John Harris, director of the Division of Planning, Landscape Architecture and Design, and C. Aujean Lee, former faculty in the Gibbs PLAD division, recently published a paper in the Journal of the American Planning Association. The paper, “Practitioner Perceptions of City-Subcontracted Community Organizing,” examines local practitioner perceptions of a commonly used subcontracting arrangement using nonprofit subcontractors.
Municipal planning departments use nonprofit subcontractors to increase neighborhood community organizing. Lee and Harris’s study is the first of its kind to assess practitioner perceptions of this arrangement and its effect on racial inequities in communities. While nonprofits can be important partners in expanding neighborhood organization efforts, Lee and Harris’s study highlights the existing disparities in this process.
For their research, Lee and Harris conducted an exploratory study of Oklahoma City by interviewing residents and a nonprofit that is contracted to do neighborhood organizing. Their findings suggest that, while the practice improves some elements of community organizing, it also perpetuates existing disparities caused by the long-standing challenges of systemic racism.
Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture professor and Institute for Quality Communities Director Dr. Amber N. Wiley’s book, Model Schools in the Model City: Race, Planning, and Education in the Nation’s Capital, has received two major honors from the Urban History Association.
Research initiated by Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture alumna Naila Hasan during her master’s studies at the University of Oklahoma has continued through faculty collaboration and resulted in a peer-reviewed publication in HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal.
Gibbs College of Architecture is pleased to announce Esther Thorp, Tyler Boydstun and Chukwuma Nwokoye as the winners of the 2026 Construction Innovation Translation Hub (CIThub) Student Ideas Competition.
