We would like to welcome Dr. Tomo Imamichi to our faculty!

Tomoaki (Tomo) Imamichi received his PhD in Environmental Psychology from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Since 2012 he is serving an Assistant Professor of Psychology at LaGuardia Community College teaching courses in General, Social, and Environmental Psychology. At LaGuardia Community College, he has organized college wide events commemorating the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima, which included presentations by atomic bomb survivors, multidisciplinary panels, and discussions on the hidden costs of nuclear technologies.

He was awarded the Future Initiative Faculty Fellowship with Prof. David Chapin to develop and teach a course “The Environmental Psychology of Care” to be offered in the 2018/2019 academic year at the Graduate Center.

His interests are environmental competence (how to deal with challenging tasks and environments), phenomenological approaches, which includes moving-through-the-environment from running-with-a-stroller (2014) to walking-with-an-elderly, and existential approaches beyond being-in-the-world and wabi-sabi (a Japanese aesthetic appreciating the imperfect and aged). His is also interested in exploring how Environmental Psychology can be more environmental from a Critical Psychology and practical perspective.

Additional information can be found at:

https://lagcc-cuny.digication.com/tomo_imamichi/Welcome/

May 22nd is our Environmental Psychology Day 2018!

Environmental Psychology Day 2018 Schedule

This is a public event and all are welcome!

Please take a look at our new schedule.

We will also end with a memorial for Dr. Ittelson.

See you there!

When Ivory Towers Were Black lies at the potent intersection of race, urban development, and higher education. It tells the story of how an unparalleled cohort of ethnic minority students earned degrees from a world-class university. The story takes place in New York City at Columbia University’s School of Architecture and spans a decade of institutional evolution that mirrored the emergence and denouement of the Black Power Movement. Chronicling a surprisingly little-known era in U.S. educational, architectural, and urban history, the book traces an evolutionary arc that begins with an unsettling effort to end Columbia’s exercise of authoritarian power on campus and in the community, and ends with an equally unsettling return to the status quo.

When Ivory Towers Were Black follows two university units that steered the School of Architecture toward an emancipatory approach to education early along its evolutionary arc: the school’s Division of Planning and the university-wide Ford Foundation–funded Urban Center. It illustrates both units’ struggle to open the ivory tower to ethnic minority students and to involve them, and their revolutionary white peers, in improving Harlem’s slum conditions. The evolutionary arc ends as backlash against reforms wrought by civil rights legislation grew and whites bought into President Richard M. Nixon’s law-and-order agenda. The story is narrated through the oral histories of twenty-four Columbia alumni who received the gift of an Ivy League education during this era of transformation but who exited the School of Architecture to find the doors of their careers all but closed due to Nixon-era urban disinvestment policies.

When Ivory Towers Were Black assesses the triumphs and subsequent unraveling of this bold experiment to achieve racial justice in the school and in the nearby Harlem/East Harlem community. It demonstrates how the experiment’s triumphs lived on not only in the lives of the ethnic minority graduates but also as best practices in university/community relationships and in the fields of architecture and urban planning. The book can inform contemporary struggles for racial and economic equality as an array of crushing injustices generate movements similar to those of the 1960s and ’70s. Its first-person portrayal of how a transformative process was reversed can help extend the period of experimentation, and it can also help reopen the door of opportunity to ethnic minority students, who are still in strikingly short supply in elite professions like architecture and planning.

Dr. Sharon Egretta Sutton, FAIA is visiting professor at Parsons School of Design and adjunct professor at Columbia University. She has also served on the faculties of Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Michigan, and the University of Washington. The twelfth African American woman in the United States to be licensed to practice architecture, Sutton is a fellow in the American Institute of Architects and a distinguished professor of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

Environmental Psychology Day 2018 Poster

Environmental Psychology Day 2018 Schedule – Sheet

Please come join us for our annual Environmental Psychology Day! Join us in celebrating the first Environmental Psychology program in the country!

We have an excellent group of students, faculty, and alumni presenting their research and other work.

Professor Celina Su will also read poetry from her new and award winning collection of poems, Landia.

Lastly, we will end the day off with a memorial to Dr. William E. Ittelson, one of the founders of our field.

All are welcome and we hope to see you there!

Please RSVP here!

Please click here to see the schedule!

Congratulations, Professor Setha Low!

Professor Setha Low has been awarded the first ever Athena Accolade City Award!

Professor Low is being honored for her outstanding contribution to the fields of Anthropology, Space, Place, Ethnography, & Qualitative Methodology.

She has received this honor from the KTH/ABE School and the CFP/Centre for the Future of Places!

You can see Professor Low’s Athena lecture, Space matters: Justice, Diversity and Democracy, at the KTH Centre for the Future of Places, please click here. 

Certification Letter Athena Award (1)

BBPoster – May 2

Come join us for Dr. Muñoz’s lecture “Against All Odds: Chilean Workers Win Against Walmart!”

As always, our Brown Bags are open to the public!

Hope to see you there!