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.

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.

This event is free and open to the public. For those who attend, three (3) AIA continuing education credits are available. Registration is not required.