake the abandoned police precinct at the heart of…

News | December 5, 2019

Don’t blame tech bros for the housing crisis

Can Big Tech solve the housing crisis? That’s the hope behind recent announcements by Apple, Facebook and Google, which together total $4.5 billion in grants and loans to remedy the affordable-housing crunch in California and the Bay Area. Microsoft last year pledged $500 million to relieve Seattle’s similarly stressed market. While Amazon’s opposition torpedoed Seattle’s attempt in 2018 to raise revenue for homelessness services,…

Scholar

Donald H. Miller

Scholar

Donald King

News | December 16, 2019

Doorway Project Winter Update: Building at the Speed of Trust

The Doorway Project, a cross-campus and community-engaged project under Urban@UW’s Homelessness Research Initiative, has been busy! Check out their activities and plans for the future in their latest blog post:   With the end of the year and the end of the decade approaching in the next few weeks, this moment feels like a perfect time to…

News | September 10, 2021

Doorway Project: 2020-2021 Year End Report

The Doorway Project is an initiative co-led by the University of Washington and YouthCare, an agency offering individualized services to young people experiencing homelessness in Seattle/King County. The Doorway Project works to address youth and young adult homelessness in the University District through centering youth wellbeing and agency in the development of emancipatory and creative…

News | July 8, 2019

Drug-related deaths continue to rise in King County

Drug-related deaths have continued to climb in King County, with fatal overdoses involving methamphetamine and fentanyl on the rise, according to Public Health — Seattle & King County. King County, like cities across the country, have focused their efforts on combating opioids. Syringe exchanges in King County distributed nearly 8 million needles last year, along…

News | May 20, 2020

EarthLab announces Innovation Grant recipients for 2020

Research projects funded for 2020 by EarthLab’s Innovation Grants Program will study how vegetation might reduce pollution, help an Alaskan village achieve safety and resilience amid climate change, organize a California river’s restoration with tribal involvement, compare practices in self-managed indigenous immigrant communities and more. EarthLab is a University of Washington-wide institute connecting scholars with community…

Degree Program

Education, Communities and Organizations (BA)

The University of Washington's Education, Communities and Organizations (ECO) degree believes teaching and learning happens not only within the formal classroom, but also across a host of professions such as youth development, policy reform, business, healthcare and in a variety of other organizations serving communities.

Center & Lab

Education, Equity, & Society (EES)

Education, Equity, & Society is an intellectual community within the College of Education that encourages students to explore the meaning, purpose, and significance of education in diverse community contexts with the aim of contributing to local and global educational equity and social change. We are an interdisciplinary group that draws on expertise in several traditions…

News | August 20, 2020

Educational inequities didn’t begin with COVID-19, but they’re far from over

As schools across the country are starting to resume instruction, which schools – and which students – remain online, while others push for in-person learning? The divide between parents and families who have the time, money, and resources to support a remote learning environment for their children and those who don’t is largely split along…

Scholar

Elena A. Erosheva

Scholar

Elena Austin

News | November 17, 2022

Empowering youth to seek climate solutions in their communities

A new $2.3 million program funded by the US National Science Foundation will educate and equip young scientists to cultivate resilience to climate impacts such as flooding and extreme heat. Partners include the University of Washington Interdisciplinary Center for Exposures, Diseases, Genomics and Environment (EDGE) and the Duwamish River Community Coalition  (DRCC). EDGE is part…

Funding

Enterprise Community – Housing Tech

In every corner of the nation, families are struggling to find an affordable place to live. We know this challenge is solvable. But only if we bring entrepreneurial market forces to bear to complement the policy and traditional market approaches that are effective but limited in their breadth due to resource constraints and timing. We…

News | February 4, 2022

Entombed in the Landscape: Waste with Assistant Professor Catherine De Almeida

Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Catherine De Almeida remembers picking up trash on the playground, seeing people throw trash out their car window, and noticing trash flying around while she played outside as a child. The presence of litter in landscapes upset her so much that she would spend her elementary school recesses picking up…

Degree Program

Environmental Health (BS, minor, MS, PhD, MPH)

The University of Washington’s Bachelor of Science in Environmental Health is a great fit for students who love science, and who are passionate about using their scientific skills to address human health issues related to the built and natural environments. Environmental Health is designated as a STEM discipline (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) by the…

Funding

Environmental Justice Fund

The Environmental Justice Fund is a grant opportunity for community-led projects that improve environmental conditions, respond to impacts of climate change and get us closer to achieving environmental justice. Created in 2017, the Fund is overseen by the Environmental Justice Committee, people with deep community roots working closely with communities on environmental justice issues. Environmental…

Scholar

Eric Higbee

Scholar

Eric W. Johnson

Center & Lab

eScience Institute

The eScience Institute empowers researchers and students in all fields to answer fundamental questions through the use of large, complex, and noisy data. As the hub of data-intensive discovery on campus, we lead a community of innovators in the techniques, technologies, and best practices of data science and the fields that depend on them.

News | June 17, 2015

eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good Projects Announced

eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good Projects Announced Bringing together data scientists to work on focused, collaborative projects designed to impact public policy. This Summer teams will be looking at: Assessing Community Well-Being Through Open Data and Social Media – providing neighborhood communities with a better understanding of the factors that impact their well-being….

Scholar

Esther Min

Center & Lab

Evans School Policy Analysis & Research Group (EPAR)

Established in 2008, the Evans School Policy Analysis and Research Group (EPAR) uses an innovative student-faculty team model to provide rigorous, applied research and analysis to international development stakeholders. EPAR has prepared more than 300 technical reports and briefs including: statistical data analysis and research, literature reviews and analysis, and portfolio analysis and strategy support.…

News | May 24, 2019

Event looks at past efforts to integrate schools in Seattle and what can be done now

May 17 was the 65th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision that said segregating public schools by race was unconstitutional. Many public schools in Seattle remain segregated in spite of past efforts to address that, including several decades of busing. A national nonprofit group, Integrated Schools, hosted an event on Thursday,…

News | November 18, 2021

Event: Insights of a once reluctant academic working on urban climate change in Southern Africa

On Monday, December 6th, 2021, Gina Ziervogel Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, joins Urban@UW and CBE to discuss the route she has taken over the last 20 years as a geographer working on climate change vulnerability and adaptation, urban governance, and social…

Map

Eviction Lab

We're unpacking America's eviction crisis. The Eviction Lab at Princeton University has built the first nationwide database of evictions. Find out how many evictions happen in your community. Create custom maps, charts, and reports. Share facts with your neighbors and elected officials.

News | February 27, 2019

Evictions, rent spikes contribute to Washington’s homelessness crisis, study finds

With rent spikes and the decline of affordable housing, a team of University of Washington researchers are finding that evictions are contributing to the rise in homelessness across Washington state. Tim Thomas is the Principal Investigator of the study, and post-doctoral fellow at the UW eScience Institute. Now they’ve created a “living document” that shows eviction rates…

News | September 19, 2016

Expand the frontiers of urban sustainability

Manhattan skyscrapers, rather than rustic rural towns, are quickly becoming the picture of sustainable living in the twenty-first century. San Francisco, Copenhagen and Singapore each top their regions in the Green City Index. As sites of innovation and economic dynamism, these places exemplify a blend of density and livability that large, prosperous cities in the…

News | October 29, 2019

Facebook commits $1 billion to ease Bay Area housing crisis

Facebook Inc. is following other tech titans like Microsoft Corp. and Google, pledging to use its deep pockets to ease the affordable housing shortage in West Coast cities. The social media giant said Tuesday that it would commit $1 billion over the next decade to address the crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area, building as many as…

News | July 31, 2018

FEMA-style tents as homeless shelters? Maybe, say some King County officials

Three health officials on the King County Board of Health are urging the panel to declare homelessness a “public health disaster” and advise local jurisdictions to respond accordingly — including potentially deploying large scale FEMA-style tents as emergency shelter before winter. Two and a half years after both Seattle and King County declared a state of…

News | June 22, 2020

Fighting climate change means fighting racial injustice

“You can’t let one segment of society become a sacrifice.” Michael Méndez, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, was on the phone talking about the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd beneath a white police officer’s knee. But he was also talking about environmental justice and climate change. And he could…

News | December 4, 2020

Final Report: Impact of Hotels as Non-Congregate Emergency Shelters

A King County initiative that moved people out of homeless shelters and into hotel rooms earlier this year helped slow the transmission of the coronavirus SARS-CoV2, according to the final report from a study of the intervention. The study is co-authored by Gregg Colburn and Rachel Fyall, faculty co-leads of Urban@UW’s Homelessness Research Initiative, and the…

News | March 16, 2017

First UW Livable City Year project reports delivered to the City of Auburn

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…

News | November 23, 2015

Focusing on Race & Advancing Equity

“I challenge all of us — students, faculty and staff, and my leadership team — to own both our personal responsibility for the culture of our campus, and the institutional challenges we need to address to combat the racism, both individual and institutional, that persists here and throughout our society.” In April 2015, President Ana…

News | June 18, 2018

Food insecurity is a growing obstacle for college students

Expanding access to higher education is a core part of the mission at the University of Washington Tacoma, which had its commencement Monday. Many of the campus’ students commute from nearby communities, 58 percent have parents without college degrees, and 73 percent receive financial aid. “We have a lot of first-generation students,” said Christine Stevens, a professor who…

News | September 18, 2020

Food insecurity rates have more than doubled since start of COVID-19 pandemic

Since the onset of the pandemic, food insecurity rates have more than doubled in our state. That’s according to researchers at the University of Washington who have just compiled the results from their first round of a statewide survey. It was done this summer in cooperation with Washington State University and Tacoma Community College, as well…

Funding

Ford Foundation

We believe in the inherent dignity of all people. Yet around the world, billions of people are excluded from full participation in the political, economic, and cultural systems that shape their lives. We view this fundamental inequality as the defining challenge of our time, one that limits the potential of all people, everywhere. Addressing inequality…

Funding

Ford Foundation Fellowship Program

This program seeks to increase the diversity of the nation’s college and university faculties by increasing their ethnic and racial diversity, maximize the educational benefits of diversity, and increase the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students. Fellowships are made at the predoctoral,…

News | June 13, 2018

Forest loss in one part of US can harm trees on the opposite coast

Large swaths of U.S. forests are vulnerable to drought, forest fires and disease. Many local impacts of forest loss are well known: drier soils, stronger winds, increased erosion, loss of shade and habitat. But if a whole forest disappears, new research shows, this has ricocheting effects in the atmosphere that can affect vegetation on the…

News | August 11, 2023

Forget Banning Books — A Rural WA County May Close Its Library

As libraries throughout the country face increasing calls to ban young adult books that cover race and LGBTQ+ issues, one in a rural district east of Walla Walla faces a challenge to its very existence. The Columbia County Rural Library District could be dissolved by voters after a community member filed a petition to close…

News | August 2, 2016

Forget Pokemon Go. New tech incubator takes VR to the next level

If you’ve hung out by Lake Union, Westlake, or Green Lake at any point over the past three weeks, you’ve likely seen person after person point his or her phone toward the sidewalk or trees to try to catch that Bulbasaur, Blastoise, or Dratini. So it won’t be news to you that the digital and…

News | June 12, 2018

Four Lessons From the Tacoma Whole Child Initiative

Five years ago, Tacoma launched the Whole Child Initiative, with the goal of supporting the comprehensive development and success of each student. We have seen firsthand that supporting the whole child comes with a new set of challenges. But, with the right partners and a focused plan, this approach can make all the difference for…

News | March 15, 2021

From crisis to community: Homeownership access with Assistant Professor Arthur Acolin

Arthur Acolin, an Urban@UW Affiliate sat down with CBE to talk about his work. College is a time of exploration and discovery for all students. It is a time that often shapes how we view the world. Going through this transition during a moment of turbulence in the world can shape that experience significantly, which…

Map

Furushwa

In response to thousands of evictions by the Kenyan government Amnesty International built this resource to allow residents at risk of eviction, or those who’ve already been made homeless, to easily report it. To collect multi media evidence showing the human impact of illegal evictions and to send instant up-to-date-information alerting residents when an eviction…

Scholar

Galen Minah

Scholar

Gary Handwerk

News | July 28, 2020

Gentrification and changing foodscapes in Seattle

Seattle is the third most quickly gentrifying city in the US, after Washington, DC and Portland, OR (The Seattle Times [web]). Gentrification is often the outcome of decades of segregation, redlining, and urban renewal policies that exploit the large gap between existing and potential property values, which in turn encourages an influx of wealthier residents….

Degree Program

Geography (BA, minor, MA, PhD)

Geographers address some of the world’s most urgent challenges, including globalization, economic inequality, world hunger and agricultural development, global health and health care, the social control of public spaces, immigration, gender inequality, and what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century. Answers to such questions are complex and partial, and these issues…

Degree Program

Geospatial Technologies (MS)

The Urban Studies Program offers a Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies degree. Admission is open during autumn quarter only and will be comprised of a 20 student cohort. The degree will provide advanced training in GIS, training students to use and apply geospatial hardware, software, and data in urban and environmental planning scenarios. It…

News | March 20, 2018

Giving Voice, Being Seen: Community Agency and Design Action in a Time of Climate Change, April 26

Climate change affects everyone, but it does not impact all communities equally. These differences may be most evident in the built environment and the shared spaces such as parks, streets, schools, homes, which we experience and move through daily. In seeking to inspire more collaborative, inclusive and creative responses to climate change in the built…

Center & Lab

Global Business Center

Our mission is to develop global business expertise by hosting and sponsoring outstanding international education initiatives. As home to one of only 17 federally-funded Centers for International Business Education and Research (CIBER), the GBC works in partnership with the U.S. Department of Education to contribute to the international understanding and competitiveness.

News | May 20, 2024

Global life expectancy is projected to increase by 5 years by 2050

Reported by Rodielon Putol for Earth A recent study from the prestigious Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) 2021 reveals an encouraging trend: global life expectancy is expected to rise by nearly five years by 2050, despite various global challenges. According to the findings published in The Lancet, life expectancy for males is projected to…

Degree Program

Global Master of Public Administration (MPA)

The Evans School’s Global Master of Public Administration will prepare you to thrive in public sector organizations that work across borders. With theory and a practical skillset unique to two cultural contexts, you will be equipped with the skills you need to improve public policy, pursue powerful ideas and advance your capacity to lead internationally.…

Scholar

Grace Lasker

Degree Program

Graduate Certificate in Historic Preservation

The College of Built Environments (CBE) offers two complementary certificates in historic preservation which emphasize the field of historic preservation and related developments in allied fields that address the multiplicity of issues in the identification, evaluation, and protection of cultural resources. The certificates are intended to enhance the education of students beyond their regular course…

Degree Program

Graduate Certificate in Housing Studies

Quality, affordable, and well-connected housing is an essential component of strong and healthy communities. Housing markets are constantly evolving and there is an increasing collaboration among public, private and nonprofit actors in addressing various housing issues. The Graduate Certificate in Housing Studies (GCHS) offers graduate students an opportunity to learn the fundamental concepts and tools…

Scholar

Grant Blume

Scholar

Gunnar Almgren

Center & Lab

Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center

The Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center (HIPRC) is dedicated to reducing the impact of injury and violence on peopleʼs lives through research, education, training, and public awareness. HIPRC’s goal is to reduce the rates of injury and death from unintentional events such as car crashes and drownings, and from purposeful violent acts such as…

Center & Lab

Haring Center for Inclusive Education

The University of Washington Haring Center for Inclusive Education provides early childhood education to children with and without disabilities, conducts leading-edge research to advance inclusive learning, and trains education professionals in proven practices to develop every child’s potential. The essential support of our generous donors creates inclusive communities that empower all children to learn, play…

Center & Lab

Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies

Harry Bridges’ unique combination of pragmatic organizing ability, democratic unionism, commitment to racial desegregation, and outspoken engagement with issues of social justice continues to serve as the touchstone of the Center’s mission. Supporting research, teaching, and community outreach, The Center focuses on labor’s contribution to society. The Center promotes the study of labor in all…

News | April 22, 2024

Has the US finally figured out how to do high-speed rail?

Written by Jeremy Hsu for NewScientist. Construction began today on the first true high-speed rail line in the US, which will connect Los Angeles suburbanites to the bright lights of Las Vegas, Nevada. Not only should the project enable people in the US to finally experience European and Asian standards of speedy passenger trains, it…

Center & Lab

Health Promotion Research Center

The Health Promotion Research Center (HPRC) is one of 26 Prevention Research Centers funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We conduct community-based research that promotes the health and well-being of middle-aged and older adults, particularly those with lower incomes and in ethnic/cultural minority populations most at risk of health disparities. We are…

Scholar

Heather D. Hill

Scholar

Hedwig E. Lee

News | June 11, 2024

Here’s why an Arizona medical examiner is working to track heat-related deaths

Written by Alejandra Borunda for NPR News Greg Hess deals with death day in, day out. Hess is the medical examiner for Pima County, Ariz., a region along the United States-Mexico border. His office handles some 3,000 deaths each year — quiet deaths, overdoses, gruesome deaths, tragic ones. From April through October every year, Hess…

News | February 12, 2016

Heterogeneity and American Ghettos with Dr. Mario Luis Small – 2/25

February 25th / 6:00-7:30pm / CMU 120 Dr. Mario Luis Small Grafstein Family Professor, Harvard University By the end of the 20th century, the dominant theories of urban poverty argued that U.S. ghettos had become isolated areas devoid of everyday institutions and disconnected from mainstream society. Dr. Small examines whether the conventional models have underestimated…

News | December 21, 2020

Hidden in plain sight: The ghosts of segregation

Originally written by Richard Frishman for the New York Times‘ series World Through a Lens.   The six faded letters are all that remain, and few people notice them. I would never have seen them if a friend hadn’t pointed them out to me while we walked through New Orleans’s French Quarter. I certainly wouldn’t have…

Scholar

Hilary Godwin

Scholar

Himanshu Grover

News | February 1, 2024

History uncovered: UW research finds thousands of past racial restrictions in Kitsap

Reported in The Kitsap Sun By Peiyu Lin It’s not a secret that Kitsap County possesses a history of segregation, where some areas of the peninsula were only allowed to sell or rent to white people in the early and mid-20th century. But a specific geographic distribution of the over 2,300 properties that carry racial…

News | October 19, 2021

Home after fire: A new housing model aims to give kids stability

When the Almeda Fire hit southern Oregon on Labor Day weekend just over a year ago, Christy Brooks was on her way home from her daughters’ school after picking up books and a computer in preparation for the coming year. The air was smoky and smelled burnt, but Brooks doesn’t remember feeling overly concerned. She…

News | December 9, 2021

Home, not-so-sweet home

Imagine buying your dream home — and then learning you are prohibited from owning it. A surprising number of residential property deeds in Washington state contain clauses excluding certain groups from ownership. Those clauses are no longer enforceable thanks to a 1968 anti-discrimination law, but the exclusionary language — a reminder of sanctioned racism in…

News | October 26, 2017

Homeless artists showcase work at UW

One way to humanize the homeless is through art. “Telling our stories: art and home(lessness)” is a show Oct. 11-Dec. 15 featuring the work of six artists living in a low-barrier supportive housing project. They are part of an artists’ collective developed out of collaboration with University of Washington researchers, the Downtown Emergency Service Center…

News | September 28, 2021

Homeless in Silicon Valley’s shadow get help, but ‘sustainable’ change is elusive

Andrea Urton, who grew up homeless in Los Angeles, has seen how little corporate interests  tend to care about helping the impoverished. So it was with some surprise when she received a phone call from an Apple representative. “I have never had an Apple or a Google or a Facebook reach out to me personally…

News | June 6, 2019

Homelessness drops 8% in Seattle but more live in tents

The number of homeless in Seattle dropped nearly 8% over the last two years reflecting an across the board drop in nearly all categories. But there was an increase in the number of people living unsheltered in tents and encampments and that’s where Seattle’s Navigation Team focuses on. Mayor Durkan announced on Friday an expansion…

News | October 27, 2017

Homelessness is Seattle’s public health crisis

In this Crosscut editorial, UW professors Ben Danielson in the Department of Pediatrics and Bill Daniell in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences discuss homelessness as a public health crisis: “In 2015, Seattle and King County each declared a homelessness State of Emergency. Both have made commendable efforts since then to intensify outreach,…

News | December 7, 2022

Homelessness Research Initiative convenes homelessness scholars from across the UW

Last Tuesday, faculty, staff, and students from across the University of Washington met in the Hans Rosling Center for Population Health for a convening of the Homelessness Research Initiative. Led by faculty co-chairs Rachel Fyall, associate professor in the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, and Gregg Colburn, assistant professor in the College of…

News | February 18, 2020

Homes are selling in Tacoma at fastest rate in nation, Redfin says in new report

Last May, Redfin elevated Tacoma on the nation’s real estate map with a report saying the city was the nation’s hottest market.  That distinction was just given again. On Thursday, the real estate company’s blog reported Tacoma was the fastest-selling metro market nationwide in January. Tacoma also ranks high as a competitive market, with 34.2…

News | June 26, 2017

How a rising minimum wage affects jobs in Seattle

Three years ago, Seattle became one of the first jurisdictions in the nation to embrace a $15-an-hour minimum wage, to be phased in over several years. Over the past week, two studies have purported to demonstrate the effects of the first stages of that increase — but with diverging results. Mark C. Long, professor in…

News | March 2, 2016

How a rising minimum wage may impact the nonprofit sector

As the income inequality discussion continues to simmer across the country, municipal minimum wage ordinances have become hot topics of conversation in many cities. In January 2016, Seattle will implement its second step-up in the local minimum wage in 9 months, reaching $13 for many employers in the city and edging closer to a $15…

News | January 12, 2022

How a Seattle community is supporting a tribe’s fight for its existence

The Duwamish tribe isn’t recognized by the US government. It doesn’t have its own reservation. More than a century of broken treaty promises, discriminatory laws and violence forced many of its people from their ancestral homelands in what is now the Seattle area. Still, the Duwamish continue to exist and fight for their survival. Today,…

News | September 25, 2019

How a VR project documenting Seattle’s music history revealed the risk of a new digital divide

Yolanda Barton loves Seattle’s music history — the history that starts decades before Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden came screaming onto the scene and Macklemore took fans thrift store shopping. We’re talking about the “honey at dusk” vocals of jazz legend Ernestine Anderson; about booty-celebrating rap superstar Sir Mix-a-Lot; about Quincy Jones, the jazz and pop music virtuoso and winner…

News | January 9, 2021

How a year of protests changed Seattle

It took the ripples of outrage over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last May about three days to reach Seattle, driving thousands of protesters into the streets in solidarity with demands to end police violence against people of color and address, finally, the institutional racism that feeds it. Seven months later, those tear…

News | April 4, 2024

How do wildfires affect mental health? A new UW study examines the connection

Originally reported in the Seattle Times by Taylor Blatchford Checking air quality and staying indoors when smoke inundates the Seattle area has become second nature during Washington’s wildfire season in recent years. But new research highlights how wildfires can affect a less visible aspect of well-being: mental health. A University of Washington study published in…

News | December 2, 2021

How Does Climate Change Affect Human Health?

