Lecture: “Scaling Up: Design with People and Places”Kristen ZeiberFriday, October 6th12(noon) — 1pmCUDC, 1309 Euclid Avenue, Suite 200Free and open to the public
RSVPs encouraged on Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/573039656153285/
In her talk, Kristen will speak about navigating scales, from architecture to urban design to regional design, in her exploration of the connection between people and the places they live. Work presented ranges from small-scale design/build to watersheds, from the post-Katrina Gulf Coast to post-coal Pennsylvania. She argues that across all scales, designers should work for people, and with respect for their relationship to the landscapes where they have chosen to live—even if those places have environmental or economic risk.
Kristen Zeiber is a Project Manager, Urban Designer, and Adjunct Faculty at Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC). She has been with the CUDC since 2013, and contributes to the organization’s neighborhood planning, research, mapping, and student advising. She also teaches the annual Midwest Urban Design Charrette for Masters students in Architecture and Urban Design in collaboration with several other universities. She is on the Board of Directors and co-chairs the Scholarship Committee for the Cleveland chapter of ACE Mentors, a nonprofit extracurricular program which introduces high school students to the Architecture, Construction, and Engineering professions.
Kristen’s previous Community Design Center and Design/Build experience includes over four years post-Katrina at Mississippi State University’s Gulf Coast Community Design Studio in Biloxi, MS, with founder David Perkes; and short internships with the Center for Urban Pedagogy in New York and the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Vermont. She holds a MS in Architecture Studies (SMArchS-Urbanism) from MIT, and a Bachelor’s of Architecture from Penn State University.
This talk examines the gay bar as an institution in its own right, focusing on the role it plays in secondary cities such as Cleveland, Fresno, or Oklahoma City, and outpost bars that are the only gay bar within an hour's drive of another. In these small cities, often in red counties of red states, smartphone apps are of little use and social acceptance is more elusive. Data include 50 interviews with gay bar owners and managers, site visits to over 80 gay bars in 27 states, a new national dataset of gay bar listings from 1977-2017, and a longitudinal study of San Francisco's three gay bar districts. Mattson shows that bars in general have been squeezed in recent years, and that gentrification, changing leisure patterns, and corporate chain competition are more relevant to the challenges facing gay bars than narratives of technological or social progress. Mattson reports on several ways that urban planners, municipalities, Chambers of Commerce, and Convention Bureaus could support gay bars, and argue why they should start doing so. And he argues that we need to abandon planning stereotypes of LGBTQ people as the shock troops of gentrification or canaries of the knowledge economy, and start treating regional gay bars as social institutions in their own right.
