The Remaking Cities Institute (RCI) is pleased to announce that Carolyn Ristau has joined the RCI as a Visiting Scholar.
Ristau has over a decade of experience practicing and researching urban issues, including zoning, housing, transportation, and public safety. She has worked with the City of Pittsburgh, Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation, East Liberty Development Inc., and Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh.
Ristau guest lectures on zoning and its promotion of a one-size-fits-all American Dream for SoA seminars and studios, unpacks zoning regulations and tools in guides for her firm Details Reviewed LLC, and explores urban places on urbantraipsing.com. Ristau’s research on morality, zoning, and redevelopment probes how morality is built into zoning code regulations both overtly in the purpose section of many cities’ ordinances and covertly in the regulations themselves. She also studies the adaptive reuse of religious buildings as markers of the exclusionary nature of land use development and as sites that encapsulate the story of our ever-changing cities. The goal of her research is to understand the origins and context of zoning and development regulations to find ways that these regulations could be used to support more inclusive communities.
Ristau works as the Office Assistant for the School of Architecture and is the founder of Details Reviewed LLC, a zoning consultancy. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Urban Studies from the University of Pittsburgh, where she graduated summa cum laude.