Terry Schwarz

Director – Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative

Panelist – 4:00pm, Wednesday, April 6th – Lab Culture: Hands on Think Tanks for Cities

As part of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design, the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative has grown and evolved well beyond its original mission as a community-based design center. Schwarz has been the driving force behind much of this evolution. The collaborative was created to provide urban design services to communities and neighborhoods that are typically underserved by the design professions — urban, impoverished places where an enhanced and intentional approach to design can dramatically improve residents’ quality of life.

Schwarz joined Kent State in 2000 and has been an integral part of delivering design services to the collaborative’s core clientele. In addition, she opened a world of research advocacy in which the experimental work being conducted by the collaborative in some of Cleveland’s most distressed neighborhoods is translated and applied to regional and national problems.
Schwarz teaches in the graduate design curriculum in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design. She recently prepared the Re-imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland plan in collaboration with Neighborhood Progress Inc. and the Cleveland City Planning Commission. In 2009, she received the Cleveland Arts Prize for Design.

In 2005, Schwarz launched the Shrinking Cities Institute in response to Cleveland’s ongoing population loss and the challenges associated with large-scale urban vacancy. The Shrinking Cities Institute has grown to include a science-based approach to the ecological reclamation of urban land. She also was the impetus behind Pop Up City, which activates some of Cleveland’s most spectacular but underutilized vacant places as havens for cultural and arts activities. She has lectured in conferences and symposiums across the country and around the world, and her reports and publications have influenced policy discussions at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Brookings Institution. She remains committed to growing the influence and impact of the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative at the local and national levels.

Schwarz has a bachelor’s degree in English from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a master’s degree in city and regional planning from Cornell University. Among her past positions , Schwarz has served as senior planner for the city of Shaker Heights Planning Department and the Affordable Housing Advisory Board in Tompkins County, N.Y. Schwarz has worked on many projects in the Cleveland area, including the First Suburbs Consortium Housing Initiative, the Slavic Village Land Use Study and the WIRE-Net Industrial Streetscape Guidelines. She is a member of the American Planning Association