2019 Great Places Awards

View call for submissions.

GPA Program Coordinator

Julie Williams Lawless, PhD | Lawless Planning & Design Research, & University of Kansas

2019 GPA Jury

• Taryn Sabia | Associate Professor of Research, Director of the Florida Center for Community Design and Research, University of South Florida; Urban Charrette, Inc.
• Peter C. Bosselmann | Professor of the Graduate School in Architecture, City & Regional Planning, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design, University of California, Berkeley
• Joel Burns | Tarrant County Housing Partnership, Historic Fort Worth, Inc. Fort Worth, TX
• Jill DeLozier | Vice-President of Downtown OKC, Oklahoma City, OK

2019 Book Category Winner

Interpreting Kigali, Rwanda: Architectural Inquiries and Prospects for a Developing African City

by: Korydon Smith, University of Buffalo and Toma Berlanda, University of Cape Town, South Africa

While one-quarter of the world’s population lives in informal (“squatter”) settlements, there has not been a proportionate amount of environmental design research, urban planning, or architectural design in these contexts. This is particularly the case for urban sub-Saharan Africa, where populations are growing rapidly and where self-built urban settlements are anticipated to double in size within one generation. Interpreting Kigali, Rwanda, fills a major research gap and provides a bridge toward implementing sustainable solutions to neighborhood planning and housing design in a rapidly growing African city. The book grows out of a series of design studios based in Kigali. The work combines archival, historical, and field research with a young-but-growing body of work on informal settlements throughout the Global South.

2019 Book Category Honorable Mention

Making Places for People: 12 Questions Every Designer Should Ask

by: Christie Johnson Coffin and Jenny Young, University of Oregon

Combining research and case studies, Making Places for People helps make the field of environment-behavior studies inspirational, relevant and accessible to a wide range of design professionals, academics, students, and laypeople. The authors explore social questions in environmental design, bringing perspectives from practice, teaching and research to challenge assumptions about how places meet human needs.

2019 Place Design Category Winner

An Intimate Exchange: Bridging the Divide between Refugees and Their Hosts

by: Daniel Winterbottom, University of Washington

There are an estimated 116,000 Syrian civil war refugees living in Sweden. Most have been re-settled in rural villages like Dals Lagden, living parallel lives to their Swedish neighbors. Segregated in their own neighborhoods, refugees often remain physically and socially isolated from the greater Swedish community. There are venues of mixing, sports being a good example, but integration has been a slow and arduous process. The project focuses on the universal human rituals surrounding food and bathing, namely the sauna, to bring these disconnected communities together. Participation in intimately held, shared rituals erodes barriers to social cohesion, cultural exchange and understanding and transforms individuals’ relationships to one another and the community as a whole. The site also functions as a gateway into the village, a village that lacked a community “heart” or commons. Visitors and locals alike are met with a space that is welcoming, active, egalitarian and based in practical needs and uses. In these shared endeavors, dialogue ensues and insights are gleaned reducing the perceptions of the “other”. Through this intentionally designed setting, stories are exchanged and friendships forged.

2019 Place Design Category Honorable Mention

Fowler-Clark-Epstein Urban Farm

by: Christie Johnson Coffin and Jenny Young, University of Oregon

Firmly rooted in ecological design, the Fowler Clark Epstein Urban Farm responds to the social and environmental needs of today, while reviving the story and uses of a historic Boston farmstead. Built on a site that was slated for a housing development, this project came about through the work of multiple stakeholders, and is one of the first to implement the city’s zoning provisions to support urban farming. The goals were ambitious: to transform a neglected corner lot in Mattapan - one of the most under-resourced neighborhoods in Boston - into a beautiful, ecologically resilient, historically sensitive, accessible, and agriculturally productive landscape. Today, a dedicated staff works on site to grow food, train farmers, and build community.

2019 Planning Category Winner

New Beginnings Homeless Transition Village: A Permittable Settlement Pattern

by: Stephen Luoni, Shawna Hammon, Ethan Kaplan, Charles Sharpless, Garrett Grelle, and Linda Komlos with the University of Arkansas Community Design Center; John Langham with WER Architects/ Planners; Steve Marshall with the Marshall Group of Northwest Arkansas; Kevin Fitzpatrick with the University of Arkansas, J William Fulbright, College of Arts and Sciences; Ken Overman with Omni Engineers; Leslie Tabor of Leslie Tabor Landscape Architects; Neal Morrison with Morrison-Shipley Engineers, Inc. and Mike Rusch with Serve Northwest Arkansas

More than three million Americans experience homelessness annually. Emergency shelter capacity is limited while governments are unable to provide temporary housing. Informal self-help shelter solutions are now popular adaptive actions despite nonconformance with city codes. Unfortunately, most informal solutions have resulted in objectionable tent cities and squatter campgrounds where the local response has simply been to move the problem around. Working for sociologists holding expertise in homelessness and a homeless services provider, we collaborated with city officials and engineering consultants to develop a prototype transition village that replaces a tent city near downtown. The project plan prototypes a shelter-first solution (with wraparound social services) using a kit-of-parts that can be replicated in other communities. The village design reconciles key gaps between informal building practices and formal sector regulations, creating a permittable solution under most city codes.

2019 Research Category Winner

Alameda Creek Atlas

by: Brett Snyder, Department of Design, University of California-Davis

The place research represented by the Alameda Creek Atlas, is part of multi-pronged effort to build resilience to climate impacts in the watershed through planning and design for sediment transport and Steelhead Trout habitat. Engaging communities and stakeholders within the research and planning of the watershed supported the creation of a feed-back loop, whereby local experts shared broad and diverse conceptualizations of the watershed as a place to the design and research team, and project members then reflected these conceptualizations back to inform a constituency that might advocate for the necessary changes within the watershed.