The inaugural Urban Humanities Global (Un)Conference held in Tucson March 3-5, 2023 will draw close to a hundred scholars, practitioners and community leaders to the Sonoran Desert to chart a path forward for the next generation of spatial transdisciplinary research, design and public engagement.

At the 2023 Modern Languages Association Convention in San Francisco, CAPLA Dean Nancy Pollock-Ellwand joined COH Dorrance Dean Alain-Phillippe Durand, CALS Dean Shane Burgess and Eller College of Management Dean Karthik Kannan to discuss the innovative Bachelor of Arts in Applied Humanities, including the Spatial Organization & Design Thinking emphasis area in partnership with CAPLA.

Under the guidance of landscape architecture lecturers Alexandra Stoicof and Nolan Bade, 19 students in a fall 2022 BLA design studio created concepts for a new coffee shop coming soon to South Tucson: Luna y Sol Cafe.

CAPLA Heritage Conservation Program Project Director Helen Erickson and graduate students Sarah McDowell and Teresa DeKoker have been instrumental in efforts to preserve Camp Naco, a borderlands Buffalo Soldier camp located near Bisbee, Arizona, resulting in awards for their story map and new funding to preserve the site.

Though the pandemic was a challenge for many, for CAPLA Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Design Eduardo Guerrero it presented a new opportunity—connecting ideas from urbanism experts around the world through conversations, resulting in his urban podcast, Crossing City Limits. Learn more in this fascinating interview.

For Park(ing) Day 2022, members of the American Society of Landscape Architecture UArizona student chapter partnered with the American Institute of Architects Southern Arizona to temporarily repurpose parking spaces on downtown Tucson’s Congress Street as a “pop-up” parklet.

“For thousands of years, the beauty of the Sonoran Desert has invoked wonder among its human inhabitants,” says Hunter Lohse when introducing the Sonoran Soundscape project that he and fellow MLA students Alizabeth Potucek and Christian Galindo created with Assistant Music Professor Yuanyuan (Kay) Le for the UArizona Wonder House at South by Southwest in March.

Assistant Professor of Planning and Sustainable Built Environments Ladd Keith was interviewed by The Washington Post about the City of Tucson's Cool Pavement Program as well as the inequitable impacts of extreme heat on communities, the concepts behind "cool corridors" and more.

Thanks to research by CAPLA's Heritage Conservation Project Director Helen Erickson and graduate students Sarah McDowell and Teresa DeKoker, the Buffalo Soldier military establishment Camp Naco in Southeastern Arizona has been listed by the U.S. National Trust for Historic Preservation's as one of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places for 2022.

Rowhouses created as part of CAPLA design-build studios led by architecture professors Mary Hardin and Eric D. Weber, and designed and built by architecture students, were featured on KVOA News 4, an NBC affiliate in Tucson, on April 29, 2022.

Assistant Professor of Architecture Courtney Crosson has been appointed director of the University of Arizona’s Drachman Institute by CAPLA Dean Nancy Pollock-Ellwand. Crosson's introduction was combined with a project showcase on April 13 in a "relaunch" of this important, community-focused institute.

On March 24 and 25, 2022, the Institute for the Study of International Expositions (ISIE) will host its first annual symposium: International Expositions: Looking to the Past, Seeing the Future. Registration for the online event co-sponsored by CAPLA is now open.