FALL 2023 Lecture series at the CUDC

Kent State’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC) announces our Fall 2023 schedule of lectures and programs, organized around the theme, The Ways We (should) Live Now. Lectures in this series will inspire you to look at cities differently and envision a better and more equitable future. 

Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, Kent State University
1309 Euclid Avenue, Suite 200 | Cleveland, Ohio

Kent State’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC) announces our Fall 2023 schedule of lectures and programs, organized around the theme, The Ways We (should) Live Now. Lectures in this series will inspire you to look at cities differently and envision a better and more equitable future. 

The series launches on a Thursday evening, September 27, 2023, with a lecture by Dawn Mayes, CUDC’s Director of Design Entrepreneurship and Inclusion, in partnership with AIA Cleveland, Recruiting & Retaining a Diverse Workforce: Exploring Barriers and Strategies. 

On October 18th, 2023 an evening lecture by Sharon Wohl, new Associate Dean at Kent State’s College of Architecture and Environmental Design. The event will begin with reception at 5:30 pm, to welcome Sharon to Northeast Ohio and introduce her to Cleveland’s design community. At 6 pm, she will give a talk titled Meanderings: Advocacy, Complexity, and Opportunities in the Urban Sphere.

At noon on Friday, October 20th, Stephanie Ryberg-Webster will give a lecture at the CUDC  based on her new book, Preserving the Vanishing City: Historic Preservation amid Urban Decline in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr. Ryberg-Webster is an Associate Professor in the Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs in the Levin College of Public Affairs and Education at Cleveland State University. 

Savina Romanos, an architect and urban designer at !melk in New York City, will give a lecture at noon on Friday, October 27th titled Grow a Vocation. Most interested in pushing the boundaries of architectural scale and its effect on larger contexts, Savina has led large scale master plans and urban design projects from concept to implementation, both stateside and internationally. Deeply entrenched in the quality of design and the overall character and narrative of urban environments, Savina is adept at developing new and refreshing - but always contextually rooted - urban form.

In partnership with Third Space Action Lab, the CUDC will welcome Omari Souza on October 9th for a lecture in conjunction with the release of his new book, An Anthology of Blackness: The State of Black Design. The Anthology is an adventurous collection that examines how the design field has consistently failed to attract and support Black professionals—and how to create an anti-racist, pro-Black design industry instead. This special event will be held at Third Space Action Lab, 1464 E. 105 Street in Cleveland. It will begin with a reception at 5:30 pm, followed by Professor Souza’s talk, Inclusivity Matters: Elevating Voices in the Anthology of Blackness.

The final program in the series will be a lecture and roundtable discussion with Dana Cuff at noon on November 17. Professor Cuff, founding director of cityLAB at UCLA will talk about her new book, Architectures of Spatial Justice — a field-defining work that demonstrates how architects are breaking with professional conventions to advance spatial justice and design more equitable buildings and cities. 

The complete program calendar appears below. All programs are free and open to the public. 

Recruiting & Retaining a Diverse Workforce: Exploring Barriers and Strategies 
September 27, 2023 | 5:00 - 6:30 pm
In-person event at the CUDC in partnership with AIA Cleveland
Refreshments will be served.

Access lecture recording

Meanderings: Advocacy, Complexity & Opportunities in the Urban Sphere with Sharon Wohl
October 18, 2023 | 5:30 - 7 pm
In-person event at the CUDC with Zoom Livestream
Reception at 5:30 pm; lecture at 6 pm. Refreshments will be served.

Preserving the Vanishing City: Historic Preservation amid Urban Decline in Cleveland, Ohio
October 20, 2023 | noon - 1 pm
In-person event at the CUDC with Zoom Livestream
Refreshments will be served.

Grow a Vocation with  Savina Romanos
October 27, 2023 | noon-1pm
In-person event at the CUDC with Zoom Livestream
Refreshments will be served.

Inclusivity Matters: Elevating Voices in the Anthology of Blackness with Omari Souza
November 9th | 5:30 - 7 pm
In-person event at Third Space Action Lab, 1464 E 105th Street in Cleveland, Ohio with Zoom Livestream
Reception at 5:30 pm; lecture at 6 pm. Refreshments will be served. Book signing follows the lecture.

Architectures of Spatial Justice with Dana Cuff
November 17, 2023 | noon-1pm
In-person event at the CUDC with Zoom Livestream
A light lunch will be served.

Please see individual event pages for full details and the most up-to-date information. Contact the CUDC at cudc@kent.edu or 216.357.3434.

PAST events

 
 

SPRING 2023

CUDC Spring 2023 Program Series Approaches to Practice

Jan 20 from noon-1pm - Urban Design Pecha Kucha Join CUDC students, faculty, and staff for this in-person event featuring a series of short, 20-slide/20-second presentations on urban design topics. Lunch is included, all are welcome.

Jan 27 from noon-1pm - Book Release Event: Urban Histories in Practice Panel discussion with editor Steven Rugare and contributors Gary Sampson, Stephanie Ryberg-Webster, and Jeffrey Kruth. In-person event at the CUDC. Free refreshments.

Feb 10 from noon-1pm - Refuse//Repose: Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Trash-Pile Lecture by Andrew Economos Miller, Schidlowski Fellow at KSU’s College of Architecture and Environmental Design. In-person event at the CUDC. Lunch is included, all are welcome.

Feb 17 from noon-1pm - Design for Displacement Lecture by Sai Sinbondit, Founding Principal & Executive Director, i_you design lab. In-person event at the CUDC with Zoom livestream.

