PROMISING DEVELOPMENTS
DESIGNING PRESENTS AND FUTURES FOR THE SOUTH SIDE OF CHICAGO Wednesday, January 25, 2017 9:00–5:00 The Experimental Station 6100 South Blackstone, Chicago, Illinois
Organized By:
#SouthSideStories @TerreformUR @expstation
PARTICIPANTS Monica Chadha has practiced architecture for over 20 years. She is the Founder and Principal of Civic Projects LLC. In 2010, The Design Futures Council recognized her as an Emerging Leader and in 2013 she was included in the inaugural Public Interest Design 100 list of leaders. She currently serves on the Chicago Metropolitan Planning Council’s Placemaking and Sensible Growth Committees. At both Studio Gang Architects and Ross Barney Architects, Ms. Chadha was responsible for the design and team leadership of several award-wining buildings including the Champaign Public Library and the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Civil Engineering Building. C.W. Chan, a retired entrepreneur and mental health consultant and social service administrator, has been active in voluntary community service for four decades. His extensive civic service record over the decades has included being founder and board president of the Chinese American Service League; president and chairman of the Chicago Chinatown Chamber of Commerce; chairman of the Asian American Coalition of Chicago; and since 2000, founder and chairman of the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community (CBCAC). CBCAC has been instrumental in infrastructure improvements as well as the Chinatown Vision Plan that contributed to wide recognition of the south side ethnic neighborhood as the most thriving Chinatown in North America. Naomi Davis is an urban theorist, attorney, activist, and founder/CEO of BIG: Blacks in Green™. She created the “sustainable-square-mile” practice to implement BIG’s courses – The 8 Principles of Green-Village-Building™ and Grannynomics™. BIG’s Urban Homestead Estate™ in West Woodlawn aims to usher the “Age of the Neighbor Investor & Developer.” She is a LEED GA, Green For All Fellow, and serves on the Great Lakes Advisory Board, Illinois Natural Resources Advisory Board, Illinois Climate Table, Local First Chicago, Obama Library South Side CBA Coalition, Woodlawn Chamber of Commerce, and the Steering Committee of the Woodlawn Summit Organization. Gordon Douglas is Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at San José State University and current Acting Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU. Gordon’s research concerns local identity, peoples’ relationships to their urban surroundings, and socio-spatial inequality. His forthcoming book, The Help Yourself City, studies “DIY urbanism” and its implications for planning, participation, and privilege in American cities. Other recent studies have examined the cultural geography of gentrification in Chicago, and the impacts of community expectations on development projects. Gordon received his PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago. His writing and photography have appeared in City & Community, the Journal of Urban Design, Urban Studies, and other publications.
Cathy Gerlach has served as the Senior Program Officer of the Troubled Buildings Initiative (TBI) since 2004. The TBI program was established by the City of Chicago and Community Investment Corporation in 2003 to improve conditions at distressed multifamily housing through advocacy and receivership. As the first program officer, she authored foundational program documents. Cathy was inspired to attend law school by her experiences in the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) program. Her coursework at Northwestern Pritzker Law School focused on property, housing, and criminal law. Prior to attending law school, she worked as a business analyst for a software development and consulting company. Alex Goldenberg is the Executive Director of Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP) in Chicago. Jamie Kalven is a writer and human rights activist. He is the author of Working With Available Light: A Family’s World After Violence and the editor of A Worthy Tradition: Free Speech in America. Since the early 1990s, he has worked in and reported from public housing communities in Chicago. He has reported extensively on police abuse in Chicago and was the plaintiff in Kalven v. Chicago, in which the Illinois appellate court ruled that police misconduct files are public information. His reporting first brought the police shooting of Laquan McDonald to public attention. He received the 2015 George Polk Award for Local Reporting and the 2016 Ridenhour Courage Prize. Alden Loury is the the Director of Research and Evaluation at the Metropolitan Planning Council, where he works to identify, execute, and publicize MPC’s research agenda and findings. Alden has also worked for the Better Government Association as an investigative reporter and policy analyst, and The Chicago Reporter as a reporter, editor, and publisher where he won several journalism awards for stories highlighting the experiences of young black men and documenting racial disparities in drug sentencing, jury selection and jury verdicts. He is a Chicago native and graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jennifer Makelarski has served as Director of Research and Training for the Lindau Laboratory since 2009. Dr. Makelarski holds a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Iowa. She oversees the Lindau Laboratory’s urban health research, specifically research protocol development and data analysis and dissemination. Prior to joining the Lindau Lab, Dr. Makelarski worked for the Reproductive and Molecular Epidemiology Education Program at the University of Iowa lending expertise on numerous epidemiological studies, including the largest US population-based study of birth defects. Dr. Makelarski’s interests include urban health, community resources, food insecurity, and women’s health.
