Over the next two weeks, Next City will unroll short profiles of 77 people, places and ideas that have changed cities this year. Together, they make up our 2012 Disruption Index. Forefront subscribers can download the Index in full as a PDF, complete with beautiful designs and graphics by Danni Sinisi. Readers who make a $75 donation to Next City will have a full-color printed copy of the Index mailed to them.
When Maurice Cox and his University of Virginia students arrived in Cape Coast, Ghana last summer, Cox made it clear that they were there to do things a little differently than had been done in the past. Piloting a community-driven, place-based study abroad program, Cox, then an architecture professor at UVA and faculty advisor for the program, told his students to talk to the people in the community about the design problems they observed. Over and over, they heard about a dangerous main street with nowhere for pedestrians. Children were being injured and killed in traffic. Under Cox’s advisement, the students decided to present a solution: painted sidewalks. Building relationships with local officials and residents, the UVA students gained the approvals needed to paint eye-catching murals on road and thus, create a visible, recognizable right of way for pedestrians, even small ones.
Upon his return from Ghana, Cox was appointed associate dean of community engagement at Tulane University’s architecture school, where he’s also heading the university’s renowned Tulane City Center. A community-focused architecture design/build studio launched just months after Hurricane Katrina, the Center works with neighborhood groups and community members to collaboratively design and construct projects, from new housing to a youth-run working farm.
Designing for communities often means designing with communities, so it’s best to know the players involved. It’s even better to have been practically every one of those players at one time, as Maurice Cox has. He’s been an architecture professor at the University of Virginia, founded an urban design firm, served as a city councilor and mayor of the city of Charlottesville, Va., and worked as design director of the grant-giving National Endowment for the Arts. This range of experience uniquely situates him to understand the varying needs of stakeholders involved in community design and to, somehow, bring them all together.
Fortunately for New Orleans, that is exactly what he plans to do at Tulane. Cox is spearheading an expansion of the City Center that will take the university-run organization far off campus, to a satellite office in one of New Orleans’s poorest and most underinvested neighborhoods, Central City. By breaking the traditional town-gown divide, Cox plans to make the already powerful City Center into an even greater force for change. The new center, which will open on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard in the next year, will be part office, part community resource center and neighborhood hub. His goal? “We want to inspire the communities in which we work to fight against the status quo,” he said. In other words, Cox has found another street to disrupt, another path to blaze.
Nate Berg is a writer and journalist covering cities, architecture and urban planning. Nate’s work has been published in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, NPR, Wired, Metropolis, Fast Company, Dwell, Architect, the Christian Science Monitor, LA Weekly and many others. He is a former staff writer at The Atlantic Cities and was previously an assistant editor at Planetizen.