Maurice Cox has been named the 2024 laureate of the Henry Hope Reed Award at the University of Notre Dame, which entails $50,000 granted by the Dreihaus Trust of Chicago in the name of Richard H. Driehaus. The prize honors Cox’s contributions to addressing socioeconomic inequity through policy design, education, and public service.
Cox has a background in both higher education and the public sector. He was a member of the city council in Charlottesville, Virginia, from 1996 to 2002 and served as mayor from 2002 to 2004. Later in his career, he served as the director of planning for the city of Detroit, and the commissioner of planning and development for the city of Chicago. In addition his public service, Cox held academic appointments at Syracuse University in New York, the University of Virginia, Tulane University in Louisiana, and the Harvard University School of Design.
In issuing his award, the prize jury wrote, “Throughout his career, Maurice Cox stressed strategies that provide access to housing and neighborhood services for all citizens through a mixed-use model of urban development and has worked consistently to make places more sustainable, resilient and livable. He has repeatedly put himself in places where the challenges seemed the greatest and has left behind solid foundations that others can build upon.”
Cox holds a bachelor of architecture degree from the Cooper Union in New York City. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Detroit Mercy.
I wish we could get Henry Louis Gates Jr. to look up Mr. Maurice Cox’s ancestral roots.
Would be interesting. AJ