Parsons The New School for Design
School of Design Strategies
Date/Time: Friday, April 17, 11am-4pm
Location: Kellen Auditorium, 66 5th Avenue, 1st Floor

Concurrent Urbanities brings together designers, artists, architects, urbanists, planners, non-profit and non-governmental organizations, civic and community activists, with government representatives and the private sector, in order to explore the complex production of new urban conditions across the world. Organized by the School of Design Strategies (SDS) at Parsons The New School for Design, Concurrent Urbanities is a series of thematically linked events.  Our intent is to place global forces in relation to local, situated knowledge and practices so that emerging patterns of urbanity at large can be clearly unearthed and explored. Particular emphasis is placed on exploring new roles that artists and designers play, and the design theories, methods and techniques of visualization and communication they employ, to encourage radical democratization, forms of social resistance, economic equity, and environmental sustainability.
 
In collaboration with "Into the Open: Positioning Practice," the Venice Biennale US Pavilion Exhibit at Parsons, and with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics (The New School), SDS’ Concurrent Urbanities 1 will feature individuals and groups from the United States and Europe that represent a new generation of design activists whose work proposes a radical remapping of the relationships between urban practices and design through broad participatory design processes, bottom-up organizational approaches, innovative networking, as well as through emergent approaches to field operations.

Schedule:

11-1pm
Introduction by Miodrag Mitrasinovic (Chair, Urban and Transdisciplinary Design, SDS, Parsons TNS)

Anne Frederick (Director, Hester Street Collaborative, New York)
Rosten Woo (Executive Director, Center for Urban Pedagogy, New York)
Deborah Gans (Principal, Gans Studio, New York)
Vyjayanthi Rao (Asst. Professor of Anthropology, The New School)

Joseph Heathcott, (Associate Professor, Chair of Lang Urban Studies, The New School), moderator

1-2pm  lunch break
 
2-4pm

Introduction by Ivan Kucina (Visiting Scholar at the School of Design Strategies and Professor at the University of Belgrade, Serbia)

Marc Neelen and Ana Dzokic (STEALTH.unlimited, Rotterdam)
Alexander Vollebregt (SpaceLab Research Laboratory, TU Delft)
Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (NAO, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia)
Ivan Kucina

Vyjayanthi Rao (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, The New School), moderator