Sherin Wing, Ph.D., is a social historian who writes on architecture, urbanism, racism, the economy, and epistemology (how we know what we know by researching and examining the agendas inherent in our sources of information) to name a few issues and topics. She is dedicated to exploring issues in order to expand our understanding of our world and to promoting social justice therefrom. She acquired all three of her degrees at UCLA.
CONTOURS: Designing the Green Roof, Mon, Feb 20 '12
In Germany, approximately 12% of all buildings have green rooftops. Here in the U.S., the percentage is far less and in fact, that number is not even officially documented. But it is on the rise. Some more well-known examples include the California Academy of Sciences and the American Society of ...
CONTOURS: Urbanism, Housing, and the Economy, Mon, Feb 13 '12
Two issues that effect everyone, whatever social, economic, and professional strata they occupy, are population and urban growth. What’s more, ongoing shifts in population and urbanism across the world, especially in developing nations, have dramatically impacted the building industry ...
CONTOURS: On Business and Bosses, Mon, Feb 6 '12
The business of business from the top is changing. The pace of that change for everyone who has directly suffered from the Great Recession is admittedly glacial, though some continue to argue that the Great Recession hasn’t done “too much” harm to the building and design ...
CONTOURS: New, Energy-Efficient Technologies, Part II, Mon, Jan 23 '12
Continued from CONTOURS: New, Energy-Efficient Technologies, Part 1: This week, we examine some very advanced technological developments on the active technology front that may potentially lead to more efficient and cheaper photovoltaic panels.
CONTOURS: New, Energy-Efficient Technologies, Part 1, Mon, Jan 9 '12
Smart and energy efficient is the new-ish approach for many architecture and design firms these days. The problem for the last decade has been that trying to persuade clients to incorporate some of these strategies into their needs has been difficult. Why? The prohibitive costs of implementing ...
CONTOURS: The Year’s End: The Political, Economic, and Social Perspective, Tue, Dec 27 '11
By Sherin Wing & Guy Horton We sit here in the joyous wreckage of The Holi-daze listening to one of the forgotten tunes of 2011, “Soothe Me” by the London-based band, Yuck. We think, yes, soothe us. Please. Just give us some good news. Anything. ABI? Unemployment? A functioning ...
CONTOURS: The Gender Gap in Top Management, Mon, Dec 19 '11
According to a recent special report on women and work in the Economist, “In America in the early 1970s more than half of all families with children consisted of a breadwinner husband, a stay-at-home wife and two or more kids; now only a fifth do. Instead there are lots of single-parent ...
CONTOURS: Immigration and the Economy, Mon, Dec 12 '11
Listening to the Republican presidential debates, one would think that immigration is the single most important issue pressing on the U.S. economy today and that if it were “solved”—i.e. no immigrants of color (especially those from Mexico in particular, though those from Arab ...
CONTOURS: What Should Architecture Occupy? Part Three, Mon, Nov 14 '11
The results of the OWS poll are in. Now, there are many different approaches to summarizing the responses. One is to rely solely on statistics, but since many of the answers cannot be meaningfully summarized this way, and since OWS itself is about giving people a voice, the best way to ...
Gender and Design Leadership, Mon, Oct 24 '11
Women in the architecture workplace is, oddly, a subject that does not receive a lot of press. Perhaps it is because from the time of school onward, women in the field are indoctrinated into being either as “hard,” “iron-like” or on a practical level, unbathed and ...
The Ideal Firm’s Profile, Mon, Oct 17 '11
In publications such as The Atlantic Monthly and The Economist, articles have heralded a new economic era. An era that demands that business be done differently in order to survive not only the continuing recession but to create a new, more agile business model. As many economists have asserted ...
A Macro Look at Unemployment and the Economy, Mon, Oct 10 '11
Different approaches to alleviate the Great Recession’s intransigence have been suggested. Repeatedly, policy approaches have been examined, only to be jettisoned, based on whether they concur with their own political ideologies. To combat this, we examine a few academic studies that offer ...
CONTOURS: Urban Justice, Mon, Sep 26 '11
The Census Bureau just released its latest statistics from 2008 on, amongst other things, poverty. In an article on making housing more accessible to the poor, I cited some older statistics to highlight the much-neglected need. Too often, people focus on the “other” poor, those living ...
CONTOURS: Whither Goest Thou, Green Economy: Part 2, Mon, Sep 19 '11
There is an unofficial index in The Economist which they call the “R-word index.” It tracks the number of times the word “Recession” appears in the press. It is on the increase, and no wonder, with unemployment in the U.S. still hovering at around 9-10% (depending upon ...
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), PhD, UCLA
Areas of Research and Writing:
Racism
Postcolonialism
Epistemology
Architecture and Urbanism
China
