Patty Heyda and Bruce Lindsey Finalists for Confluence Awards

Two Sam Fox School faculty members, Associate Professor Patty Heyda and Professor Bruce Lindsey, are among 10 Washington University finalists for the William H. Danforth St. Louis Confluence Award.

The annual award is designed to elevate WashU’s investment in St. Louis by encouraging and rewarding faculty research that enhances the university’s impact in the region. The winner receives a $50,000 cash prize in recognition of ongoing and completed interdisciplinary, community-engaged research.

Patty Heyda’s project, Radical Atlas, maps the politics of inequality in American first-ring suburbs through the lens of Ferguson and north St. Louis County. Through more than a decade of redevelopment research, over 100 maps spatialize the current systems that provoke racial segregation, fragmentation, poverty, exploitation, and environmental destruction in the aging suburb, and how these systems exacerbate the erosions of residents’ rights and design’s possibilities. The atlas also offers creative and productive policy alternatives.

Bruce Lindsey, the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Community Collaboration, is highlighted for his work with The Divided City, an urban humanities initiative in partnership with the Mellon Foundation, Center for Humanities, and the Sam Fox School. In operation for nearly a decade, The Divided City has spurred dozens of collaborations between the humanities and architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design ranging from drone photography for neighborhood planning purposes, to poetry and storytelling nights focused on placemaking, to researching the connection between American post-war design history and Japanese American internment during World War II.

The university will honor the finalists April 10 at the .ZACK with a ceremony including a panel of researchers and community partners, recognition of the top 10 finalists, and an announcement of the 2024 winner.