Since 1996, the Yale Urban Design Workshop has collaborated with New Haven’s Dwight neighborhood community on a range of planning, design, and equity issues, developing community-based plans in 1996 and 2008, and designs for specific new community facilities, including schools, retail, and affordable housing.
The Thames River Heritage Park Plan, prepared by the Yale Urban Design Workshop in 2015, presents a new, innovative, streamlined strategy to establish Connecticut’s first state heritage park. Now being developed in the Thames River estuary, the park was first envisioned by planners more than 50 years ago to celebrate the rich historical and contemporary engagement between Groton, New London and the Thames River. Today plans for the park are moving forward with community support and enthusiasm, and with the YUDW plan providing the blueprint.
Late in 2007, the Yale Urban Design Workshop (YUDW), a community design center affiliated with the Yale School of Architecture, was invited by Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) to conduct an international design charrette to develop a master plan for a proposed 1200-acre Peace Park, on a historic site at the confluence of the Yarmouk and Jordan Rivers, just south of the Sea of Galilee. The site straddles the border between Jordan and Israel, and is partly occupied by the ruins of the former Palestine Electric Company, an early example of regional cooperation, and well a collection o
In 2007, The Farrel Corporation, a major industrial landowner in Ansonia, commissioned the UDW to revisit the plan and develop a mixed use proposal for a portion of their downtown manufacturing campus which was becoming vacant. The scheme proposed residential loft conversions within the existing manufacturing buildings, new commercial space arranged around a new public plaza, a vertical garden connecting Main Street to Canal Street, and underground parking to serve the development.
