Founded in 1992, by
Alan Plattus, then Associate Dean and Professor at the Yale School of
Architecture, the Yale Urban Design Workshop (YUDW) is a community design
center based at the School of Architecture. Since its founding,
the YUDW has worked with communities all across the state of Connecticut,
providing planning and design assistance on projects ranging from comprehensive
plans, economic development strategies and community visions to the
design of public spaces, streetscapes and individual community facilities.
Clients include small towns, city neighborhoods, planning departments,
Chambers of Commerce, community development corporations, citizen groups,
and private developers. After a number of years on the Yale campus,
the YUDW is currently located in a storefront space on Chapel Street
in New Haven's Dwight neighborhood, two blocks from the School of
Architecture.
In all its work, the YUDW is
committed to an inclusive, community-based process, grounded in broad
citizen participation and a vision of the design process as a tool for
community organizing, empowerment, and capacity-building. A typical
YUDW project may include design charrettes, focus groups, and town meetings,
as well as more conventional means of program and project development.
These projects are staffed mainly by current graduate professional students
at the Yale School of Architecture supervised by faculty of the School,
but often also include Yale College undergraduates, recent graduates
of the School as full-time staff, faculty and students from Yale's
other professional schools (including the Law School, the School of
Forestry and Environmental Science, the School of Management, the School
of Public Health and the School of Art), as well as outside consultants
and other local professionals.
Recent and current projects
undertaken by the YUDW include downtown and neighborhood plans for the
Connecticut towns of New Britain, Bristol, West Haven and Woodbridge,
and development studies for a former airport site in Bethany and an
industrial campus in Ansonia.
In May 2008 a YUDW team of
faculty and students helped to organize and lead a design charrette
in the Jordan River Valley, to develop plans for a 1200 acre Peace Park
straddling the border between Israel and Jordan. The project is
a cross-border environmental and economic development initiative conceived
by Friends of the Earth Middle East, an NGO involved in environmental
peace-making in the region. The Yale team worked on site along
with Jordanian, Israeli and Palestinian professionals and students,
and presented the results of the charrette in both Amman and Jerusalem.
One of the Workshop's longest
relationships has been with New Haven's Dwight neighborhood, just
west of Yale's campus. The fall of 2006 marked the completion
of the new Alvis Booker Building, housing the Greater Dwight Daycare
Center and offices for the Greater Dwight Development Corporation, designed
in collaboration with local architects Thompson|Edwards. In the
summer of 2007, the YUDW worked with the GDDC and the community to update
the Neighborhood Plan, following in the footsteps of work first undertaken
by the Workshop and the Neighborhood Partnerships Network that produced
the first Dwight Plan, published in 1995.
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