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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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Public Forum on Ethical Redevelopment
The Alley Project — Via De Los Muertos
This week, Salon member Erik Howard and five Detroit-based practitioners are presenting the Young Nation initiative, The Alley Project (TAP). TAP transformed a Southwest Detroit neighborhood alley and surrounding vacant lots into an inspirational graffiti art gallery. On the forum, the Detroit cohort will share information and answer questions about how TAP leveraged arts + culture to make a significant impact in a disinvested community.
We need your voice. Join the Forum
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Grand Opening
ArtHouse: A Social Kitchen
Sat., Nov. 19 • 4–6pm
411 E 5th Ave, Gary, IN 46402 [map it]
RVSP
Join us for the grand opening celebration of ArtHouse: A Social Kitchen, Gary’s newest destination for food, culture, art, meeting, and learning.
Enjoy complimentary confections from local culinary artists, a free hot apple cider station, musical entertainment, marshmallow roasting around communal fire pits, and the official unveiling of our public art installation. Guests will also have the opportunity to purchase delicious delectables from local food trucks.
Tours of the shared commercial kitchen space offered, as well as information and applications to Gary residents interested in the Culinary Business Incubator and food programming. The evening’s ceremonies will include remarks by Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson and Theaster Gates, Artistic Director of ArtHouse.
This event is FREE and open to the public. RSVP today.
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What Place Lab is digesting
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Theaster Gates starts Artisan and Craft Workforce Training Program in Chicago
Robin Scher, ArtNews
Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, operating under the banner of his nonprofit Rebuild Foundation, announced the launch of Dorchester Industries, a self-described “workforce training and apprenticeships initiative for un- or underemployed people across the South Side of Chicago.”
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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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"Good Planning" is Bad Planning, and "Progressive" is Not Enough: A Response to Peter Marcuse
Samuel Stein, Progressive City
...“good planning” is not just something to go beyond, but something to refuse outright. “Good planning” is bad planning for the majority of the population. It’s not an underdeveloped platform for change, it’s a way of ensuring that the status can remain quo. It provides quality of life to some while exposing others to extreme harm.
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Urban Forests: What city trees do for us, and what we should do for them
David Maxwell Braun, National Geographic
An interview with Jill Jonnes, author of Eiffel’s Tower, Conquering Gotham, Empires of Light, South Bronx Rising, and the recently released Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Cityscape.
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Report: Single family home prices near Chicago’s 606 Trail up nearly 50% since 2013
Jay Koziarz, Curbed Chicago
While the “606 effect” is hardly surprising, the extent of the trail’s boost to nearby housing prices is nothing short of staggering...The 606 has had the largest effect on home prices east of Western Avenue in places like Logan Square and Humboldt Park. As a result, complaints of high rents and the hegemonic effect of gentrification has come from these traditionally hispanic and relatively affordable areas.
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Real estate innovation by the numbers
School of Architecture and Planning, MIT
A new lab in the MIT Center for Real Estate (CRE) will link the creation of the built environment to economic impact, seeking to identify innovations in design and technology that will determine the future of communities and cities.
The MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab (REIL) will explore three areas: innovations in building design that lead to new building types and urban forms; new processes in construction such as 3-D printing and modular construction; and new data technologies with the potential to transform the organization of cities and the built environment.
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Miss last Friday's edition of the digest? Read it in the archives here.
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Coltrane Crumbles: The jazz legend's neglected house in Philly
Bruce Klauber,
Philadelphia Weekly
Simply put, North 33rd Street is not exactly an ideal spot for a historic landmark. Located on a well-worn stretch of Brewerytown row homes and garages north of Center City, the house is largely ignored by commuters and others. A driving range across the street in Fairmount Park attracts far more visitors. Patrick Grossi, advocacy director of the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, acknowledged the problem. While the city’s preservation community views the house as an asset, he said, its location is "a primary issue" leaving it unworthy of major investment.
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How SCAD founder Paula Wallace turned old buildings into a new campus
Patrick Sisson, Curbed
Through optimism, vision, and a deep understanding of how to inspire students, [Paula] Wallace turned a collection of historical properties scattered about the Georgia city’s then-dilapidated downtown into a cutting-edge arts institution and the catalyst for a thriving neighborhood. Slowly acquiring and rehabilitating buildings to create elegantly restored classrooms, studios, and student housing, Wallace and SCAD used the past as an asset to shape the future.
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Refugees Could 'Save' America's Rust Belt—Will We Let Them?
Vanessa Quirk, Metropolis Magazine
[Don Weinreich and Eliza Montgomery], two architects at the New York–based firm Ennead Architects...had been researching the topic of refugee resettlement for the better part of a year, and had established a vital theoretical framework..: “It’s about changing this proposition that refugees are people who need charity, as opposed to people who should be your partners, for both their and your own betterment.” This simple pivot in perception—from parasite and host to agent and partner—has tremendous spatial consequences.
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When Telling The Story of Changing Neighborhoods Becomes Part of the Story
Jen Kinney, Next City
What role newcomers should play in honoring and preserving what came before — and what’s here now — is a fine line. Gentrification is often seen as an economic phenomenon, but it’s also a social one, a failure to acknowledge current residents and their cultural contributions to a neighborhood. “Gentrification, commercialization and development has never been kind to building neighborhoods and histories and communities..."
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“Art-Washing”—A New Name for a Not-So-New Side Effect of Gentrification
Eileen Cunniffe, Nonprofit Quarterly
NPQ has previously reported on the challenges of affordable housing for artists, and the well-documented cycle of artist-driven urban renewal, which typically leads to artists being priced out of the neighborhoods they have helped to revive. This is sometimes referred to as “the SoHo effect.” One positive trend has been toward developing permanent affordable housing for artists...
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From our bookshelf:
Belonging: A Culture of Place
by bell hooks
Purchase it here
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Detroit engages with its community to solve its raw sewage and storm water problem
Zach Edelson & Matthew Messner, The Architect's Newspaper
The City of Detroit is solving one of its major problems with the help of one of its other problems. Detroit is experiencing combined sewer overflow, a messy, and often downright dangerous event that happens every time it rains too much. But by leveraging the abundant city-owned vacant land, Detroit may have found a way to alleviate at least some of the overflow.
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U of C's Harris School unit blasts Safe Roads Amendment
Greg Hinz, Crain's Chicago Business
In a position paper posted on its website, the Center for Municipal Finance of U of C's Harris School of Public Policy said the proposal to put all state and perhaps local taxes and fees in a lockbox, available only for transportation purposes, is vaguely written, oversold and "creates more problems than it actually solves."
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Food for Thought
Daniel Kay Hertz, South Side Weekly
...new full-service chain groceries don’t open in black neighborhoods in Chicago very often, and both of these openings dramatically increase the quality of food options for their communities, while creating hundreds of jobs—the design, at first, wouldn’t seem to be the most important thing. But now that the dust has settled, it’s worth taking a minute to think about what these buildings look like, and what their designs tell us about who they’re for.
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What a Theater Means to a Refugee Camp
Kriston Capps, City Lab
It might come as a surprise that a refugee camp had any sort of theater, much less one that garnered marquee performances. But the ad-hoc camp at Calais is a much more vital place than outsiders know, according to Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, who opened the Good Chance Theatre in Calais from October 2015 to March of this year.
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