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.
The University of Oklahoma College of Architecture is proud to announce that Model Schools in the Model City, authored by Director of the Institute for Quality Communities, Amber N. Wiley, Ph.D., has been named one of ten finalists for the 2026 ASALH Book Prize for Best New Book in African American History and Culture.
This semester, students in the LA 5535 Studio: Ecological Planning and Design, led by Prof. Afsana Sharmin, took on an ambitious hypothetical project to redesign key parts of the OU campus. Their mission: to tackle the critical real-world challenge of stormwater management through innovative green design.
Petya Stefanoff, Chair of the Educational Committee with the American Planning Association, Oklahoma Chapter (APA-OK) and Gibbs College PhD candidate, has developed a new training program for local government officials. The program, focused on land use, zoning principles, and land development, recently certified its first graduates with Certified Citizen Planner status.
