Hello 2018!

A very happy New Year from UDC! We’ve had a busy and exciting year in 2017, with several projects that enabled us to engage in impactful work in urban communities. As we roll into the New Year, we also wanted to share with you a significant list of UDC ‘new’s (get it?) that have been in the works over the past few months.

WEBSITE
For starters, we have a clean new layout for our website that has enabled us to showcase what we do better. While we have a clearly defined urban focus in our work, we engage with a variety of urban issues on projects with diverse formats and outputs. Updating the website to better reflect this diversity of thought and action has been a priority for us. Do check out the website at http://urbandesigncollective.org/ and share your feedback with us!

CITY OBSERVER
In addition to this, we have also updated the graphic layout for our biannual journal publication – City Observer. Our vision for the journal is a free online publication and a document that can be widely shared digitally and easily read. To this end, we reformatted the content to enhance legibility on a screen, while keeping the visual qualities of the layout that we love. Another first for us with City Observer this time around was the move to source articles and essays for the second issue of the year through a ‘Call for Submissions’. We were overwhelmed with over 50 responses to the call and are delighted to feature several of them in the December 2017 issue. Check out the new issue here!

UDC BLOG
The UDC Blog is another initiative with some exciting updates in 2018. One of our ongoing ‘regulars’ series of posts on the blog, the Weekly Roundups which was started in March 2015 will be wrapped up when we hit the 150th post next week and will transition into a Monthly Roundup Series. With this change, we hope to have a more consolidated post each month, to share the highlights in city-related content and provide an insight into the latest and greatest in urban design as we progress through the year.

We are also excited to introduce another new series beginning in January 2018 – a ‘Monthly Op-ed’ column – that will focus on a specific subject each month, explored through a series of two to three weekly posts. Nandini Ramakuru kicked off the first of the series on January 1st this year with a great post on the Nudge Theory and its relationship to urban design – read more about it here and watch this space for the next instalment in the series!

INSTAGRAM
Yes, we took the dive into the world of Instagram this year because we thought it would be a good way to share our everyday urbanism moments with our audience. Follow us on udc_gram or https://www.instagram.com/udc_gram/

As you can probably tell by now, we’ve been busy at work revisiting, ideating and updating on several fronts in alignment with our ‘Publications and Social Media Outreach‘ vertical. This process is an important part of who we are as a team, and we believe it reflects the way we should be operating as urbanists as well – in a nimble, goal-oriented and self-aware manner. In that spirit, we hope to hear your feedback on all of the above, as we progress through the coming year!

Thank you for your support and encouragement thus far and here’s to a great new year in 2018!