Please join us in congratulating the 2025 Gibbs College Faculty & Staff Awards recipients. Recipients were honored by Dean Butzer during the Gibbs College Back to School Meeting and will be recognized during the college awards banquet in October. They were nominated by their colleagues via an open nomination process.
A collaborative project between the University of Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Department of Commerce and the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency was recently featured in The Oklahoman. A team of OU researchers are currently redesigning the Oklahoma Housing Needs Assessment, an online source of detailed information about Oklahoma’s 77 counties.
The City of Broken Arrow City Council recently adopted the Aspen Landing Waterfront Vision, an ambitious exploration of riverfront development conceptualized by OU Urban Design students. The vision is based on a study by students that identified potential to improve and expand over 230 acres of park land along the riverfront in southern Broken Arrow, known as Aspen Landing.
The Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture is pleased to announce the creation of the new Division of Planning, Landscape Architecture and Design.
A new pergola designed by Urban Design students Virginia Paiva and Samiul Haque was recently installed at Chapman Green in downtown Tulsa. The pergola was funded by a grant from the Claritin® Clarity Parks Project, which helps restore community outdoor spaces that have been impacted by natural disasters.
A multidisciplinary team of OU researchers from the Gibbs College of Architecture and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Gallogly College of Engineering has been selected by the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency (OHFA) to create the Oklahoma State Housing Needs Assessment.
The Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) recently completed a year-long project sponsored by the Association for Central Oklahoma Governments (ACOG). ACOG's Community Economic Resiliency Initiative allowed the IQC to launch a new Community Engagement Fellowship, in which four Gibbs faculty members and a dozen Gibbs students provided planning services in the cities of El Reno, Guthrie, and Harrah.
Dr. Laura Harjo, an associate professor of Native American Studies and Regional + City Planning faculty affiliate, recently organized and presented the exhibition Muscogee (Creek) Tribal Town Futurity: Spatial Storytelling with Emergent Technologies in the Gould Hall Buskuhl Gallery. She was assisted by Gibbs College’s Dr. Angela Person (Architecture) and Prof. Shawn Schaefer (Urban Design), as well as several Architecture and Urban Design students, Gibbs College staff, and others.
From April 11 through April 15, 2022, the University of Oklahoma will present Muscogee (Creek) Tribal Town Futurity: Spatial Storytelling with Emergent Technologies.
Urban Design students, Roshita Taylor, Soujanya Malla, and Jeremy Banes, shared their designs for Sweeney Switch in downtown Harrah, Oklahoma during the town’s St. Patrick Day celebration.
GCA Communications intern Kali Curtis (K) spoke with Shawn Schaefer (S), the director of the Urban Design Studio here at Gibbs! We sat down with Schaefer to learn about how the use of technology and design methods has evolved throughout his career.
In 2018, Urban Design students worked with Tulsa residents and community leaders to create a new vision for Tulsa’s B.S. Roberts Park. Their vision is now becoming a reality.
Nine Gibbs College faculty and staff were recently recognized during the awards segment of the Fall 2021 Back-to-School Meeting. Honorees were nominated by their colleagues in Gibbs College through an open nomination process.
Urban design studio students attended Harrah Days to engage with residents and introduce their downtown Harrah planning project. At their booth, students gathered community input on local strengths, needs, and ideas for future downtown development.
In 2020, the Association of Central Oklahoma Governments (ACOG) reached out to the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) to ask for assistance with their Community Economic Resiliency Initiative (CERI). The Initiative was developed to help local governments respond to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Three Oklahoma communities were selected to receive urban planning services from the IQC. These services would emphasize community identity and placemaking.
In the Fall of 2020, the Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) hosted their first Quality Communities Retreat, sponsored by Mayors’ Institute on City Design and Oklahoma Municipal League.
