C.L.I.M.B. (City Life Is Moving Bodies), 155th Street
Image by Kubi Ackerman,
GSAPP, M.Arch ‘07
The CLIMB Project is a Northern Manhattan community-based initiative founded on the belief that safe parks and neighborhoods are essential to community health, and that all communities, regardless of socioeconomic background, are entitled to access to safe parks and neighborhoods. The purpose of the project is to combat the problems of gang violence, drugs, obesity, sedentary lifestyles and displacement by engaging residents and organizations in creating a sense of neighborhood and park ownership.
At the core of the CLIMB project is the creation of a multi-use urban hiking trail to link the escarpment parks of northern Manhattan – Highbridge Park, Jackie Robinson Park, St. Nicholas Park, Morningside Park and northern Central Park. In addition to physically stringing these parks together, we propose conceptually linking organizations, institutions and residents in the vicinity of the parks to create and/or strengthen programming and services. This project was a design studio class coordinated with the UDL and conducted by Columbia’s schools of architecture, engineering and public health.
The Urban Ecology Studio is a research and training collaboration between the Senior Civil and Environmental Engineering Design Seminar at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). The Urban Ecology Studio trains students of different disciplines to investigate deeply environmental design solutions for cities in the twenty first century.
Faculty: Richard Plunz, Patricia Culligan, Mindy Fullilove, Lourdes Hernandez-Cordero, Dimitris Vlachopoulos, Philip Simmons.