Over the past century, the Earth’s average temperature has risen by 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Although it seems like a negligible amount, this global warming is out of the ordinary in the planet’s recent history, causing dramatic shifts in climate patterns and weather. Beyond that, scientists predict it will get even worse in the years to come. Every human being…

News | October 5, 2021

How extreme heat hits our most vulnerable communities the hardest

Heat already kills more Americans than any other weather-related disaster, according to the National Weather Service — and climate change is making these extreme events even more dangerous. The Northwest’s record-breaking heat wave in June, which scientists say would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change, for instance, killed hundreds of people in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia….

News | January 6, 2023

How land design is answering the cultural needs of Native Americans in Seattle

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…

News | January 16, 2021

How much will homelessness rise? Grim study shows possible ‘impact of doing nothing,’ researchers say

A recession following the coronavirus pandemic could cause twice as much homelessness nationwide as the Great Recession did more than a decade ago, says a grim study released Tuesday by Economic Roundtable, an L.A. research group. Using detailed data on unemployment and homelessness from L.A. County social services, authors of the study project that people at the…

News | August 12, 2019

How nature can improve your family’s mental health

People who study health outcomes – and any parent with common sense – have long known that having access to a green space is important for health. From decreased asthma and obesity to increased immunities and quality sleep, exposure to the outdoors is good for everyone. But a large, growing body of evidence, captured in a new meta-study, reveals that experiences in nature have especially…

News | October 26, 2020

How poverty hurts Washington state’s democracy

Never in recent history have more Washingtonians needed a strong social safety net. In April, as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down whole industries, over half a million workers in our state lost their jobs. Suddenly, they and their dependents needed help to cover life’s basic expenses, from rent and utilities to food and medical care. No doubt…

News | August 30, 2018

How racism kept black Tacomans from buying houses for decades

Honorably discharged after serving in the Korean War, the young man looked to settle down in Tacoma with his wife. If only they could convince someone to show them a home. If they got to a house first, the real estate agent would leave upon seeing them. They learned to park down the street and…

News | June 11, 2020

How Seattle’s unemployed survived the Great Depression

When the stock market crashed in fall of 1929, the road from joblessness to homelessness was short. Meager local relief programs and private charity weren’t up to the challenge of mass unemployment. As the Depression deepened and President Herbert Hoover resolutely opposed federal involvement in relief efforts, “Hoovervilles” sprang up around the country. Seattle’s largest shanty…

News | February 15, 2019

How Seattle’s 1919 General Strike Ignited America’s Labor Movement

On February 6, 1919, 65,000 union workers in Seattle walked off the job. On that Wednesday morning, barbers, newsboys, ice wagon drivers, stereotypers, electrical utility workers, and bill posters didn’t show up for work, a demonstration of solidarity with shipyard workers who had already been striking for two weeks in pursuit of higher wages. The…

News | March 15, 2018

How social networks help perpetuate the ‘cycle of segregation’

Think about the last time you looked for a new apartment or house. Maybe you asked your friends or colleagues about where they lived. You thought about your route to work, or that neighborhood you always drive through on your way to your kid’s soccer practice. Many of these places were familiar to you, whether…

News | April 10, 2018

How Texas is ‘building back better’ from Hurricane Harvey

For most Americans, the one-two punch of last fall’s hurricanes is ancient history. But hard-hit communities in Texas, Florida and the Caribbean are still rebuilding. Nicole Errett, lecturer in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, recently traveled with public health students from the University of Washington to southeast Texas, where the impacts of…

Map | Berlin

How the S-Bahn Ring Divides Berlin

​Map explores where new and native Berliners settle relative to the S-Bahn ring

News | July 29, 2024

How Tiny Homes Could Help Solve America’s Homelessness Crisis

Reported by Giulia Carbonaro for Newsweek Shelter villages of tiny homes have popped up across the U.S. in recent years, as the small structures have started to be seen by many advocates as a promising solution to solve homelessness. Perhaps unsurprisingly at a time when mortgage rates are still hovering around the 7-percent mark and…

News | October 18, 2024

How to avoid sharing election misinformation

Reported by Audrey Nguyen for NPR The 2024 election season is upon us. While Election Day is November 5, early voting started in September in some states. As we wait for the final results to be declared, chances are, you’re going to come across false or misleading information. To avoid spreading misinformation this election season,…

News | July 6, 2020

How urban design can make or break protests

If protesters could plan a perfect stage to voice their grievances, it might look a lot like Athens, Greece. Its broad, yet not overly long, central boulevards are almost tailor-made for parading. Its large parliament-facing square, Syntagma, forms a natural focal point for marchers. With a warren of narrow streets surrounding the center, including the…

News | November 5, 2019

How Washington’s toll lanes help low income communities

A recent study sought to discover how toll lanes like the ones implemented on Washington’s 405 freeway affect low-income communities. And while those communities are the ones who most often can’t afford the toll lanes, one expert argues that they benefit everyone. “(Drivers) are voluntarily choosing to subsidize the operation and the construction and the maintenance of…

News | September 2, 2021

How wildfires disproportionately affect people of color

Disasters in the U.S. often hit minority groups the hardest. Hurricane Katrina disproportionately impacted Black residents in New Orleans in 2005. In California, massive wildfires are a concern. Wildfires have unequal effects on minority communities. A 2018 study shows mostly Black, Hispanic, or Native American communities experience 50% greater vulnerability to wildfires compared with primarily white communities in the…

News | September 29, 2022

How Will Downtowns across America Change in the Next Decade?

There is nothing quite like the hustle and bustle of a city. No matter where you are, you know when you’ve made it downtown. Since downtowns have changed so much in the past, what will they look like in the next decade? Well, in order to predict the future, we must go back to the…

News | May 19, 2020

How will the COVID-19 pandemic reshape Seattle? Podcasting professor weighs in

What happens when seemingly unstoppable economic growth meets an irrepressible global pandemic? Seattle is finding out. The hard way. To get a uniquely informed perspective on the situation as it stands—and as it may look in the future—we turn to Jeff Shulman, the Marion B. Ingersoll Professor of Marketing at the Foster School of Business. For…

Funding

HUD CDBG Community Development Grants

The CDBG program works to ensure decent affordable housing, to provide services to the most vulnerable in our communities, and to create jobs through the expansion and retention of businesses. CDBG is an important tool for helping local governments tackle serious challenges facing their communities. The CDBG program has made a difference in the lives…

Center & Lab

Humanistic GIS Laboratory

Welcome to Humanistic GIS Laboratory (HGIS Lab)! This Lab is committed to exploring the Digital Earth as the home of humankind. Driven by this common interest, a group of UW scholars and student researchers have been working together (1) to explore innovative methodologies to improve geospatial technologies with the consideration of human experience, (2) to…

News | November 15, 2018

Hydropower to become unsustainable as climate changes

Large hydropower dams will become a less sustainable source of renewable energy as the climate changes, especially in the developing world, according to a report released Nov. 5. Unpredictable weather extremes, especially severe climate-driven droughts, are likely to reduce the dams’ ability to generate electricity, concluded the Michigan State University study. To avoid unreliable power generation,…

Funding

IBM Center for the Business of Government – Connecting Research to Practice

The aim of the IBM Center for The Business of Government is to tap into the best minds in academe and the nonprofit sector who can use rigorous public management research and analytic techniques to help public sector executives and managers improve the effectiveness of government. We are looking for very practical findings and actionable…

News | April 6, 2023

IHME to Advance US County-level Health Disparities Research

The Institute for Health Metrics (IHME) has been awarded a $16.8 million contract from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to dissect health disparities at the county level in the US. The funding will help IHME conduct comprehensive research that builds upon IHME’s…

News | October 17, 2019

Immigrants often revive struggling cities through housing, population growth

President Trump has turned repeatedly throughout his tenure and his re-election campaign to two targets: immigrants whom he has described as “invading” the country, and American cities he has called out of control. But to the extent that each presents real policy challenges — how to integrate foreigners, what to do about struggling places —…

News | December 5, 2019

Impact of WTO protests in Seattle still felt 2 decades later

An array of issues brought tens of thousands of protesters to Seattle 20 years ago Saturday, with one unifying theme: concern that the World Trade Organization, a then-little-known body charged with regulating international trade, threatened them all. With their message amplified not just by their numbers, but by the response of overwhelmed police who fired…

News | November 10, 2020

In King County, pollution makes ZIP codes predictors of your health

In Seattle, a ZIP code can predict everything from income to social class to life expectancy. White, wealthy residents of northern neighborhoods such as Laurelhurst live 13 years longer than their poorer neighbors of color in the southern neighborhoods of South Park and Georgetown. Air and soil pollution has disproportionately affected Seattle’s communities of color for…

News | May 21, 2020

In Seattle’s polluted valley, pandemic and particulates are twin threats

From a boat on the Duwamish River, it’s easy to see giant yellow excavators plucking crushed cars off the ground and swinging them toward an open-air shredder. At Seattle Iron and Metal, mounds of shredded steel as big as apartment buildings loom above the river. “It looks like something out of Mad Max,” James Rasmussen…

News | March 31, 2020

In the coronavirus crisis, who gets to be outside?

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,…

News | September 9, 2021

In the early 1990s, heat waves battered Philadelphia’s most vulnerable communities. The lessons learned are helping today

The water trickled down quickly, enough to coat the sun-bleached concrete basin in a city park with a layer of wetness. A toddler danced, smiling as water from the park’s sprinklers rained down on her, keeping her cool. It was a blistering midsummer day in July, the kind that as recently as 30 years ago…

News | April 2, 2021

In the face of hate, Asian Americans call for solidarity with all people of color

Since the beginning of the year, Asian Americans have come increasingly under violent attack. Elders have been assaulted in Chinatowns across the country from Oakland to San Francisco to New York City. In late February, Inglemoor High School Japanese teacher Noriko Nasu and her boyfriend were walking through Seattle’s Chinatown-International District (C-ID) and were attacked…

News | September 9, 2024

In Washington’s closest elections, volunteers go door-to-door to ‘rehab’ faulty ballots

Reported by Scott Greenstone for KUOW/NPR On a mid-August afternoon in Seattle, Lisa McCrummen walked around Phinney Ridge knocking on doors — but her neighbors were not home. “‘Your neighbor stopped by to make sure your primary election ballot is being counted,’” McCrummen wrote on a note. McCrummen left notes like this all afternoon at…

News | January 27, 2022

Incorporating Ride-Sourcing Service into ADA Paratransit

In early December 2021, PacTrans PI and Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington, Qing Shen, and a Graduate Research Assistant in the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Urban Design and Planning at the Uni246 versity of Washington, Lamis Ashour, delivered a webinar titled, Incorporating Ride-Sourcing Service into ADA Paratransit: Opportunities and Challenges…

Center & Lab

Indigenous Wellness Research Institute

The Indigenous Wellness Research Institute’s vision is to support the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples to achieve full and complete health and wellness by collaborating in decolonizing research and knowledge building and sharing. Our mission is to marshal community, tribal, academic, and governmental resources toward innovative, culture-centered interdisciplinary, collaborative social and behavioral research and education

Map | New York

Inequality and New York’s Subway

This project from the New Yorker shows New York City has a problem with income inequality. And it’s getting worse—the top of the spectrum is gaining and the bottom is losing. Along individual subway lines, earnings range from poverty to considerable wealth. The interactive infographic here charts these shifts, using data on median household income,…

Scholar

Ines Jurcevic

News | July 11, 2019

Informal housing, poverty, and legacies of apartheid in South Africa

“Ten percent of all South Africans — the majority white — owns more than 90 percent of national wealth… Some 80 percent of the population — overwhelmingly black — owns nothing at all.” — New York Times On April 27, 1994, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) won the first multiracial democratic election…

Center & Lab

Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) launched in July 2007 with the goal of providing an impartial, evidence-based picture of global health trends to inform the work of policymakers, researchers, and funders. Five guiding principles: Scientific Excellence Policy Relevance Impartiality Collaboration Knowledge Sharing

Research Beyond UW | University of California, Berkeley

Institute of Urban and Regional Development

Through collaborative, interdisciplinary research and practice, Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD) supports students, faculty, and visiting scholars to critically investigate and help improve processes and outcomes that shape urban equity around the world. "The future of IURD will be to position itself as a global leader in research and policy that aims to…

News | July 19, 2021

Integrating solutions to adapt cities for climate change

A new article explores how record climate extremes are reducing urban livability, compounding inequality, and threatening infrastructure. Co-authored by Marina Alberti, Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington; Brenda B Lin, Alessandro Ossola, Erik Andersson, Xuemei Bai, Cynnamon Dobbs, Thomas Elmqvist, Karl L Evans, Niki Frantzeskaki, Richard A Fuller, Kevin J Gaston,…

News | September 21, 2021

Interdisciplinary course helps empower the local community

Professors in the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments have created an interdisciplinary, graduate-level course, the McKinley Futures Nehemiah Studio, that combines architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, and real estate principles into a groundbreaking opportunity for the local African American community as well as the students who participate in it. The studio…

Degree Program

Interdisciplinary Urban Design & Planning (PhD)

This program brings together faculty from disciplines ranging from Architecture to Sociology to focus on the interdisciplinary study of urban problems and interventions. Covering scales from neighborhoods to metropolitan areas, the program addresses interrelationships between the physical environment, the built environment, and the social, economic, and political institutions and processes that shape urban areas. The…

Degree Program

International Development Policy and Management Certificate

Offers students a foundation for addressing complex questions of poverty and development. The IDCP “transcriptable” certificate has been earned by 225 UW graduate students from 14 departments and Schools, and allows students to study current topics in international policy, management and economics in a disciplinarily diverse classroom.

Funding

International Dissertation Research Fellowship

The Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) offers six to twelve months of support to graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who are enrolled in PhD programs in the United States and conducting dissertation research on Native American or non-US topics. The IDRF program especially welcomes applications from underrepresented institutions. Sixty fellowships…

Degree Program

International Studies (BA, minor, MA, MA in Applied International Studies, PhD)

The International Studies Program combines social sciences and humanities to examine international problems and change. Using a diverse, multidisciplinary approach, the Program encourages students to look at our increasingly interdependent world in order to learn how to study it and understand its politics, societies, economies, and cultures.

News | May 13, 2024

Is Seattle a walkable city? Pedestrian death rates show otherwise

Written by Jadenne Radoc Cabahug for Crosscut. Washington was the first state to commit to zero traffic fatalities. But 24 years later, deaths are at an all-time high and officials are reevaluating. Twenty-four years after Washington became the first state to commit to decreasing pedestrian traffic deaths to zero, the numbers continue to move in…

News | June 7, 2019

It’s going to get harder to evict people in WA. Will that reduce homelessness?

As the number of homeless residents soars in King County and across the state, housing and homelessness advocates have turned their attention to eviction reform as a piece of the solution. One prominent study, from the Seattle Women’s Commission, found that the vast majority of people evicted end up on the street, in shelters or…

News | August 30, 2022

J-PAL North America Launches Two Partnership Opportunities to Research Social Programs

J-PAL North America, a research center in the MIT Department of Economics, has opened two Evaluation Incubators: the Housing Stability Evaluation Incubator and State and Local Evaluation Incubator. J-PAL North America’s Evaluation Incubators equip partners to use randomized evaluations — the most scientifically rigorous method used to study program impact — in order to generate…

Scholar

J. Mark Pendras

Scholar

Jacob L. Vigdor

News | October 27, 2016

Jacqui Patterson: A Brief Annotated Reading List

Jacqueline Patterson is a preeminent researcher and activist in the field of environmental and climate justice. Patterson is one of UW’s 2016 Walker-Ames endowed speakers, and special guest at the upcoming symposium, Urban Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Change. Urban@UW has compiled a brief reading list to help contextualize Patterson’s work: Gulf Oil…

Scholar

James Gregory

Scholar

James Harrington

Scholar

Janine Jones

Scholar

Jeff Hou

News | July 26, 2016

Jeff Shulman and the Seattle Growth Podcast: An Office Hours Visit

Jeff Shulman moved to Seattle a decade ago to begin his career at the University of Washington. In that short time, he’s watched Seattle’s dramatic and ongoing growth transform the city. This former South Lake Union resident has put together a thirteen-episode, in-depth look at how Seattle’s changes have affected real people. With nearly 100…

Scholar

Jelani Ince

Scholar

Jen Davison

Scholar

Jennifer Otten

Scholar

Jennifer Romich

Scholar

Jeremy Hess

Scholar

Jessi Quizar

Scholar

Jessica Kaminsky

Scholar

Jim Theofelis

Scholar

Jin-Kyu Jung

Scholar

Jodi Sandfort

Scholar

Joe Casola

Scholar

Joe Lott

Scholar

Joe Mienko

News | November 26, 2024

Join Urban@UW in creating innovative solutions for city dwellers, today and into the future.

