The symposium will feature talks by (left to right): Daniel D’Oca, Interboro Partners and Harvard Graduate School of Design; Marc Norman, Ideas and Action + University of Michigan, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning; Jennifer Goold, The Neighborhood Design Center, Baltimore; and Patty Heyda,Washington University in St. Louis, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

In the absence of comprehensive policies designed to address the challenges of disadvantaged urban communities, many weak-market cities have embraced uniform redevelopment strategies as the primary tool of urban revitalization. From Baltimore and Cleveland to St. Louis and Buffalo, we hear stories of “renaissances” and “rebirths,” but the very interventions that elicit this optimism also exacerbate uneven development and grant marginal benefits to distressed neighborhoods. Resource-poor communities are urged not to shy away from pressures of development, but to face them head on. Is it really possible to leverage market forces to the benefit of urban communities, when the modes of development often clash with their own interests?

This symposium brings together scholars and practitioners of urban design and planning to address this question, and take stock of emerging alternative spatial practices. Conventional urban activist organizations (community development corporations, community land trusts, and local design centers, etc.) are gaining more visibility, while the practices rendered by a range of advocacy groups (resettlement agencies, artist collectives, LGBTQ and post-incarceration support programs, etc.) are becoming increasingly more spatial in nature. Strategies of Empowerment seeks to foster a debate on the viability of these provocations to provide the basis for an operational design theory, capable of exerting real and systemic change on the ground.

Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2018
2 pm – 6 pm

UB South Campus
Hayes Hall 403

Continuing education credits approved:
3 LU/HSW (AIA)
2 CM (AICP)