Yale Urban Design Workshop

🌊 Event: Reimagining the Waterfront

The Yale Urban Design Workshop is heading virtually to the Lehigh Small Cities Co-Lab! We are thrilled to participate in their second Lunch and Lab on Friday, March 6, to discuss the future of our rivers and coasts. YUDW Founding Director Alan Plattus and partners from ARCADE and RiverWise to explore how small cities can transform their waterfronts into vibrant cultural and economic assets. YUDW Executive Director Andrei Harwell and Alan's article "On the Waterfront: Piloting and Ways to Begin" will be featured in the publication for this session, due to be out next week! We will keep you posted and link to it soon.

Scan the QR code in the flyer to register!

After two years of dedicated effort, we are proud to announce the launch of our new graphic identity and website. Our new logotype is in a tightly set in Akzidens Grotesque, a deliberate nod to the era of Letraset letters and manual paste-ups that defined the emergence of community design centers as an alternative form of practice. This identity bridges our radical roots with our future commitment to providing professional design and planning services to New Haven and Connecticut’s towns and cities. The rotated circle W mark celebrates our main design methodology: a focus on the workshop as a way of gathering together different viewpoints and knowledge to hash out the work to be done.

As we move forward, we want to honor our history and the visual legacy that carried us for nearly two decades. We are officially retiring our previous logo, designed by Seher Erdogan .erdogan.studio in 2008. We are deeply grateful for Seher’s contribution to our identity and carry that spirit of rigorous, community-focused design into this next chapter.

Big news! 🌊 The Yale Urban Design Workshop is thrilled to announce the launch of a new project to develop a comprehensive Vision Plan for Lighthouse Point Park, in collaboration with the and the Board of Park Commissioners.

This iconic landmark is a vital part of our community’s history and future. We are excited to work together to reimagine its potential while preserving what makes it special. Stay tuned for updates on the planning process and how you can get involved!

YALE PRESIDENT’S PUBLIC SERVICE FELLOWSHIPS (PPSF) are now open for application! The Workshop is listed as a site for fellowship! Feel free to reach out to us for more information.

Seen here, the 2025 Workshop Fellows and Design Assistants surveying the Dwight Neighborhood in preparation for our community based planning effort.

For nearly 20 Years, YUDW faculty directors Alan Plattus and Andrei Harwell have collaborated at the Yale Urban Design Workshop on community based projects across Connecticut, many of which have focused on public infrastructure and representation. They were recently invited to contribute a chapter in Gihan Karunaratne’s volume Resilient Urbanism. Using recent examples from YUDW work, they describe our critical approach to making infrastructure more social, didactic, and performative.

In 1992, our very first project as the Yale Urban Design Workshop started with a chance meeting between graduate architecture student Andrew Meyers and Winsted native and future presidential candidate Ralph Nader on an airplane. The student was studying participatory design processes and Nader invited him to bring a team of Yale faculty and students to Winsted to conduct a design charrette, a state of the art community engagement technique at that time. The project was sponsored by the Shafeek Nader Trust for the Community Interest

Participants included Yale faculty Alan Plattus, Diana Balmori, Kent Bloomer, Peter DeBretteville, Douglas Rae, Mimi Converse Winkler, James Winkler, consultants Anne Tate, Joel Russell, Carla Cooke, Peter Blackburn, Chester Chelman, and graduate students Tara Brown, Steve Case, Erik Chu, Yelena Erceg, Tim Geisler, Louise Harpman, Katie Winter, Andrew Winters, and Diana Cadwallader.

As part of the preparation for a neighborhood planning process in New Haven’s Dwight Neighborhood, since 2022 we have been working with neighborhood residents, the Dwight Central Management Team, and the Greater Dwight Development Corporation to think about and measure local air quality.

By exploring air pollution (PM2.5) trends, our team aims to better understand how Dwight’s history, land use, and traffic patterns affect the air Dwight residents breathe today. This brief analysis, prepared by recent Yale School of Public Health graduate Aline Maybank draws on 2022 - 2025 data from air quality monitors installed by the project team and City of New Haven in and around Dwight. Research was funded by a grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Read more about Dwight air quality at: dwightneighborhood.info

Images by Aline Maybank, a recent grad from School of Public Health

Are you hot?! We spent Saturday afternoon at Washington Park in Bridgeport hanging with our friends at groundworkbridgeport talking to South Side residents about their experience of urban heat in the neighborhood. The Cool Corridors project, supported by a grant from Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection (DEEP) will develop a plan for urban cooling in the public realm.

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Yale Urban Design Workshop