Shaping Change: Urbanism, Planning, & Social Impact
Shaping Change centers on the premise that built environment professionals and educators should acknowledge and become more deliberate with regard to their impact on culture and society. Using Detroit as a case study, the presentation will illustrate processes used by the author that include more people, more programs, and more geographies as a way to reposition our discipline as an inherently activist endeavor. In other words, built environmental professionals possess tools that can reach far beyond designing buildings, urban spaces, and community plans. Shaping Change explores design processes that can amplify the impact of people who are typically left out of design decisions. This does not mean that the people who typically build or hire an architect, urban designer, landscape architect, and planner are left out of the process. Instead, designers and planners can use creative methods to widen their work to include all (or more) people rather than a select few. The lecture will also submit that people and firms operating in this way are not alternative practices. Instead, they are a part of an ecology that is working to alter how we practice. With this in mind, the talk suggests that all citizens do not stand-in-the-way; but instead, they are the primary catalysts for urban innovation. Lastly, Shaping Change builds on the research of Jesus Lara, Barbara Brown Wilson, Jerry Herron, countless Detroiters, and the author’s 30+ years of practicing, researching, and teaching.

Dan Pitera FAIA, NOMA, Hon. FALA is a social and political activist masquerading as an architect. Dean Pitera has practiced, taught, and researched methods focused on the social, ecological, equitable, and political aspects of designing and realizing thoughtful architecture and urban design for all people. After a twelve-year period of discernment in four different US locations and five universities, in 1999, Dean Pitera settled at the University of Detroit Mercy, where he was Executive Director of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center (DCDC). Under his direction, DCDC was honored with the National AIA’s 2017 Whitney M. Young Jr. Award, and was included in the 2017 Curry Stone Design Award’s Social Design Circle. DCDC also won the 2011 and 2002 Dedalo Minosse International Prize, and was included in the US Pavilion of the 2025, 2012, and 2008 Venice Biennale in Architecture.. In 2019, Dan Pitera, FAIA was appointed Dean of the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture + Community Development and is currently Past President of AIA Michigan Board of Directors. He was awarded AIA Detroit’s 2023 Gold Medal and was a 2004-2005 Harvard University Loeb Fellow. He likes “fallout shelter” yellow…

The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS) is co-organized by the MSUP Program and second-year PhD students in Urban Planning: Light refreshments will be served. This event is open to Columbia University affiliates with a valid university ID. Any questions on the events can be directed Rossella Asja Lucrezia Ferro, rf2930@columbia.edu and Daniela Perleche Ugas, dp3167@columbia.edu.