Jeffrey Raven, FAIA, LEED BD+C NYIT Associate Professor & Program Director for Graduate Urban Design/Principal of Raven A+U directed an urban design workshop in Durban, South Africa. This exciting project highlights the global impact of NYIT SoAD’s applied research on climate-resilient urban design. The UDCW Team was led by Jeffrey Raven, with Christian Braneon, PhD (Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University), Mattia Leone, PhD and Enza Tersigni, PhD. (University of Naples Federico II, Italy), Michael Esposito (Elementa Engineering). Another key member of the team was Luciana Barreto Nogueira Godinho, a graduate of the MSAURD Urban Design program at the New York Institute of Technology.

The UCCRN Urban Design Climate Workshop sessions engaged representatives from Durban to integrate and scale up mitigation and adaptation principles by reducing energy consumption in the built environment, strengthening urban climate resiliency, and enhancing human comfort and quality of life. Through the participatory engagement of Durban stakeholders, the Climate Workshop demonstrated that through energy-efficient urban planning and urban design, compact urban districts can work synergistically with high-performance construction and landscape configuration to create interconnected, protective, and attractive urban areas that promote mitigation, adaptation, resilience, and transformation. The Durban Urban Design Climate Workshop was sponsored by the German government Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH in collaboration with the Government of Durban.