PROMISING DEVELOPMENTS | JAN 25 2017
Naomi Miller, as the administrative engine behind Place Lab, facilitates the work done by Place Lab’s team and the various network of projects, including formulating the concepts behind Ethical Redevelopment, engaging academic resources, and implementing the year-long event series and national discussion. Her artistic practice explores performance with an emphasis on artistic and professional collaborations. Previously, she was Programs Manager at the Vera List Center, The New School, New York. She received her M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute and her B.A. from Clark University. Natalie Moore is the author of The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), and the South Side bureau reporter for WBEZ, the NPR-member station in Chicago. Natalie has worked for The Detroit News as a city hall reporter, the St. Paul Pioneer Press as an education reporter, and the Associated Press in Jerusalem. Natalie’s work has been published in Essence, Black Enterprise, Chicago Reporter, Bitch, In These Times, Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune. She has an M.S.J. in Newspaper Management from Northwestern University, and a B.A. in Journalism from Howard University. Stephen Ostrander is Senior Planner at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP), where he has led development of many local plans throughout the Chicago region, including the Chinatown Community Vision Plan, recipient of the 2016 Strategic Plan Award by the Illinois Chapter of the American Planning Association. Stephen was also part of the team that created GO TO 2040, the first comprehensive plan for the Chicago region. He holds an B.A. in American studies from Stanford University, an M.A. in American history from Duke University, and a Master of Urban and Environmental Planning from the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. Carson Poole is a planner and community development practitioner. At Place Lab, Poole supports the planning and implementation of new projects, conducts community and civic engagement, and assists with the production of public programs. Prior to Place Lab, Poole worked with Openlands and the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. Poole also currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Illinois Farmers Market Association, an organization that promotes farmers markets in Illinois through outreach, education, and advocacy. He received his Master of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a B.Sc. from Cornell University. Emmanuel Pratt is co-founder and Executive Director of the Sweet Water Foundation. Emmanuel is also the Director of Aquaponics for Chicago State University and teaches courses within the college of Arts and Sciences. Emmanuel’s professional and academic work has involved investigations of architecture,
urbanization, race/identity, gentrification, and most recently transformative processes of community development through intersections of food security and sustainable design innovation. Emmanuel is currently a Loeb Fellow at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Vyjayanthi Rao is an anthropologist by training and the Director of Terreform. She has taught at The New School for Social Research and at The University of Chicago, where she received her doctorate. From 2002 to 2004, she served as the Research Director of Yale University’s Initiative on Cities and Globalization, and as the Co-Director of Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research, an urban laboratory in Mumbai. Currently, she focuses on cities after globalization and the intersections of urban planning, design, art, violence, and speculation. She is the author of numerous articles, the co-editor of Speculation, Now: Essays and Artwork, and is completing a manuscript on the spatial transformation of Mumbai. Michael Sorkin is an architect and urbanist whose practice spans design, criticism, and pedagogy. He is the president of Terreform, a nonprofit center for advanced urban research, and principal of Michael Sorkin Studio, an international design practice. Since 2000, Sorkin has been Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at City College of New York. He is the architecture critic for The Nation, contributing editor at Architectural Record, and author or editor of twenty books. Sorkin is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the recipient of the 2013 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Mind Award, and is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. Dawveed Scully is a Senior Urban Designer at SOM in Chicago. While his background is in architecture he has experience on urban scale projects working on everything from campuses to new cities. In recent years as a member of SOM city design practice he has developed a focus on the revitalization of the American city, working on a variety of projects on the south side of Chicago and most recently a project in Detroit’s East Riverfront looking at similar issues. Connie Spreen co-founded the Experimental Station, a non-profit cultural incubator, in 2002. She has been Executive Director of Experimental Station since 2008. In that role, she has built & overseen a variety of programs, including an active Cultural Events program, Blackstone Bicycle Works, 61st Street Farmers Market, LINK/SNAP Access For City of Chicago Farmers Markets, and LINK Up Illinois. Connie currently serves as a chair of the Cook County Food Access Task Force and as a member of the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago’s Children (CLOCC) Executive Committee. She holds a doctorate in French Literature and Languages from the University of Chicago.
SCHEDULE
PROMISING DEVELOPMENTS | JAN 25 2017
session one
session three
9:30 CONNIE SPREEN
2:00 MONICA CHADHA
Introduction
9:40 MICHAEL SORKIN Opening Remarks
9:50 NATALIE MOORE The South Side in Black and White
10:10 ALDEN LOURY Taking Advantage of Missed Opportunities on the South Side
10:30 JAMIE KALVEN The Unmaking of Place
10:50 DISCUSSION session two
11:20 ALEX GOLDENBERG What is a Community Benefit?
11:35 NAOMI MILLER + CARSON POOLE Ethical Redevelopment and the Chicago Arts + Industry Commons
12:00 JENNIFER MAKELARSKI From Assets to Action
12:15 CATHY GERLACH Safe Housing for Everyone
Incremental Change: Urban Activation in Englewood
2:15 C.W. CHAN Organizing to Plan Chinatown’s Future
2:30 STEPHEN OSTRANDER Chinatown Community Vision Plan
2:45 DISCUSSION session four
3:15 NAOMI DAVIS The Sustainable Square Mile: West Woodlawn Botanic Gardens and Village Farm Initiative
3:30 DAWVEED SCULLY Death and Life of the U.S. Steel Site
3:45 EMMANUEL PRATT Regenerative Placemaking and the Perry Avenue Commons: Designing for People, Planet, and Profit
4:00 DISCUSSION 4:30 WRAP UP
12:30 DISCUSSION 1:00 LUNCH
Discussion Moderators: Gordon Douglas, Michael Sorkin, and Vyjayanthi Rao