Working together with Berlin-based scholars and practitioners, the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative develops projects that focus on: the interdependence of formal and informal planning practices; the relationship between gentrification and historic preservation; nature and agriculture in the city; the urban imprint of cross-border mobility and migration; infrastructure and urban organizational systems; and innovation in the post-industrial and post-socialist city.

Through the lens of “Growth and Inequality in a Post-Industrial City,” Harvard work focuses on a central challenge facing Boston (and many other major American cities and metropolitan areas): balancing the pressure and need for continued development with legitimate concerns about how that growth can dramatically reshape poor and even middle-income neighborhoods, including many communities that are home to large numbers of minorities, immigrants, and artists.

The University of Michigan offers up to four fellowships per year for architects, designers, or scholars in the humanities whose research explores the intersection of architecture, urbanism and the humanities, with particular emphasis on the role of egalitarianism in shaping metropolitan regions. 

Experimental courses explore political philosophy and egalitarianism; architectural and urban histories and theories; and cultural theory; urban economics and social inequality; aspects of egalitarianism, post-industrial cities in the United States, and/or megacities of South America. 

This inaugural Michigan-Mellon symposium explored the following themes as a way of opening up a new integration between contemporary urban design and humanities discourse: Rethinking Modern Orthodoxy; Privatization and the Commons; Capital and Justice; and Political Space of Media.

This interdisciplinary course uses texts and methods from history, theatre, and dance to examine artists and works of art as agents of change in New York (1960-present) and contemporary Detroit.