Projects & Other Work

“Arroyos on the desert are magic,” writes CAPLA Lecturer in Architecture Bill Mackey in the introduction to his new bilingual book Guess That Arroyo: Tucson, developed in collaboration with the Watershed Management Group's River Run Network.

A March 21, 2023 feature on Tucson’s Dunbar/Spring neighborhood in The Guardian, “‘A living pantry’: how an urban food forest in Arizona became a model for climate action,” quotes CAPLA Assistant Professor of Planning and Sustainable Built Environments Ladd Keith.

At the beginning of the Spring 2023 semester, students in the University of Arizona Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Built Environments and Minor in Sustainable Built Environments programs joined together at the UArizona Community Garden to grow fruits, vegetables and other plants while cultivating their own community. This is their story.

The inaugural Urban Humanities Global (Un)Conference held in Tucson March 3-5, 2023 will draw close to a hundred scholars, practitioners and community leaders to the Sonoran Desert to chart a path forward for the next generation of spatial transdisciplinary research, design and public engagement.

University Distinguished Professor of Architecture Mary Hardin has been awarded an ACSA 2023 Design-Build Award for Stadium Rowhouses: Macro to Micro. One of just four national Design-Build Award recipients, Hardin leads hands-on design-build projects with undergraduate and graduate architecture students at UArizona.

At the 2023 Modern Languages Association Convention in San Francisco, CAPLA Dean Nancy Pollock-Ellwand joined COH Dorrance Dean Alain-Phillippe Durand, CALS Dean Shane Burgess and Eller College of Management Dean Karthik Kannan to discuss the innovative Bachelor of Arts in Applied Humanities, including the Spatial Organization & Design Thinking emphasis area in partnership with CAPLA.

For the third year in a row, UArizona architecture students participated in a universal design competition that put their creative and analytical skills to the test on a significantly sloped site. Thanks to AGM Container Controls and Ascension Wheelchair Lifts, the winning students received a total of $7,400 in prizes.

Under the guidance of landscape architecture lecturers Alexandra Stoicof and Nolan Bade, 19 students in a fall 2022 BLA design studio created concepts for a new coffee shop coming soon to South Tucson: Luna y Sol Cafe.

CAPLA Heritage Conservation Program Project Director Helen Erickson and graduate students Sarah McDowell and Teresa DeKoker have been instrumental in efforts to preserve Camp Naco, a borderlands Buffalo Soldier camp located near Bisbee, Arizona, resulting in awards for their story map and new funding to preserve the site.

Though the pandemic was a challenge for many, for CAPLA Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Design Eduardo Guerrero it presented a new opportunity—connecting ideas from urbanism experts around the world through conversations, resulting in his urban podcast, Crossing City Limits. Learn more in this fascinating interview.

This spring, MS Urban Planning student Glenn Ingram, recent MLA graduate Mattea Wallace and Associate Professor Philip Stoker, working with UArizona East Asian Studies Professor Jiang Wu, created the “Regional Religious Systems in Hangzhou China” story map using GIS. This fall, Ingram's poster from the project won an award.

For Park(ing) Day 2022, members of the American Society of Landscape Architecture UArizona student chapter partnered with the American Institute of Architects Southern Arizona to temporarily repurpose parking spaces on downtown Tucson’s Congress Street as a “pop-up” parklet.