Support Urban@UW Urban@UW extends the understanding of cities—from people, buildings, infrastructure, and energy to economics, policy, culture, art, and nature—beyond individual topics to dynamically interdependent systems, so that we can holistically design and steward vibrant and welcoming cities in which future generations will thrive. Urban@UW works with scholars, policymakers, and community stakeholders to develop cross-disciplinary…

Scholar

Jon E. Froehlich

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Jonathan Mayer

Scholar

Jonathan Warren

Scholar

Joseph R Zunt

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Josephine Ensign

Scholar

Judith A. Howard

News | February 22, 2017

Julian Agyeman: A Brief Reading List

Julian Agyeman, Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, will be delivering a talk at the University of Washington on February 28 at 7:30pm. Agyeman was originally trained as an ecologist and biogeographer before turning to critical urban studies and environmental social science. Agyeman’s scholarship challenges basic notions of sustainability through…

Scholar

Julie M. Johnson

News | May 5, 2021

Just Sustainabilities in a Post-Pandemic World: Virtual Symposium on May 27th

The COVID-19 pandemic has tested our cities’ adaptability and resilience and dug deeper holes in cities’ social, environmental and physical fabric. As we come out of the pandemic, we need to re-think how the city fabric functions. Planning for the post-pandemic city requires a careful understanding of the implications of the COVID19 pandemic on pre-existing…

Funding

Just Tech COVID-19 Rapid-Response Grants

The Social Science Research Council (SSRC), as part of its Just Tech program, seeks proposals from across the social sciences and related fields that address the risks, opportunities, and challenges posed by public health surveillance stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic. We specifically encourage proposals that interrogate the role the public and private sectors may play…

News | August 1, 2017

Justice Dept. rules intensify crackdown on sanctuary cities

The Justice Department escalated its promised crackdown on so called sanctuary cities in late July, saying it will no longer award coveted grant money to cities unless they give federal immigration authorities access to jails and provide advance notice when someone in the country illegally is about to be released. Under old rules, cities seeking…

Scholar

Kam Wing Chan

Scholar

Karina Walters

Scholar

Katharyne Mitchell

Scholar

Katherine Beckett

Scholar

Kemi Adeyemi

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Ken Yocom

Scholar

Kessie Alexandre

Scholar

Kevin Haggerty

Scholar

Kevin Laverty

Scholar

Kim England

Scholar

Kimberly Ambrose

News | July 28, 2022

King County hoping to close heat disparity gap in low-income areas

Earlier this year, King County announced it is developing a heat strategy plan to better handle extreme heat waves. But data shows certain neighborhoods — particularly lower income areas — tend to get much hotter. Those behind the heat strategy say they’re hoping to close that heat disparity gap. The hottest areas are in south…

News | October 29, 2020

King County wants to buy motels for emergency, affordable housing

On a chilly Monday afternoon, case manager Richard Gibson walked through the courtyard at Martin Court in the southwest corner of Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood. The weather in the days before had taken a cold turn, and the colorful children’s playground he strode past sat vacant. Lining either side of the courtyard and parking lot were…

Scholar

Kristie L. Ebi

Scholar

Kyle Crowder

News | August 14, 2018

Kyle Crowder examines renter/landlord perspective on seattle rental ordinances

In a recent interview with KOMO Radio, CSDE Affiliate and Professor of Sociology Kyle Crowder explains the results of a recent study of Seattle’s rental housing market. In that research, Crowder finds that neither renters nor landlords strongly support the city’s rental ordinances, noting: “Renters were often skeptical that the ordinances would have much effectiveness because the general perception is that landlords…

Map | Seattle

Lack of Sidewalks in Seattle

​This map from the Urbanist highlights the roughly 900 miles (28% of city blocks) without any sidewalks in Seattle.

Scholar

Larry Knopp

Scholar

LaShawnDa Pittman

Research Beyond UW | Columbia University

Latin America and Caribbean Laboratory

The Latin American and Caribbean Laboratory (Latin Lab) serves as an intellectual platform for research, educational, and service initiatives related to architecture and urban planning in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The Lab aims to become a leading laboratory for the study of the built environment and community development in LAC and its diasporas…

Center & Lab

Latino Center for Health

The Latino Center for Health provides leadership for community-engaged research through capacity building and authentic partnerships with community stakeholders to promote impactful improvements in the health and well-being of Latinx communities in Washington state, regionally, and nationally.

News | July 5, 2018

Lattes and a shot of hope: North Bend coffee house offers safe place for teens in need

Suicide is the 8th leading cause of death overall in our state. It’s a horrific reality that touches all ages – including teens, but there is a unique place where teens are finding help with not only suicide prevention, but any struggle. “I can never figure it out on my own,” said 16-year-old Aidan Sullivan….

Scholar

Laura Evans

Scholar

Laure Heland

Center & Lab

Law, Societies and Justice

LSJ courses analyze the meaning of justice, the methods used in efforts to realize it, the politics of rights, and the complex roles that law and legal institutions play in structuring social life. Many courses analyze these issues in comparative perspective. Coursework emphasizes close reading of key texts, active classroom engagement with complex ideas, and…

Degree Program

Law, Societies and Justice (BA, minor)

The Law, Societies and Justice Department offers students an opportunity to understand the complex roles of law in society. Law takes multiple forms and performs a wide array of important functions. At the same time, the work of law is shaped by numerous political, economic, social, cultural and geographic factors. Because of this, law “on…

Scholar

Lillian J. Ratliff

News | August 16, 2021

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy honors UW College of Built Environments faculty, Nehemiah Studio for curriculum on mitigating gentrification

The Nehemiah Studio, a UW class on mitigating gentrification in Seattle’s Central District designed by Rachel Berney, Donald King and Al Levine with support from College of Built Environments Dean Renée Cheng, has been honored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The course supports joint efforts by the college and the Nehemiah Initiative Seattle to train graduate students to help mitigate displacement in…

Scholar

Lisa Hoffman

News | October 2, 2018

Livable City Year and Tacoma finalize partnership

Throughout the 2017-2018 academic year, 349 University of Washington students and 26 UW faculty members worked with staff and community members from the City of Tacoma on projects to advance livability and sustainability in the city. The year-long partnership between Tacoma and UW Livable City Year (LCY) provided the city with university resources to tackle…

News | December 13, 2016

Livable City Year releases RFP, invites cities to partner for 2017-8 academic year

The University of Washington’s Livable City Year initiative is now accepting proposals from cities, counties, special districts and regional partnerships to partner with during the 2017-2018 academic year. UW Livable City Year (UW LCY) connects University of Washington faculty and students with a municipal partner for a full academic year to work on projects fostering…

News | August 30, 2024

Living in tree-filled neighborhoods may reduce risk of heart disease, study shows

Written by Kaitlin Sullivan and Anne Thompson for NBC News Living in a tree-filled neighborhood may be as beneficial to the heart as regular exercise, new research shows. Researchers at the University of Louisville designed a clinical trial that followed hundreds of people living in six low- to middle-income neighborhoods in South Louisville, Kentucky. They…

News | August 17, 2021

Living Landscapes Incubator Request for Proposals

The Living Landscapes Incubator is a new grant program, developed as a collaboration among the College of Built Environments, the College of the Environment, Urban@UW, and the School of Public Health. Planning and designing for landscapes, environments, and infrastructure that support sustainable, livable, and equitable communities is a key challenge of our time. With generous funding from…

News | October 1, 2024

Loneliness in Washington tops national average

Reported by Christine Clarridge and Alex Fitzpatrick for Axios.  More than 43% of Washingtonians reported feeling lonely at least sometimes, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Why it matters: Loneliness isn’t just a feeling; it’s associated with serious mental and physical health impacts, including elevated likelihood of developing diabetes, cardiac risk,…

Scholar

LuAnne Thompson

Scholar

Lucy Jarosz

Scholar

Luther Adams

Scholar

Lynne Manzo

Funding

MacArthur Foundation

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and…

Scholar

Maggie Beneke

News | October 18, 2022

Making cities more equitable: Meet Davon Woodard

It’s fair to say Davon Woodard is downright passionate about urban spaces—particularly making them more equitable and livable for the diverse communities that inhabit them. “Everyone has a right to a home (city) which is reflective of and respectful of their lived experiences,” he wrote. “My work is guided by that principle.” Davon is an…

News | March 7, 2016

Making Disruption a Force for Good – A letter from President Ana Mari Cauce

We hear a lot about “disruption” these days as businesses and institutions—and universities are no exception—are faced with the prospect of an upstart coming along and disrupting a portion of, or their entire, enterprise or industry. Disruption is often seen as a side effect of innovation, particularly in technology. Each of us carries an example…

News | March 16, 2020

Making Transit More Transparent: Catching Up with Kona Farry

Kona Farry is an undergraduate student at UW studying Community, Environment, and Planning. Last year Farry created a website (https://www.pantographapp.com) showing the real-time locations of buses, ferries, and trains in the greater Seattle area that received a lot of interest. (Also, since the coronavirus outbreak he has created an app to help remind people to…

Map | New York

Manhattan Skyline Reimagined To Reflect The City’s Income Inequality

Manhattan has one of the worst income gaps of any city—or country—in the world, often separated by just a few blocks. These striking graphics make that inequality apparent in the height of the city’s buildings. *not interactive

Scholar

Manish Chalana

Scholar

Manka Varghese

News | March 1, 2018

Many homeless people take better care of their pets than themselves; this clinic helps them

Homeless people with pets are usually criticized and sometimes turned away from shelters. But that’s starting to change. His name is Bud the Amazing Wonder Dog, but the huge German shepherd-rottweiler mix was not feeling amazing or wonderful during his clinic visit, as he whimpered and tried to steady himself on an examination table too…

News | January 30, 2020

Many Seattleites are now Voluntarily Paying Rent to the Duwamish

To help right the wrongs of history, thousands of people are paying rent each month to the Duwamish Tribe. Called “Real Rent Duwamish,” the all-volunteer effort — in partnership with the tribe — facilitates monthly “rent” payments to the tribe. Launched in 2017, Real Rent Duwamish has had 4,524 donors so far, now totaling around $20,000…

Map

Map Kibera

Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, was a blank spot on the map until November 2009, when young Kiberans created the first free and open digital map of their own community. Map Kibera has now grown into a complete interactive community information project. We work in Kibera, Mathare and Mukuru, use all these tools. Get in touch!

News | January 28, 2020

Mapping Eviction in Western Washington

Evictions due to lack of affordable housing and rising rent costs contribute to the homelessness crisis. A new interactive map by graduate student Alex Ramiller with the UW Department of Geography builds on the study released in 2018 that measured and analyzed the issue of evictions in western Washington using court records, census data and housing market trends. Between…

Map | New York Seattle

Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America

The University of RIchmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab compiled historic maps and data of redlining practice in 150+ cities across the country in an interactive format.

News | December 13, 2019

Mapping jet pollution at Sea-Tac airport

Communities underneath and downwind of jets landing at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport are exposed to a type of ultrafine particle pollution that is distinctly associated with aircraft, according to a new University of Washington study that is the first to identify the unique “signature” of aircraft emissions in Washington state. Researchers at the UW Department of Environmental &…

News | January 9, 2020

Mapping the segregation of Minneapolis

Before it was torn apart by freeway construction in the middle of the 20th century, the Near North neighborhood in Minneapolis was home to the city’s largest concentration of African American families. That wasn’t by accident: As far back as the early 1900s, racially restrictive covenants on property deeds prevented African Americans and other minorities…

Scholar

Marcia Meyers

Scholar

Marieka M. Klawitter

Scholar

Marissa Baker

Scholar

Mark Ellis

Scholar

Mark Purcell

Scholar

Mary D. Fan

Scholar

Mary Kay Gugerty

Scholar

Matthew Kelley

Research Beyond UW | New York University

McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research

The McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at New York University Silver School of Social Work is committed to creating new knowledge about the root causes of poverty, developing evidence-based interventions to address its consequences, and rapidly translating research findings into action through policy and practice.

Scholar

Megan Ming Francis

Scholar

Megan Ybarra

Map | Melbourne

Melbourne Immigrant Birth Places

This map reveals the top three birthplaces for immigrants in Melbourne and other cities and suburbs across Australia. You can also access a map revealing birthplaces excluding English and New Zealand immigrants.

Research Beyond UW | Virginia Tech

Metropolitan Institute

The Metropolitan Institute conducts basic and applied research on the dynamics of metropolitan complexities, such as demographics, environment, technology, design, transportation, and governance. With most of the globe’s population moving to urbanized areas, the major public policy challenges of this century will require a deeper understanding of how metropolitan complexities play out across multiple jurisdictions,…

Scholar

Michael Brown

Scholar

Michael Knapp

Scholar

Michelle Garner

Funding

Michelson 20MM Foundation – Spark Grants

With the COVID-19 crisis severely impacting the educational space, the Michelson 20MM Foundation is launching a new round of the Spark Grant program to fill urgent needs for education organizations that are well-aligned with the following target outcomes: increasing access to and efficiency of emergency student aid programs; decreasing the “digital divide” through ensuring students,…

News | August 1, 2016

Midsummer in Full Swing, A July Recap

While we are in the midst of a beautiful summer, things at the University of Washington and at Urban@UW are moving right along. We’ve seen some original writing, research, and even a podcast come out of community covering topics from marine noise pollution to data science and minimum wage to police reforms. The eScience Institute…

Scholar

Ming-Yi Tsai

News | September 11, 2018

Minimum wage increases in six cities working as intended, Berkeley study of food-service jobs finds

The minimum wage increases that started four years ago in SeaTac are spreading across the country, but economists continue to study – and disagree about – the impact of the new policies on pay and jobs. The latest look at increased wage floors in six U.S. cities, including Seattle, finds that food-service workers saw increases…

Research Beyond UW | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MIT CoLab

The Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) is a center for planning and development within the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). CoLab supports the development and use of knowledge from excluded communities to deepen civic engagement, improve community practice, inform policy, mobilize community assets, and generate shared wealth. We believe that community knowledge can…

Center & Lab

Mixed Metro

Our intent is to create a classification system that will allow readers to easily comprehend (i.e., “see”) a broad range of neighborhoods on the basis of racial composition with an explicit eye towards the notion of diversity. The classification system emerged from detailed explorations of the impact of many configurations of census tract racial composition…

News | July 2, 2020

Monsanto will pay $95 million in PCB settlement with Washington state

The state of Washington will receive tens of millions of dollars in a settlement against Monsanto over its manufacture of toxic chemicals that were deposited decades ago in Washington soil and water and continue to wreak environmental damage today. State Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s office in 2016 sued the company over its production of polychlorinated…

News | March 28, 2022

More air pollution present in areas with historical redlining

Despite dramatic improvements in air quality over the past 50 years, people of color at every income level in the United States are exposed to higher-than-average levels of air pollution. While this disparity has been widely studied, the links between today’s air pollution disparities and historic patterns of racially segregated planning are still being uncovered. Now…

News | May 21, 2019

More back-to-back heat waves will come with climate change

Here’s another health danger climate change will deliver in the coming years: New research warns that back-to-back heat waves that go on for days will become more common as the planet warms. The elderly and the poor will be the least prepared to weather this threat, the investigators noted. But hospital ERs and emergency service…

Research Beyond UW | University of Portland

Moreau Center

Inspired by the vision of Blessed Basil Moreau, C.S.C., founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross, rooted in Catholic social teaching, and guided by the mission of the University, Moreau Center programs center on direct service. Service is one of the key components in a Catholic education. Direct service involves directly connecting with people and…

Map

Mukuru on the Move

This map identifies the various community health assets that the residents of the Mukuru informal settlement in Nairobi identified in a series of workshops from 2008-2010

Map | New York

Multilingual Tweets in NYC

This map visualizes the geography of about 8.5 million geo-located tweets collected between Jan 2010 and Feb 2013. Each tweet is marked by a slightly transparent dot coloured according to the language it was written in.

News | March 29, 2024

Muslims observing Ramadan at Tacoma ICE center aren’t receiving timely meals, immigration advocates say

Originally published by KUOW  Written by Diana Opong The month of Ramadan is a time of holy celebration, but some Muslim people held at the privately run Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma say they aren’t being given clean clothes daily, nor timely meals before and after fasting. Naeem, a 52-year-old man being held at…

Map | Nairobi

Nairobi Gender Violence Resources

​Resources for victims of Gender Violence including: outreach, counseling services, clinical services, legal services, religious institutions, coordination groups, security services and shelters

Scholar

Nancy Sugg

News | July 31, 2019

National attention, praise for new Silicon Valley history ‘The Code’ by UW historian Margaret O’Mara

Her sweeping new book about the history of Silicon Valley has University of Washington history professor Margaret O’Mara on a busy national book tour this summer. The book, “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America,” was published this month by Penguin Press and is receiving many positive reviews. “The Code” takes the reader from the…

News | March 12, 2021

Nature & Health Speaks: Beyond Inclusive Design with The Eli’s Park Project

The Eli’s Park Project is committed to carrying on Eli’s legacy of love through a community-led renovation of the Burke-Gilman Playground Park. They are working with the community to create an accessible, inclusive, nature-based park where people of all ages and abilities can find play and peace. The reimagining and manifestation of this new, inclusive Burke-Gilman Playground…

News | January 20, 2022

Nearly half a million Washingtonians live in pharmacy deserts

University of Washington researchers recently completed an analysis of pharmacy deserts. While the publication is in the review process, Rachel Wittenauer, a Ph.D. student with the university’s CHOICE Institute, said roughly 450,000 adults statewide in both urban and rural areas are living in pharmacy deserts. Pharmacy desert communities are defined as being both low-income and…

News | August 20, 2024

Need anti-withdrawal meds? In King County, call this 24/7 hotline

Reported by Eilis O’Neil for KUOW and NPR News People addicted to opioids in King County can call a new hotline and get a prescription right away for a drug that can help. Buprenorphine reduces symptoms of withdrawal and can help people stay off fentanyl and other opioids. Buprenorphine “does cut overdose risk by 50%,…

News | March 15, 2024

Neighborhood Poverty May Impact Women’s Ovarian Reserves

Reported by Lori Solomon at Health Day News FRIDAY, March 15, 2024 — Living in a neighborhood with greater poverty in adulthood is tied to lower ovarian reserve, according to a study published online March 5 in Menopause. Anwesha Pan, from the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues aimed to examine the association between…

News | March 10, 2020

New Bill that May Pave the Way for Seattle Seismic Upgrades

Public officials for decades have promised to deal with the old brick buildings in Seattle that could crumble with deadly consequences when a major earthquake hits — and have produced nothing but paper plans. Now some advocates hope a new attempt could at last lead to action. A state bill that could help building owners finance…

News | January 11, 2018

New book ‘City Unsilenced’ explores protest and public space

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…

News | June 17, 2021

New Bridges Center report revisits lessons of Puget Sound’s $15 minimum wage

As the administration of President Joe Biden moves to establish a $15 minimum wage for federal contractors, and advocates call to raise the federal minimum wage nationwide, a new report revisits the lessons of Puget Sound’s ground-breaking success in raising the minimum wage to $15. Puget Sound’s Fight for $15: Family Experiences and Policy Impacts…

News | June 5, 2019

New documentary examines the impact of gentrification in Seattle

If you’ve been in our area for any length of time, you can probably recognize the changes occurring not only in downtown Seattle but across Western Washington. Many feel that gentrification of neighborhoods is stifling cultural communities and their history. On the Brink, a new documentary produced by University of Washington’s Foster School of Business…

News | May 18, 2023

New Fee, Loans Aim to Right ‘Historic Wrong’ of Racist Covenants in Washington State

Members of communities once prohibited from buying homes under racist homeowner agreements, will soon get state homebuying assistance. The law signed last week by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee establishes a new $100 processing fee for homebuyers. The funds raised will help some first-time homebuyers cover down payments and closing costs. Tens of thousands of racially…

News | October 15, 2019

New Phase, Next Steps: Doorway 2.0 Fall Updates

The Doorway Project, a cross-campus and community-engaged project under Urban@UW’s Homelessness Research Initiative, has been busy! Check out their activities and plans for the future in their latest blog post:   Welcome to the Doorway Project blog! As a part of the new phase of the project, which we are calling Doorway Project 2.0, we…

Funding

New Profit – Social Entrepreneurship for Equity

New Profit is currently committed to improving social mobility in the United States by supporting organizations with demonstrated, impressive track records of performance, strong appetites for growth, and high potential for social impact.

