Social Agency Labbers Kareeshma Ali, James Moore, and Jeffrey Goodman took second place in the Designing Action: Nashville competition with their entry, "The Yard". The entry focuses on promoting well-being and health for the Nashville community by redesigning an underused industrial riverfront site as a multi-use, publicly accessible park and wetlands area. Click through to see the competition entry and for a link to the full winning entry at the Designing Action website.

Social Agency Lab members participated in Pruitt-Igoe Now: The Unmentioned Modern Landscape, a competition to rethink the site that formerly housed the Pruitt-Igoe public housing development, which was famously demolished in what architectural critics have called "the end of modernism." Social Agency worked with young adults attending after-school programs at Rebuild Foundation, a St. Louis and Chicago community-based redevelopment organization, to develop a process by which St. Louis youth could take charge of the site's future. Our entry took third place out of 348 total entries. Click through to see a larger version of the winning entry.

Jeffrey Goodman, with assistance from Kathleen Onufer, designed The Citizen's Guide to Urban Design as a way to create a common language for residents, planners, architects, and developers to discuss the form of the city. Created with the Foundation for Louisiana, the booklet helps people understand how designs are represented, how planning concepts come together to form places, and what the design process looks like so that they can better participate, criticize, and contribute. These guides are available for download here.

Kate Balug is developing this project during a year-long fellowship in Mexico City, in collaboration with Laura Janka, a Mexico City-based architect and urban designer. Museo del Futuro (Museum of the Future) is an experimental framework for accessing public imagination and engaging with critical public participation through artistic experience. The project is process-based: beginning with highly flexible street performance, it will continue with the development of collaborative artworks by community cultural groups, and culminate in a mobile museum structure that presents a particular perspective of Mexico City in the present that is based on a vision of 2068 inspired by interactions with the public. Click through the images for the project description.

Kate Balug, Christina Calabrese and Zakcq Lockrem are developing this multimedia project along with partners from the Department of Anthropology at Rice University and TxRx Labs, a Hackerspace in Houston. Using GPS technology and situationist theory, we are developing a web space to share logs, pictures and sounds of drifts through the world's cities. Exhibitions are planned for Houston, TX and Mexico City. Click through for the full project description.

Christina Calabrese, Zakcq Lockrem and Alexandra Miller prepared this entry for the Institute for Urban Design's By the City / For the City competition. The project is a response to submission #82: Wouldn't it be great if there were an easy to use website to find/search for and apply for necessary certification/guidelines for community projects (putting up a mural, installing benches, planting trees on a sidewalk...). Our visuals refer to the Situationist practice of the détournement of comics, replacing text boxes to create new meaning. The project is reflective of each of our personal interests: Christina's fascination with virtual worlds, Zakcq's interest in giving communities the tools to plan for themselves and Alex's belief in technology and the power of narrative to create positive outcomes. The project will be showcased in an exhibit during Urban Design Week in New York in September and be published as a part of An Atlas of Possibility for the City of New York.

Publications by Social Agents