Feb 22 - Cleveland’s Urban Forestry Future with Davey Tree. Education Session from 2:30-5pm. Social Hour from 5-6pm. Keynote Lecture from 6-7:30pm. In-person event at the CUDC.

Feb 24 from noon-1pm - From the Theater to the Plaza: Spectacle, Protest, and Urban Space in Twenty-First-Century Madrid Lecture by Matthew Feinberg, Ph.D, Associate Professor of Spanish, Baldwin Wallace University. In-person event at the CUDC with Zoom livestream.

March 14 from 5-7pm - Demystifying the ARE Mixer and Workshop with Cleveland AIA’s Young Associates & Architects (YAAM) Committee on preparing for the Architect Registration Exam (ARE). In-person event at the CUDC.

Apr 7 from noon-1:30pm - Out of Architecture Workshop with Jake Rudin and Erin Pellegrino, principals, Out of Architecture. In-person event at the CUDC with Zoom livestream.

Apr 20 from 5-7:30pm - When Love Meets Work a lecture, conversation, and book-signing event with author Eva Hagberg. In-person event at the CUDC in partnership with Cleveland AIA.

 

fall 2022

VIDEOS OF LECTURES

Sept 9 - Mac Love: Making Art Work Mac Love is Co-Founder & Chief Catalyst at Art x Love, a creative agency based in Akron (OH). His work has been nationally recognized as a leading example for creative community collaboration. Mac shares the principles, methods, and tools that inform and guide his projects, and demonstrate how they are systemically shifting the way people, communities, and cities invest in the arts and their environment.

Oct 21  Imani Badillo: To Those Who Nourish: Farming and Environmental Health in Northeast Ohio Visit https://linktr.ee/tothosewhonourish to learn more about each of the farms, about Cooking Sections, SPACES, and about this project.

Oct 28 - Jill Desimini: Cyclical City: Stories of Urban Transformation (passcode: s9mEwc&8)

 

SPRING 2022

VIDEOS OF LECTURES

Maci Nelson Multi-Modal Design Conversations

Maci Nelson is a landscape designer focused on using multimedia and storytelling to communicate design intent and processes.

Taylor Kabeary & Eduardo Duarte Ruas, Preservation Side B Hybrid Preservation Changing the World

As the world changes, our practices of preservation, planning, and placemaking must adapt to the need for equality, equity, and inclusion. Our fields must undergo a change from traditional practices of exclusion and narrowness (Side As) to embracing more modern practices of inclusion and expansiveness (Side Bs). How can we form a hybrid between Sides As and Side Bs to form strong practices that protect, include, and serve many communities? How can we form Side Cs? This workshop will provide a guide on how to view Side As and Side Bs of preservation and adjacent fields, and theorize on what Side Cs look and feel like. 

Marlon Davis Visual Disruption: A Post-Disciplinary Practice

Marlon Davis presented a lecture on buildings and spaces that have been erased from the history of Black American experience. He will share 3D visualizations that explore creative paths for research and propose reclamations of these spaces renewing art, architecture, and design’s relation to social justice, BIPOC communities, and history. The site of erasure he will examine is Osage Avenue in Philadelphia (1985) to retell this story. He will also discuss his work with Black Architects and Designers Guild and his work at DE-YAN to discuss how he uses 3D tools to reinvent his practice.

Stathis G. Yeros Queer Urbanism in the San Francisco Bay

Stathis Yeros discussed the spaces that queer and transgender people have historically inhabited in the United States, what they reveal for cultural representations of gender, race, and sexuality, and what lessons they hold for designers and planners. In his dissertation and published work, he employs the concept of “queer urbanism” to contextualize insurgent spatial practices and discourses in effective coalitional politics, arguing that for this to be possible, urban theory and spatial practice have to account for non-binary conceptualizations of space beyond the public/private, male/female, grassroots/institutional dichotomies.

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fall 2021

VIDEOS OF LECTURES

Abigail Feldman The Land of Enchantment: Design, Water, and the Vernacular Southwest

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine being in a place where you can see rain storms one hundred miles away. Behind you dark clouds pile up against the tip of the Rocky Mountains. The high altitude light washes over the tips of Piñon trees dotted across the desert at sunset, and you wish you had chapstick. This is New Mexico, otherwise known as the Land of Enchantment. People have lived here for a long time and water is always on our minds. This lecture offers the perspective of one landscape architect's work to link "old school" green infrastructure to contemporary design, to help innovate strategies for stormwater, and to root design in the vernacular land use of this region from acequias to zuni bowls.

Ifeoma Ebo Shifting Power Through Design

Historically the urban landscape has been used as a tool to establish inequitable power/social relationships. The same tools that have been used to shape inequity can also be used to center equity and justice in our world. This lecture will use history, theory and projects centering community engagement design to explore how to shift power through design.

Jerome Haferd Dark Methods : A Geography of Practice

“Dark Matter is not the opposite of matter, but matter that behaves differently.” Working within erased or marginalized histories, neighborhoods, or sites that fall outside the ‘mainstream’ challenges us to question both the how and the what of architecture. Haferd, an Akron native, will chart a geography of his Harlem-based design practice, drawing connections between projects in the larger Hudson Valley, recent housing prototypes for Cleveland, OH and St. Louis, and beyond.

 

SPRING 2021

VIDEOS OF LECTURES

Thanks for your interest in our lecture series. Click the images below for more info and links to watch the recorded lectures.