News | November 20, 2020

New report by UDP PhD Candidate Katie Idziorek: Toward Universal Access

Urban Design & Planning PhD candidate Katie Idziorek is a co-author on a significant new report published this month: Toward Universal Access: A Case Study in the Los Angeles and Puget Sound Regions. Read an excerpt below:   Approximately 61 million U.S. adults—one quarter of the adult population—live with some form of disability. The Americans with Disabilities…

News | February 3, 2017

New route-finding map lets Seattle pedestrians avoid hills, construction, accessibility barriers

Transportation routing services primarily designed for people in cars don’t give pedestrians, parents pushing bulky strollers or people in wheelchairs much information about how to easily navigate a neighborhood using sidewalks. On Wednesday AccessMap – a University of Washington project spearheaded by the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology — launched a new online travel planner…

News | April 20, 2023

New UW Center for Environmental Health Equity to Launch with a $12 Million Grant from the US EPA

The University of Washington will lead a new center to help address longstanding environmental and energy justice issues—from legacy pollution to energy security—in Pacific Northwest and Alaska Native communities with funding announced today by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The $12 million, five-year EPA cooperative agreement will create the new UW Center for Environmental…

News | August 11, 2021

New UW collaboratory to support equitable and just climate action

An interdisciplinary group of University of Washington researchers has teamed with Front and Centered to create an innovative Collaboratory to promote just and equitable climate action. The Collaboratory aims to respond to climate change impacts with attention to equitable mitigation and adaptation solutions. It will feature three linked platforms to achieve this goal through a…

News | May 2, 2024

New York cities plagued by blackouts due to climate change, study finds

Written by Saul Elbein for The Hill. Climate change is pushing some New York City neighborhoods into dozens of nearly daylong blackouts per year, a new study has found. Large swaths of the state’s principal towns and cities faced repeated, protracted and dangerous weather-driven power outages between 2017 and 2020, according to findings published Wednesday in…

News | September 6, 2023

New York Is Full. And It’s the Housing Market’s Fault

Since last spring, roughly 100,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City. This is a city of immigrants, welcoming to immigrants, built by immigrants. People who were born abroad make up a third of New York’s population and own more than half of its businesses. Yet the city has struggled to accommodate this wave…

News | June 7, 2022

New, stronger rules for truck pollution still would not meet air quality goals

EPA’s proposal to limit toxic pollution from heavy-duty trucks is stronger than anything that has come before it. But state and local air quality agencies say it’s not aggressive enough to meet the federal regulator’s own clean air standards. The National Association of Clean Air Agencies — which represents 115 local air pollution control agencies…

News | February 12, 2016

New! Urban Map Gallery

We’ve created a new urban map gallery to explore how other people and organizations are studying and visualizing data. The gallery features seven cities facing different social, economic, and geographic issues. This curation is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather provide insight and inspiration. Maps included track everything from sound to subway…

Scholar

Nicole Errett

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Nives Dolšak

News | August 29, 2019

No minorities, no meat? Gig economy deepens cities’ divides

When an Indian customer of online food delivery service Zomato tweeted that he had canceled his order because it had been assigned to a non-Hindu worker, and his request for a Hindu denied, thousands weighed in. Last month’s incident was among a long series of allegations of discrimination related to religion, race, gender or sexual…

News | January 3, 2023

Northwestern tribal transportation program center headquartered at UW

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…

News | November 16, 2016

NYC, Chicago mayors join Seattle’s Ed Murray is support of “sanctuary cities” for immigrants

SEATTLE — Democratic mayors of major U.S. cities that have long had cool relationships with federal immigration officials say they’ll do all they can to protect residents from deportation, despite President-elect Donald Trump’s vows to withhold potentially millions of dollars in taxpayer money if they don’t cooperate. New York’s Bill de Blasio, Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel…

News | October 28, 2016

October Recap: Urban Transporation, Health, and Justice

October has seen a lot of research and engagement surrounding urban design, health, and transportation from University of Washington’s urban scholars and practitioners. Here at Urban@UW we’ve kicked off our Livable City Year program, reflected on our first full year of work and collaborations, and are planning for our symposium on Urban Environmental Justice in…

News | March 29, 2024

Office-to-residential conversion is a trendy idea for downtown resurgence — but has big challenges

Originally published in Geekwire Written by Chuck Wolfe, longtime affiliate associate professor in College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. Office-to-residential conversions are frequent fodder in discussions of the post-pandemic city, downtown regeneration, and hopes to contain rising housing costs. Remote work is here to stay, especially in hybrid form in the tech-centric…

News | July 14, 2020

On re-centering the poor in poverty politics

A conversation between LaShawnDa Pittman, American Ethnic Studies, and Jayna Milan, UW Marketing graduate, for the Relational Poverty Network. Jayna Milan: What are priority research topics on impoverishment in this moment? LaShawnDa Pittman: The first thing that I thought about when I saw this question was getting poor people access to the political system and…

News | September 17, 2021

On the 20th anniversary of its Superfund listing, the Duwamish River faces a triple threat

This opinion article was originally written by Paulina López, James Rasmussen, and BJ Cummings, manager of community engagement programs at the University of Washington. This Monday will mark 20 years since Seattle’s hometown river was declared a Superfund site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The Duwamish River’s history is a case study of environmental injustices. The vibrant, marginalized, low-income and…

News | July 1, 2022

Once enslaved, this man helped build Tacoma; his great-granddaughter wants you to know him

He soldiered in the Civil War, helped build Tacoma, became a force in Washington politics and chased the Alaska Gold Rush. John N. Conna, a Black man who was enslaved for the first part of his life, did all of that once he gained his freedom — and more. But his story has mostly vanished…

News | October 8, 2019

One in nine Seattle residents lives below the poverty line

Washington was one of only 14 states in the country where poverty rates fell from 2017 to 2018. According to new Census data released this month, the poverty rate in Seattle is 11 percent, down from 12.5 percent in 2017, but is considered statistically unchanged. Still, about one in nine residents live in poverty. “The…

News | April 7, 2016

One Year On, Seattle Explores Impact Of $15 Minimum Wage Law

NPR’s Ari Shapiro talks with University of Washington Professor Jacob Vigdor about the state of the minimum wage in Seattle, as California and New York move to lift their minimum wages to $15. ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Now, let’s dig deeper into what has happened in Seattle, one of the first big cities to pass that…

News | July 16, 2020

Opportunities to engage UW faculty and students to address COVID-19

In recognition of the intense needs of local governments around COVID-19 response and recovery, the LCY program has compiled a list of existing UW courses whose faculty and students are seeking to assist local communities in COVID-related projects. Most projects can start in Autumn 2020 — some as early as Summer 2020. The list of…

Map

Opportunity Mapping

These maps provided by the Puget Sound Regional Council are a study of the region’s geography of opportunity, based on 2010 census data. “Opportunity” is a situation or condition that places individuals in a position to be more likely to succeed or excel. Opportunity maps illustrate where opportunity rich communities exist, assess who has access…

News | November 21, 2022

Over 40,000 households have racist restrictions, UW researchers estimate

State funding approved last year provided $250,000 for researchers at Eastern Washington University and the University of Washington to look for racist or restrictive covenants. The language has not been enforceable since the 1960s, but lead researcher UW Professor James Gregory said doing the work is worthwhile. ”We owe it to our fellow citizens not…

Scholar

P. Joshua Griffin

News | March 2, 2023

PacTrans Receives USDOT $15M Renewal Award

To continue and expand its important work to improve the movement of people and goods throughout the region, the Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans) has received another green light: a $15 million renewal grant over the course of five years from the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT). “We are grateful for receiving this new grant to…

News | May 28, 2020

Pandemic lays bare the everyday stressors, inequities of marginalized communities

On March 14, two weeks after the first U.S. coronavirus death was announced here in King County and as an onslaught of social distancing policies descended on our communities, we began a research study to understand how 500 King County residents were coping with all of it. Every evening, study participants have been generously sharing with us…

News | October 16, 2015

Panel on Innovation Districts Seeks To Explore How To Foster New Ideas Through Urban Planning

What have we in Seattle learned about Innovation Districts, as we start to create them in places like Pioneer Square and the U District? Knowing that we are growing, what kind of Innovation District do we want? And frankly, what do Innovation Districts have to do with making Seattle a great place to live and…

News | August 2, 2021

Paratransit services for people with disabilities in the Seattle region during the COVID-19 pandemic: Lessons for recovery planning

A new journal article titled, “Paratransit services for people with disabilities in the Seattle region during the COVID-19 pandemic: Lessons for recovery planning” co-written by Urban Design & Planning PhD students Lamis Abu Ashour, Xun Fang, and Yiyuan Wang; as well as Andrew Dannenberg, Affiliate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and Urban Design…

News | November 27, 2018

Parks help cities – but only if people use them

Written by Thaisa Way, faculty director of Urban@UW and Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture in the College of Built Environments. In cities, access to parks is strongly linked with better health for both people and neighborhoods. Children suffer higher rates of obesity when they grow up in urban areas without a park in easy reach. Because low-income neighborhoods have fewer green spaces, poorer…

Scholar

Paula Nurius

News | February 8, 2022

Pedestrian deaths climb in Seattle, despite city’s pledge to eliminate them

Pedestrian fatalities can affect anybody, but Seattle’s Black, homeless, and senior communities are disproportionately impacted. Seattle’s pedestrian fatality rate was 150% higher in the five years after the launch of Vision Zero compared to the five years before, a KUOW analysis of SDOT data found. Yet — cars have been hitting pedestrians less often. That…

Research Beyond UW | University of Pennsylvania

Penn Institute for Urban Research

The Penn Institute for Urban Research (Penn IUR) is a university-wide, interdisciplinary institute at the University of Pennsylvania dedicated to urban research, education, and civic engagement. Affiliated with all 12 schools of the University of Pennsylvania and with the world of practice, Penn IUR fosters collaboration among scholars and policymakers across disciplines to address the…

News | September 19, 2017

People of color exposed to more pollution from cars, trucks, power plants during 10-year period

A new nationwide study finds that the U.S. has made little progress from 2000 to 2010 in reducing relative disparities between people of color and whites in exposure to harmful air pollution emitted by cars, trucks and other combustion sources. The groundbreaking study led by University of Washington Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Julian…

Scholar

Peter Kahn

News | April 28, 2020

PODCAST: An Indigenous community’s fight for educational equity and cultural reclamation

A recent award-winning study by University of Washington College of Education Assistant Professor Shaneé Washington explores the challenges and possibilities for Indigenous families, community members and district educators to engage with one another in culturally sustaining and revitalizing ways. In a new podcast, Washington discusses her study, “Family-School-Community (Dis)Engagement: An Indigenous Community’s Fight for Educational Equity and Cultural…

News | October 11, 2024

Pollinator Village Built by Future Designers

Reported by the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. Photo by Alex Blair. This past summer, the College of Built Environments (CBE) partnered with Sawhorse Revolution, a Seattle-based nonprofit dedicated to fostering confident, community-driven youth through the power of carpentry and craft, to host a transformative three-week intensive program on campus. Fifteen…

News | October 17, 2019

Pop-up galleries and data: Visualizing the lives of homeless people and their animals

Sparked by a grant from the UW Population Health Initiative, the UW’s Center for One Health Research created a series of pop-up galleries featuring autobiographical photographs made by people experiencing homelessness with their animal companions. The first gallery was Oct. 4 in UW’s Red Square. Other pop-up gallery events took place in Occidental Square in Seattle’s Pioneer Square district; in Cal…

Center & Lab

Population Health Initiative

The University of Washington aspires to be the world’s leading university in population health. On May 3, 2016, President Ana Mari Cauce launched a groundbreaking Population Health Initiative by inviting the University community and partners to join in developing a 25-year vision to advance the health of people around the world by leveraging capabilities and…

News | August 24, 2020

Population Health Initiative announces award of 14 COVID-19 population health equity research grants

The University of Washington Population Health Initiative announced the award of approximately $265,000 in COVID-19 population health equity research grants to 14 different teams of UW faculty researchers and community leaders. Funding was partially matched by additional school, college, departmental, and external funds, bringing the total value of these awards to roughly $378,000. These population health equity…

News | May 5, 2020

Population Health Initiative announces award of 21 COVID-19 rapid response grants

The University of Washington Population Health Initiative announced the award of approximately $350,000 in COVID-19 rapid response grants to 21 different faculty-led teams. These teams are composed of individuals representing 10 different schools and colleges. Funding was partially matched by additional school, college and departmental funds, bringing the total value of these awards to roughly $820,000. “A…

News | September 19, 2018

Poverty rates hold steady, average incomes continue to increase in Seattle area and Washington state

The share of Washingtonians living below the federal poverty threshold declined slightly from 11.3 percent to 11 percent between 2016 and 2017, according to new Census data released Thursday. While this change was not statistically significant, the 2017 poverty rate remains below the post-recession high of 14.1 percent in 2013. Washington was one of 28 states and…

News | February 19, 2021

Preliminary Report: Homeshare Study Policy Recommendations

Housing instability is a national crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and Washington state has some of the highest levels of homelessness in the nation. In both rural and urban parts of the state, too few people can afford to rent or own a home on the wages they earn. The 2019-2021 Washington state biennial…

News | August 12, 2021

Project aims to better use of municipal open data, boost equity

In this month’s installment of the Innovation of the Month series, we highlight EquiTensors, a project that is reflecting on and raising awareness of applications, opportunities and potential misuses of data science and AI applied to mobility and transportation, specifically as it refers to race, equity and diversity. MetroLab’s Josh Schacht spoke with the leader of the…

News | September 9, 2019

Project aims to boost care for opioid use among homeless

On August 21, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation and the University of Washington’s Alcohol & Drug Abuse Institute (ADAI) announced the Meds-First Initiative that expands an innovative approach to treating opioid-use disorder for high-acuity populations to four locations in Washington. The treatment sites are located across the state in North Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma and Walla Walla. “Medication…

News | September 17, 2020

Project Highlight: Seattle Street Sink

For many living unsheltered, access to a place to wash up is hard to come by. During the pandemic, it is more important than ever to have accessible hygiene stations. The Real Change Advocacy Department partnered with University of Washington College of Built Environments faculty to design and install environmentally friendly “street sinks”. On May…

News | April 25, 2019

Project Sidewalk helps users map accessibility around Seattle, other cities

About 3.6 million adults in the United States use a wheelchair to get around, according to census data. But unless you’re one of those people, you might not know how hard it is to get around your city. Now people can help map out accessibility here in Seattle. University of Washington researchers have led the development…

News | May 16, 2023

Prolonged Power Outages, Often Caused by Weather Events, Hit Some Parts of the U.S. Harder than Others

A study published April 29 in the journal Nature Communications analyzed three years of power outages across the U.S., finding that Americans already bearing the brunt of climate change and health inequities are clustered in four regions — Louisiana, Arkansas, central Alabama and northern Michigan — and that they are most at risk of impact…

News | June 22, 2020

Protestors want Seattle de-gentrified – This is how it could happen

For more than a week, protesters against police brutality and racial injustice have occupied a six-block stretch of a Seattle neighborhood and turned it into a festive hub for their demonstrations. They named it the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, since renamed the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP), after police withdrew from a police…

News | September 21, 2022

Q&A: Exploring How the Design of the Built Environment Affects Our Health and Well-Being

How does the design of the built environment – such as houses, schools, workplaces, streets, parks, transportation systems, and urban form – affect our health and well-being? To explore these issues, editors Nisha D. Botchwey, Andrew Dannenberg, and Howard Frumkin, recently published the second edition of “Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Well-being, Equity,…

News | October 20, 2022

Q&A: UnlockedMaps provides real-time accessibility information for urban rail transit in six metro areas

While many people use Google Maps and other navigation tools to plan their rail transit trips across a city, these apps and websites often lack important information about how accessible a specific station is. That’s a problem for people who use the elevators, including those with mobility disabilities, pregnant people and commuters with heavy equipment…

News | May 29, 2016

Quick Recap: Here’s What Happened in May!

May saw a lot of wonderful events, visitors, and research coming out of the University of Washington community. Here’s a quick recap: The CBE PhD Program looked at the future of cities Patricia Romero Lankao visited to talk about the human dimension of climate change Seattle’s “diverse neighborhoods” are actually surprisingly segregated New lighting research…

News | April 17, 2024

Quiet! Our Loud World Is Making Us Sick

Written by Joanne Silberner for Scientific America. Ten years ago Jamie Banks started working from her home in the town of ­Lincoln, Mass. After a couple of months, the continuing racket from landscaping machines began to feel unendurable, even when she was inside her home. “This horrible noise was going on for hours every day, every…

Scholar

Quintard Taylor

News | November 27, 2023

RAC projects learning together, building momentum

Co-creation sessions with Duwamish Valley community members and stakeholders that focused on identifying priorities, values, and aspirations for community open space in their neighborhoods. (Credit: Maron Bernardino) After their launch in spring of this year, the two inaugural projects of the Research to Action Collaboratory have been making progress in key ways. Supported by Urban@UW,…

Scholar

Rachel Berney

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Rachel Endo

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Rachel R. Chapman

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Rachel Vaughn

News | August 10, 2023

Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities Are Pervasive in the US, Across Most Causes of Death and in Most Counties, New Study Shows

It’s been more than two years since the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared racism a public health threat, and a new study gives a stark look at just how pervasive racial and ethnic disparities are in the United States. Researchers tracked US mortality data across nearly two decades, breaking rates down by…

News | February 24, 2021

Racial disparities prompt calls to repeal King County’s bicycle helmet law

In the fall of 2019, a white man spat on Edwin Lindo while he was riding his bicycle with a friend around Mercer Island. “It gets on my jersey and I’m like, ‘I can’t believe this is happening right now,’” he recalled. Lindo, who identifies as Central American Indigenous from Nicaragua and El Salvador, and his friend,…

News | February 6, 2021

Racial equity within built environment design practice

Originally written by Jake Minden, MLA Candidate 2021. In my final year of the MLA program, I’ve been given the opportunity to participate in the Applied Research Consortium (ARC), a new program within the college that links graduate students, faculty members, and firms to research a topic that aligns student interest, faculty expertise, and firm…

News | July 9, 2020

Racial justice is an urban issue: A curated list of resources from UW BIPOC scholars

Racial injustice is not a new issue. Segregation and discrimination on the basis of race has long been tied to the built environments across the country, from redlining and restrictive covenants in the mid-1900s, to white flight and suburbanization after World War II, to the current trends of gentrification and displacement in cities throughout the…

Scholar

Ralina L. Joseph

Scholar

Raymond Jonas

News | January 5, 2016

Re-Imaging Urban Scholarship: Differencing the Data

Winter Quarter 2016 | HUM 597E | 1 credit, C/NC Instructor:Thaisa Way (Landscape Architecture) Meeting Dates: Friday, January 15, 12-1:20 pm (Startup Hall) Friday, January 29, 12-1:20 pm (Henry Art Gallery) Tuesday, February 2, and Wednesday, February 3 (Participation encouraged as feasible, Center for Urban Horticulture) Thursday, February 4, 9-10:20 am (eScience Institute, Physics/Astronomy Tower)…

News | February 19, 2016

Reading List for Dr. Mario Small’s Visit 2/25

In anticipation of next week’s lecture with Harvard’s Dr. Mario Luis Small we thought you might enjoy a few readings to get a feel for what exactly he is all about. No Two Ghettos Are Alike – This short piece by Dr. Small shares it’s name with Thursday’s lecture, and explores some of the complex…

News | May 7, 2016

Reading List for Patricia Romero Lankao Visit 5/11

In anticipation of Patricia Romero Lankao’s visit we thought you might enjoy these pieces to get a feel for her research and thinking. Water in Mexico City: What Will Climate Change Bring to Its History of Water-Related Hazards and Vulnerabilities?—This research paper delves into the history and evolution of water related risks and crises in…

Scholar

Rebecca J. Walter

Scholar

Rebecca U. Thorpe

News | August 31, 2021

Red-lining, race, and wealth continue to form borders between Seattle voters

There’s a lot we can glean from Seattle’s voting habits in each election, from how the city has skewed more and more progressive in the leaders it’s elected in recent years, to how conservative interests still remain present despite that fact. During the August mayoral primary, though, the candidates voters chose painted an even broader…

News | July 12, 2023

Redlining Continues to Reverberate in Seattle Nearly a Century Later in Pedestrian Deaths

Could the decades-old government housing discrimination program, commonly called redlining, have anything to do with pedestrian fatalities today? According to a recent national study that compared federal redlining maps of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation with data on 2010–2019 pedestrian deaths from the national Fatality Analysis Reporting System, the answer is yes. A recent study…

News | December 20, 2016

Reflections on Urban Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Change

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…

News | September 16, 2024

Register Today for Urban@UW’s presentation at Climate Week NYC

Urban@UW is heading to the big apple for Climate Week NYC, the largest international conference of business leaders, political change makers, scientists, and civil society representatives working for climate action. Rachel Berney, Faculty Director, and Kate Landis, Program Manager, will present “Call Me, Maybe? University-Community Partnerships for a Greener Tomorrow” on Monday, 9/23, from 5-7PM….

