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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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URBAN INNOVATOR OF THE WEEK
Isis Ferguson, Associate Director of City + Community Strategy for Place Lab, was named Urban Innovator of the Week by Urban Innovation Exchange. From the interview: "Ferguson has been with Place Lab since its inception two years ago. With a Master's degree in gender and cultural studies and a Bachelor's degree in women's and Black studies, Ferguson has had an interest in 'creating spaces of care and equity and inclusion, and understanding that art is the way we can do that' from a young age, when her mother instilled in her an appreciation and passion for creative and civic engagement."
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THEASTER GATES + BLACK MONKS HEAD TO D.C. FOR NEW PERFORMANCE
Theaster Gates and his Chicago-based experimental music ensemble, the Black Monks of Mississippi, are planning a performance piece called “The Runners," involving the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Howard University track team.
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What Place Lab is digesting
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Miss last Friday's edition of the digest? Read it in the archives here.
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Affluent and Black, and Still Trapped by Segregation
by John Eligon and Robert Gebeloff, The New York Times
Liberals and conservatives often disagree about the causes of poverty and other social ills. Broadly speaking, liberals point the finger at structural factors and advocate for policy changes, while conservatives look to individuals and families and favor behavior changes. Clearly, both points of view have validity. But what’s often overlooked is what lies between these two poles — communities and neighborhoods — and the value of focusing on this middle zone.
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How Bad Urban Planning Led To The Birth Of A Billion-Dollar Genre
by Alice Kemp-Habib, The Fader
Architect Mike Ford traces the relationship between structural racism, public housing projects, and hip-hop.
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Experts: Housing, education discrimination drive minority wealth gap
MPR News Staff
The financial gap between black and Latino families and their white counterparts is growing. In fact, a new study from the Institute of Policy Studies finds that it would take over 200 years for the wealth gap to close.
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A wish list for better walking and biking in the Black Metropolis
John Greenfield, Chicago Reader
Transit advocate Ronnie Matthew Harris wants to eliminate barriers that physically divide Bronzeville. "Data shows that a community that walks, bikes, and uses public transportation is a community that is healthier, safer, and more economically viable," he said. "Go Bronzeville wants to respond to some of the inequity in public policy and urban planning that sometimes contributes to disparities in health and wealth."
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If you can’t hire black and Latino tech workers, you’re not really looking, says Walker & Company CEO Tristan Walker
Eric Johnson, Recode
[Tristan Walker], the CEO of Walker & Company Brands roundly rejects the Valley’s favorite cliché, "culture fit." On the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, Walker said startups rarely define their own cultures before using it as an excuse to hire homogenous workers.
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How Community Networks Stem Childhood Traumas
David Bornstein, The New York Times
Liberals and conservatives often disagree about the causes of poverty and other social ills. Broadly speaking, liberals point the finger at structural factors and advocate for policy changes, while conservatives look to individuals and families and favor behavior changes. Clearly, both points of view have validity. But what’s often overlooked is what lies between these two poles — communities and neighborhoods — and the value of focusing on this middle zone.
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From our bookshelf:
Atlas of Cities
by Paul Knox
Find it here
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New Museum Connects History of Slavery to Mass Incarceration
Jen Kinney, Next City
A new museum in Montgomery, Alabama, will connect the history of African-American enslavement in the U.S. to modern-day issues of mass incarceration and police violence. The Equal Justice Initiative, which litigates on behalf of prisoners denied fair and equal treatment, also unveiled designs for the nation’s first memorial to commemorate the victims of lynching, a design that seeks to spread awareness beyond its own walls.
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From Detroit to Memphis: The Imperative of Bold Leadership for the Future of American Cities
Speech by Kresge Foundation President and CEO Rip Rapson
"It’s all too tempting to summon up dystopian images of Detroit as a post-apocalyptic, post-industrial wasteland, leveled by the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy, corrosive political dysfunction, and long-standing corporate disinvestment. Seen through that lens, Detroit is easy to dismiss as unique, a case-study in urban decline to be avoided, not emulated."
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Race Against Time: A North Philly artist aims to document her disappearing community
Melissa Simpson, Philly Voice
[A Philadelphia Housing Authority...redevelopment project]...is uprooting and displacing people of color on the lower end of the income spectrum. Rasheedah Phillips — artist, author and managing attorney of the Landlord-Tenant Housing Unit of Community Legal Services — is utilizing Afrofuturism practices to preserve a piece of the neighborhood by creating the Community Futures Lab.
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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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Exploring the challenge of balancing public amenity and openess on Chicago’s lakefront
Jay Koziarz, Curbed Chicago
While Chicago’s lakefront is undoubtedly the city’s greatest public asset, striking a delicate balance between unobstructed open space and built amenities is an ongoing debate and an issue with which designers have become all too familiar. One firm in a unique position to comment on the seemingly paradoxical nature of Chicago lakefront design is locally-based Woodhouse Tinucci Architects.
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One Block, Zero Shootings: How one mom is building community in Englewood
WBEZ
Last year, a woman was shot and killed on 75th and Stewart in Englewood. Most people have that moment when enough is enough. This was Tamar Manasseh’s.
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A New Way to Preserve Affordable Housing In Chicago
Morning Shift, WBEZ
On the Northwest side an initiative known as ROOTS - that’s an acronym for Renters Organizing Ourselves to Stay - has taken 19 foreclosed properties and made them into permanent affordable housing for longtime residents who were at risk of being priced out of rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods.
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A tribute to female flâneurs: the women who reclaimed our city streets
Lauren Elkin, The Guardian
The flâneur – the keen-eyed stroller who chronicles the minutiae of city life – has long been seen as a man’s role. From Virginia Woolf to Martha Gellhorn, it’s time we recognised the vital, transgressive work of the flâneuse...Rather than wandering aimlessly, like her male counterpart, the female flâneur has an element of transgression: she goes where she’s not supposed to.
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How Chicago Aldermen decide which restaurants get sidewalk cafés
Michael Graham, Project Six
When systems allow individuals to easily abuse them, people—especially Chicago aldermen—inevitably will...Chicago City Council routinely decides to involve itself in municipal business that would be much better handled by city departments devoted specifically to city businesses. The process for obtaining a sidewalk café permit is a stark example of this.
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