The Urban Studies DUG spent the Election Day afternoon biking down the East Bay Bike Path, a former rail line that now allows bikers and pedestrians to travel from Providence to Bristol with views of the Narragansett Bay.
New Course here in Urban Studies, being offered by Nicole Pangborn. Details are listed in the flier seen below, and is available to all Undergraduate level students.
URBN 1100
Investigating the City: Hands-on Research Methods for Urban Analysis
Through the installation of educational public art in urban neighborhoods, the Brown sophomore hopes to inspire mutual understanding of the blind and visually impaired community.
Urban Studies concentrator Ayan Rahman ‘24 shares his experience studying social and environmental issues induced by climate change
Ayan Rahman ‘24 declared his concentration in Urban Studies after taking classes where he learned about the development of cities, studying social phenomena, as well as other urban studies topics. As someone who grew up in New York, the coursework really resonated with him. During his second year at Brown, Rahman took his first Community-Based Learning and Research course, “Urban Agriculture: The Importance of Localized Food Systems,” which he felt also tied his interest in Urban Studies to working with community partners such as the Rhode Island Food Policy Council (RIFPC).
With the RIFPC, Rahman has worked in areas of Rhode Island that experience food apartheid or food insecurity and collaborated with municipal organizations to define health equity zones. Rahman collaborated with other students to create a handbook about how municipal organizations can work with community organizations to improve food outcomes within health equity zones. For example, promoting the practice of urban agriculture and investing in grocery stores in those areas.
In the fall semester of his junior year, Rahman learned more about the Edward Guiliano Global Fellowship which supports engaged scholarship, artistic and research projects around the world. He proposed a project in Bangladesh where he would record climate refugees’ experiences and observe rural-to-urban migration patterns in areas that suffered from environmental degradation.
“I wanted to study climate refugee experiences,” Rahman says, “There has been a rising trend and higher influx of people migrating to cities because of environmental issues induced by climate change. The project was looking into how can we ensure that there is enough of an infrastructure, structural support for people moving into these cities and spaces? And what are the implications for the future trajectories of Bangladesh, and the capital city in regard to the climate change? What are we going to be able to do to improve resilience? That’s how I started the project through the Guiliano Fellowship. Along the way I thought I could really do something with this thesis. And so in my second semester, I applied to the Royce Fellowship at the Swearer Center. I thought, ‘How do I expand this?’”
After receiving the Royce Fellowship, Rahman continued his fieldwork in Bangladesh, working with the International Center for Climate Change and Development, where he interviewed stakeholders within Bangladeshi settlements and studied the relationship between community and landholder.
Reflecting on his different engagement experiences through Swearer, Rahman shares, “I'm meeting people that are doing projects that are so vastly different from mine, but still tied by that same thread of community engagement. Being in a community with other people and witnessing the power of community organizing when people are mobilized for the same cause, focusing on community needs and creating interventions and solutions based around those needs is what inspires me to continue this work.”
After he graduates, Rahman hopes to continue postgraduate studies and research in urban revitalization, urban regeneration, and bottom-up approaches to community building.
The Urban Studies Program celebrated the accomplishments of senior concentrators on Sunday, May 28th, 2023 at the University’s Commencement ceremonies.
The pandemic should make us rethink our engagement beyond our borders.
Samuel Zipp, professor of American studies and urban studies at Brown University, is author of "The Idealist: Wendell Willkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World."
Featuring a catalogue of works and new photography, Mies van der Rohe is an ambitious critical monograph that aims to challenge the established narrative of this seminal architect. Dietrich Neumann takes a nonhagiographic approach, driven by the importance of context—social, political, and architectural—for understanding the architect’s life and work. Organized chronologically, Neumann consults contemporary responses to Mies’s work, competition entries, building codes, structural and material qualities of built forms, and detailed looks at the work on the drafting table in Mies’s office and those of his collaborators. He attributes two previously unknown houses to Mies and several smaller projects; these further complicate typical biographies of Mies which present his work as a series of masterpieces. Neumann notably provides a nuanced portrait of Mies’s relationship with his benefactors, including his refusal to take a stand against the Nazi government for fear that doing so would compromise any potential commissions.
Reconstructing Architecture: Sifting through visual language in the built environment can decode messages and ideas.
