This event highlighted the intersection between Architecture, Urban Design, and Advocacy in a time that has tested our resilience and approach to housing structure in San Antonio.

We want to invite the community to help us rethink how design can offer better solutions to address the shortage of affordable housing, the accessibility of housing for the housing Insecure, and the loss of neighborhoods that happens in the process. The city of San Antonio has not committed to a comprehensive policy for managing the current and future housing needs and these discussions, with community input, are essential. In bringing this conversation to the civic and civil discussions of DreamWeek San Antonio, this presentation and panel discussion brought together a multidisciplinary group of professionals and community members to discuss and challenge the existing system of how we traditionally think about affordable housing in the City.

Our future depends on us creating space for more disruptive systems and typologies that approach housing issues more comprehensively, and considers not only today’s realities but tomorrow’s challenges.

This event was co-hosted by COTE and NOMA Central Texas chapter. This course occurred in the format of a lecture that presented the empirical research of Dr. Todd Brown in Harlem, Manhattan, New York.

His study explored the role of environmental cues in the production of the various sociospatial imaginaries of the research participants within the context of gentrification. The built environment, at a variety of scales - from streetscapes to specific objects, is critically examined to investigate how individuals’ perceptions of space and place are influenced by particular architectures, urban design, environmental aesthetics, and other sensory elements.

The lecture engaged the concept of environmental perception through psychosocial, sociospatial, and socioracial lenses while centering on architecture and urban design as major physical components that often contribute to the (re)production of spaces that are racially and socially polarizing.

This event was free and open to the public and offered a 1.5 LU/HSW CE credit with a paid ticket.