Twenty Years of Shaping Civic Design

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Twenty Years of Shaping Civic Design - Mon, 08 Jan 2007 02:31:23 -0600

Twenty years ago, Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. awoke one morning and realized he was the chief urban designer of his city, or so the story goes. He promptly wrote a letter to Jaquelin Robertson, then Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, proposing the Mayors' Institute on City Design - a program that would bring mayors together with design and development experts to discuss the most challenging urban design projects facing their cities. Robertson brought the idea to Adele Chatfield-Taylor, then Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mayors' Institute was born.Twenty years later, in essentially the same format proposed by Mayor Riley, the Mayors' Institute is going strong - hosting seven to eight sessions and reaching at least fifty cities each year. In fact, the Mayors' Institute has graduated over 700 mayors and over 500 design and development professionals in its twenty year history.To celebrate this momentous occasion, the MICD hosted a public lecture and panel discussion at the National Building Museum on December 13th. Moderated by Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine, the discussion centered around the impact of politics on city design and the future of urban development in America's cities. The Mayors present were: United States Conference of Mayors President Douglas Palmer of Trenton, New Jersey; Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr., of Charleston, South Carolina; Mayor David Cicilline of Providence, Rhode Island; and Mayor T.M. Franklin Cownie of Des Moines, Iowa.

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