housing & urban development

A new research institute dedicated to a better understanding of establishing sustainable and resilient coastal communities, places and landscapes will combine resources of Texas A&M’s College of Architecture and Texas A&M University at Galveston.

Students from all disciplines at Texas A&M’s College of Architecture will design and build a single-family residence during the 2012-13 academic year in a subdivision near downtown Bryan as part of the new collegewide Real Projects initiative.

Researchers at Texas A&M's Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center are investigating why the proliferation of hazard mitigation planning by local governmental agencies in disaster prone regions along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts has not significantly reduced their vulnerability.

For more than two decades, the Colonias Program has been implementing sustainable solutions aimed at transforming these communities, reducing their isolation and helping their residents become full participants in the U.S. economy and society.

A public housing development in Beaumont severely damaged by Hurricane Rita has been rebuilt nto a successful, sustainable community, concludes a study headed by Shannon Van Zandt, interim director of the Center for Housing & Urban Development.

Addressing tghe 38th IAHS World Congress on Housing last April in Istanbul, Jorge Vanegas, dean of the Texas A&M College of Architecture, discussed global solutions to meet the need for quality, affordable, sustainable, high-performance housing.

After two decades focused on improving the quality of life for residents of the impoverished, relatively undeveloped villages, or “colonias,” clumped near population centers on the U.S. side of the Texas-Mexico border, the Texas A&M University Colonias Program is celebrating its achievements.

Philip Berke ‘81, an outstanding alumnus of Texas A&M’s College of Architecture and one of the nation’s top land use planning scholars, presented “Sustainable Cities: Demographic Trends, Impacts and Future Plans” on Jan. 20 in the Wright Gallery.

Brenda Takahashi, an experienced leader in public housing administration, will discuss sustainable community and economic development 7 p.m. Jan. 19 in the Wright Gallery, kicking off Texas A&M’s Real Estate Development Association’s Spring 2012 Speaker Series.

Relationships between architectural design and health care for the under and uninsured are the focus of the Center for Health Systems & Design’s Spring 2012 Architecture-for-Health Lecture Series.

Xuemei Zhu, assistant professor of architecture, co-authored a paper summarizing the research behind active living — a new, comprehensive way of tackling obesity involving the built environment — in the new edition of a journal published by the Institute for Comprehensive Community Development.

The Center for Housing and Urban Development at Texas A&M’s College of Architecture is part of a new research, educational and engagement network focusing on providing sustainability science to South Texas policymakers and communities.

One former and one current student from Texas A&M’s College of Architecture were roommates for a week in Leogane, Haiti in November, part of a Habitat for Humanity effort to build homes in the city ravaged by a 2010 earthquake and hurricane.

A single Navajo mother and her 10-year old son are living in The Windcatcher House, a sustainable home in southwest Colorado co-designed by Mark Olsen ’07, a former Texas A&M environmental design student completing his graduate work in the University of Colorado at Denver.

Walter Gillis Peacock, professor of urban planning at Texas A&M, is on a National Academy of Sciences committee hosting a two-day January public workshop in Houston to examine issues relating to sustainability and human-environment interactions in the Houston metropolitan area.