“[W]e need an environment which is not simply well organized, but poetic and symbolic as well.”

-Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City

Established 2019

Washington, D.C.

DISTRICT urbanism (DTu) is a Washington, D.C. based urban planning, real estate, design, and research studio.  DTu was born out of a need to clarify new paradigms of urbanism and development.

Our Approach

The city is human civilization’s greatest invention. It exemplifies the pinnacle of mankind’s worthy endeavors – civic, scientific, economic, social, and spiritual.  At the same time, it represents all the complexities and potentialities of an ever-evolving organic entity.

And yet, the city today faces countless dilemmas that will define humanity’s progress for centuries to come – including among them the forces of social deterioration, economic instability, environmental volatility, and decaying physical infrastructure.  The challenge of mass urbanization is a phenomenon for which humanity has not fully prepared.  We believe that within the pressing challenges we face lies a void of collective values to define our shared path forward.

At this juncture in mankind’s great urban experiment, humanity holds the potential to redefine its vision for collective urban settlements that promote the highest values we choose to uphold – values of justice, unity, sustainability, and collective prosperity.

Our approach to understanding conditions of and generating solutions for incremental urban change involves analysis of people, the natural environment, the built environment, and the defined physical spaces of human scale. We explore these four levels using the constructs of DENIZEN, DUST, DWELLING, and DISTRICT.

District

The human-scaled Space of identity