News | June 17, 2024

Rekindling Our Relationship with Wildfire

Written for the Climate One podcast, hosted by Greg Dalton and Ariana Brocious. Summer is just around the corner, and in addition to travel and vacation, that also means peak wildfire season. Recently we’ve seen some of the most destructive wildfires in recorded history. The images on the news of orange skies and opaque haze…

Center & Lab

Relational Poverty Network

The Relational Poverty Network convenes a community of scholars, working within and beyond academia, to develop conceptual frameworks, research methodologies, and pedagogies for the study of relational poverty. Launched at a historical moment of dramatic income inequality and enforced austerity in the global North, the RPN thinks across geographical boundaries to foster a transnational and…

Scholar

Renée Cheng

News | October 1, 2020

Renée Cheng: Change Agency, Value Change

Collisions are violent. The greater the mass or velocity of objects, the greater the energy released. The crises of the pandemic, economic crash, and social justice outcries are massive and still accelerating. In the wake of their collision, they will reveal new questions for our profession—and newfound energy to address them. Previously, architects pondering whether…

Map | Berlin

Rents in Berlin

This interactive map helps users identify which neighborhoods they can afford. A slider allows you to select a monthly net income for your household and by selecting the number of rooms required (bedrooms +1), the map will display rental data for each of the areas marked on the map. The map is color-coded to show…

News | April 17, 2016

Rethinking Data Science for the Social Sciences: Urban Sociology

On Wednesday, May 4th, an interdisciplinary panel will explore the intersections of data and cities. Rethinking Data Science for the Social Sciences: Urban Sociology will look at how the availability of new forms of data has transformed the way researchers may approach their work across disciplines. This panel will bring together experts from data science…

Scholar

Reuben Deleon

Scholar

Richard Watts

News | August 20, 2020

Rick Mohler receives Architect magazine 2020 R+D award for housing access prototype ‘ADUniverse’

Rick Mohler, UW associate professor of architecture, has won a 2020 R+D Award from Architect magazine for a project designed with Seattle city planner Nick Welch to give local homeowners the information they need to plan and build accessory dwelling units on their property. The two led a team at the UW Data Science for Social Good Program in creating a prototype…

Scholar

Rishi Sugla

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Rob Corser

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Robert Plotnick

Funding

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Pioneering Ideas and a Culture of Health

The goal of the Pioneering Ideas Brief Proposal funding opportunity is to explore; to look into the future and put health first as we design for changes in how we live, learn, work and play; to wade into uncharted territory in order to better understand what new trends, opportunities and breakthrough ideas can enable everyone…

Funding

Rose Foundation – Puget Sound Stewardship and Mitigation Fund

The Foundation is accepting applications to its Puget Sound Stewardship and Mitigation Fund, which supports community-based efforts to mitigate past pollution runoff and protect or improve the water quality of Puget Sound. The foundation is particularly interested in proposals that benefit water quality in the following areas: the waters of central Puget Sound, especially Elliott…

News | December 17, 2020

Round 2 of Washington study underway to determine food, economic insecurity during pandemic

Understanding Washington residents’ access to food and their economic well-being – or lack of it – during the COVID-19 pandemic is vital for state and community partners to identify those needs and allocate resources effectively. To help accomplish this goal, the University of Washington, Washington State University and Tacoma Community College, along with input from…

Scholar

Ryan Hasert

Map | Mumbai

Safecity Mumbai

​This crowdsourced map helps women feel safer navigating through Mumbai and other cities in India. Safecity users can report and view incidents of talking, catcalls, indecent exposure, touching, assault, poor lighting and more.

News | February 6, 2019

Salad, soda and socioeconomic status: Mapping a social determinant of health in Seattle

Seattle residents who live in waterfront neighborhoods tend to have healthier diets compared to those who live along Interstate-5 and Aurora Avenue, according to new research on social disparities from the University of Washington School of Public Health. The study used local data to model food consumption patterns by city block. Weekly servings of salad and soda…

Scholar

Samuel Kay

Scholar

Sara Curran

Scholar

Sara Jo Breslow

Scholar

Sarah Elwood

News | October 9, 2018

Save the Date for the next Doorway Project Pop-Up

Doorway Project Pop-Up cafe is coming to the HUB South Ballroom at the UW Seattle Campus, 12-4pm, Thursday, October 18th. Learn more about addressing youth homelessness. Stop by and get connected to resources for housing, education, food, and more. Everyone is invited to this event! Food, drinks, and art are provided through the pay-it-forward cafe…

News | July 14, 2020

Saving Seattle’s pandemic and protest murals

In Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, a three-eyed alien is currently offering free hugs in an alcove of Broadway Market. Less than two miles away, a giant pink sloth tells Pioneer Square passersby to “hang in there.” It’s not just creatures populating the plywood covering so many Seattle businesses. Starry skies, cotton candy clouds, many gardens’ worth of flowers…

News | April 16, 2020

School budgets are in big trouble, especially in high-poverty areas. Here’s why — and what could help

When the last recession hit school budgets about a decade ago, it didn’t hit them equally. Affluent school districts saw their state funding drop by more than $500 per student after the downturn. High-poverty districts in the same state lost much more: over $1,500 per student in state funds. Now, the coronavirus has brought much of…

News | August 5, 2021

Scientist tests soil for hidden contaminants in community gardens

This year saw many people rediscovering an interest in gardening, digging in the dirt and maybe even harvesting vegetables from a garden plot. But around the Puget Sound, not all garden soils are created equal. Soil, particularly in urban areas, can hold contaminants that are unhealthy for people who handle it or eat things grown…

Scholar

Scott W. Allard

News | July 30, 2020

Searching for climate and inequity hot spots, by car

Fifteen cars with blue snorkels jutting up from their passenger windows drove around King County on Monday, the hottest day the Seattle area has seen in 2020. Volunteer drivers crisscrossed roads from Shoreline to Enumclaw. Their odd window attachments were used to record temperature and humidity measurements every second. Shortly after sunrise, when the city’s…

News | July 14, 2020

Searching for Seattle’s hidden Latino history

Just about every week in the Seattle area, it seems, there’s news of yet another iconic local theater or ornate apartment building threatened with demolition. It’s part of the deal for a booming region where people want to live and work, and where developers and investors are eager to capitalize on real estate transactions and…

News | August 26, 2022

Seattle Approaches to Homelessness Highlighted in NYT Guest Essay

Urban@UW occasionally shares opinion pieces that touch on research related to urban topics. Here, we share a guest essay in the New York Times, titled, “Something Better Than a Tent for the Homeless”: The needs of homeowners and businesses and those of people who are unsheltered often conflict. Community leaders, faced with increasing crime and…

News | November 5, 2019

Seattle area has undergone record growth. Now voters may reshape its politics.

The Seattle region has more of almost everything than it did just six years ago, when voters chose to elect City Council members by districts. The area has added 135,000 homes, but has seen its population swell by 400,000. Homelessness has spiked by a third. Amazon’s workforce here has exploded from 13,000 to nearly 55,000….

News | July 9, 2020

Seattle arose from a tortuously transformed Duwamish River

When we think of waters that define Seattle, which ones come to mind? Puget Sound and Elliott Bay, with Lake Washington and Lake Union close behind. Perhaps Green Lake. Don’t forget the Lake Washington Ship Canal. But what about the seemingly invisible Duwamish River, harnessed (some say ravaged) beyond original recognition and poisoned beyond palatability? Shouldn’t…

News | July 29, 2021

Seattle Black faith leaders urge Mayor Durkan not to sign amended density bonus bill

Update: Council Bill 120081 was signed into law on by Mayor Durkan on July 9, 2021. Critics are still hoping that the amended law can be repealed. Critics are demanding a return to the 80% AMI threshold for affordable housing developed on land owned by religious institutions. It was a long-awaited day, one that was supposed to mark…

News | April 8, 2024

Seattle Civic Poet Shin Yu Pai launches new public poetry project on April 1

Originally reported in Northwest Asian Weekly by Kai Curry. National Poetry Month takes place every year in April. Its purpose is to increase awareness and appreciation of poetry nationwide. This year, Seattle residents will have the privilege and pleasure of discovering, installed throughout various parts of the city, poems by local poets on topics of…

Center & Lab

Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project

The Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project represents a unique collaboration involving community groups, UW faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and their efforts to map, archive and disseminate historic information on racial segregation and civil rights activism within Seattle.

Funding

Seattle Foundation

Few regions in the world can match Seattle’s current growth and prosperity. But accompanying our good fortune are great challenges, including the widening disparities between rich and poor. Such inequities weaken the vibrancy of our community. Philanthropy can—and must—step in. Using our philanthropic expertise, deep roots in the community and network of partners, Seattle Foundation…

News | July 16, 2020

Seattle groups present proposal to defund police department, invest in community

On July 8, Seattle and King County groups proposed several ways to allocate money from defunding the Seattle Police Department, all of which involve reinvesting in community-based programs. The plan comes as thousands of people have been protesting for weeks, marching in the streets in Seattle and across the country fighting against police brutality and systemic…

News | September 4, 2018

Seattle Growth Podcast 5.3: Homeless in Seattle

The fifth season of the Seattle Growth Podcast continues the wide-ranging conversation about the city’s growing homelessness crisis. “Each episode of this season brings voices from a variety of perspectives,” says podcast host Jeff Shulman Associate Professor of Marketing in the Foster school of Business. “Together, the episodes will help listeners understand homelessness from multiple angles, become better informed…

News | August 28, 2018

Seattle Growth Podcast 5.4: Homelessness and City Hall

The fifth season of the Seattle Growth Podcast continues the wide-ranging conversation about the city’s growing homelessness crisis. Episode 4 takes you behind the scenes at Seattle City Hall as the City Council weighed a controversial “head tax” on companies to raise more money to address the crisis. City Council member Teresa Mosqueda shares her opinion on the failed campaign and…

News | August 14, 2019

Seattle Growth Podcast 6.10: Case studies in building ‘neighborhood’ communities

Season six of the Seattle Growth Podcast, produced by UW Foster School of Business professor of marketing Jeff Shulman, has explored the many ways that Seattleites are building or finding a sense of community in a city that is growing and changing so rapidly. Episode 6.10 looks at efforts to build community within, well, communities. Neighborhoods…

News | August 7, 2019

Seattle Growth Podcast 6.8: Empowering youth and underserved communities

“Community” is essential to people of all ages. As season six of the Seattle Growth Podcast by UW Foster School of Business professor of Marketing Jeff Shulman continues to explore how Seattleites are building or finding a sense of community in a city that is growing and changing so rapidly, episode 6.8 introduces two people who are committed to…

News | April 4, 2023

Seattle Has a Dearth of Monuments to Women

Among hundreds of pieces of public art in Seattle, you’ll find few depicting real-life women from any point in history. The City of Seattle’s civic art collection, which includes more than 400 permanent installations, contains only one outdoor monument honoring a female historical figure. That sculpture is of Sadako Sasaki, who survived the Hiroshima bombing…

News | January 9, 2024

Seattle now has highest minimum wage of any major city in the United States

As of Jan. 1, Seattle hiked its minimum wage to $19.97 an hour for workers at larger companies like Starbucks. That’s the highest minimum wage of any major city in the U.S. Former labor leader David Rolf, who drove the original push for a higher minimum wage law in Seattle and SeaTac around a decade…

News | July 10, 2024

Seattle Nurses Take Heart Care to the Streets

Written by Christine Clarridge for Axios. Two Harborview nurses are leaving the hospital to make “house calls” at tents, bus stops and cars to bring life-saving heart care to people where they are. Why it matters: The Community Heart Failure Program not only stabilizes patients’ cardiac health but also reduces hospital admissions, lengths of stay…

News | June 30, 2020

Seattle OKs transfer of old UW laundry near Mount Baker light rail station to build affordable housing

The Seattle City Council voted unanimously on June 22 to acquire a former UW Medical Center laundry next to the Mount Baker light rail station to develop affordable housing. The transfer comes at no cost to the city, and the project will count toward the 450 units of affordable housing the university agreed to build when the council…

News | June 24, 2019

Seattle upgrades A/C at some community centers ahead of predicted wildfires

It wasn’t a picture postcard August last year in Seattle. Seattle icons, the Space Needle, ferries crossing the water, the Great Wheel spinning colorfully on the waterfront were barely visible because of smoke from Canadian wildfires. The Emerald City saw 24 days of moderately unhealthy levels of particulates in the air during the summer because…

News | March 1, 2021

Seattle will use a UW-developed mapping tool to guide equitable vaccine distribution

As it strives to improve equitable vaccine distribution, the city of Seattle will use a new mapping tool to help it site future mobile and pop-up clinics and, eventually, mass vaccination sites. The map, developed by the University of Washington, lets the city compare, by ZIP code and census tract, communities’ COVID-19 positivity rates and…

News | September 23, 2020

Seattle-area families of color are talking about improving remote education. Here are some of their ideas.

Regina Elmi is the executive director of the Somali Parent Education Board. Ann Ishimaru is associate professor of education at the University of Washington. The authors wrote this piece along with 10 other African American, Somali, Latina and Vietnamese parent leaders from the Renton, Federal Way, Kent, Highline and Seattle school districts. Thousands of families…

News | May 7, 2024

Seattle-area housing market picks up, but buyers feel the squeeze

Written by Heidi Grover for The Seattle Times The Seattle area’s spring housing market continued to heat up in April, with more activity and higher home prices across the region, particularly in King County. The number of new listings and home sales climbed throughout the Puget Sound region in April, a typical seasonal uptick. But…

News | May 10, 2019

Seattle-area universities and colleges declare Affordable Housing Week, May 13-17

They join 25 cities and King County in recognizing the importance of safe, healthy, affordable housing. The presidents of four Seattle-area universities and colleges have joined forces to declare May 13-17, 2019 as Affordable Housing Week on their campuses. Dr. John Mosby, president of Highline College; Dr. Daniel J. Martin, president of Seattle Pacific University;…

News | September 25, 2018

Seattle-area women of color share how they navigate the workplace

Seven years ago, right before I moved to the United States from Singapore, the concept of equality was a resounding reassurance offered wherever I would go. Friends, neighbors and family members would say, “Everyone is equal there … you just have to work hard.” The cliché hits me in full force in hindsight, but back…

News | June 30, 2020

Seattle’s activist-occupied zone is just the latest in a long history of movements and protests

The six blocks of occupied Seattle streets now known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or “CHOP”, have become a focal point of the nationwide anti-racist protests, eliciting both encouragement and concern. But for this Pacific Northwest city, it is far from the first time in the radical spotlight. Seattle has a long and storied history of…

News | July 22, 2022

Seattle’s soda tax benefits low-income communities, study finds

A new study concludes that Seattle’s soda tax isn’t disproportionately harming lower-income families — and is actually benefiting lower-income households as a group. University of Washington researchers analyzed sugary drink purchases across more than 1,100 households in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle in the first year the cities enacted soda taxes. In all three cities,…

News | July 23, 2020

Seattle’s tarnished dream

In his 2017 State of the City address, then-mayor Ed Murray declared that “Seattle will shine a light and offer a different vision.” He promised a city where all four-year-olds attended preschool, where all high school graduates had access to free community college, and where strict labor standards guaranteed the lowliest worker a reasonable standard…

News | January 17, 2023

Seattle’s cost of living is more complicated than you think

How much money does a family of four need to live in Seattle without financial assistance? The cheeky answer: about $2,000 more than they have at the moment. The real answer: crucially dependent, especially for those who make the least, on who you ask. Statistical sticklers might point to the Department of Health and Human…

News | June 11, 2019

Seattle’s forgotten street community: UW anthropologist talks about the unique circumstances of vehicle residency

From tiny houses to encampment sweeps, from proposed business taxes to small armies of volunteers, Seattle’s homeless crisis has sparked a series of possible solutions, along with controversy. But often missing from conversations about “homelessness,” says the University of Washington’s Graham Pruss, is attention to people who live in their vehicles. More than 11,000 people are…

News | June 27, 2022

Seattle’s history of Black language: African American English, code-switching and why it matters today

“Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round” is a crowd favorite for the Northwest African American Museum’s African American Choir Ensemble. Based on the spiritual “Don’t You Let Nobody Turn You ’Round,” the song is a civil rights anthem with lyrics that reflect a piece of the Black experience: “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me…

News | July 12, 2022

Seattle’s Homelessness Chief Worries Inflation Will Erode Progress

The head of Seattle’s new agency responding to homelessness — in a city with one of the largest unhoused populations in the US — is concerned more people are about to land on the street because of inflation and rising prices for necessities like gas. With the pandemic making the challenges of homelessness more acute and more visible, Margaret…

News | October 24, 2019

Seattle’s treasured P-Patch community gardens face uncertain future

Have you stumbled on a P-Patch community garden in your neighborhood? These beehives of gardening and community populate every corner of Seattle. Both the gardens and the people are as diverse as the neighborhoods they serve. From sprawling production farms to tiny lots, each provides a green respite, an open and interactive space. To those…

News | April 26, 2024

Seattle’s troubled past and present suggest a new approach to mental health

Written by Will James, Sydney Brownstone, and Esme Jimenez as part of the series “Lost Patients” for KUOW, an NPR Station. Edward Moore, a 32-year-old sailor, was discovered, near freezing and living in a tattered tent on the shore near current day Seattle in 1854. At the time, Washington was still a territory and Seattle…

Scholar

Sebawit (Seba) Bishu

News | August 14, 2019

See how a Seattle artist is telling the painful story of redlining in his city

Warren Pope is hellbent on walloping the corneas of any Seattleite who believes this city is absolved from a racist past. With “Warren Pope: Blood Lines, Time Lines, Red Lines,” an exhibition running through Sept. 8 at the Northwest African American Museum (NAAM), the 72-year-old West Seattle artist says he yearns to expose how the…

Scholar

Seema Clifasefi

Scholar

Shaneé A. Washington

Scholar

Shannon Harper

Scholar

Shirley J. Yee

News | January 25, 2018

Shocker: It’s mostly men moving to Seattle for tech jobs

For every four men who moved to Seattle for a tech job in the last decade, only one woman did, too, according to a recent analysis that looked at the trend of tech transplants nationwide.To industry experts and academics, the findings from the careers website Paysa.com came as no surprise. The data is more of…

News | August 23, 2023

Should Governments Be Blamed for Climate Change? How One Lawsuit Could Change US Policies

A landmark ruling saying Montana has a constitutional duty to guard residents from the harmful effects of climate change could have wider implications, environmental experts said. In a decision Monday lauded by activists as a potential turning point for the environmental movement, District Court Judge Kathy Seeley sided with young plaintiffs who claimed state policies…

News | February 1, 2024

Should social media pay for addicting kids? Seattle schools lawsuit gains steam

Reported by KUOW Written by Sami West A year into Seattle Public Schools’ lawsuit against social media companies, the case is gaining traction. More than 50 school districts in Washington state — and dozens more across the country — have joined Seattle’s lawsuit. Seattle became the first district to sue social media platforms last January,…

News | July 27, 2023

Signature Biden Program Won’t Fix Racial Gap in Air Quality, Study Suggests

A new analysis has found that the White House’s signature environmental justice program may not shrink racial disparities in who breathes the most polluted air, in part because of efforts to ensure that it could withstand legal challenges. The program, called Justice40, aims to address inequalities by directing 40 percent of the benefits from certain…

News | December 15, 2017

Skid Road: The intersection of health and homelessness

After years of caring for the homeless in the streets and dilapidated motels of Richmond, Virginia, nurse Josephine Ensign became homeless herself. Many of her patients were prostitutes—some as young as 15—and her conscience no longer allowed her to adhere to her clinic’s policies. Though she was Christian, she was fired for referring many of…

Center & Lab

Social Development Research Group (SDRG)

For over 30 years the Social Development Research Group (SDRG) has sought to investigate and promote healthy behaviors and positive social development in youth and adults. SDRG is a recognized leader in the field of prevention research. Our efforts to understand how risk and protective factors influence development have resulted in hundreds of articles in…

Degree Program

Social Welfare (BA, PhD) / Social Work (MSW)

We offer nationally recognized academic programs, leading edge research, and a wide range of supervised field education opportunities to help you build professional expertise, hone investigative skills, and foster the ability to lead and serve in a multicultural world. These rich learning opportunities allow you to connect and collaborate with social work students, committed faculty…

Degree Program

Sociology (Major, PhD)

The Department of Sociology at the University of Washington is one of the oldest Sociology departments in the country. Our distinguished faculty is actively engaged in both research and teaching, and we aim to bring excitement about Sociology to all our interactions with students. Our undergraduate major graduates several hundred students each year, and offers…

News | November 25, 2019

Some communities feel the effects of air pollution more than others

Power plants are prolific particulate producers. To generate energy, power plants burn fossil fuels, and the combustion spews gases and fine specks of pollution into the air. Air pollution affects everyone, but experts are now warning that exposure levels can weigh heavier on certain racial and ethnic communities, independent of their income levels. And even…

News | July 19, 2018

Sound Transit rail stations could help solve our housing crisis

All of Sound Transit’s LINK light-rail stations offer opportunities to create vibrant, walkable mixed-use communities with significant amounts of new housing and reduced dependence on automobiles. We need a bold, regional approach to housing affordability, says Rick Mohler, Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, and  Al Levine, Associate Faculty at the Department of Urban Design…

