NYIT is the first School of Architecture to Participate in NYC DDC's innovative "Town and Gown" program

The graduate program in Urban and Regional Design completed a project for Town + Gown entitled, "What Color is Mixed Use on a Land Use Map?" Town + Gown is in the New York City Department of Design and Construction and directed by Terri Matthews.

"Town + Gown is a systematic action research program aimed at collectively increasing applied built environmental research, information transfer and understanding. Town + gown marshals and coordinates research and academic institutions with programs of study overlapping the Built Environmental disciplines: Management, Economics, Law, Technology and Design." This was the first project executed by a school of architecture and published in the annual Building Ideas: Systemic Action Research in the Built Environment, Volume Two 2010-11.

The project was completed by ten graduate students in the course Issues of Practice with Professor Michael Schwartig. "This project is the foundation for an exploration of how a city’s traditional land use map might be transformed to relate better to contemporary planning and urban design theories and be more useful as a tool."