Archinect - News

The NYT picks up on the 'gender mainstreaming' movement in urban planning

2024-07-25T19:32:00-04:00

A new planned community is built on the urban design philosophy known as ‘gender mainstreaming.’ [...] Ms. Kail acknowledges that the parameters of gender mainstreaming are in flux. Where there used to be “a focus on the everyday life of white, middle-class women and their children,” she said, over the past decade or so, a new crop of urban planners has widened the lens, just as she’s stepping out of it.

Vienna (the city previously declared by the Times to be a "renters utopia") owes a tremendous thanks to Eva Kail for its apparent equity strides. Though recently retired, the urban planner touts the new Aspern Seestadt development and its "female face" as the embodiment of the movement to infuse gender-conscious urban design concepts to socially engineer cities and suburbs into places of empowerment for women and other traditionally marginalized groups and classes.

The leading cities to embrace the movement toward "gender mainstreaming" include Stockholm, Glasgow, and Barcelona. In line with this movement, the UN-Habtitat also quietly announced the launch of its 'Women-led Cities' initiative last June.

Demolition work for Lower Manhattan's superjail is making Chinatown residents 'terrified'

2024-04-09T15:16:00-04:00

The demolition of ‘The Tombs’ Manhattan Detention Complex to prepare for the 300-foot ‘Jailscraper’ (aka the ‘Chinatown Jail’) in Lower Manhattan is meting out further headaches for residents around the Columbus Park area, the majority of whom are elderly, ABC7 reported recently.

Cracks and other noticeable damage are now beginning to appear in adjacent structures as the 900-bed behemoth is being taken down in advance of the construction of a controversial new facility that is promoted as being more ‘humane’ than its predecessor and the city’s Rikers Island facility — despite activists’ criticisms.

"We absolutely do not trust Gramercy Group with anything anymore," a member of the group Neighbors United Below Canal told journalists. "They violated the trust of this community. They violated the trust of the building next door. They've cracked their building. There's water seeping into this building as we speak."

In response, Councilmember Christopher Marte has asked the city's Buildin...

University of Oregon opens fellowship for design and spatial justice

2024-04-03T12:19:00-04:00

Following last week’s look at an opening for a Curator of the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University, we are using this week’s edition of our Job Highlights series to explore an open role on Archinect Jobs for Visiting Faculty Fellowships in Design for Spatial Justice at the University of Oregon, an Archinect Partner School.

The roles, based in Eugene and Portland, call for individuals to teach six courses per year on the topics of environmental, social, and spatial justice in design. “We particularly encourage applications from candidates who are interested in teaching questions in spatial justice at the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, indigenousness, sexuality, and economic inequality and who are interested in teaching innovation design/research methods with a focus on architectural design studio,” the university says about the fellowship opportunities.

Four design teams shortlisted for former KKK site reclamation project in Texas

2023-10-11T17:51:00-04:00

A four-finalist shortlist for Transform 1012 N. Main Street’s adaptive reuse and racial equity project has been announced as part of a multiphase selection process that will eventually deliver the new Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing to Fort Worth, Texas.

The chance at redesigning what was once the Ku Klux Klan Klavern No. 101 Auditorium will fall on a proposal that best expresses and reflects the group’s reclamatory mission while “[prioritizing] community, equity, and collective healing in the design of the space” above all other considerations of site and material.

“The exceptional quality of the submissions prompted us to expand the initially envisioned shortlist from three to four teams and to extend our selection deadline for a few days,” Ben Crawford, the Chair of Transform 1012’s Design Architect Selection Committee, added. “We are thrilled to welcome these architects to Fort Worth to see how they could be a partner in reimagining the processes for enacting th...

Chief Heat Officer Eugenia Kargbo discusses extreme heat mitigation in Freetown, Sierra Leone

2022-08-09T14:30:00-04:00

Kargbo grew up to become a banker, but she has spent the last several years working in the administration of Freetown mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, a noted climate activist. Before becoming the city’s chief heat officer, she headed up the city’s sanitation department [...] Kargbo says her work is to keep climate change on the agenda, however many other things are tugging the world’s attention away.

A former aide to the noted climate activist Mayor of Freetown Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, Eugenia Kargbo is one of five official Chief Heat Officers (CHOs) in the world. After being appointed in 2021, she joins fellow CHOs from Athens, Miami, Santiago, Chile, and Monterrey, Mexico in a program sponsored by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock).

Arsht-Rock, along with the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance (EHRA), developed and piloted the role of CHOs to have officials "charged with unifying the response to the challenge of heat to reduce risks and impacts of extreme heat for their residents and constituents."

For these officers appointed by local officials in their cities, much of the work entails attempting to consolidate their communities' disparate (and sometimes madcap) efforts to address climate issues that are too often spread between conflicting bureaucratic hierarchies.

Meet the current Chief Heat Officers. Image courtesy of Adr...

University of Oregon announces call for Design for Spatial Justice Fellowship applicants

2020-02-10T12:25:00-05:00

The University of Oregon is currently seeking applicants for its latest cohort of Visiting Faculty Fellowships in Design for Spatial Justice.

The initiative, according to a listing currently featured on the Archinect Jobs board, “will award up to six faculty fellowships in design/research and teaching for durations of two terms to three years, to start as early as September 2020.” Applications will be reviewed beginning February 15, 2020.

The fellowships are part of the UO School of Architecture & Environment’s year-old Design for Spatial Justice Initiative, a program that spans across the school’s architecture, interior architecture, landscape architecture, and historic preservation professional programs in Eugene and Portland, with the aim of “changing the voices that are at the table in order to change the kinds of questions that can be brought to the table,” Erin Moore, Director of the School of Architecture & Environment and Associate Dean of the College of Design, explains t...