Roy Strickland

Roy Strickland is an internationally recognized and award-winning urban designer whose practice, teaching, and research have engaged the global cities of London, Paris, Tokyo, Istanbul, New York, and Beijing. He is a professor of architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where he served as the founding director of the Master of Urban Design program from 2001 to 2012. In China, he is a designated overseas expert in the field of urban design tasked to help that country develop urban design education. He also serves as senior adviser to the National Research Center for Rural Planning in Beijing. 

Strickland specializes in resilient urban design, housing, public space, school and community design, and the use of narrative film in architectural and urban design. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Progressive Architecture, Architectural Record, and The Atlantic Cities, and has been exhibited at The Architectural League of New York, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Columbia University, the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Washington, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the former director of Columbia University’s Urban Design Program and chair of the Master of Science of Architectural Studies Curriculum Committee at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning.

As the founder and director of the New American School Design Project at U-M and MIT, Strickland has developed the City of Learning (COL) design and planning strategy that has been applied to schools and school systems across the United States. COL embraces educators’ research that healthy neighborhoods support successful learning and makes school design and programming holistic by integrating the planning of schools with that of communities. By doing so it identifies schools as a potent force in urban revitalization as it expands pre-K-12 educational options and has shaped the planning and delivery of more than $1 billion in school and community development projects nationwide.

Strickland is the author and editor of Designing a City of Learning: Paterson, NJ (Reynalds Dewalt, 2001), which won a Great Places Award for outstanding planning projects from the Environmental Design Research Association. He also is the author of numerous articles in American, British, French and Italian academic and professional journals concerning architecture, urban design and urban design pedagogy. Currently, he is editing an international survey of urban design pedagogy for the Urban Planning and Design journal produced by the Institution of Civil Engineers. A former associate editor of the Harvard Architecture Review and a member of the editorial advisory board of Places: Forum of Environmental Design, Strickland is a fellow of the Urban Design Forum and a member of the Municipal Art Society Preservation Committee in New York City. He has executed public space revitalization projects in Midtown Manhattan’s Bryant Park and Union Square, and the design guidelines leading to large-scale residential developments along Frederick Douglass Boulevard and Bradhurst Avenue in Upper Manhattan.

Strickland has lectured at numerous universities and organizations in the United States and abroad, including the Architectural League of New York; Mayors’ Institute on City Design in Washington, D.C.; MacArthur Foundation; the American Planning Association; the American Architectural Foundation; Urban Land Institute Europe in Turkey; the Institute for Behavioral Studies in Japan; the South China University of Technology; and City University of Hong Kong. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University and his Master of Architecture from MIT.