Blog

Laura Delgado’s interest in studying cities began as an undergraduate when she read the book Heat Wave by Eric Klinenberg. The book looks at the Chicago heat wave of 1995 and the spatial distribution of deaths across the city. “You can see how the ways the city was planned contributed to whether people survived the heat wave,” Delgado says, “This got me thinking about cities and our power to improve people’s lives through these urban processes.”

In the summer of 2021, Joshua Jacoves set out to explore what it means to be a part of the modern Orthodox Jewish community. His research project, “Reimagining Yiddishkeit,” sponsored by the Kelter Fund at the Center for Urban and Global Studies (CUGS), sets out to answer the questions: What does it mean to be part of a religious community? How is it built? What are the spaces which encompass it?

Officially launched in 2013, Trinity’s youngest major of Urban Studies has just turned eight years old but will graduate over 150 majors with the Class of 2022. While these graduates have gone into a variety of careers, a good number of them have pursued diverse and successful urban planning- and architecture-related careers.

Trinity College senior Archana Adhikari dreams for Nepalese students to be able to ‘Fly Beyond the Horizon.’ Adhikari, from Nepal herself, experienced the many barriers that high school students in Nepal come across in the college application process. From this experience, and her strong determination to improve education and socioeconomic conditions in her community, Adhikari embarked on a project to create a solution to the inaccessibility of resources for the college application process.

In August of 2021, Belgrade, Serbia hosted its first youth conference to foster peace among Southeastern European countries. Ex-Yu Youth Leadership Conference: Networking for Peace.” This event, the first of its kind, was the brainchild of two recent Trinity graduates of the class of 2021, Ana Stambolic and Stanislav Knezevic.

In September, Dr. Leniqueca Welcome joined us as at the Center for Urban and Global Studies as the new Assistant Professor for Urban Studies and International Studies. Learn more about Leniqueca in this blog.

While the youngest major at Trinity, formally launched in Fall 2013, the Urban Studies program has been continuing to improve since its audacious start. In Fall 2020, we refashioned the curriculum from a less coherent three-cluster structure to a more focused two-track one with courses organized around the broad areas of Urban Society and Urban Planning and Policy, respectively. Clearly forward looking, this curricular reform also harkens back to two underlying strengths in our majors pursuing graduate studies and urban planning-related careers.

It is a quiet Summer at CUGS so far. The usual annual excitement with the China Program is missing, thanks to the pandemic, and we still have not returned to a “normal” state of activity on campus at 70 Vernon Street. We have a ton of things to look forward to and to plan for, though, and that is keeping us busy.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Urban Studies David Lukens and rising senior Matt Powell ’22 are working together on researching Parkville Market. Parkville Market opened last year on Park Street, one mile west of the Trinity College campus.

Samia Khoder ’21 ended her senior year at Trinity with awards and accolades recognizing her for the academic rigor and unique experiences that defined her four years. This spring, Khoder was awarded first prize of the Jeffrey E. Kelter ’76 Student Urban Research Prize for her thesis titled “Urban Authenticity: The Changing Meaning of Racial Difference in the Making and Remaking of the City.” Khoder also received the Outstanding Urban Studies Senior Award and received a W.H. Russell Fellowship. The fellowship includes a scholarship for graduate school, which Samia will use as she furthers her studies at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany.