One Community-Minded Designer Is Tapping the Potential of Chicago’s Vacant Lots

The fourth edition of the Chicago Architectural Biennial is the outgrowth of more than a decade of urban design research by this year’s artistic director, David Brown, a designer and researcher at the University of Illinois Chicago. In the biennial’s first year in 2016, Brown presented an exhibition, The Available City, in which he unveiled a framework to reconsider the uses of vacant privately and city-owned parcels in Chicago, which, at the time, numbered more than 15,000.

Now, his vision is taking shape in site-specific architectural projects, exhibitions, and programs that Brown says aim "to demonstrate how the biennial can be a participant in the making of the city." In North Lawndale, Englewood, Pilsen, Woodlawn, and Bronzeville—five historically disinvested, largely Black and brown communities on the city’s South and West Sides—Brown has paired leaders of community organizations with designers to amplify existing efforts to reclaim and repurpose disused and neglected land.

We spoke to Brown to learn more about the biennial, and the potential of newly designed outdoor gathering spaces, play areas, and exhibition and performance spaces to leave a lasting imprint on the city.

How did you begin thinking about how your ideas with The Available City might be put into practice at this year’s biennial?

The first manifestations of The Available City began to take form with Under the Grid. I helped coordinate an urban hack for two students developing [a public art initiative] for a vacant 15-block area under the Pink Line in North Lawndale. Walter Hood came to speak in an online summer workshop for 70 residents and architects from around the city. His design of the Beer Line Trail in Milwaukee, with city trees planted strategically as a continuous grove, and a splash pad and plaza under an elevated freeway at Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, California, were instructive in thinking about the space near the Bell Park site, which features installations by Outpost Office and Studio Barnes.

Few projects are inhabitable dwellings or buildings, or models of them. Why did you focus on smaller, outdoor typologies?

Given the proposal, I didn’t feel responses necessarily required larger buildings. Grids + Griots by Sekou Cooke Studio on the YMEN (Young Men’s Educational Network) Bike Box site, where shipping containers are used for outdoor storage, small stands for potential vendors, seating and gathering spaces, and space for raised beds qualifies as a small building. The argument is that you can address a fairly wide range of activities that can occur on a site through small-scale spaces that are outdoors and, in and of themselves, create urbanism.