City as Living Lab's Fall Workshop

The WORKSHOP will focus on the neighborhood from Marble Hill to Van Cortlandt Park along the Broadway corridor and the surrounding neighborhood. CALL’s long-term objective for the WORKSHOP is to advance concerns and ideas recommended by the community, participating artists and scientist into full-scale project proposals. The proposals will then be employed to seek support and funding for implementation. This WORKSHOP is a first step within a larger process that is intended to cultivate long-term active engagement by communities to promote a sustainable urban environment. CALL believes that collaborations between artists and scientists in partnership with community constituents can be important catalysts for change. CALL conducted its first WORKSHOP in November 2014 in Harlem; see the video: https://vimeo.com/130481445

Artist/ Scientist Participants:

Gianpaolo Baiocchi is a sociologist and director of NYU’s Urban Democracy Lab. He has written about how people experience engagement in their communities and real- world examples of direct participation in policy decisions, both in the United States and in his native Brazil. Recently, he co-authored a book, The Civic Imagination, about the contours and blind-spots of the democratic conversation in the US today.

Theo Barbagianis is a hydrologist who has worked on many public works projects for the City of New York. His projects include assisting in the design and management of the construction of a treatment wetland in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, designing a bio-retention system in Bronx River Park in The Bronx and designing over 20 right-of-way bio-swales in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Juanli Carrión is an artist who creates site-specific interventions, gathering materials, people, actions, objects, information and geography to reconstruct “the landscape” consequence of cultural conflicts. His most recent project, Outer Seed Shadow (OSS), is a series of public art interventions, based upon a series of video interviews in which plants are identified by community members, which ultimately hosts weekly workshops in partnership with local groups and institutions.

SLO Architecture principals Amanda Schachter and Alexander Levi combine urban and architectural design with artistic production and social action, and collaborate with diverse partners like city agencies and local teens and volunteers. SLO’s recent projects include Harvest Dome, a floating installation for Inwood Park, created from discarded storm-snapped umbrellas assembled into a giant dome as a revelation of the city’s accumulated waterborne debris.