Call for Proposals: American Roundtable

 The Architectural League of New York, a non-profit cultural organization focused on nurturing excellence in architecture, design, and urbanism is launching American Roundtable, a new initiative to bring together on-the-ground perspectives on the condition of American communities, and what they need to thrive going forward.

How can we see with fresh eyes the condition—the successes, failures, and opportunities—of the American landscape? How can we more deeply understand the relationship of individuals and communities to their environments and the constraining and empowering impacts that the built environment has on daily life, and the trajectories of lives?

Requirements

American Roundtable will commission up to ten editors to prepare reports on communities from across the United States, with an emphasis on small cities, towns, and rural areas. We are striving for both geographic diversity and diversity in terms of the communities represented.
 
The editor, or at least one member of an editorial team, must have a design background (architect, landscape architect, planner, architectural historian, etc). These editors will in turn commission contributors from various outlooks and backgrounds to respond to a set of topics (public space, health, work and economy, infrastructure, and environment), producing features that cover a range of perspectives in diverse media formats.

Rural areas, small towns and cities, micropolitan regions, or metropolitan regions of less than about 400,000 will be favored.

The reports will be published online and as a series of standard format print publications in September 2020. Commissioned teams will be awarded $10,000 to support their work.