News | January 8, 2021

Spanaway tops list of toughest places in the U.S. to buy a home

When Eric Seiler started looking to buy a house near Spanaway at the height of this year’s coronavirus lockdowns, he thought he might find a buyers’ market. Instead, Seiler and his fiancée started on a home search that involved making at least 15 offers on homes, only to be beat out by other buyers. “There…

News | July 16, 2024

SPARK Grant Recipients Win Big with a Social Justice Jacket

Reported by Kate Landis for Urban@UW What if a denim jacket could tell the stories of people impacted by housing inequality across the country? Resistive Threads, a project that was awarded a Urban@UW SPARK grant in 2023, was recently awarded a Honorable Mention at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference,…

News | November 7, 2023

Spark Grants Complete Collaborative Research on Artificial Turf, Food Bank Home Delivery, and Urban Streetwear

An electronic denim jacket, an artistic collaboration to depict Black residents’ urban experiences. (credit: Bret Halperin) Over the past year, three teams of researchers from the University of Washington tackled a host of urban challenges in our region with the support of Urban@UW’s Spark Grants. In September 2022,  Urban@UW awarded $20,000 to each team in…

News | October 25, 2022

Sparking Climate Connections – UW Lightning Talks on Climate Change

Addressing our climate crisis can’t be done alone; this all-hands-on-deck moment requires as many voices, disciplines and perspectives as possible to forge connections that will inspire collective action. Urban@UW and the EarthLab Advisory Board of Deans invite you to participate in an exciting two-part event bringing together the rich variety of climate change related research…

News | August 20, 2020

Special Collections Library launches new digital exhibit on protest history in Seattle

For the last few months, Abbey Maynard, Student Reference Assistant and Visual Materials Student Assistant at the UW Libraries Special Collections, has been working on creating a new digital exhibit: We Are All The Conspiracy: The Day After Protest, Seattle 7, and Community Activism in 1970s Seattle, featuring material about the Seattle Liberation Front (SLF), a political…

News | December 9, 2015

SPH Faculty Tap into New UW Effort to Create More Livable Cities

A new University of Washington initiative is thinking “upstream” when it comes to creating safer, healthier and more livable cities. Urban@UW aims to bring together UW faculty, staff and students from different disciplines with city decision-makers and citizens to wrestle with urban issues such as housing and poverty, growth and transportation, and food and economic…

News | May 26, 2020

SPH partners with state health department to reach vulnerable communities about COVID-19

What do communities most vulnerable to COVID-19 need to know about the disease, and what are the most effective methods for reaching them? These are questions a partnership between the University of Washington School of Public Health and the Washington State Department of Health seeks to answer. To better understand the information needs of communities…

Scholar

Stan de Mello

Scholar

Stephanie Farquhar

Scholar

Stephen M. Gardiner

Scholar

Stephen Meyers

Scholar

Stevan Harrell

Scholar

Steve Herbert

News | February 16, 2024

Student Housing Has a New Mantra: Bigger Is Better

Written by Kevin Williams for The New York Times Off-campus complexes are getting larger, with some being home to more than 1,500 students, and being built on prime parcels of land as close to campus as possible. When the Standard, an off-campus student housing complex, opened in the fall in Bloomington, Ind., welcoming its first…

News | August 20, 2018

Student volunteers help expand UW’s outreach to homeless youth

It started with a Sunday afternoon café outside a community center last December — the University of Washington’s new initiative to reach homeless youth around the U District. In the eight months since, the UW’s effort, known as The Doorway Project, has offered a café in the neighborhood each quarter, while students have helped add services — from…

News | August 3, 2018

Students push public transit policy

Public transit systems are lifelines that connect people to jobs, education and opportunity. And students at the University of Washington School of Public Health are working to give Seattle residents a bit more slack. Students met with the Seattle City Council’s Sustainability & Transportation Committee last month to discuss ways to expand access to public…

News | June 30, 2020

Study asks Washington state residents to describe food security and access during pandemic, economic downturn

The Washington State Food Security Survey, which went live June 18 and runs through July 31, is open to all Washington state residents aged 18 or over. It was created by researchers at the University of Washington, Washington State University and Tacoma Community College, along with input from partners in local, county and state governments —…

News | March 20, 2019

Study Finds Racial Gap Between Who Causes Air Pollution And Who Breathes It

Pollution, much like wealth, is not distributed equally in the United States. Scientists and policymakers have long known that black and Hispanic Americans tend to live in neighborhoods with more pollution of all kinds, than white Americans. And because pollution exposure can cause a range of health problems, this inequity could be a driver of unequal health outcomes across…

News | March 21, 2019

Study points to grocery store gap, inequity in access to healthy foods in the Seattle area

Seattle neighborhoods that are lower income or that have more Black or Hispanic residents have fewer options for healthy foods, more fast food and longer travel times to stores that sell produce, according to a new study by the University of Washington School of Public Health and Public Health – Seattle & King County, in Washington. The…

News | July 21, 2016

Study: Perceived threats from police officers, black men predict support for policing reforms

At a time of intense national attention on law enforcement and race, a new University of Washington study suggests that racially based fear plays a role in public support for policing reforms. The research, conducted by UW postdoctoral researcher Allison Skinner and published online July 12 in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology, used a…

Scholar

Sue Sohng

News | September 12, 2018

Summer Design/Build Studio 2018

Food and the ability to prepare it are fundamental components of life. Places of food preparation–whether a home kitchen or a fire pit–serve not only their most explicit functions but also act as cultural gathering spaces for families and communities. Food preparation poses particularly unique challenges in Seattle’s homeless communities for individuals, families and larger…

Scholar

Susan E. Collins

Scholar

Susan P. Kemp

Center & Lab

Sustainable Transportation Lab

In the Sustainable Transportation Lab, we study how to make our transportation system more economically viable, environmentally benign, while ensuring access to opportunities for all.

Degree Program

Sustainable Urban Development (BA)

Accomplishing sustainable urban development is a crucial challenge for the twenty-first century. The University of Washington Tacoma is at the forefront of engaging and educating undergraduate students on this topic. The Sustainable Urban Development degree provides students with a critical and rigorous training in ecological, political, economic, and social aspects of urban development processes.

Scholar

Suzanne Davies Withers

News | February 20, 2021

Systemic racism affects wildlife, too: A Q&A with an urban ecologist

What makes the country mouse different from the city mouse? Christopher Schell is a wildlife ecologist who has been curious about this dynamic his entire career. Though he specializes in coyotes instead of mice, the question remains the same. Schell, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Tacoma, is also part of a growing…

News | August 17, 2020

Systemic racism has consequences for all life in cities

Social inequalities, specifically racism and classism, are impacting the biodiversity, evolutionary shifts, and ecological health of plants and animals in our cities. That’s the main finding of a review paper led by the University of Washington, with co-authors at the University of California, Berkeley, and University of Michigan, which examined more than 170 published studies and analyzed…

Scholar

Tania M. Busch Isaksen

News | April 7, 2021

Taskar Center researchers offer a roadmap for more robust modeling of pedestrian mobility on a city-wide scale

Many approaches to measuring and supporting city-wide mobility lack the level of detail required to truly understand how pedestrians navigate the urban landscape, not to mention the quality of their journey. Transit apps can direct someone to the nearest bus stop, but they may not account for obstacles or terrain on the way to their…

News | August 14, 2019

Tech companies step up to fund affordable housing, but experts say it’s not enough to curb shortages

Microsoft pledged $500 million for affordable housing in January. Five months later, Google said it would invest $1 billion to help the Bay Area housing crisis. Amazon and Salesforce also announced contributions of their own this year. Major tech companies are stepping up to help mitigate affordable housing shortages, caused in part by the influx of high-income labor they have imported to the…

News | August 31, 2020

Terms in Seattle-area rental ads reinforce neighborhood segregation, study says

A new University of Washington study of thousands of local rental ads finds a pattern of “racialized language” that can perpetuate neighborhood segregation, using specific terms to describe apartments in different areas of town. Terms like “convenient” and “safe and secure” are more common in neighborhoods with a greater proportion of people of color, while…

Scholar

Thaisa Way

Center & Lab

The Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity

The CCDE strives to be a space where our community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni gather to promote greater equity. Through research collaborations, networking opportunities, action-oriented classes, mentorship programs, and community events we engage in dialogue to think critically about race and its intersections, to interrupt privilege, and ultimately to change the structures of…

Research Beyond UW | Case Western Reserve University

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development (the Poverty Center) works to inform public policy and program planning through data and analysis to address urban poverty, its causes, and its impact on communities and their residents. Since our founding in 1988, our mission has broadened to understand and address poverty by delving into its…

News | December 16, 2019

The Central District has lost over a dozen of its Black churches. The rest may still be saved

There’s little doubt that The Nehemiah Initiative faces an immense challenge combating the displacement of African Americans from central Seattle. When you drive through the Central District today, you see gentrification in its stark reality. New market-rate buildings line the intersections of 23rd Avenue and East Union Street, as well as 23rd and South Jackson…

Research Beyond UW | Queen Mary University of London

The City Centre

In 2006, the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London, launched a new centre for collaborative research and related activities that are focused on the city. The City Centre is designed to provide a space in which academic research can be developed and communicated with those within and beyond the academy. Particular interests…

News | May 21, 2020

The coronavirus is hitting Pierce County’s communities of color hard, health data shows

People of color are being hit hard by the coronavirus in Pierce County. New data from the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department show native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, Hispanics and blacks are suffering from COVID-19 at rates far above their percentages of the county population. “We are very concerned about the significant disparities we are…

News | January 16, 2019

The deed to your Seattle-area home may contain racist language. Here’s how to fix it.

Starting in the 1920s, covenants in force throughout the region allowed only white people to own property in most neighborhoods in Seattle. The covenants were outlawed in the 1960s, but now a new state law allows property owners to strike them from a property deed. They date back to a time when racial discrimination was…

News | November 6, 2020

The Digital Divide: Gender and technology in an unequal world

All over the world, digital literacy and access to technology are commonly divided along gender and racial lines. During a global pandemic that has forced an even stronger reliance on technology than before, the disproportionate and inadequate access that lower-income women of color face is clear, both around the United States and in the Global…

News | October 27, 2020

The Doorway Project October Update

Urban@UW is a proud partner in The Doorway Project, a cross-campus and community-engaged project under the Homelessness Research Initiative. Below we share their quarterly update: Last month, The Doorway Project, in collaboration with University District Youth Center, hosted a community dialogue (Real Talk Thursday) on the topic of ‘voter apathy.’ That conversation feels even more relevant…

News | April 23, 2019

The Doorway Project: Spring Pop-Up Cafe

Come join The Doorway Project for lunch, coffee and community at their final Pop-Up Cafe and Town Hall event at the UW School of Social Work. They will be hosting a no-cost vet clinic for folks experiencing homelessness or housing instability and their pets, sponsored by the UW Center for One Health Research. Come add…

News | February 6, 2018

The Doorway project’s second pop-up cafe

Save The Date: The Doorway Project’s second pop-up cafe will be open on Sunday February 25, from 2:00pm-4:00pm at the University Heights Center, 5031 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105. Everyone is welcome to attend this free, family-friendly event to listen to live music, enjoy warm beverages and food. No one will be turned away…

News | February 22, 2021

The downsides of being a tech hub: Housing disruption and inequality

With the technology sector’s astronomical growth over the past two decades, there has been no shortage of cities vying to be the next Silicon Valley. But while there are many benefits to being a tech hub – from increased wealth to inflows of talent – there are downsides, too, including polarised inequality and increased pressure on…

News | March 3, 2020

The Effects of Seattle Housing Crisis

Aaron, who lives with his wife Silje and their two children in a parking lot outside of Seattle, begins his day in darkness, making a two-hour commute by scooter and bus to his job at the post office.  “You do what you need to get through a given day. You get rest when you can,”…

News | January 20, 2021

The environmental psychology of COVID-19 with Professor Lynne Manzo

We are living through a new reality, adjusting to life during a global pandemic. We are all changing our routines, our travel plans, our holiday traditions. For those of us who have been able to keep our jobs through this economic crash, we have had to adapt to a new working environment, working from our…

Funding

The Funders’ Network: Green Stormwater Infrastructure

Partners for Places, an initiative of The Funders' Network, enhances local capacity to build equitable and sustainable communities in the United States and Canada. These grants support the planning and implementing of green stormwater infrastructure. Water directors of a city, county, or utility and one or more place-based foundations are eligible to apply. For Round…

News | August 27, 2020

The historian of Seattle hip-hop

In 1979, when Daudi Abe was 9, his father took him to Dirt Cheap Records and set him loose to explore. After a few minutes in the Central District store, Abe came up to the cashier carrying a 12-inch vinyl single with the words “Sugar Hill” across the top. “I just liked the sky-blue cover,”…

News | July 26, 2021

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on low-income tenants’ housing security in Washington state

Originally written by Matthew Fowle, Ph.D Candidate and Rachel Fyall, Associate Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance. The COVID-19 pandemic and related economic recession have had a substantial negative impact on low-income tenants’ housing security. A record number of households have been unable to pay their rent on-time. To stem the threat of…

News | September 14, 2016

The library, the new happening place to be

Everywhere, people are deserting the public space. They’re not standing in line at the bank: They’re banking online. They’re not shopping for clothes at the mall: They’re getting clothes mailed to them at home. The internet is enabling people to meet their needs without going out. Librarians have seen this coming for years, and many…

News | January 30, 2020

The Middle-Class Housing Crisis in Seattle

Kara Peters works at Seattle’s Central Library. She’s a third-generation Washingtonian who grew up in West Seattle. “Grandma, she did Mary Kay. She had four daughters who all went to West Seattle High School,” Peters said. But unlike her parents and grandparents, Peters can’t afford a house in Seattle, even though she makes a decent income. In…

Center & Lab

The Minimum Wage Study

The Minimum Wage Study is a research effort dedicated to providing rigorous analysis of the impact of minimum wage ordinances in metropolitan regions and states. We seek to provide insights that will be useful for policymakers and scholars. As more states and localities move forward with plans to raise the minimum wage, this research will…

News | September 15, 2020

The pandemic is transforming how Americans use public libraries, parks, and streets — and it’s depriving vulnerable people of space when they need it most

On a Friday in early March, Jennifer Pearson looked around her library in Lewisburg, Tennessee. “The library was full of older people,” Pearson, the library’s director, said. “I thought, if I don’t close this space, they will never stop coming to it, so I have to close it, for their good and for my staff.”…

News | September 9, 2022

The Past, Present and Future of Tipping and Tipped Workers in Seattle

Today, Washington state and Seattle have some of the best laws in the U.S. when it comes to protecting tipped workers, but the practice of tipping has an ugly beginning and a rocky past. As service industries (where most tipping happens) continue to be shaken up by the pandemic, and as the emerging gig economy…

News | August 30, 2024

The pros and cons of spraying pesticides to keep disease-carrying mosquito populations down

Written by Julia Jacobo for ABC News Researchers are trying to find ways to quell growing mosquito populations that spread disease without putting recovering populations of important pollinators like bees and butterflies at risk. Pesticides are an important management tool for mosquito control as well as for other pests that impact agriculture, Laura Melissa Guzman, assistant…

News | July 15, 2024

The Quinault Nation and the Rising Pacific

Written by Hallie Golden for the Associated Press TAHOLAH, Wash. (AP) — Standing water lies beneath the home Sonny Curley shares with his parents and three children on the Quinault reservation a few steps from the Pacific Ocean in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The back deck is rotting, and black mold speckles the walls inside, leaving…

Research Beyond UW | Univeristy of California - Berkeley

The Suitcase Clinic

The Suitcase Clinic is a humanitarian student organization and volunteer community offering free health and social services to underserved populations since 1989. Structured around the principles of public health, social welfare, community activism and empathy, the Suitcase Clinic currently operates three weekly multi-service drop-in centers in the city Berkeley: the General Clinic, the Women’s Clinic…

Center & Lab

The Taskar Center for Accessible Technology

The Taskar Center for Accessible Technology (TCAT) at the University of Washington Department of Computer Science & Engineering focuses on developing and deploying technologies that will increase independence and improve quality of life for individuals with motor and speech impairments. We aim to enhance access to everyday technologies through the development of user-focused novel interfaces,…

News | December 1, 2020

The ununited state of juvenile justice in America

As a child in the United States, justice often depends on where you live, the color of your skin, which police officer arrests you, or which judge, prosecutor or probation officer happens to be involved in your case. Juvenile courts across the country processed nearly 750,000 cases in 2018. About 200,000 of these cases involved…

News | December 13, 2022

The UW Botanic Gardens is working toward creating a diverse and accessible space for all

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…

News | April 27, 2023

The UW Is a Core Member of Newly Announced New York Climate Exchange

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the Trust for Governors Island on April 24 announced that a consortium led by Stony Brook University will found and develop a world-leading climate solutions center on Governors Island in the city’s harbor. The New York Climate Exchange will be a first-of-its kind international center for developing and…

Map

The Waterlines Project

We examine the history of Seattle through a focus on its shorelines: the natural and human forces that have shaped them, the ways they have been used and thought about by the people who have lived here, and how this historic understanding might influence urban-development decisions being made today.

News | January 6, 2021

The year inequality became less visible, and more visible than ever

This year, many Americans left the places where it was still possible to encounter one another. White-collar workers stopped going downtown, past homeless encampments and to lunch counters with minimum-wage staff. The well-off stopped riding public transit, where in some cities they once sat alongside commuting students and custodial workers. Diners stopped eating in restaurants,…

News | February 10, 2023

There are 4,000 racist housing covenants in Pierce County. You can find them on a map

Professor of history James Gregory knows the subject well. For roughly two decades, he’s been unearthing the ugly, racist underpinnings of racial disparities in wealth and homeownership seen to this day across Puget Sound. For Gregory, it started in 2005, when he first began to dig into discriminatory housing covenants in Seattle and later King…

Scholar

Theresa Rocha Beardall

News | October 29, 2024

This Atlanta neighborhood hired a case manager to address rising homelessness − and it’s improving health and safety for everyone

Reported by Ishita Chordia, Ph.D. Candidate in Information Science, University of Washington Homelessness has surged across the United States in recent years, rising 19% from 2016 though 2023. The main cause is a severe shortage of affordable housing. Rising homelessness has renewed debates about use of public space and how encampments affect public safety. The…

News | October 12, 2020

This South King County church created a drive-thru food bank in response to the pandemic

The Tukwila Food Pantry has been a lifeline for many South King County residents who have lost their jobs during the pandemic. Like many local food banks, it saw a surge in demand. It went from serving 50 households a day, pre-Covid, to 500. The pantry is at Riverton Park Methodist Church. It started out…

Scholar

Thomas Diehm

Scholar

Thomas R Andrews

News | May 25, 2023

Thousands of Amazon Staffers Are Pouring into Its Seattle Offices

Tony Wang’s truck Yumbit is located on the corner of 6th Avenue and Lenora Street, the shiny heart of what some here playfully call “Amazonia”, after Amazon, the largest employer in the downtown area. And the extra customers that he and similar outlets are scrambling to serve are some of the 55,000 employees Amazon ordered…

Scholar

Tim Thomas

News | May 12, 2021

Tiny air pollutants may come from different sources, but they all show a similar biased trend

Air pollution from fine particulate matter—extremely small bits of material like soot that can enter the nose and throat while breathing—can have deadly health consequences. One 2019 study of 4.5 million U.S. veterans estimated that nearly 200,000 people, of whom a disproportionate number were Black, died of causes associated with fine particulate matter (also known as…

News | June 9, 2020

To address health inequities, Black folks need the right to move without harm

On a crisp afternoon last fall, Douglas Pullen, a 69-year-old Black man, was nearly hit by a white driver during his daily walk through his Seattle neighborhood. Having witnessed this, Kate Hoerster, assistant professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at UW School of Medicine, checked on Mr. Pullen after he was safely on the other side…

News | June 5, 2017

To reach Auburn’s island of homelessness, cross this log

That feeling – that investment in services and subsidized housing leads to more homelessness – is a myth, said Lia Musumeci. She’s a University of Washington student who’s working with Auburn on homelessness issues. The project is part of a larger initiative, Livable City Year, a UW program partnering with Auburn to help it as…

News | March 19, 2024

To report or not report ‘suspicious people’ near campus

Originally reported in The Daily by Shira Sur It took three encounters with a person threatening bypassers near the West Campus dorms for first-year student Hannah Whitemarsh to call 911. Whitemarsh’s call to UWPD, which was made in mid-October of 2023, was transferred to the Seattle Police Department (SPD). After she was asked whether the…

Map

Toilets in Mumbai

Students and faculty from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Graduate School of Design (GSD) came together to address a common issue in slum dwelling—the scarcity and poor conditions of public toilets in urban slums in Mumbai—and to discuss sustainable solutions from design and public health.

