Announcing the Inaugural Oregon | Places Prize Winner

We are pleased to announce that Sara Jensen Carr has been selected as the 2019 recipient of the Oregon | Places Prize.

The winning proposal, “Water is Wealth: Occupation and Erasure in Honolulu’s Urban Landscape and Its Ecological Future,” will explore how Hawaii’s ahupua’a system — a land division based primarily on watersheds but also formed by tribal divisions and agricultural trade — shaped the urban landscape of Honolulu, and how reimagining that system could hold the key to the ecological future of the 50th state.

Carr is assistant professor of architecture, urbanism, and landscape at Northeastern
University’s School of Architecture at the College of Arts, Media and Design. Her research focuses on how the urban landscape forms well-being, and her monograph, The Topography of Wellness, is forthcoming from University of Virginia Press.

The biennial prize is a new collaboration between the College of Design at the University of Oregon and Places Journal. The Oregon | Places Prize has been established to support ambitious public scholarship on the large theme of power and place — on the practices, institutions, spaces, and aesthetics that encourage or obstruct the achievement of urban equity and environmental justice, and on the relationship of the design disciplines to larger structures of power.

Read more about the prize and this year’s winner in the College of Design’s news story.