Presentations, Exhibit and Tours:
Presentations | Exhibit | Tours
Sherry Ahrentzen
Change strategy: Inquiry
Housing advocates can capitalize upon various approaches of research inquiry in promoting agendas of change. This presentation poses ways to situate 3 key components of research inquiry to help advance advocacy-oriented practices: (1) asking compelling questions; (2) choosing systematic modes of inquiry and meaningful, often measurable, outcomes; and (3) analyzing and interpreting results. Examples shown demonstrate research on a range of housing design issues and scales, that draw implications for change in land use policy, design practices, and housing/building regulations and standards.
David Baker
Better living through density
Population density is roughly inversely proportional to carbon output: the denser the city, the more energy efficient. Dense development maximizes utility infrastructure, making eco-districts with power cogeneration and heat-recovery technology possible and also lowers costs incurred by transportation with viable alternatives to the automobile.
Since housing types directly impact density, architects and planners are at the forefront of this issue as urban populations grow. Thoughtful strategies–including mixed-use, active edges, and complete streets–are key to designing dense developments as wonderful, affordable, efficient communities.
Thomas Barrie, AIA
Change strategy: Partner
This presentation will discuss the roles of “urban outreach” in the contemporary land-grant university. In particular, the author’s Research, Extension and Economic Development position in Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities will be outlined, illustrated by a number of community-based research and service learning projects. The conclusion argues that by history, structure and resources, land grants are well positioned to advance research and engage the public in issues regarding affordable housing.
Bryan Bell
Change strategy: Engage
Social Economic Environmental Design SEED® is a new standard to guide, evaluate and measure the positive impact of design projects on communities. The session will cover case studies the SEED Evaluator, a web-based tool for developing design projects, evaluating them as they progress, and assessing them when completed. It can be of critical value to communities, designers and architects who want to ensure they are developing responsible projects that are transparent and accountable to the public they are for.
Pat Clancy
Why design matters
Maurice Cox
The many roles of designer as change agent
Teddy Cruz
Why change is necessary
One pressing challenge in our time, primarily when the paradigm of private property has become unsustainable in conditions of poverty, is the need to re-think existing conditions of ownership. The social and economic entrepreneurship efforts found in marginal communities are usually off the radar of conventional top down economic recipes, tax credit and subsidy-based lending. We need to re-define affordability by amplifying the value of social participation -the role of communities- not only in producing alternative partnerships in housing development but in generating new interpretations of property. More than just owning or renting ‘units,’ dwellers, in collaboration with community-based non-governmental associations, can also co-own and manage the economic and social infrastructure around them.
Kathleen Dorgan
Change strategy: Imagine
Imagine our poorest and most neglected neighborhoods revitalized through strategic design initiatives. Consider a federal policy that commits to innovation and continual improvement in all aspects of sustainable community building. As a nation we promise that we will engage every resident and all of their skills and their intelligences with the inspiration of visiting artists in building communities of genuine choice. Imagine places so exciting, so stimulating and so beautiful that community members will want to visit regularly just to see the latest improvements and soak up the atmosphere. Most surprisingly the dollar investment required for this success is less than was required for the previous lethargic or failed initiatives in the same neighborhoods. Every existing neighborhood asset is reused, recycled and reimagined instead of wasted. Piles of paperwork are replaced by public overview using social networks. Engagement is sustained, meaningful and on the street.
Dutton
Change strategy: Educate
The Over-the-Rhine Residency Program engages students and faculty full-time in the school of social life to effect democratic, equitable development strategies for lower income people, workers, people of color, and families.
The Program resists philanthropy and assists the neighborhood in its struggle to address oppression and enact its right to self-determination. The goal is to see how class and racial struggles take specific form in Over-the-Rhine and Cincinnati; to experience relationships characterized by oppressed and oppressor populations. And through this investigation of the systemic structures that produce oppressor/oppressed relationships, the intent is to act upon those structures, with the oppressed community.
Gaspar
Change strategy: Demystify
What is affordable housing? The phrase seems plain enough, but doesn’t
always mean what people think it does. Its technical definition can
determine what gets built and who lives there. The Center for Urban
Pedagogy (CUP) has created toolkit for housing organizers to run an
interactive workshop that uses simple graphics to help individuals answer
the all-important question: “Affordable to whom?”
