cca-wri research fellowship program

The CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program deepens its exploration of vacancy as a cyclical condition—holding the potential to regenerate lands, structures and social relations in tandem. Vacancy suggests not emptiness and erasure, but rather conditions of return, renewal, and evolution that can manifest histories of marginalization.

This second iteration of the program seeks to build on the 2026 edition and expand the geographies across which its first four projects opened questions related to the assumed stasis of vacant lands and buildings. These projects moved across urban places changed by real estate speculation, Indigenous land tenure and creative reappropriation in Honolulu, to other urbanized contexts such as St. Louis, where disinvestment and racial segregation have maintained urban vacancy as a norm. They also investigated the futures of intentional vacancy and collective ownership in high-risk disaster zones such as Nepal, as well as disaster mitigation planning . Rurality is embedded across all urban conditions of occupation and land use, and comes to the foreground in research on Toyama Prefecture in Japan, where abandoned rural homes open gaps that have been filled with renewed craft traditions, practices, and pedagogies that create new places for living and new forms of generational knowledge.

Applicants to the 2027 program are invited to put forward projects that explore vacancy as a condition that encompasses and exceeds vacant buildings and vacant lands—one that can be actively maintained through policy, financial withdrawal, and environmental risk. We welcome applications focused on specific sites that are actively contending with vacancy as a social, cultural, political, and spatial condition, and committed to a theoretical model that can inform design practice. This can be achieved through a range of approaches, particularly those that take vacancy as a broad, if highly situated, condition and experience across specific urban and rural locations, as well as processes of economic, demographic, and environmental change. These approaches include engaging with:

• Vacancy as an expression of the climate crisis

• Material cycles of design and planning that stem from demolition and land remediation

• Vacancy as intentional and planned for, particularly through urban and national policy-making

• Histories of vacancy across distinct cultural contexts, generating new understandings of why certain cultures deem it better not to build

• Vacancy as generated by extreme pollution, extraction, and environmental damage, including non-human reoccupation as a strategy of repair

Sited case studies can draw on prior research engagements and show evidence of community involvement in decision making and planning. Projects can also deepen ties to the geographies engaged with by researchers in the first cycle of the program, or address entirely distinct places.

The program convenes designers, municipal and urban officials, and researchers to explore and reimagine dialogues between real-world, ongoing projects and sites related to vacant land and buildings. Each summer (July to October) from 2026 to 2028, CCA-WRI Research Fellows will engage with specific sites from recently completed or active research and/or design projects to see how the generation of vacant land, buildings, and other spatial conditions works across geographical contexts, urban and rural realities, political circumstances, and timeframes. On an annual basis, the program puts the fellows into collaborative dialogue with the intent of creating an experimental space for thinking and active design.

The CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program seeks to build an experimental research format that allows designers and researchers to ground ongoing projects in the CCA Collection by undertaking in-depth, historically informed research, and also collaborate and exchange with peer practitioner-academics from around the world—building a space in which theoretical exploration can move towards on-the-ground action.

Researchers with active design projects that may not otherwise benefit from a historical perspective can turn their attention to, by way of example, materials related to Ignasi de Solà-Morales’s notion of wasteland, Gianni Pettena’s works that surface questions of occupation, environmental change, and duration, or photographs that document land use, environmental transformation, and human impact, including the CCA’s ten-year Olmsted project dating back to 1988 that documents seventy-four sites designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and photographed by Robert Burley, Lee Friedlander, and Geoffrey James. These and other projects in the CCA Collection can spark ideas on how to engage with sites of intense urban and rural transition.