Gregg Colburn, Assistant Professor of Real Estate, co-authored a new book titled Homelessness is a Housing Problem, alongside journalist Clayton Aldern. The new book explores the factors that drive homelessness, and the cultural and economic shift that can ultimately benefit all — housed and unhoused. Colburn believes housing market conditions — specifically, high housing and rental prices, and low vacancy rates — exacerbate economic and personal challenges for society’s most vulnerable. And it’s the housing market, aided by the private…
Research Theme: Equity & Justice
Includes methodologies as well as topics related to addressing bias, representation, access, and other aspects of equity and justice in the built environment
2022 CBE Inspire Fund awardees announced
In 2021 the College of Built Environments launched the CBE Inspire Fund, designed to support CBE research activities for which a relatively small amount of support can be transformative. The second year of awards have just been announced, supporting five projects across 4 departments within the college as they address topics such as food sovereignty, anti-displacement, affordable housing, and health & wellbeing. This year’s awardees include: Defining the New Diaspora: Where Seattle’s Black Church Congregants Are Moving and Why Rachel…
Daniel Winterbottom selected for Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellowship for Innovation & Leadership
Professor of Landscape Architecture, Daniel Winterbottom, RLA, FASLA has been selected for the 2022-2023 Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership. He will be investigating how landscape architecture can play a role in reducing the negative effects of incarceration. Each year, LAF selects 3-4 Fellows and 2-3 Olmsted Scholars for the LAF Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership, a year-long transformation program to develop ideas that have the potential to create positive and profound change in the profession, environment,…
The need for more equitable fare enforcement: An examination by Isis Moon Gamble, recent graduate of CBE’s Master of Urban Planning program
Though Transit Equity Day is just one day, the issue of equity on Seattle’s public transit is an ongoing and important conversation to Seattle and King County residents. Neighborhoods across the county have unequal access to transit lines; bus stops are often located in inconvenient or dangerous places due to oncoming traffic and lack of sidewalks; and bus schedules are irregular or sparse, with long wait times. These are just a few of the challenges folks might experience before getting…
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 trash. When she got into the field of architecture, De Almeida found herself drawn to how things could be flexible and take on multiple identities…
Tera Williams
I am interested in researching equitable revitalization methods in marginalized communities so those communities can be revitalized without creating mass displacement and erasure of the existing culture. I have been using environmental psychology as a lens to analyze the neighborhood and explain the existing value there to people who do not inherently see it. I am interested in delving into how design can be used as a tool to empower communities to strive for spatial justice. I have additional interests in culture, place, identity, collectivism, belonging, community, equitable community development, human well-being, affordable housing, economic empowerment, and interdependence.
Bo Peng
My particular interest and great passion lies in the social consequences of inclusive landscapes in immigrant communities, especially in relation to public space. I would love to research the typologies and requirements of an inclusive place-making that conveys respect to different needs and activities, especially under today’s political atmosphere in terms of immigration and the xenophobia surrounding it. My doctoral study will try to establish a comprehensive understanding of the inclusivity and livability of more recent immigrant communities, as concerned directly with the narrative of everyday activities. How can inclusive public spaces in immigrant communities that serve diverse populations, including outsiders, promote environmentally as well as socially sustainable development of those communities? I would also like to explore the theory of space syntax with regard to an inclusive place-making process. By analyzing spatial configuration of public landscapes that are shaped by people’s everyday activities, space syntax offers empirical studies regarding reciprocal impacts of human behavior and the environment.
UDP scholars among UW team receiving $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 generate the knowledge, mechanisms and tools needed to design an adaptable society. That is one, researchers say, that can switch between different operating strategies depending…
Living Landscapes Incubator receives research funding
Living Landscapes Incubator is a recently awarded project led by School of Environmental and Forest Sciences‘ Joshua Lawler along with Co-Principal Investigators Dan Brown (Director, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences), Jen Davison (Director, Urban@UW, Assistant Dean of Research, College of Built Environments), Ken Yocom (Chair, Landscape Architecture; Interim Faculty Director, Urban@UW), and Mike Yost (Chair, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences). In the last year, the global pandemic and the restrictions that have followed have shown how important…
Brian McLaren awarded Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellowship
Brian McLaren, Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture, has been awarded an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellowship. The Visiting Senior Fellowship Program takes place during March and April of 2021 and is awarded through the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Intended to support research in the history, theory, and criticism of the visual arts, the Visiting Senior Fellowship is complemented with lectures, colloquia, and informal…