Itohan Osayimwese is an architectural historian at Brown, but she works much like an archaeologist, sifting through visual language to see how it is translated into messages and ideas. Osayimwese believes that many people still don’t think of Germany as a colonial power of the 19th century and do not understand the country’s modern architectural history in relation to larger developments worldwide. When Osayimwese, an assistant professor of history of art and architecture, did the research for what became the book Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany, she aimed at widening the conceptual and geographic lens of architectural history.
The Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to announce the 2019 class of SAH Fellows. Dolores Hayden, David Van Zanten, Dietrich Neumann and Richard Guy Wilson will be inducted as Fellows of the Society of Architectural Historians on Thursday, April 25, 2019, during the SAH 72nd Annual International Conference awards ceremony in Providence, Rhode Island. SAH Fellows are individuals who have distinguished themselves by a lifetime of significant contributions to the field of architectural history, such as scholarship, service to SAH or stewardship of the built environment.
This April, junior urban studies concentrator Garrett Robinson was awarded the Royce Fellowship. Robinson’s research delves into a pressing urban studies problem: luxury development and displacement in communities of color.
On July 29 (“Keep depot off State House lawn”), the Providence Journal’s editorial board argued against the proposed location for the new bus terminal on the grounds of the Rhode Island State House, and asked for alternative solutions: “Are there any creative thinkers out there?"
In the Brown University Herbarium, the digitization of tens of thousands of plants preserved over two centuries has opened the door to studies that span space, time and the diversity of nature.
As Brown undergraduates return to College Hill from across the globe, they reflect on where their summers took them and what they learned along the way.
Urban studies concentrator Gray Brakke is using his technology know-how to shed light on the understudied subject of welfare services available to low-income residents in the suburbs.
In its heyday, the Jewelry District was not just the hub of the city’s costume jewelry industry. It was also a lively, densely built residential neighborhood packed with houses, schools and churches.
We are writing to compliment The Providence Journal’s editorial board for its superb editorial on Nov. 20 ("Rhode Island needs towering aspirations") urging Rhode Island residents to keep an open mind about a proposal for three residential high-rises (Hope Point Towers) from New York developer Jason Fane.
Brown researchers gather uncollected writings, speeches and interviews to create a more comprehensive portrait of the writer who changed how we think about cities.
A career-spanning selection of previously uncollected writings and talks by the legendary author and activist, edited by Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring - September 2016
In the New York Daily News, Jim Morone and David Blumenthal discuss the history of presidential candidates hiding illnesses. "Take John F. Kennedy. He radiated youth and vigor — and hid the fact that few Presidents have been sicker or more heavily medicated."
Presidential Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow Stefano Bloch's article, "Place-Based Elicitation: Interviewing Graffiti Writers at the Scene of the Crime," can be found online.
Direction Home, a film by Hilary Silver on issues surrounding homelessness, premieres this week on PBS. The film follows seven homeless people living in Rhode Island over seven years as they search for a permanent home.
Direction Home follows seven homeless people over seven years until they have a home. They were Initially living in Welcome Arnold shelter in Cranston, RI until 2007 when Governor Carcieri decided to demolish the building to make way for a new State Police Headquarters that was ultimately never built on the site. The film tracks and periodically re-interviews the characters about where and how they are living. The film also chronicles the efforts of housing activists, tent city residents, and service providers. It reveals some of the reasons why people become chronically homeless, why Housing First and permanent supportive housing policies are ultimately effective in ending homelessness, and why rights for the homeless are so important. The film was made with the support of RI Council for the Humanities and Brown University and the assistance of Brown University students.
The restricted data of the report “creates a city within a city” and makes the East Side “a privileged island,” Bloch said. If the report had included crime statistics from the West Side of Providence, overall crime would appear to be much higher, he said, adding that the East Side is much safer than other areas of the city.
Recipients of the second round of Global Experiential Learning and Teaching grants have been announced. The GELT program, unveiled in the summer of 2014, provides support for faculty to embed an education abroad component into an on-campus course.
The website, designed with the help of Ashley So, acts as a repository for student papers and projects from "Crime and the City" (URBN 1230), a course about the socio-spatial construction and understanding of contemporary urban criminality taught by Professor Stefano Bloch (Urban Studies).
A Ferguson teach-in was hosted on campus by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. Urban Studies Professors James Morone and Stefano Bloch were on the panel.