The Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning recognized June Manning Thomas, Centennial Professor Emerita of urban and regional planning and Mary Frances Berry Distinguished University Professor of urban planning, with a Distinguished Educator Award. The award recognizes significant contributions to the planning field.

ArcPrep runs five days a week at the Michigan Research Studio in downtown Detroit, a block away from the U-M Detroit Center. The program takes DPSCD students through five modules a semester. Each module—tool box; food, culture and access; institutions and civil liberties; technology and the city; final project—is meant to show students opportunities of the practice.

Lauren Williams will join Taubman College as an assistant professor of architecture and digital studies in the fall of 2023. Williams is a Detroit-based designer, researcher, writer, and educator working with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine how social and economic systems distribute and exercise power.

The Engage Detroit Workshops grant program will support eight teams of U-M faculty, staff, students, and community partners in organizing workshops that will strengthen partnerships between the University of Michigan and Detroit. The 2023 round of funding is supporting projects through August 2024. The projects range from one that helps parents become more involved in their children’s education to another that explores the range of fatherhood experiences.

The symposium, hosted by the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, is the culmination of the Michigan-Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis. Sessions are open to the entire University of Michigan community and beyond.

Five projects will receive funding in the latest round of Pressing Matters grants, a research incentive funding program that supports research advancing the state of practice in Taubman College’s various disciplines and forges new interdisciplinary opportunities. The projects include one that aims to reconstruct Black Bottom, a thriving Afro-American community sacrificed for urban renewal projects in the 1950s and 1960s.

Now in its concluding year, the project is evolving into an Urban Humanities Initiative at the University of Michigan, which will continue to connect humanities researchers, planners, and architects, along with community leaders outside the university, as they work toward a fairer future.

Interior lighting in the space is mediated by a combination of 9 shades and glosses of white pigments, producing a visual richness and reflective reverb that ensures every Instagrammer and foodie has perfect lighting for social media dispersion.

“We found that placemaking had a very positive impact on the growth and development and the resurgence of urban communities, really throughout the throughout the world, but especially here in Detroit, and that it really helped to drive the change in conversation.”