Six finalists have been announced for the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Architecture 2018. They include projects in Mexico, Brazil, Peru and the United States. Ricky Burdett, Director of LSE Cities and Jury Chair of the prize highlighted the importance of a deep connection between architecture, society, and the environment.

“We were not interested in one-off iconic objects. We were interested in buildings that work—for the city, for the institution, for the neighbourhood, community, and the individual occupants. Buildings that have meaning and complexity, and enrich the lives of the people who use and inhabit them. We were mindful of how buildings would adapt over time, how they would age and respond to changes in everyday practices and lifestyles. We were looking for projects that—regardless of scale or budget—might set new typologies for universities, museums, public institutions, galleries, and housing as we move forward in the twenty-first century,” said Burdett.

Julia King, a Research Fellow at LSE Cities, will speak at Learning from Small Cities: Governing Imagined Futures and the Dynamics of Change in India’s Smart Urban Age on 1 August 2018 at King’s College London. The talk is entitled “State-Led Citizen Engagement in Urban Development: The Case of India’s Smart Cities Mission”. King leads Incremental Infrastructure, a research project to identify, design, and prototype sanitation interventions in the context of marginalised and peripheral communities in Delhi, and teaches in the Cities Programme.

Leading change in your city includes the backstory of the LSE’s new Executive MSc in Cities and how new forms of research and education are central to plugging capacity needs in existing and future cities. Executive programme co-founders Philipp Rode and Savvas Verdis are interviewed by Peter Griffiths, Managing Editor at LSE Cities.

Richard Sennett, Chair of the Advisory Board, LSE Cities and Professor of Sociology at the LSE, has been made a Fellow of the British Academy for his contribution to humanities and the social sciences. The British Academy, founded in 1902, is an independent fellowship of world-leading scholars and researchers; a funding body for research, nationally and internationally; and a forum for debate and engagement.

Philipp Rode, Executive Director of LSE Cities and Urban Age, is speaking at the Moscow Urban Forum on 17 July 2018. Rode will be speaking on Public vs Personal: Chronicle of the Transportation Revolution and Master of Urban Management: Education for Urban Leaders. The transport panel will draw on LSE Cities research into design, technology and transport governance, while the urban leadership panel will expand on LSE’s Executive MSc in Cities, designed to equip city leaders to manage change in their cities. The first cohort of participants recently graduated.