Baton Rouge will rejoin the collection of American cities to have represented themselves in the prestigious Mayors’ Institute of City Design workshop from Dec. 11 to Dec. 13.
Baton Rouge was involved in a MICD session in 2006, but the event was not hosted in the city or affiliated with the University.
This time, the University is directly involved with the workshop. The University’s Coastal Sustainability Studio will bring together mayors and design specialists from around the country to discuss specific problems individual mayors are working to combat.
The University was selected to put together this event through a competitive process similar to that of applying for grants, according to Director of the Coastal Sustainability Studio and assistant professor of architecture Jeffrey Carney.
Carney said the Coastal Sustainability Studio’s unique proposal examined how to make cities more resilient to events like flooding and economic downturn.
“Resilience is about being prepared for risk,” Carney said.
Carney said the MICD provides professionals a chance to constructively work with mayors to heighten city planning progress to plan for those risks.
Baton Rouge has improved a great deal with the Plan Baton Rouge initiative in 1998 and its improvements to the downtown area, Carney said.
Mayors from Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Texas and Louisiana will attend.
The participating design specialists will represent Columbia University, Tulane University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Architecture and design firms like Unabridged Architecture, Biohabitats, Gensler and Sasaki will also be there.
Carney said people tend to think of the University and Baton Rouge as separate entities, but events like this show they are intertwined.
The MICD — with more than 900 mayors and 600 designers as graduates — is a leadership initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the American Architectural Foundation and the United States Conference of Mayors with support from United Technologies Corporation, according to its website.
“The mayor has the power to shape a city’s look and how it works,” Carney said.