News | February 16, 2024

Transit workers fight drugs on buses and trains

Written by Joseph Gallivan for Axios Oregon Transit companies are pushing to make it a Class A misdemeanor to use drugs on buses and trains in Oregon. TriMet, the Oregon Transit Association, and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 757 testified yesterday to support amending Senate Bill 1553. The amendment would add the use of illicit drugs…

News | September 14, 2021

Trees: Our mental, physical, climate change antidote

There are many sugar maples along the banks of the Mill River in western Massachusetts. But this one is special, at least to Danielle Ignace. Its wide, green canopy keeps Ignace cool as she works or entertains friends, even on this hot summer day in Williamsburg. Its tens of thousands of leaves, rustling in a…

News | March 1, 2018

Tri-campus survey aims to identify student struggles with housing, food costs

In a region as expensive as the Puget Sound, making ends meet affects college students, too. Rent, utilities and food can run into the hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a month – and for students without the means, it’s a daunting and sometimes compromising challenge. Urban@UW is trying to learn more about the situations…

News | July 9, 2020

Trouble paying medical bills can lead to longer episodes of homelessness, new study shows

Even before the pandemic left COVID-19 patients with staggering hospital bills, many people, especially those who are uninsured, were often overwhelmed with medical bills. And medical debt and housing instability often go hand in hand. In a new University of Washington study of people experiencing homelessness in King County, unpaid medical bills were their primary…

Research Beyond UW | Technical University of Berlin

U-Lab

The "Urban Research and Design Laboratory" was initiated in 2010 at the Technical University of Berlin. Based on the model of dialogue formats it encourages exchanges between teaching, research and practice, responding to demands of interdisciplinary project work as well as case study-based and activity-oriented functioning in the education of future city planners, urban designers…

News | May 25, 2022

U.S. cities are backing off banning facial recognition as crime rises

Facial recognition is making a comeback in the United States as bans to thwart the technology and curb racial bias in policing come under threat amid a surge in crime and increased lobbying from developers. Virginia in July will eliminate its prohibition on local police use of facial recognition a year after approving it, and…

Research Beyond UW | University of Chicago

UChicago Urban Labs

The University of Chicago's Urban Labs comprises 5 units: Crime Lab, Education Lab, Energy & Environment Lab, Health Lab, and Poverty Lab. Working in partnership with policy makers and practitioners worldwide, Urban Labs help evaluate and implement the most effective urban policies and solutions around the world, bringing improvements to people's lives in real time.…

Research Beyond UW | University College London

UCL Urban Laboratory

The UCL Urban Laboratory, established in 2005, is a university wide initiative that brings together the best urban teaching and research at UCL. Our activities build on the full spectrum of work across the arts and sciences, ranging from civil engineering to film studies, from urban history to the latest developments in architectural design. At…

News | June 30, 2022

Understanding the role of historical residential segregation on pediatric injury and violence

Approximately 265 pediatric deaths occurred as a result of injury or violence in Washington state in 2020. A team of researchers from the University of Washington and hospitals around the state are collaborating on a new Population Health Initiative-funded pilot project, “Residential Segregation and Pediatric Injury and Violence in Seattle, Spokane and Tacoma,” to better…

News | August 5, 2016

Uneven: Mobility, Sidewalks, and Maps (including a map-a-thon!)

Much has been said about sidewalks as theaters of urban life. Productive democratic friction between strangers is one of the hallmarks of good city building, yet this vision of a grandly equitable platform for urban life is not without flaws. Sidewalks may appear to be benign slabs of concrete or brick, but as platforms for…

Funding

United States Conference of Mayors – CommunityWINS Grant Program

The Wells Fargo/U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) CommunityWINSTM (Working/Investing in Neighborhood Stabilization) Grant Program is a collaborative effort between USCM, Wells Fargo Bank, and the Wells Fargo Foundation. The goal of the grant is to: Assist cities with the opportunity to invest, strengthen, and address housing affordability issues. Award $1,000,000 to support local nonprofit partners…

Center & Lab

United:ED

United around education, our alliance of community and education partners, with faculty and students at the University of Washington’s College of Education, supports youth, and especially children of color, by expanding their opportunities to learn. Within a collective commitment to justice for underserved populations, Unite:Ed co-creates projects and strategies that advance equity in the communities…

News | March 13, 2024

University of Washington study finds cities must prioritize youth mental health

Excerpted from KOIN/Channel Six in Portland Written by Michaela Bourgeois Researchers at the University of Washington conducted an international survey that found cities need to focus on youth mental health as younger generations flock to urban areas. Starting in April 2020, researchers worked with the nonprofit citiesRISE to survey over 500 people in 53 countries…

News | June 29, 2021

Urban areas of King County feel heat waves the most, study finds

Areas of King County with more paved landscapes and less tree canopy are feeling the heat more intensely than less urbanized areas, according to a new study from King County and the city of Seattle. More urbanized areas were as much as 20 degrees hotter due to an abundance of hard surfaces like parking lots, rooftops and…

Center & Lab

Urban Commons Lab

Urban Commons Lab in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington focuses on research and public service that contribute to civic engagement and democratization of contemporary city-making. We approach Urban Commons as a spatial and social practice that embodies reciprocity, sharing, civic engagement, and collective actions. Through research, and community design projects…

Map | São Paulo

Urban data visualization lab

We design interactive experiences, data analysis, visualization, maps, and cartography, focusing on Brazil and the Amazon.

Degree Program

Urban Design and Planning (Minor, Cert, MUP, dual MLA-MUP, PhD)

Our core mission is to develop a community of inquiry, learning, and practice that helps urban regions to become more livable, just, economically effective, and environmentally sound through a democratic process of urban design and planning.

Research Beyond UW | Columbia University

Urban Design Lab

The Urban Design Lab (UDL) of the Earth Institute and GSAPP works to find innovative solutions to the sustainable development issues confronting cities. The UDL conducts multidisciplinary applied design research in collaboration with community-based organizations and other public and private interests. The UDL's team works closely with outside experts in architecture, ecology, economics, environmental science,…

Research Beyond UW | University of Tokyo

Urban Design Lab

The objective of the Urban Design Lab is to strike a balance between scientific research, teaching, and practical urban design work in the field. We encourage students to develop practical skills as well as a sound theoretical knowledge in order to enable them practicing in all areas of urban design; in the contexts of spatial…

Initiatives

Urban Environmental Justice

Today’s urban challenges are embedded with critical inequities in how people and communities relate to and are affected by their surrounding environments. These inequities are often the result of entrenched policies and institutions that have protected some groups while marginalizing others to lands and situations where environmental protection and health are lacking; in the United…

News | August 18, 2020

Urban heatwaves are worse for low-income neighborhoods

Temperatures this summer have hit record levels across major cities, such as New York, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, London, Athens, Baghdad, and Qatar. Yesterday, an excessive heat warning was issued for South Central and Southwest Arizona and Southeast California. Climate change is leading to increased severity and frequency of heat waves, sea-level rise, and flooding due to heavy rainfall. These events tend to hurt some groups…

News | May 26, 2023

Urban Scholar Highlight: Dana Nickson

This is the third in a series of interviews from Urban@UW highlighting the research of urban scholars at the University of Washington. Urban@UW spoke to Dana Nickson, Assistant Professor in the School of Education at the University of Washington Seattle. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.   What do you do at…

News | March 28, 2018

Urban Scholar Highlight: Josephine Ensign

Josephine Ensign is a Professor in University of Washington’s School of Nursing and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, Affiliate Faculty in UW’s Certificate Program in Public Scholarship, and coordinator of Urban@UW’s Homelessness Research Initiative’s Doorway Project—which is hosting a popup cafe in honor of Earth Day on April 22!…

News | February 18, 2023

Urban Scholar Highlight: Melanie Malone

This is the second in a series of interviews from Urban@UW highlighting the research of urban scholars at the University of Washington. Urban@UW spoke to Melanie Malone, Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.   What do…

News | October 1, 2019

Urban Scholar Highlight: Rachel Berney

Rachel Berney is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning, Adjunct Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture, an Urban@UW Fellow, and author of Learning from Bogotá: Pedagogical Urbanism and the Reshaping of Public Space. Her primary interests include community sustainable design, public space, and international development in the Americas, as well as…

News | January 31, 2018

Urban Scholar Highlight: Rachel Fyall

Rachel Fyall is an Assistant Professor in the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, and the Faculty Chair of Urban@UW’s Homelessness Research Initiative. We sat down with her last quarter to discuss her work. What you do at the UW and what led you to your current research interests? The main thing I study…

News | November 22, 2022

Urban Scholar Highlight: Rubén Casas

This is the first in a series of interviews from Urban@UW highlighting the research of urban scholars at the University of Washington. Earlier this month, Urban@UW spoke to Rubén Casas, Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Urban Studies at the University of Washington…

News | August 28, 2017

Urban Scholar Highlight: Scott Allard

Scott W. Allard is a Professor of Public Affairs at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. Allard is also on the executive committee of the West Coast Poverty Center and Urban@UW, and an affiliate of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology. We sat down with him to discuss his work at…

Research Beyond UW | Imperial College London

Urban Systems Lab

Cities are central to economic growth and social activity with a growing share of the global population. Increasingly, the need of cities to improve performance in services and infrastructure is creating not only technical, social, and business challenges, but also opportunities as new niches are opened on the basis of new technology and a better…

News | December 7, 2023

Urban@UW announces 2nd Request for Applications for RAC

Urban@UW is excited to announce the second round of Request for Applications (RFA) for the Research to Action Collaboratory (RAC). The RFA invites teams of community members, researchers and students across the University of Washington who are excited to co-produce actionable, community-centered research and knowledge for persistent urban-focused problems. The deadline for submitting an application…

News | May 24, 2021

Urban@UW Announces Another Round of Funding Through Research Spark Grants

Urban@UW is excited to be able to provide another cycle of funding for small-scale, new or emergent projects in urban systems. Our Urban@UW Research Spark Grants RFP is intended to catalyze new ideas, connections, and next steps for UW faculty and research staff undertaking cross-disciplinary and community-engaged urban scholarship. The application window opens June 14,…

News | February 19, 2020

Urban@UW announces Research Spark Grants

UPDATE: In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on academic and research activities, Urban@UW has made the difficult decision to postpone our Spark Grants program. In addition to recognizing the varied strains and hardship our community is experiencing, we want to ensure that new collaborations launch in a context that promotes meeting and…

News | April 3, 2024

Urban@UW announces second cycle of Research to Action Collaboratory projects

Urban@UW is excited to announce the project teams selected for the second Research to Action Collaboratory (RAC) cohort. Throughout the next 18 months, Urban@UW will work with these teams to provide seed funds, dedicate time to building team cohesion and collaboration skills, and foster opportunities for peer support, shared resources, and learning. These two project…

News | April 17, 2023

Urban@UW Announces the 2023 Research to Action Collaboratory Inaugural Cohort

Urban@UW is excited to announce the project teams selected for the inaugural cohort of the Research to Action Collaboratory (RAC). Throughout the next 18 months, Urban@UW will work with these teams and provide seed funds, dedicated time to build team cohesion and collaboration skills, and foster opportunities for peer support and shared resources and learning….

News | March 1, 2022

Urban@UW anti-displacement workshop generates connections, ideas, and opportunities for further partnership.

On January 25th and 26th, Urban@UW hosted a virtual workshop that brought together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and community partners to elevate key perspectives and facilitate cross-boundary discussions and action around the capacity for people to stay in place and stay in the community in the face of displacement.  The workshop built on discussions initiated by…

News | June 9, 2022

Urban@UW brings together scholars, authors and artists for a roundtable conversation on environmental justice

On May 16th, 2022, Urban@UW’s Urban Environmental Justice (UEJ) Initative hosted a virtual roundtable entitled, “Place and Politics in the Pursuit of Environmental Justice”, examining the ways a changing climate and extreme weather events are giving shape to local places, communities, and politics. With a recognition that today’s urban challenges are embedded with critical inequities…

News | October 20, 2017

Urban@UW compiles Faculty Highlights Report for research, teaching and engagement on homelessness

As part of its recently launched Homelessess Research Initiative, Urban@UW has collaborated with faculty and staff across all three UW campuses to compile a broad-ranging selection of powerful and robust projects addressing homelessness from a research lens. Check out the Faculty Highlights Report to learn more about these efforts and the people behind them.

News | February 11, 2022

Urban@UW hosts Anti-Displacement and Belonging Workshop

On January 25th and 26th, Urban@UW hosted a virtual workshop that brought together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and community partners to elevate key perspectives and facilitate cross-boundary discussions and action around the capacity for people to stay in place and stay in the community in the face of displacement.  Led by Urban@UW Faculty Director Rachel Berney,…

News | November 26, 2024

Urban@UW is working toward a future where cities are hubs of innovation, inclusivity, & sustainability.

Research-to-Action Teams 2023-2024 In April of 2023 the teams selected for the inaugural cohort of the Research to Action Collaboratory (RAC) were announced. These groups combine the research capabilities of University of Washington scholars with frontline leaders embedded in their communities and government officials who can codify change.  The Research-to-Action Collaboratory provides the teams with…

News | September 5, 2024

Urban@UW Presenting at New York Climate Week

Urban@UW Director Rachel Berney and Program Manager Kate Landis will present on the Research-to Action Collaboratory later this month at New York Climate Week, as part of the New York Climate Exchange.  “We are thrilled to be one of the very few university centers invited to participate in New York Climate Week. This well- publicized…

News | August 18, 2020

Urban@UW Research Spark Grants awardees announced

Urban@UW is excited to announce the awardees for our Research Spark Grants program. The two proposals selected address urgent urban challenges in our region, with a strong focus on community engagement and vulnerable populations.   Co-creating an Adaptive Community-Science Network: Supporting Tribal and Grassroots Action through the Puget Creek Watershed Assessment Urban communities in the…

News | September 28, 2021

Urban@UW shares annual letter to kick off 2021-2 school year

As we begin the third academic year to be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, Urban@UW wishes to acknowledge the ongoing effects of this crisis, which are compounded by systemic forces of inequality and injustice. We feel the grief, the uncertainty, the weariness. And we are buoyed by the perseverance, commitment, and solidarity of moving forward…

News | April 19, 2022

Urban@UW to host roundtable on place and politics in the pursuit of environmental justice

Urban@UW’s Urban Environmental Justice Initiative is hosting a virtual roundtable examining the ways a changing climate and extreme weather events are giving shape to local places, communities, and politics. Moderated by the UEJ Initiative Faculty Lead, Rubén Casas, participants include Kenneth Walker, author of Climate Politics on the Border: Environmental Justice Rhetorics (2022) and Nik Janos, co-editor of Urban Cascadia and the Pursuit of…

News | November 26, 2024

Urban@UW unites research, community insight, and policy to drive innovation for resilient and equitable cities.

Inclusive Data-Driven Innovation for the Future of Cities Urban@UW extends the understanding of cities—from people, buildings, infrastructure, and energy to economics, policy, culture, art, and nature—beyond individual topics to dynamically interdependent systems, so that we can holistically design and steward vibrant and welcoming cities in which future generations will thrive. In partnership with the College…

News | November 1, 2024

Urban@UW’s Research to Action Teams Gather for a Fall Workshop

What do Microforests, the historic University of Tacoma campus, refugee resettlement, greenwater recycling, everything bagels and tasty Thai food have in common? They all played a part in October’s Research to Action teams retreat, led by Urban@UW.  Urban@UW brings together multidisciplinary academics and embedded community leaders to solve complex urban challenges through the Research to…

News | November 26, 2024

Urban@UW’s Research to Action Collaboratory provides funding, facilitation, & tools to empower cross-disciplinary teams to solve urban problems

About the RAC The Research to Action Collaboratory serves as a catalyst for research teams, building their transformational collaborative capacity to address today’s most pressing urban challenges. The RAC combines financial support, thought partnership, and skill-building to increase the capacity of scholars, community stakeholders, and the UW for impactful, collaborative research. Today’s most pressing problems—from…

News | June 26, 2015

Urbanity and Indigeneity with respect to Education by Megan Bang

Presented at the June 1st Urban@UW Launch

News | December 17, 2019

UW Aging with Pride study helps inform plans for Seattle’s first LGBTQ-affirming, affordable senior housing

The City of Seattle Office of Housing on Dec. 9 announced funds to develop Seattle’s first affordable senior housing development designed to be an affirming environment for LGBTQ seniors and the greater LGBTQ community. The project is led by Capitol Hill Housing, a nonprofit developer, along with GenPRIDE, the first LGBTQ-affirming senior center in Seattle/King…

News | March 2, 2016

UW aids city of Seattle on open data initiative

<allenges.< p=””></allenges.<>   If people find it easier to get data from the city of Seattle going forward, they can in part thank the University of Washington. A team of UW faculty members and doctoral students spent the past six months working with the city on a new open data policy unveiled last week by…

News | March 6, 2020

UW and Premera Working to Create Rural Nursing Placement Program

Premera Blue Cross, a leading health plan in the Pacific Northwest, today announced a $4.7 million grant to the University of Washington to establish the Rural Nursing Health Initiative to place current students in rural practices in Washington state. Premera Blue Cross announces a multimillion dollar grant for rural nursing to the UW School of…

News | October 27, 2015

UW initiative aims to tackle city, region’s most pressing urban issues

When Thaisa Way put a call out last spring to see if University of Washington faculty members working on urban issues wanted to join forces, she wasn’t sure what the response would be. “There were a lot of people who said, ‘You’re not going to get anyone to show up,‘” said Way, a UW associate…

News | November 13, 2018

UW opens permanent food pantry on campus

Studies suggest that as many as 25 percent of college students nationwide do not get enough food. That’s one of the reasons why the University of Washington on Thursday opened a new, permanent food pantry. Located on the west side of campus in Poplar Hall, the 700-square-foot space provides free, nonperishable groceries and select fresh produce. Anyone…

News | September 14, 2015

UW Partners with Seattle for Smart Cities Initiative

UW Today is reporting that, as part of a new White House Smart Cities Initiative called The MetroLab Network, the University of Washington has partnered with the City of Seattle in joining “a new national network of university-city partnerships that will work on ‘smart city’ solutions.” “Great universities can’t succeed without great cities,” said UW…

News | June 3, 2022

UW Ph.D. students hold symposium on the role of technology in urban environments into the future

Originally written by Mingming Cai, Ana Costa, Kristin Potterton & Salman Rashdi.  On May 20th, students in University of Washington’s Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Urban Design and Planning and Ph.D. Program in the Built Environment hosted the virtual 2022 annual research symposium. Based on the theme, Pathways toward the future: Assessing the digital dimensions of…

News | March 29, 2022

UW professor’s new book presents opportunity to ‘rethink housing’

Not all U.S. major cities are grappling with homelessness at the scale of say, Seattle or San Francisco. And it’s not because some cities have more people in poverty, or more people in crisis. Gregg Colburn, assistant professor of real estate at the University of Washington, believes housing market conditions — specifically, high housing and…

News | June 21, 2022

UW professors help lead Black Arts Legacies project

When Kemi Adeyemi, Assistant Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, signed on to help lead Crosscut’s Black Arts Legacies project, she brought a history of deep thinking on the role that the arts play in Black culture, and what the work of these artists can reveal. “Black artists tell us stories about what it…

News | December 7, 2015

UW project focuses on fines and fees that create ‘prisoners of debt’

Criminals are meant to pay their debts to society through sentencing, but a different type of court-imposed debt can tie them to the criminal justice system for life and impact their ability to move forward with their lives. Though debtors’ prisons were eliminated in the United States almost two centuries ago, a modern-day version exists…

News | March 23, 2023

UW Receives $1.2M Climate Change Research Grant from EPA

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced nearly $4 million in grant funding for universities—including University of Washington—to research impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities. UW will receive $1,267,559 for a community-based project researching ways to preserve water, soil and sediment along the Duwamish River, famously polluted by decades of industrial contamination. Flanking…

News | November 2, 2021

UW receives $2M from National Science Foundation to design an ‘adaptable society’

A team led by the University of Washington has received a nearly $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to further research into how urban societal systems can be organized to be both efficient and resilient. The Leading Engineering for America’s Prosperity, Health and Infrastructure (LEAP-HI) project, based in the UW College of Engineering, supports fundamental research to…

News | September 27, 2017

UW researchers analyze effects of minimum wage on seattle food prices

Affiliates UW Assistant Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Health Services Jennifer Otten (lead author), UW Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance Jake Vigdor, and Evans School’s Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Public policy and Governance and Adjunct Professor of Economics Mark Long…

News | March 3, 2022

UW School of Public Health announces ARCH: Center for Anti-Racism and Community Health

Coinciding with this year’s Black History Month theme of “Black Health and Wellness,” today the University of Washington (UW) School of Public Health announces the launch of the Center for Anti-Racism and Community Health (ARCH). Led by inaugural Director Dr. Wendy E. Barrington, the ARCH Center will serve as a community-driven academic hub focused on…

News | October 1, 2015

UW School of Social Work taps technology to help curb suicide and improve child welfare

Edwina “Eddie” Uehara, a University of Washington professor and Ballmer Endowed Dean in Social Work, is eager to facilitate cultural exchanges. Not exchanges of people from different countries or ethnicities, but from disciplines that can be worlds apart: computer technology and social work. “It really is this moment,” said Uehara, “when all of us are…

News | May 13, 2019

UW students face food, housing insecurity, survey shows

Preliminary data from a survey of food and housing insecurity at the University of Washington’s three campuses shows that an estimated 190 students may lack a stable place to live, and about one-quarter of students have worried recently about having enough to eat. Results of the online survey, conducted by UW faculty in 2018, are…

News | June 17, 2015

UW Students put GIS Skills to Use on Social Justice Projects

Geography Students in Professor Sarah Elwood’s GIS Workshop course are applying lessons learned to projects with local nonprofits.

