City Managers’ Design Academy: Pilot | April 8 – 10, 2015
City managers from Cedar Hill, TX, Des Moines, IA, Dubuque, IA, Las Vegas, NW, and Tulsa, OK were selected to participate in the American Architectural Foundation’s pilot session of the City Managers’ Design Academy April 8-10, 2015 in Dallas, TX. The event united these select city managers with architects, economic development specialists, transportation planners, landscape architects, and urban design experts from across the country and engaged them in an intensive two-and-a-half day collaborative workshop in which city managers, with the help of design experts, drafted solutions to their unique design and development challenges. These charrettes educated and empowered the city managers to incorporate strategic design thinking for place-based projects in their cities.
AAF has a long history of providing design support to civic leaders as a tool to create social, economic, and environmental solutions for the growing challenges of metropolitan areas. The City Managers’ Design Academy was launched in 2015 to strengthen city managers’ design leadership skills and offer support in the development and design of urban projects such as downtown commercial and residential revitalization, multi-modal transportation, affordable housing, waterfront development, and green infrastructure implementation. Multi-disciplinary design professionals provided pro bono design expertise in support of these goals.
The City Managers’ Design Academy was made possible by a generous gift by the Edward W. Rose, III Family Fund of the Dallas Foundation.
Click the photo below to see more images of the event.
Photo courtesy of bcWORKSHOP.
Caption: Participants of AAF’s City Managers’ Design Academy Pilot (left to right): Abigail Rybnicek (ICMA), Scott Sanders (City Manager, Des Moines, IA), Jessica Cho (ICMA), Jim Twombly (City Manager, Tulsa, OK), Ron Bogle (AAF), Faith Okuma (Surrounding Studios), Lesley Bain (Framework Cultural Placemaking), Betsy Fretwell (City Manager, Las Vegas, NV), John Southgate (John Southgate Consulting), Bettina Ramón (AAF), Brent Brown (bcWORKSHOP), Jeff Tumlin (Nelson\Nygaard), Greg Porter (City Manager, Cedar Hill), Elizabeth Okeke-Von Batten (AAF), Mary Suhm (AAF), Mike Van Milligen (City Manager, Dubuque, IA).
