Category: Lectures & Academia

A recent controversy surrounding the proposed Public Art for the Cultural Trail has many citizens concerned about urban space, its equity, and purpose in our city. A series of free lectures were made available to the public to listen, learn, and ask questions about urban space, parks, or where we live and spend our time.

Street Logic was the second in a two part lecture series.  The first lecture was by Dr. Kirk Savage author of “Monument Wars” and “Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves” Race, War, and Monument in the Nineteenth Century America. His lecture was an eye opener for many in the audience and uncovered many details that were missed by multiple stakeholders, artists, and citizens. His lecture (see blog) on the history and meaning of the slave “image” set the stage for Street Logic – a lecture that would explores “image”  and the history of urban space through the lens of architecture and Hollywood.

Marquez, whose thesis research focused on issues of architecture and identity, questions the design of “cultural” in the United States and its meaning for communities and neighborhoods. His work on West Washington Street in Indianapolis, Mexican Town in Detroit, and Huntington Park in California called to question the need for “culture” and the dangers it presents when commercialized or left in the wrong hands. Street Logic has been presented at multiple universities, including Southern Illinois University and the University of North Carolina to help citizens and students understand how and why “images” are misrepresented in cities, streets, and public spaces. An interactive media presentation- Marquez  frames the streets aesthetic, function, and ideology according to those who have the power to build images and those who do not.

The event was held on Saturday, April 30th at Forest Manor Multi-Service Center

In a recent November article in The Chronicle of Education, James Proctor, Director of the Environmental-Studies Program at Lewis & Clark College, questioned what a more “cosmopolitan sustainability movement might look like?” I quickly considered my own firms efforts, of late, with local advocacy groups, public markets, and development corporations on the renewed interest in our cities connection along cultural, political, economic, ecological, or social lines – all key elements that Proctor categorized under the “rubric of cosmopolitanism”.

Aesthetic or social movements, such as these, often demand we shift our thinking about how we retool where we live in order to prepare our neighborhoods for notions of regeneration for an upcoming century. We seem to be in a climate where neighborhoods and citizens are growing increasingly less interested in the idea of one dimensional planning efforts that have become the default for organizing and development strategies in our cities. This includes predictable program models, tired community surveys, shelved master plans, and uninspired development frameworks that leave little consideration for the interdependence or success of solving complex growth issues.

Disenchanted, I’m listening to communities organize under new forms of urban  typologies that tend to blur private/public relationships and are fixed on equipping their neighborhoods with re-imagined streetscapes and vision plans based on innovative infrastructure, smart growth, identity, ecology, arts, advocacy and people. These new modes of infrastructure can easily be characterized by their overlap of program functions, along with cultural and innovative uses that benefit not just the local, but an expanded network of  functioning neighborhoods, retail zones, including suburbs.

Indianapolis Museum of Art // Emerging Designer Lecture Series – A New Urban Design Future from William Marquez on Vimeo.

These conversations are being introduced and implemented through programmatic elements such as energy installations, public pavilions, gateways, multi-model stations, playgrounds, sculpture gardens, cultural trails, pocket parks, and hybrid type public facilities that challenge the formal structure of the city, connect us, or bring communities together. These public infrastructure scenarios are popping up everywhere and being discovered daily at interchanges, bridges, production clusters, retail centers, brown-fields, and transit nodes.

This “movement” on place making has grown out a type of local activism that insists on denying formal boundaries, diversifying programmatic frameworks, and discovering hybrids and shared cultural opportunities that enhance notions of place, identity, and future. It is in many ways it is a scaled “stimulant” towards what will be the eventual integration of contemporary hybrids of landscape and architecture.

In all cases these elements invite activities once left to formal or permanent institutions to reorganize under new modes of urban place making that take on more temporary, seasonal, or transitional structures. They will take on a very different form and function than those of fifty years ago. What I believe we can all agree on is that wind-powered generators, green roofs, and organic gardens alone, will not solve the plethora of issues surrounding cities and neighborhoods in the emerging twenty-first century.