Steven Bingler is a leading advocate for innovative, equitable and community centered architectural, urban design and stakeholder engagement solutions. He grew up in a working class family in Charlottesville, Virginia where he was among the first in his extended family to graduate from high school. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Architecture and is a lifetime member of the university’s prestigious Raven Society.
In 1983 he founded Concordia, a New Orleans based architectural, planning and community centered design firm. The word concordia, which is the Latin word for “harmony,” became his personal and professional mission statement. Concordia’s award winning projects have appeared in many local, national and international publications, including Newsweek, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today, as well as Architectural Digest, Architecture and Metropolis magazines.
Bingler has founded or co-founded a series of New Orleans based organizations with missions focused on community centered entrepreneurship and design innovation. He co-founded with Martin C.Pedersen the “Common Edge Collaborative”,an online news site with more than 400 essays published on community centered planning and design. https://commonedge.org/
See recent article co-authored with Pedersen, published in Fast Company, 08-15-22; “America’s biggest financial threat isn’t government spending. It’s the cost of climate change.
Bingler’s work has received support from the Ford, Rockefeller, Bill and Melinda Gates, George Lucas, Prudential, William Penn and other foundations. His research papers have been widely published in books and journals on climate change, urban planning, architectural design, public health and education. His op-eds, developed in collaboration with his colleague Martin Pedersen, have been published in the New York Times and Washington Post.
As a fervent naturalist, he has recently become a spokesperson for community centered climate change planning. In addition to his efforts in coordinating the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP) for the recovery of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, he recently served as the principal investigator for the Global Transformation Roundtable, a Rockefeller Foundation funded initiative. He authored the resulting report, “Sea Changes”, outlining planning principles for addressing sea level rise, wildfires, drought and other systemic existential challenges.