Urban Design Week
Urban Design Week awarded the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2009 New York City Cultural Innovation Fund
The Institute for Urban Design is pleased to announce that our project Urban Design Week, an annual open-air festival to celebrate the year’s innovations in architecture and urban design, has been awarded an important grant by the Rockefeller Foundation as part of the 2009 New York City Cultural Innovation Fund.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s generous grant will be officially presented to the Institute for Urban Design at a ceremony at the Rockefeller Foundation on October 15th, 2009. The Institute will then publicly present Urban Design Week at our symposium Arrested Development: Do Megaprojects Have a Future?, which will take place on the November 7th at The Cooper Union.
Urban Design Week
Every spring, Urban Design Week (UDW) will turn a part of the city into an open-air public forum on design, an urban stage to harness the city’s cultural vitality and celebrate its exceptional urbanity. The Institute for Urban Design will choose a different location every year (a street, a plaza, a pier, a park) and invite an architect, landscape architect or urban designer to create an innovative urban space, an ephemeral stage where the week-long festival will unfold with public performances, film screenings, presentations of projects, public debates, and a final celebration of the year’s most innovative advocacy projects and architecture and urban design proposals.
In the coming months the Institute for Urban Design will launch an open call to architects, urbanists, landscape planners, community-based organizations, advocacy groups, independent researchers, artists and activists, to offer ideas on key urban design issues. In its role as an urban design think tank, the Institute for Urban Design will establish a platform for the city’s progressive minds to come together, produce projects and counter-projects, and formulate the goals of a new civic agenda. UDW will be the culmination of this open and collaborative process, the final charrette of a yearlong urban design workshop.
The making of a city is, by definition, a collective endeavor: UDW, with its experimental format and its concerted, integrative approach, seeks to make that endeavor both visible and public. A modern-day agora, the urban stage of UDW will be the place where architects, planners, policymakers, activists, and, above all, all engaged citizens discuss, shape and make visible New York City’s urban imaginaries.
