LAI International 2024 Richard T. Ely Distinguished Educator
Hazel Ruth Edwards, Ph.D., FAICP
Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning
College of Engineering and Architecture, Howard University
Recognizing an outstanding career as an educator, practitioner and visionary in the fields of architecture and urban planning as she advocates the spirit of placemaking to students, clients and her academic colleagues.
This award is presented to a public official who, through his or her efforts—technical, managerial or other significant effort—has made a notable contribution to improving the quality of urban life or to a person who has made outstanding contributions to urban affairs and who has advanced the frontiers of knowledge via research and/or practice.
Dr. Hazel Ruth Edwards, FAICP, is an educator and planner whose career combines place-based research with planning and urban design practice and teaching. She has been a member of LAI since 2001 and is a member of the George Washington Chapter. This award is given in recognition of her excellence within the academic world in the field of land economics, recognizing her extensive contributions to higher education, in the area of urban planning and architecture, and her distinguished career of service to the profession.
Dr. Edwards is Professor and past-Chair of the Department of Architecture at the College of Engineering and Architecture at Howard University. Prior to joining Howard University, she taught in the graduate architecture and city planning programs at Morgan State University's Institute of Architecture and Planning and at The Catholic University of America's School of Architecture and Planning, where she served as director of the Master of City and Regional Planning program.
Her unique career has combined place-based research with planning and urban design teaching and practice. The common thread of her academic, scholarly, and professional endeavors has been improving livability for all citizens, increasing diverse voices in the design and planning fields, and uncovering untold stories of campus environments. She has been driven by a passion to expand her student’s understanding of how community emerges. She and her students worked with neighborhoods overwhelmed by drug activity in Baltimore, MD; with public agencies for domestic violence victims; and in multi-ethnic neighborhoods heavily impacted by gentrification, plus in communities of greater means in Washington, D.C.
Edwards coauthored “The Long Walk: The Placemaking Legacy of Howard University” in 1996, a history of the campus’s 129-year physical development that became the framework for its 1998 Central Campus Plan. She also generated significant funding for her research projects and published work on place making at other American historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In the Harvard University Press’ “Landscape and the Academy”, her essay “On Hilltop High: The Enduring and Nurturing Landscapes of Howard University” was published in 2019.
She was selected as a Radcliffe Fellow for the 2023-2024 class at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. At Radcliffe, she built on her prior work on Howard University to explore the connections between the historic distinction of land as “ours” (Black) and “theirs” (white) articulated by sociocultural and spatial-justice practices which have impacted that university since its founding. The project also investigates the disposition of the land as a means to reconciling its place in history prior to 1866 and will develop a playbook of sorts that could help other HBCUs or any type of institution uncover their connections to the indigenous people, slavery and the disposition of their land.
Dr. Edwards holds the Ph.D. in Regional Planning from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University, and the Bachelor of Architecture from Howard University. She was a Carolina Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is certified with and an elected fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners. Edwards is the 2022 recipient of Architectural Record’s Women in Architecture Design Leadership Educator award. In June 2021, she was appointed to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts by President Joseph R. Biden and was elected as its Vice Chair.