Daniel Glenn
Deliberation: Too costly for affordability
John McDermott
Affordability through preservation
Sergio Palleroni
Change strategy: Instigate
The Alley Flat Initiative in Austin, Texas, the first net-zero affordable housing program in Texas, resulted from a partnership between the Guadelupe Neighborhood Corporation, a local housing organization, and the University of Texas. This presentation will explore the change strategies the partnership used to develop this form of affordable housing in the historically contested and rapidly appreciating neighborhood of East Austin, and in the process transform the practices of both institutions.
Casius Pealer
Alternative activist practices
Architects are increasingly working in a variety of practice settings to provide design and planning advice to low income families and communities. Casius Pealer will discuss a number of well established and newly innovative opportunities for this kind of work, as well as the potential of these alternative practices to transform the profession of architecture.
Dan Pitera
Change strategy: Activate
An activist seeks to affect change in the established way of doing things. She or he is not content with the way things are. This presentation will use case studies to foster a position toward activating change through a strategy that: 1. Critiques the context; 2. Locates moments of intensity; and 3. Designs responses and actions.
Pyatok
Why change is necessary
US zoning/building codes perpetuate idealized conditions of households already solidly arrived in the middle class and above. They prevent lower income households from using time-tested strategies of incremental self-help, oftentimes untidy and unpredictable. Consequently, they force excessive housing subsidies to leapfrog households into middle class conditions, and prevent them from wisely using their own resources while developing entrepreneurial skills.
Criag Wilkins
Deliberation: Housing class
A discussion of how two seemingly disparate efforts – “housing Class”, which by design puts forth images of appropriate users of (affordable) housing for political and financial advantage and, “Housing class”, which establishes acceptable kinds of architectural responses to the issue of (affordable) housing in design school – might be (re)woven into powerful, intertwined models of education and practice.
Royce Yeater
Affordability through preservation
Jess Zimbabwe
Change strategy: Inform
Mike Newman, Rashmi Ramaswamy and Helen Slade
Interactive exhibit: Fenced In/Fenced Out
"Fenced In/Fenced Out," an interactive exhibit presented by The Museum of Contemporary Phenomena, will explore how people adapt the built environment, in this instance, affordable housing to meet their needs. Instead of looking at the issue from the perspective of architects, planners and policy makers, the exhibit goes to the grass roots of the housing movement to seek participation from everyone. The portable exhibit, "Grandma's Travelling Table," is both a symbol and an opportunity—a table where everyone is invited to sit down and gossip, collect stories, and discuss ideas. It is a tool to encourage dialog about the impact of housing design and planning ideas, with the goal of turning users into makers.
Tours:
Susan King, Harley Ellis Devereaux
Affordable Green Housing in the Real World
This tour will show three examples of real world applications of integrating sustainability into special needs housing by Harley Ellis Devereaux: Wentworth Commons in Chicago's Roseland neighborhood, is the first multi-unit residential building in Chicago to receive LEEDS certification; Sankofa House in North Lawndale, are homes for kinship and grand families, that utilized the City of Chicago's Green Homes Program; and Trumbull & Spaulding Apartments that demonstrate green renovation.
Peter Landon, Landon Bone Baker Architects
Taking Back the Neighborhood
Three of Landon Bone Baker's community-based renovation and infill affordable housing developments will be visited. These projects have supported communities' organizing and legal efforts to maintain affordable housing under pressures of gentrification: Archer Courts, Chinatown, the renovation of two midrise CHA buildings slated for demolition; and Harold Washington Unity Coop and Rosa Parks, both new construction infill multifamily affordable housing developments of multiple buildings on scattered sites in Chicago's West Humboldt neighborhood.
Jane Sloss, Chicago Associates Planners and Architects
Opportunities for Transformation through Reuse
The tour will feature the Howard Theater Building and the surrounding Howard Street area of Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood. The adaptive reuse of the Howard theater provides an example of mixed income housing achieved through reuse of Chicago's existing building stock. The building features mixed use to support housing operations costs and offers a mixture of unit types to meet the needs of diverse households. The tour will also explore subsequent development in the area, including development of the Willye B. White Park and Fieldhouse and redevelopment of the Howard station.