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The Place Lab digest is a weekly round-up of pertinent news, opinion, investigations, and explorations of the arts, architecture, and city-building in Chicago and beyond.
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Samaria Rice: A Mother Speaks
Friday, July 7 • 6–8pm
Stony Island Arts Bank
6760 S. Stony Island Ave. [map]
Free; RSVP required
In the Fall of 2016, Rebuild Foundation received the gazebo from the Cudell Recreation Center in Cleveland, Ohio, where twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was murdered by the Cleveland Police. Samaria Rice, Tamir’s mother, will speak about why and how the gazebo came to Chicago, its significance, and its care.
Learn more
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What Place Lab is digesting
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Chicago commits $100 million to investment fund aimed at low-income areas
Peter Matuszak, The Chicago Tribune
The City Council approved seeding the Chicago Community Catalyst Fund, also known as Fund 77, with $100 million from the city's investment returns and reserves. Rather than award grants or invest in businesses directly, the idea is to seek proposals from the private sector to create a variety of independent investment funds. Managers of those funds would request access to some of the city's cash by laying out a case for a targeted, community-focused investment strategy and committing additional funding from private investors.
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Stay up-to-date on Place Lab projects, events, news, and happenings with our dedicated blog, SITE.
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What Does 'Community' Mean?
Megan Garber, Citylab
For much of the 20th century, if you asked someone to define “community,” they’d very likely give you an answer that involved a physical location. One’s community derived from one’s place—one’s literal place—in the world: one’s school, one’s neighborhood, one’s town. In the 21st century, though, that primary notion of “community” has changed.
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10 projects set to transform Detroit
Robin Runyan, Curbed Detroit
Detroit's landscape is changing every day, hopefully for the better, maybe not always. [Curbed Detroit has] mapped out ten specific projects—either in progress or planned—that we think will be transformational to their neighborhoods at least, and possibly the city as a whole.
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‘Translucent’ Washington Park artist residences clear key city hurdles
Jay Koziarz, Curbed Chicago
An unusual looking four-story affordable housing development at 63 E. Garfield Blvd. on Chicago’s South Side is moving closer to becoming a reality. Also known as the KLEO Life Center, the Washington Park project comes from Chicago-based architect JGMA and Brinshore Development and is wrapped in a translucent facade designed to provide its residents ample sunlight during the day and give the structure an internal glow at night.
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African countries want to turn their poor, overcrowded urban centers into “smart cities”
Lily Kuo, Quartz Africa
If all goes to plan, Kigali and more of the country will look like this idyllic, tech-enabled district within the next two decades. Rwanda is on a campaign to transform its capital city of rolling hills and low-rise buildings into a so-called smart city where urban living has been optimized.
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Missed last Friday's edition of the digest? Read it in the archives here.
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A Vietnamese Architect’s Easy-to-Erect Homes for the Poor
Mike Ives, The New York Times
[Trong] Nghia is the latest high-profile architect to design an inexpensive, prefabricated home as an antidote to urban sprawl, mass displacement or natural disasters. Experts say [his] S House is one of several “humanitarian” or “social” architecture projects worldwide that highlight a rising social consciousness in the profession at a moment when the estimated number of displaced people worldwide...is the highest since the aftermath of World War II.
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Why solving ‘hidden’ suburban poverty is trickier than helping cities
Patrick Sisson, Curbed
A new book, Places in Need, explores how preconceptions make it harder to combat suburban poverty. Despite its reputation, Lake County, Illinois has seen the number of people in deep poverty... double since 1990. It’s one of many stretches of suburbia that, especially in the wake of the Great Recession, has been grappling with a growing poverty issues without the benefit of the same social safety net set up in cities.
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Beautiful Gauguin artworks, without their ugly history
Lee Ann Norman, The Chicago Reader
"Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist," a new survey of Paul Gauguin's oeuvre at the Art Institute, aims to disrupt the familiar association of Tahitian motifs with his work: full-bodied, brown-skinned women, sandy beaches, lush landscapes, tranquil waters. While offering the background that positions Gauguin as an artistic innovator, the exhibition skirts the context that raises ethical questions around his relationship to cultural consumption and appropriation.
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Proposed Budget Cuts Could Push More Underserved Kids Into A Summer Slide
Roz Edward, The Chicago Defender
Warnings are going out that proposed federal budget cuts to after-school care and summer learning programs will harm underserved students. The American Library Association said in a statement that funding cuts are “counterproductive and short-sighted.”
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Chicago’s first art gallery devoted to video games will open next month
Ryan Smith, The Chicago Reader
The local nonprofit, the Video Game Gallery, announced that on August 11 it will level up to a brick-and-mortar location at the Bloomingdale Arts Building alongside the 606. The institution will be a first of its kind cultural outlet in Chicago and one of only a few in North America. Since its launch in 2014, VGA Gallery's focus has been on selling high-quality prints of video game art on its website while organizing exhibitions, artist residencies, and a variety of pop-up events at local art spaces. Last fall, the gallery partnered with the Rebuild Foundation for an exhibit of Philip Mallory Jones's game Dateline: Bronzeville.
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The City Parks Welcoming Immigrants
Mimi Kirk, CityLab
Parks departments across the country are listening to immigrants and designing events and facilities with them in mind... The increasing number of immigrants settling in the United States over the past 45 years has U.S. cities’ parks departments reaching out to immigrants, often as part of broader racial equity programs.
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The National Public Housing Museum’s long journey home
Maya Dukmasova, The Chicago Reader
When the National Public Housing Museum finally opens next year... at 1322 W. Taylor—the last remnant of Chicago's oldest federal housing project, the Jane Addams Homes—it will be the first cultural institution in the country devoted to chronicling and analyzing America's attempts to house its people.
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What are you thinking?
Is there something you'd like to see more of in our digest? Topics, interest areas, or subject matter that we're missing? Just havea couple of notes?
Let us know
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Episode 19: The Gentrification Episode
Third Wave Urbanism podcast
Gentrification has almost been labeled a veritable dirty word in many urbanist circles, oversimplified by some to encompass “societal ills” that should probably be called out for what they are. But whether alluding to racism and displacement, rising rent prices or new development, it’s not an easy subject to cover. This week’s episode of Third Wave Urbanism explains [their] personal feelings towards the phenomenon — the good and the bad — and learn more about what one community in Brooklyn is doing to prevent gentrification before it starts courtesy of Next City.
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Urban Planner Turned Poet Maps Seattle’s Story
Josh Cohen, Next City
Claudia Castro Luna has spent her life thinking about the intersection of people and place and how each exerts influence on the other... She’s wrapping up her two-year term as Seattle’s first civic poet. Her culminating project, the Poetic Grid, is an interactive map of Seattle plotted with place-based poetry.
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What smart planners are reading right now
Check out what publications planners all over the globe are following to stay in the loop on redeveloping, building, and maintaining better cities.
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