Mission

News

December 16, 2023

Kate Orff on "Managed Retreat" in Bloomberg

“There’s no thread that connects the investment [of a buyout] to something that is actually meaningful. There’s nothing that follows the dot all the way through,” says Kate Orff, faculty director of Columbia University’s Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” for her work on coastal adaptation. What’s needed “is a program that actually looks more synthetically at how all of these things come together.”

April 14, 2023

Kate Orff in Time 100 Most Influential People of 2023

TIME named Kate Orff to the 2023 TIME 100, its annual list of the most influential people in the world.

Widely recognized as a leading voice in landscape architecture, urban design, and climate adaptation in a global context, Orff joins a class of preeminent figures in politics, technology, philanthropy, media, business, entertainment, and beyond. The full list is available on newsstands on Friday, April 14.

Mission

The Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes (CRCL) uses planning and design to help communities and ecosystems adapt to the pressures of urbanization, inequality, and climate change. CRCL works with public, nonprofit, and academic partners to deliver practical and forward-thinking technical assistance through interdisciplinary research, visualization of risk, project design scenarios, and facilitated convenings. CRCL integrates resilience thinking into design education and academic programming, bringing real-world challenges into the classroom to train future design leaders.

Established in 2018 at Columbia University’s Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), CRCL extends Columbia’s leadership in climate-related work and supports the interdisciplinary collaborations and external partnerships needed to engage the most serious and challenging issues of our time.

Our Work