Placemaking Week 2024

What defines the possibilities of a society? What establishes those limits, beyond which change is impossible? Besides habits, laws, customs, economic systems and other disembodied forces, the arrangement of human activities in physical space has a decisive impact. Yet, how do we proceed? As designers, artists, teachers, students – citizens - what are we supposed to do? And how do we learn to speculate creatively, in a conjectural way? We would like to offer the one-to-one as an ethical premise for the work, for practice and for pedagogy, while seeking an extension of two preoccupations: engagement and making. This panel is a conversation around recent place-based and site-specific initiatives at MICA Social Design. From high-school design-build projects, to toolkits for equity-based school leaders, to collaboration with a consortium of community land trusts, we offer an expanded view of placemaking in practice in the City of Baltimore. In our work, we engage with reality: actual people; authentic situations; materiality. This does not necessarily mean solely fabricating an object or building a building. We are also deeply invested in the building of a conversation, or a relationship…and the understanding that any making is part of a social, economic, political system. Work at the scale of one-to-one is inherently relational; it offers the promise of reflecting upon the work as opposed to merely thinking about it, increasing the capacity to impact culture. This coupling of projection and reflection allows for work to yield policy. Design is not a way to distance ourselves from the arbitrary forces that shape the contemporary landscape, but a way to re-imagine them. As a graduate program focused on co-operative structures and the ethics of working-together, we will strive to show how we model this in how we organize and operate as a (temporary) collective.