News | December 15, 2021

UW study finds Seattle $15 minimum wage ‘did little to offset widening inequality’

University of Washington researchers have been conducting studies into various facets of Seattle’s $15-an-hour minimum wage for years. For their latest study, they looked into how the higher minimum wage has addressed (or failed to address) income inequality. Seattle minimum wage will increase on Jan. 1 The study found that over a 12-year period, inequality…

News | October 13, 2021

UW study provides rare window into work life of app-based drivers during pandemic

When you get into the car of the app-based driver you just tapped up on your phone, you expect and hope the driver and the car are safe and capable of getting you where you need to go. Apps rate drivers, which you can see. But what if the driver is sick? What if the…

News | June 17, 2015

UW team “Hackcessible” wins Hack The Commute Competition

UW team wins City of Seattle sponsored Hack the Commute with a web-based map that helps those Hackcessible Access Map (in beta) >

News | May 26, 2016

UW-led study pinpoints how air pollution harms your heart

Dr. Joel Kaufman of the University of Washington led a 10-year study of 6,000 people in six cities that found air pollution accelerates deposits of calcium in heart arteries, a known cause of heart attack and stroke. Scientists have known for years that long-term exposure to air pollution raises the risk of heart disease, but…

News | November 28, 2016

UW, City of Seattle and MetroLab Network to host workshop on big data and human services

On January 17, 2017 the City of Seattle, MetroLab Network and the University of Washington will convene experts from local government and universities to discuss common challenges and propose collaborative, data-driven solutions to human service issues. Work will continue after the meeting as members focus on opportunities for collaborative research, and scalable projects. The workshop…

News | May 2, 2019

UW, WSU community partnership: Improving the health of homeless youth and their pets

Rivals in the sports arena, the state’s two largest public universities have teamed up off the field to improve the health of young adults experiencing homelessness – and their pets. The University of Washington and Washington State University are working with New Horizons Ministries and Neighborcare Health to provide health care and veterinary care to…

News | March 15, 2024

UW’s College of Built Environments Professor Faces an Electrifying Challenge

Reported by Jen Moss for the University of Washington’ College of Built Environments King County Metro (Metro), which serves a daily average of over 250,000 riders across more than 203 square miles of the county, has an emissions challenge. Their zero-carbon emissions target, set by the King County Council, must be met by 2035. This…

News | November 29, 2017

UW’s Doorway Project kicks off services for homeless youth

The University District community includes as much as one-third of King County’s homeless youth over any given year. It’s a neighborhood where a food bank and youth shelter are available, and where young people on the streets can blend in.   Now the University of Washington, in a partnership among Urban@UW, faculty, students and community…

Scholar

Val Kalei Kanuha

Center & Lab

Value Sensitive Design Lab

Pioneered in the 1990s, value sensitive design seeks to provide theory and method to account for human values in a principled and systematic manner throughout the design process. Central to this approach is engaging our moral and technical imaginations. We are designers and researchers, thinkers and doers. We design toolkits and methods. We work on…

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Vanessa Freije

Scholar

Vanessa Galaviz

Scholar

Victoria Lawson

News | April 30, 2020

Virginia takes a big step against criminalizing poverty

Virginia will no longer suspend driver’s licenses because people owe court debt, thanks to legislation that was signed into law last week. The state has been suspending hundreds of thousands of licenses each year, disproportionately those of African Americans and lower-income Virginians. “Payment systems are not sustainable because people are robbing from rent and from putting food…

News | October 4, 2022

WA Faces an Epidemic of Inaccessible Sidewalks

Across Washington lies a glut of impassable sidewalks for people with disabilities. At thousands of intersections, sidewalks end without a ramp to the street. Where there are ramps, a Seattle Times review of more than 30 cities’ and counties’ assessments of their roads and sidewalks found no jurisdiction where even 50% comply with the Americans with…

News | October 7, 2024

WA Gen Z voters excited, but turnout still a toss-up

Reported by Paris Jackson for Cascade/PBS There’s a surge in interest among young voters, those considered Generation Z, this election cycle. They’re outspoken, savvy and civically engaged. Gen Z’ers are those born between 1997 and 2012, according to Pew Research. They’re touted as the generation that grew up with the internet as an integral part…

News | January 30, 2021

WA Rep. Jayapal: Bill raising federal minimum wage to $15 will bring US ‘up to standard Seattle set’

Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal joined Congressional Democrats on Tuesday to introduce a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025. If passed, this would mark the first time the federal minimum wage was raised since 2009. The proposal would gradually phase in the increase, starting by raising minimum wage…

News | November 9, 2021

WA’s frontline communities face the brunt of climate change

Urban@UW colleague Rubén Casas shares his perspective on challenges and opportunities for mobilizing vulnerable communities in the face of climate change in this op-ed written for Crosscut. — In my last column, I called for a centralized, coordinated solutions center to help us meet the challenges of climate change — a kind of “help desk” for…

News | April 18, 2023

Washington and Seattle Launch Campaign to Plant Thousands of Urban Trees

Officials with the state and city of Seattle on Thursday launched a renewed effort to plant trees in urban areas most affected by pollution, flooding and other extreme weather events, like the unprecedented 2021 heat wave that smashed record highs and killed more than 150 people in Washington. Redlining, or racially discriminatory mortgage and land-use…

Center & Lab

Washington Institute for the Study of Inequality and Race (WISIR)

The Washington Institute for the Study of Inequality and Race (WISIR) is an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to bringing the tools of critical theory and contemporary social science to the analysis of social, economic, and political inequality along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. The center seeks to enhance public understanding of these…

News | February 8, 2021

Washington lawmakers look for ways to exit the eviction moratorium — and prevent the fallout

Nearly a year after Gov. Jay Inslee stopped evictions for failure to pay during the pandemic, lawmakers now find themselves attempting to unwind an experiment of their own making. Both Republicans and Democrats are looking for a way to end the eviction moratorium while staving off what some predict could be a “tsunami” of evictions…

News | April 20, 2022

Washington maker of shed-sized homeless shelters has thrived since the pandemic

Ty Charnicky gripped a broom and smiled as he swept the floor. It wasn’t dirty. He swept it often. “When I was in the car, I did this to the car too. I cleaned it out at least once a week. I did my laundry once a week,” Charnicky said, before straightening some of his…

News | May 20, 2024

Washington overdose deaths continued to rise in 2023 while national trends declined, but there’s hope

Reported by Kate Walters for KUOW/NPR Overdose deaths in Washington state continued to rise throughout 2023, bucking the national trend. According to preliminary data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week, reported overdose deaths across the U.S. fell by roughly 5% in 2023, compared to 2022. In contrast, Washington state saw…

News | May 9, 2023

Washington Seeks to Repair Harm Caused by Racially Restrictive Real Estate Covenants

Washington state is setting aside money to help people who were hurt by racially restrictive real estate covenants — documents that were used to enforce segregation in the early- to mid-20th century. On Monday, Gov. Jay Inslee signed a measure into law Monday that will create a downpayment assistance program for people affected by the…

News | April 11, 2023

Washington State’s 2021 Heat Wave Led to Previously Uncounted Deaths from Injury

Heat is a quiet killer. Unlike most natural disasters, which can leave visible damage across an entire region, a heat wave’s effects on human health can be difficult to track. So after record high temperatures struck the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2021, official estimates included only people killed directly by heat exposure. A…

News | January 27, 2021

Washington tribes join lawsuit to stop sale of National Archives in Seattle

Concerned it would threaten their cultural preservation, history and treaty rights, 40 tribes in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska joined a Jan. 4 lawsuit with Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson to stop the federal government from selling the National Archives facility in Seattle and shipping its millions of boxes of records to California and Missouri….

News | April 9, 2020

Watch videos of UW students’ ideas for public toilets, road safety and job matches in India

A UW study abroad program empowers students from all disciplines to apply their skills to real-life problems — such as food insecurity, water scarcity, and a lack of adequate housing and education. At the end of the program the students create videos to share their projects. Participants in the Grand Challenges Impact Lab, directed by UW…

News | December 4, 2015

Weekly Recap 11/30 – 12/4

In case you’ve been sleeping for the past week, here are some of the urban news highlights: #COP21 Kicked off in Paris and cities took center stage Newsweek Article > Environmental Historian Christof Mauch came to UW and gave a lecture: ‘How Vulnerable Is Our World? Environmental Sustainability and Lessons from the Past’ Seattle Times…

News | December 18, 2015

Weekly Recap 12/12-12/18

A few of the highlights in Urban news for the past week: 195 nations reached a landmark accord that will, for the first time, commit nearly every country to lowering planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions to help stave off the most drastic effects of climate change http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/world/europe/climate-change-accord-paris.html UW announces new Master of Science in Data Science…

News | December 6, 2016

Welcoming the residents of Tent City 3

Winter is approaching, and with it the need for shelter for our neighbors who find themselves without permanent housing only grows. Earlier this year, at the request of the Tent City Collective – a group of students, alumni and Tent City 3 residents – our University engaged in a public process to assess whether we…

Center & Lab

West Coast Poverty Center

The West Coast Poverty Center works to bridge the gaps between antipoverty research, practice, and policy by connecting scholars, policymakers and practitioners; facilitating important social policy research; magnifying the reach of new knowledge; and fostering the next generation of antipoverty scholars. A collaborative venture of the UW School of Social Work, the Daniel J. Evans…

News | May 12, 2022

West Coast Poverty Center to host summit on housing equity

With support from sponsors including Urban@UW, the West Coast Poverty Center will host its annual summit on June 1st. This year the topics will revolve around housing equity. The legacies of redlining and other federal policy choices of land and wealth extraction continue to manifest in racial wealth gaps, unequal access to housing, discrimination in…

Research Beyond UW | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

West Philadelphia Landscape Project

The West Philadelphia Landscape Project has worked in the Mill Creek Watershed since 1987, with a focus on the Mill Creek neighborhood. Throughout our more than 25-year history, we have worked with the people of Mill Creek to address the opportunities and challenges posed by the urban landscape. For more than twenty-five years, the West…

News | May 7, 2021

What can our cities do for us? Columnist Rubén Casas has ideas

Originally written by Rubén Casas, Assistant Professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of Washington Tacoma, for Crosscut.  Of the many insightful things Italo Calvino wrote about a city, the one that sticks with me the most is this one: “You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer…

News | December 10, 2020

What happened when these places raised the minimum wage to $15?

The federal minimum wage — $7.25 per hour — hasn’t changed since 2009, even though the cost of living has risen rapidly. Labor activists long have been asking for a raise in the minimum wage but due to the partisan split between the House and Senate, it seems unlikely there will be a change in…

News | December 17, 2019

What happens when black Americans leave their segregated hometowns

Where someone grows up is profoundly important for their life chances. It influences things like the schools they attend, the jobs, parks and community resources they have access to and the peers they interact with. Because of this comprehensive influence, one might conclude that where you grow up affects your ability to move up the…

News | December 3, 2020

What happens when the eviction moratorium expires?

More than 171,000 Washington households are behind on rent, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In normal times, every one of them could be issued a notice to vacate today, and face eviction in court in a matter of weeks. That’s not happening right now because Gov. Jay Inslee enacted a moratorium…

News | December 24, 2020

What is a Community Land Trust? And could one help with Tacoma’s homelessness crisis?

When Tacoma Housing Now took over vacant Gault Middle School in November to shelter unhoused people, the action came with a list of demands. The most prominent of them insisted on making Gault, which has sat vacant for a decade, part of a Community Land Trust, also called a CLT. In Tacoma, CLTs aren’t a new idea….

News | December 6, 2021

What it’s going to take for Tacoma to become an ‘anti-racist city’

Urban@UW colleague Rubén Casas shares his perspective on the city of Tacoma’s goal of becoming an ‘anti-racist city’ in his Crosscut article. — Mayor Victoria Woodards wants to make Tacoma “an anti-racist city.” The question is, can she do it? And if so, how should it look in practice? This was a central theme of her…

News | January 6, 2016

What motivates people to walk and bike? It varies by income

Lower- and middle-income King County residents who live in denser neighborhoods — with stores, libraries and other destinations within easy reach — are more likely to walk or bike, according to new University of Washington research. But neighborhood density didn’t motivate higher-income residents to leave their cars at home, the transportation engineers found. Of the…

News | March 3, 2020

What New Upzoning Will Mean for the U District

The U District has changed a lot in the last couple of decades. But it is about to change even more dramatically. In 2021, a Sound Transit light rail station will open in the heart of the U District at N.E. 43rd Street and Brooklyn Avenue N.E. Light rail will transform the U District into…

News | June 22, 2017

What the bond between homeless people and their pets demonstrates about compassion

A video camera captures an interview with a man named Spirit, who relaxes in an outdoor plaza on a sunny afternoon. Of his nearby service dogs, Kyya and Miniaga, he says, “They mean everything to me, and I mean everything to them.”In another video, three sweater-clad dogs scamper around a Los Angeles park, while their…

News | February 21, 2018

What would a truly disabled-accessible city look like?

To David Meere, a visually impaired man from Melbourne, among the various obstacles to life in cities is another that is less frequently discussed: fear. “The fear of not being able to navigate busy, cluttered and visually oriented environments is a major barrier to participation in normal life,” says Meere, 52, “be that going to…

News | August 24, 2016

What’s next for Seattle’s homeless?

Their future depends on answering hard questions about what type of community we want this to be. This is the final piece in a three-part series about the region’s homelessness crisis. Read parts 1 and 2 here and here. It has been over nine months since Seattle Mayor Ed Murray declared a “state of civil…

News | September 16, 2019

Where there’s wildfire, there’s smoke. Protecting ‘clean-air refugees.’

Summer in Seattle offers a luminous respite from the rest of the year. The clouds depart and carry away the rains as the sky shades cobalt blue and the sun casts golden light from Puget Sound to Mount Rainier. The city feels liberated. Or so residents recall of an earlier time. In the past decade,…

News | October 8, 2020

Where you live could influence your COVID-19 risk

King County neighborhoods that are poorer and have higher levels of air pollution also tend to have higher rates of COVID-19 cases, according to new research by the UW Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences (DEOHS) and collaborators. These neighborhoods—mainly clustered in South King County—also have lower COVID-19 testing rates than the county average,…

News | July 6, 2023

Why a Pierce County Water District is Spending Millions to Clean Up Its Water

Lakewood is one of many water systems going to extraordinary lengths to address the threat [of PFAS] that health officials are still trying to understand. The synthetic compound Polyfluoroalkyl, commonly referred to as PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” has been used in common products for decades. Scientists are now linking the chemicals to a growing list…

News | June 25, 2024

Why social media rarely leads to constructive political action

Written by Stefan Milne for UW News. While social media platforms are rife with problems — from harassment to misinformation — many argue that the platforms also nurture political movements, such as the Arab Spring and #MeToo. But in her new book “Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix,” Katherine Cross, a University…

News | June 21, 2024

Why the First Heat Wave of the Summer Can Be the Most Dangerous

Written by Scott Dance for the Washington Post. In an average June, just a few days reach 90 degrees in Detroit. But by the time the year’s first blast of summer breaks in the Motor City this weekend, nearly a week of intense heat will have passed. And some of the most dangerous heat waves…

News | September 22, 2020

Wildfire smoke disproportionally harms poorer communities, remedies necessary to address health inequity

With most of the Northwest blanketed by wildfire smoke, public officials and health experts suggest staying inside as much as possible to reduce exposure to the significant health risks of wildfire smoke. However, inequity in our communities means not every home provides great protection and many workers in disadvantaged populations can’t afford to stay home, says Anjum Hajat,…

News | August 2, 2024

Wildfire Smoke Exposure Linked With Higher Dementia Risk

Reported by Dennis Thompson for HealthDay THURSDAY, Aug. 1, 2024 (HealthDay News) — The wildfires thats are increasing with climate change could harm the future brain health of humanity, a new study suggests. Wildfire smoke appears to increase people’s risk of a dementia diagnosis even more than other types of air pollution, researchers reported this…

News | February 21, 2023

Will global warming make temperature less deadly?

The scientific paper published in the June 2021 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change was alarming. Between 1991 and 2018, the peer-reviewed study reported, more than one-third of deaths from heat exposure were linked to global warming. Hundreds of news outlets covered the findings. The message was clear: climate change is here, and it’s…

Funding

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

The Hewlett Foundation makes grants in five core program areas: education, environment, global development and population, performing arts, and philanthropy. In addition, the Foundation makes grants to support disadvantaged communities in the Bay Area. The Foundation’s grants are awarded solely for charitable purposes.

Scholar

William E. Daniell

Scholar

William Hartmann

Scholar

William Rorabaugh

News | November 25, 2019

With mic and spade, this researcher-turned-podcaster is helping restore Seattle’s Indigenous landscape

When Jessica Hernandez arrived in Seattle five years ago to begin her master’s degree program at the University of Washington, everything suddenly felt out of place. She was born to Indigenous parents who had immigrated from Central American and Oaxaca, Mexico, and grew up in Los Angeles, going to schools that taught classes in Spanish…

News | February 1, 2017

Working with community to tackle homelessness

Seattle’s rapid rise in homelessness, coinciding with increasing costs in housing and living, have brought significant challenges to economically vulnerable populations in the Puget Sound. In spite of a sense of urgency regionally and in many areas of the country, sufficient resources, effective systemic fixes and broad support still have not come together to end…

Events

Working with Vulnerable Populations for Greater Community Resilience

News | September 16, 2021

World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki faced discrimination, criticism and controversy, but his work elevated design — and the Seattle skyline

Minoru Yamasaki appeared on the cover of Time magazine on Jan. 18, 1963, and in the days before they were given reality TV shows, that was about as famous as architects could get. The illustration behind Yamasaki’s face featured a gleaming vision of Seattle’s Pacific Science Center, which he had recently designed, to mostly ecstatic…

News | June 18, 2019

World’s population could swell to 10.9 billion by 2100, U.N. report finds

The world’s population could swell to 10.9 billion by the end of the century, a new United Nations analysis found, raising concerns that adding more than 3 billion people to the planet could further deplete natural resources and accelerate global warming. The increase, up from the current count of 7.7 billion people, is expected despite a continued…

News | March 31, 2020

WWII-era ‘victory gardens’ make a comeback amid coronavirus

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…

Scholar

Yona Sipos

News | June 20, 2018

You asked about the crisis of homelessness in Seattle. Here are some answers

There’s a lot of money in Seattle these days. Companies like Amazon and Starbucks are based here, and construction has been booming. But our city has one of the biggest homelessness problems in the country. Our listeners are wondering about that disconnect. And they’ve been asking us questions about the issue. To try to answer…

News | December 1, 2022

Young kids who breathe polluted air can fall behind in school, study finds

Young children living in neighborhoods with high rates of poverty are more likely to be exposed to many different air pollutants, and that can harm their development during early childhood, according to a study published Wednesday. The children’s increased exposure to air toxins during infancy can reduce reading and math abilities and cause them to…

News | May 25, 2017

Your neighborhood may be driving you to drink: study

A new study shows that living in poor, “disorganized” neighborhoods matters more when looking at how much alcohol a person drinks than their proximity to bars or stores that sell booze. The link between poverty and alcoholism is established. But the new research out of the University of Washington throws quality of life into the…

Scholar

Zackery Thill