David Brown: Community-driven futures we could have today | THIS Wednesday Feb 26th, 6PM

[Alison Elizabeth Post]

Dear GMS community,

Please join us for the GMS Co-sponsored talked below this Wednesday evening!  (See below for more details.) 

Alison

****

Alison E. Post

Associate Professor

Political Science and Global Metropolitan Studies

University of California, Berkeley

aep...@berkeley.edu

Please join us for this Arcus Foundation Lecture by David Brown about The Available City, his ongoing initiative to document, explore, and reimagine vacant lots in Chicago as landscapes of collective action.

The Available City is an improvisational urban design framework that proposes Chicago’s 10,000 city-owned vacant lots — equal to the Loop in land area — as a landscape of community-driven collective spaces implemented by neighborhood community organizations. Within the 18 underserved South and West Chicago neighborhoods with the highest numbers of city-owned vacant land, which are home to primarily Black and brown communities, The Available City focuses on strengthening the character and quality of life by engaging community organizations and residents (in collaboration with architects from around the world) in thinking about and building collective spaces that reflect each neighborhood’s interests and needs.

As a model for social justice, The Available City it seeks to transform the vacant land — a detrimental outcome of predatory lending practices and the neighborhoods being underserved for decades — into a distinct landscape and urbanism within the city that is notable for its provision of new capacity, resources, and opportunities that have been absent for residents of the 18 neighborhoods for far too long.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER Designer, educator, and researcher David Brown works on The Available City, the potential of Chicago’s 10,000+ city-owned vacant lots as a collective space system, an urban design, and a future we can have today. Iterations of the speculative design have been exhibited in the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale and the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Brown was the artistic director of the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial, which had The Available City as its focus and theme. His essays and drawings presenting the transformative impact The Available City can have on Chicago’s South and West Sides are found in CENTER 18: Music in Architecture—Architecture in Music, the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies Vol. 2, and Flat Out 4. Those essays continue his study of architecture in relation to structures in jazz that facilitate improvisation, which he initiated in the book Noise Orders. In 2023, he established The Available City as a nonprofit organization.

Wednesday February 26th 2025

Bauer Wurster Hall

6-6:30 Reception with Light Refreshments in Gallery, on display: David Meyer's Exhibition Moving the Spirit by Shaping the Earth

6:30-7:45 Lecture and Q&A in Auditorium