Hazel Ruth Edwards
Hazel Ruth Edwards, PhD, FAICP, is an award-winning educator and planner whose career combines place-based research with planning and urban design practice and teaching. The common thread of her academic, scholarly, and professional endeavors has been improving livability for all citizens and increasing diverse voices in the design and planning fields.
A native of North Carolina, Dr. Edwards was raised in Washington, D.C., and later graduated from Howard University (Bachelor of Architecture). She went on to receive degrees from Harvard University (Master of Architecture in Urban Design) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Doctor of Philosophy in Regional Planning). She returned to North Carolina as a Carolina Minority Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Early in 1996, Dr. Edwards returned to Howard University to conduct research on the history of the university’s physical development as the historical framework for the 1998 Central Campus Plan. What began as a planning study was published as the university’s third history The Long Walk: The Placemaking Legacy of Howard University. Coauthored with then University Vice President Harry G. Robinson III, The Long Walk is acclaimed as landmark work and has been reviewed in PLACES Magazine, among other publications. The book was also the basis for an award-winning documentary, “The Long Walk,” directed by Raki Jones. After the book was published, she continued to work with Vice President Robinson as Special Assistant for Campus Planning and Development on the West and Central Campus Plans as well as numerous other university planning activities from 1996 to 1999. Many of the projects that were an outcome of the campus plans are still integral to Howard University’s function and form today.
Her professional experiences and her becoming a certified planner with the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) provided the requisite background to begin an academic career in city planning. She left Howard in 1999 to join the faculty of the graduate program in City and Regional Planning at the Institute of Architecture and Planning, Morgan State University. There she was also a co-principal investigator for two multidisciplinary funded research projects which focused on socioeconomic, community-based approaches for developing integrated mass transit systems in the City of Baltimore, Maryland. In 2007, she joined the faculty at the School of Architecture and Planning at The Catholic University of America. Shortly thereafter, she became the founding director of its new Master of City and Regional Planning, which was ranked in 2014 by Planetizen as one of the Top 15 Small Planning Programs in North America.
When she returned to Howard in 2016, she became the first woman appointed as Full Professor and Chair of the Department of Architecture in the College of Engineering and Architecture since the program’s founding in 1911.
Her contributions to the design and planning academy and profession have been recognized by several awards and honors including induction into the George Washington Chapter of Lambda Alpha International, an honorary land economics society, in 2001. She received the 2009 Lankford Giles Vaughn Award for Professor of Architecture of the Year by the Washington, D.C. Chapter, National Organization of Minority Architects; the 2015 Marcia M. Feld Leadership Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP); the 2022 Women in Architecture Design Leadership Educator Award from Architectural Record; and the 2024 Richard T. Ely Distinguished Educator Award from Lambda Alpha International. She was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners (FAICP) in 2018.
Her participation on volunteer committees with the ACSP, American Planning Association (APA), the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and the Planning Accreditation Board provided the background to guide the work of her students in communities in Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. One such project received the Outstanding Student Project Award from the Maryland APA in 2002. She worked and volunteered for a number of design and planning firms and organizations throughout her career. She has been a member of several AIA and APA volunteer teams focused on developing alternatives to complex urban design (UDAT), planning (PAT), community planning (CPAT), and sustainable design assessment (SDAT) challenges.
In addition to these design-based activities, Dr. Edwards is also an experienced researcher with strong grantsmanship. Her research has focused primarily on quality-of-life issues in urban areas, but she has a particular interest in historical research. The Long Walk book project led to her funded research and published work on place making at other historically black colleges and universities in the United States. Her essay, “On Hilltop High: The Enduring and Nurturing Landscapes of Howard University,” appears in Landscape and the Academy, Beardsley, John and Bluestone, Daniel, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). That work also informed her project, “Ours and Theirs: Developing the HBCU Campus Amisdt Racialized Land Patterns,” when she was a 2023–2024 Radcliffe Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Her dedication to scholarship also extends to applying the design thinking process and architectural vocabulary to designing with an eye toward the future. At Howard, she is one of the Principal Investigators of a seven-institution research team funded by NASA. The Habitats Optimized for Missions of Exploration (HOME) Space Technology Research Institute for Deep Space Habitat Design, is one of two space technology research institutes selected by NASA in 2019. Howard architecture faculty and students are investigating earth-bound settings for adaptive architecture with potential applications to zero-/partial-gravity space habitats. The Howard team is focusing on empathetic, human-centered design for adaptive structures for space missions. The 11 student participants brought life experiences from around the country, the Caribbean nations, and Africa. Their hope is that by looking at space habitats together they can, in turn, impact earth bound settings.
One of her most cherished honors came in June 2021, when she was appointed to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts by President Joseph R. Biden and was elected as its Vice Chair.