Designing for Density: A Conversation on Accessory Dwelling Units

Friday, February 7, 2025 | 12:00 – 1:00 PM

Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative - 1309 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio

Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88034695285

Join us for an engaging panel discussion on accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and their potential to expand housing options in urban and suburban neighborhoods. This session will explore how ADUs can create opportunities for aging in place, foster diverse housing choices, and integrate sensitively into existing historic contexts. The conversation will highlight lessons from the Cleveland Heights ADU design competition, sponsored by AARP. Panelists will share insights on design strategies, zoning and regulatory challenges, and best practices for implementing ADUs in communities.

Panelists:

  • Tommy Chesnes, Senior Designer, Architect at Onyx Creative

  • Patrick W. Hewitt, AICP, Planning Manager, Strategy & Development, Cuyahoga County Planning Commission

  • Rachel Novak, AICP, Senior Planner, Cuyahoga County Planning Commission

  • Eric Zamft, AICP, Director of Planning, Neighborhoods & Development, City of Cleveland Heights

This session offers one hour of professional development credit for planners.

Precarious Fields
Friday, March 21, 2025 | 12:00 – 1:00 PM

Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative - 1309 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio

Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81490218019

Speaker: Laure Nolte, Schidlowski Fellow

Laure Nolte is an architectural designer, biomaterials researcher, artist, and educator. Her work spans planetary to molecular scales, exploring relationships between material behavior and human behavior. Laure has taught at Dalhousie University, guest lectured at the University of Washington, and worked professionally at Habit Studio in Halifax, NS, and Olson Kundig in Seattle, WA.

Planetary Ports: A Theory of Infrastructural Urbanization
Friday, April 4, 2025 | 12:00 – 1:00 PM

Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative - 1309 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio

Zoom link:  https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85742229618

Speaker: Jeffrey S. Nesbit, Assistant Professor of Architecture & Urbanism, Temple University

Jeffrey S. Nesbit is an architect, urbanist, and founding director of the research group Grounding Design. His work focuses on processes of urbanization, infrastructure, and the evolution of “technical lands.” He has over 15 years of experience leading public architecture and urban projects, as well as managing research projects for city governments and NGOs. He has published extensively on “infrastructural urbanization” and hosted interdisciplinary podcast series. He is currently Assistant Professor at Temple University and has taught at Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and other leading institutions.

Urban Infill: Great Lakes Climate Mobilities (Book Release)
Friday, April 11, 2025 | 12:00 – 1:00 PM

Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative - 1309 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio

Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89417554063

Join us for a panel discussion to celebrate the release of Urban Infill 9: Great Lakes Climate Mobilities, Volume 9 of the  Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative’s journal, Urban Infill. 

Volume 9, Great Lakes Climate Mobilities focuses on one of the most pressing questions facing Northeast Ohio: How might climate change reshape the human and physical geographies of cities in the Great Lakes region? As wildfires rage in the west, sea levels rise along the coasts, and water grows scarce across vast stretches of the country, the cities of the Great Lakes are in an advantageous and possibly precarious position. An abundance of freshwater and relatively stable climate could draw people to the region - yet the scale and timing of such movements are impossible to predict with any certainty.

In partnership with the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, this event will bring together diverse voices - designers, planners, writers, and artists - to discuss these complex issues in a hybrid format, in person and over Zoom. This event is free and open to the public.

FALL 2024 - 25th Anniversary PROGRAM series at the CUDC

VIDEOS OF LECTURES

Power + Place with Bryan C Lee Jr, Design Principal, Architect, Colloqate 
September 23, 2024

Climate Action as if the Earth Mattered with Brett KenCairn, Center for Regenerative Solutions
September 27, 2024 

On Campus with Andrew Gutterman, Sasaki Associates
October 18, 2024 

 
 

SPRING 2023

VIDEOS OF LECTURES

CUDC Spring 2023 Program Series Approaches to Practice

Feb 17 - Design for Displacement Lecture by Sai Sinbondit, Founding Principal & Executive Director, i_you design lab.

Feb 24 - From the Theater to the Plaza: Spectacle, Protest, and Urban Space in Twenty-First-Century Madrid Lecture by Matthew Feinberg, Ph.D, Associate Professor of Spanish, Baldwin Wallace University.

Apr 7 - Out of Architecture Workshop with Jake Rudin and Erin Pellegrino, principals, Out of Architecture.

