chud gallery

In partnership with Texas A&M’s AgriLife Extension Service, the Texas A&M College of Architecture is expanding its 25-year-old Texas Target Cities program that helps communities lacking resources and expertise resolve issues critical to their future.

Five projects selected as outstanding examples of public interest design, which addresses social, economic and environmental issues for a community, rather than an individual client, were named by a jury of designers and social justice advocates as winners of the Mitchell-Dockery Prize in Public Interest Design.

Emergency management planners could reduce losses and strengthen community resilience by mapping socially vulnerable areas and focusing hazard mitigation efforts where they are most needed, said Shannon Van Zandt, a Texas A&M urban planning professor.

Urban planner Rik Adamski discussed "tactical urbanism," the implementation of small scale, typically low-cost, community-led improvements to public space, Feb. 20.

Relief efforts after a natural disaster should include local businesses as well as households, because “one can’t return without the other,” said researchers at the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center investigating Galveston’s recovery after 2008’s Hurricane Ike.

Shannon Van Zandt, the new director of the Center for Housing and Urban Development, is redefining and expanding the center's mission after its separation from the Colonias Program, the center's primary focus since its inception in 1991.