planning

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.

Transportation planning education at Texas A&M will be bolstered by the fall 2012 arrival of Wei Li, the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning’s newest faculty member.

At an early age, Houston-based artist Rick Lowe became interested in learning what he could do to improve residents’ quality of life in low-income communities. He began, he said, by creating paintings and sculptures dealing with political and social issues.

This summer, for the first time, the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Plannning is offering five undergraduate classes online. Two of the course, URSC 325, Introduction to Geographic Information Systems, and URSC 330, Land Development I, are available only to students pursuing degrees offered by the department.

A College Station area consisting of strip malls and parking lots would become a pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use, downtown core in an award-winning master plan proposed by Master of Landscape Architecture students at Texas A&M.

Transportation planners will find answers to key questions on road project prioritization in a new book co-authored by two members of the Texas A&M Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning faculty.

Former Rice School of Architecture dean Lars Lerup, whose work focuses on the intersection of nature and culture in the contemporary U.S. metropolis, and on Houston in particular, kicked off the Department of Architecture’s 2012 Spring Lecture Series with a Feb. 13 presentation about new urbanism.

On Saturday, April 28, Texas A&M urban planning students are staging the “Urban Plan-It Challenge,” a fun-filled, campuswide fund-raising competition based on the popular “The Amazing Race” television series. Contestants will vie for prizes in a series mental and physical tasks related to challenges confronting the planet.

This fall master of urban planning student Nick Oyler is traveling to Germany on a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowship to study how Europe’s political, economic and cultural environment impact planning and sustainability.

Historic preservation efforts undertaken after natural and manmade disasters were the focus of “Disaster,” the 13th Annual Historic Preservation Symposium at the Langford Architecture Center.

Shelley Potter ’78, a Texas A&M’s College of Architecture Outstanding Alumna, received the 2011 Women’s Legacy Award from the Texas A&M Women Former Students’ Network at a Nov. 4 luncheon. A past chairwoman of The Association of Former Students, she is president of POTTER, a Dallas design firm.

Valuable sociological and economic data collected by the federal government but not available to the general public will soon be available to select researchers from Texas and the surrounding region with the opening this fall of the Texas Census Research Data Center at Texas A&M University.

A new report by the Texas Transportation Institute ranks 328 seriously congested highway corridors across the U.S. for the first time by morning and evening drive times, middays and weekends. It also identifies "reliably unreliable corridors with the most day-to-day variations in congestion.

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.

Peter Lang, associate professor of architecture at Texas A&M, joined curators, designers, artists and architects from across the globe to discuss experimental curating for design and architecture exhibitions at “Curating and Counter Curating,” a September 2011 conference in Stockholm, Sweden.