 

fall 2022

VIDEOS OF LECTURES

Sept 9 - Mac Love: Making Art Work Mac Love is Co-Founder & Chief Catalyst at Art x Love, a creative agency based in Akron (OH). His work has been nationally recognized as a leading example for creative community collaboration. Mac shares the principles, methods, and tools that inform and guide his projects, and demonstrate how they are systemically shifting the way people, communities, and cities invest in the arts and their environment.

Oct 21  Imani Badillo: To Those Who Nourish: Farming and Environmental Health in Northeast Ohio Visit https://linktr.ee/tothosewhonourish to learn more about each of the farms, about Cooking Sections, SPACES, and about this project.

Oct 28 - Jill Desimini: Cyclical City: Stories of Urban Transformation (passcode: s9mEwc&8)

 

SPRING 2022

VIDEOS OF LECTURES

Maci Nelson Multi-Modal Design Conversations

Maci Nelson is a landscape designer focused on using multimedia and storytelling to communicate design intent and processes.

Taylor Kabeary & Eduardo Duarte Ruas, Preservation Side B Hybrid Preservation Changing the World

As the world changes, our practices of preservation, planning, and placemaking must adapt to the need for equality, equity, and inclusion. Our fields must undergo a change from traditional practices of exclusion and narrowness (Side As) to embracing more modern practices of inclusion and expansiveness (Side Bs). How can we form a hybrid between Sides As and Side Bs to form strong practices that protect, include, and serve many communities? How can we form Side Cs? This workshop will provide a guide on how to view Side As and Side Bs of preservation and adjacent fields, and theorize on what Side Cs look and feel like. 

Marlon Davis Visual Disruption: A Post-Disciplinary Practice

Marlon Davis presented a lecture on buildings and spaces that have been erased from the history of Black American experience. He will share 3D visualizations that explore creative paths for research and propose reclamations of these spaces renewing art, architecture, and design’s relation to social justice, BIPOC communities, and history. The site of erasure he will examine is Osage Avenue in Philadelphia (1985) to retell this story. He will also discuss his work with Black Architects and Designers Guild and his work at DE-YAN to discuss how he uses 3D tools to reinvent his practice.

Stathis G. Yeros Queer Urbanism in the San Francisco Bay

Stathis Yeros discussed the spaces that queer and transgender people have historically inhabited in the United States, what they reveal for cultural representations of gender, race, and sexuality, and what lessons they hold for designers and planners. In his dissertation and published work, he employs the concept of “queer urbanism” to contextualize insurgent spatial practices and discourses in effective coalitional politics, arguing that for this to be possible, urban theory and spatial practice have to account for non-binary conceptualizations of space beyond the public/private, male/female, grassroots/institutional dichotomies.

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fall 2021

VIDEOS OF LECTURES

Abigail Feldman The Land of Enchantment: Design, Water, and the Vernacular Southwest

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine being in a place where you can see rain storms one hundred miles away. Behind you dark clouds pile up against the tip of the Rocky Mountains. The high altitude light washes over the tips of Piñon trees dotted across the desert at sunset, and you wish you had chapstick. This is New Mexico, otherwise known as the Land of Enchantment. People have lived here for a long time and water is always on our minds. This lecture offers the perspective of one landscape architect's work to link "old school" green infrastructure to contemporary design, to help innovate strategies for stormwater, and to root design in the vernacular land use of this region from acequias to zuni bowls.

Ifeoma Ebo Shifting Power Through Design

Historically the urban landscape has been used as a tool to establish inequitable power/social relationships. The same tools that have been used to shape inequity can also be used to center equity and justice in our world. This lecture will use history, theory and projects centering community engagement design to explore how to shift power through design.

Jerome Haferd Dark Methods : A Geography of Practice

“Dark Matter is not the opposite of matter, but matter that behaves differently.” Working within erased or marginalized histories, neighborhoods, or sites that fall outside the ‘mainstream’ challenges us to question both the how and the what of architecture. Haferd, an Akron native, will chart a geography of his Harlem-based design practice, drawing connections between projects in the larger Hudson Valley, recent housing prototypes for Cleveland, OH and St. Louis, and beyond.

 

SPRING 2021

VIDEOS OF LECTURES

Thanks for your interest in our lecture series. Click the images below for more info and links to watch the recorded lectures.