housing & urban development

Texas A&M students are building build two “tiny houses” — a broad term generally referring to residences 300 square feet or less — that will be donated to a group providing affordable, sustainable housing for disabled, chronically homeless people in Central Texas.

The Carver Community Center in Navasota, Texas, once the site of the town’s African-American high school, was the scene of “Navasota Neighborhood Day,” organized Nov. 23, 2013 by Master of Urban Planning students at Texas A&M University.

Philip Berke ‘81, widely regarded as one of the nation’s top land use planning scholars, is returning to Texas A&M in 2014 to rejoin the urban planning faculty and help lead the university’s Institute for Sustainable Coastal Communities.

Frances Whitehead, a self-described “designist,” talked about how she combines art and design to help transform distressed urban and rural sites at a Nov. 6 public lecture.

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.

The revitalization of an isolated, impoverished East Dallas neighborhood, a collaboration between its residents and a design group led by Brent Brown ’91, a former architecture student at Texas A&M, was highlighted at a recent conference at Southern Methodist University.

Graduate architecture students prepared prototype low-cost housing solutions for long-term inhabitants of some of the world's largest refugee camps for a presentation to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees.

A group of villages in Costa Rica hard hit by recent flooding received watershed management, drinking water and waste disposal guidance from an interdisciplinary United Nations-sponsored team that included a former Texas A&M environmental design student.

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.

Prospective students can learn more about Texas A&M’s Urban and Regional Science doctoral program during an Oct. 21-23 open house, to be held in conjunction with the 14th annual College of Architecture Research Symposium: Natural, Built, Virtual.

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.

For centuries, a symbiotic relationship between planning and transportation has existed. “For most of the 20th century, engineers decided what needed to go where. In the 21st century, that’s changing a bit,” said Forster Ndubisi, head of Texas A&M’s Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning.