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Research Theme: Arts & Humanities & Urbansim

Studies of civic culture, including public art and community design-build efforts

Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City

Purcell, Mark. (2014). Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City. Journal Of Urban Affairs, 36(1), 141 – 154.

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Abstract

There has been much attention paid recently the idea of the right to the city. This article argues that in order to fully appreciate the power of the idea, we should understand it through a close reading of Henri Lefebvre's body of work on the city and politics. Lefebvre presents a radical vision for a city in which users manage urban space for themselves, beyond the control of both the state and capitalism. However, while it calls for profound change, Lefebvre's vision is also eminently practical; it can very much serve as a guide and inspiration for concrete action to change the city today.

For Democracy: Planning and Publics Without the State

Purcell, Mark. (2016). For Democracy: Planning and Publics Without the State. Planning Theory, 15(4), 386 – 401.

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Abstract

This article argues that planning should develop a robust conception of publics without the State. We should do so because the State is a necessarily oligarchical arrangement that prevents us from achieving real democracy. We should explore publics without the State in both theory and practice.

Keywords

Participation; Democracy; Hobbes; Locke; Publics; State

Seeking Northlake: Place, Technology, and Public as Enabling Constraints for Urban Transdisciplinary Research

Brown, Megan; Benson, G. Odessa Gonzalez; Keel, Roneva; Mahoney, Eleanor; Porter, Jennifer; Thompson, James. (2017). Seeking Northlake: Place, Technology, and Public as Enabling Constraints for Urban Transdisciplinary Research. Cities, 60, 314 – 322.

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Abstract

This article reviews the urban transdisciplinary research of the Northlake Collective, a multidisciplinary group of graduate students in the University of Washington's Lake Union Laboratory. Through a series of place-based investigations, we explored a small slice of Seattle ultimately seeking to engage the public through an online digital humanities portal. The broader goal of our work and this paper is to address how we, as a team of emerging scholars, understand and investigate 'cities' in the current century as both networked at the global scale and dynamic places for everyday interactions and processes. The paradoxes and complexity inherent to understanding the 'city' and how to address these concerns led us to develop a framework that might enrich grounded urban theory through the 'enabling constraints' of place, technology and public. The productive character of these three concepts, combined with the practical constraints and interrelationships they bring to bear, allowed us to deepen our work and produced the context for our research of Northlake. We propose this tripartite framework for exploring the contemporary city via the structure afforded by transdisciplinary, born-digital collaborations. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords

Memory-work; Local Trap; City; Politics; Context; Cities; Geographies; Thinking; Systems; Agency; Transdisciplinary Urbanism; Enabling Constraints; Place; Technology; Public; Collaboration

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

Launching the Inspire Fund: An early step for CBE’s Office of Research “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 the research needs of faculty, staff and students across the College of Built…

Jeff Hou and co-editors publish book on emerging civic urbanisms in Asia

In Emerging Civic Urbanisms in Asia: Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, and Taipei beyond Developmental Urbanization, Jeff Hou, Professor of Landscape Architecture, and co-editors Im Sik Cho and Blaz Kriznik, explore the ways that citizens are increasingly involved in shaping their neighbourhoods and cities, representing a significant departure from earlier state-led or market-driven urban development. These emerging civic urbanisms are a result of an evolving relationship between the state and civil society. The contributions in this volume provide critical insights into how…

Andy Dannenberg and co-editors publish an updated & expanded book on making healthy places

In Making Healthy Places, Second Edition: Designing and Building for Well-Being, Equity, and Sustainability, planning and public health experts, Andy L. Dannenberg, Affiliate Professor of Urban Design & Planning, along with co-authors Nisha D. Botchwey and Howard Frumkin bring together scholars and practitioners from across the globe in fields ranging from public health, planning, and urban design, to sustainability, social work, and public policy. This updated and expanded edition explains how to design and build places that are beneficial to the…

Ann Marie Borys publishes book on American Unitarian churches

Ann Marie Borys, Associate Professor in Architecture recently published a book titled American Unitarian Churches: Architecture of a Democratic Religion. The Unitarian religious tradition was a product of the same eighteenth-century democratic ideals that fueled the American Revolution and informed the founding of the United States. Its liberal humanistic principles influenced institutions such as Harvard University and philosophical movements like Transcendentalism. Yet, its role in the history of American architecture is little known and studied. In American Unitarian Churches, Ann Marie…

Ken Tadashi Oshima named a Society of Architectural Historians Fellow

Ken Tadashi Oshima is Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he teaches trans-national architectural history, theory and design. He has also been a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and UCLA, and has taught at Columbia University and the University of British Columbia. He earned an AB degree, magna cum laude, in East Asian studies and visual and environmental studies from Harvard College, an MArch degree from University of California,…

Amy Thorton

My research area is art and design for public health.

Through built investigations, illustration, photography, video, movement practices, narrative, the full-sensory experience of rural farming, community gatherings, and back country explorations, I explore the root cause for accelerating anthropogenic environmental destruction and human chronic disease: disconnection, divide, and lack of care.

I believe in order to address this challenge for human and planetary health and human to human reconnection, we must radically alter our methods of learning and communicating. I call on designers, artists, scientists, and the academy to eschew sensory-limiting, isolating, disembodied, sedentary, screen-based, occularcentric practices and employ full-sensory, embodied, and experiential modes of understanding, communication, and synthesizing. I believe that research and the communication of that research must also be experiential, full sensory, and embodied in order to grapple with the complex challenges with which we are faced. My work, therefore, explodes the confines of text and the occularcentric to include a multi-sensory, place-and-body based approach.

I am interested in empirical (or field study) design research and analysis. Implementing design and art installations which aim to inspire reconnections, I subsequently observe, document, collect informal, qualitative, and multi-sensory “data”, and communicate the outcomes through full-sensory experiential production which strives to provoke and engage the experiencer’s senses. Supporting this work, I deploy theoretical research based on intersectional feminism, indigenous knowledges, knowledge held by multi-species beings, and a canon (bibliography) of female and intersectional theorists.

My hope is to inspire and encourage reconnections to body, to natural environment, and to each other. My work is situated in the rural environment including its human and other-than-human community which has been largely neglected by academia and contemporary art. I enjoy trashing the anthropocentric concept of trans-urbanism and replacing it with trans-wilderness or trans-ruralism. Gastrointestinal microbes are from where?