2024 Park(ing) Day

 

Park(ing) Day is an international day to recognize and celebrate re utilizing paved on-street parking spaces for higher and better uses.

For nearly 10 years, Kent State Univeristy’s Master of Landscape Architecture students have participated in Park(ing) Day annually in downtown Cleveland. More recently participation has stemmed from a Construction Methods class that offers practical skills to design and build out a space for parking day. Students have the opportunity to interact with local design professionals to support their interests and network with local designers.

The CUDC, as part of it’s 25-year anniversary in downtown Cleveland, participated in Park(ing) Day 2024 by organizing, marketing, and educating the public. Marketing materials included social media posts, the creation of a Park(ing) Day Manual for others to participate, and coordinating the days events with student and professional participants. By advertising this year’s Park(ing) Day, CUDC is hopefull that this event will become a base for more public and private participation next year!

In addition to setting up the day’s events, CUDC staff participated in the day’s event by utilizing Making Our Own Space (MOOS) benches and a shade structure to occupy the parking space.

Graduate Landscape Architecture students participated through the Landscape Construction Methods class and set up individual putt-putt courses to occupy parking spaces.

In total, the event utlized 7 on-street parking spaces and the lawn in front of Cleveland State University’s Levin College. Particpants included CUDC staff, graduate Landscape Architecture students and professional firm participation from LAND Studio, RDL Architects, OHM Advisors, STATICCRAFT and CSU APA’s student chapter. Thank you to everyone who particpated, and we look forward to Park(ing) Day 2025!

Party Wall Common

A new exhibition by architect and urban designer Petra Kempf at Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative

1309 Euclid Avenue, Suite 200 | Cleveland, Ohio 44115 | 216.357.3426 | cudc.kent.edu

Opening reception and gallery talk: October 24, 2024 from 5:30-7pm

Gallery hours:
Monday – Friday from 9am - 4pm from October 25 through November 25, 2024 and Saturday, November 2, 2024 from 10am – 2pm.

Free and open to the public.

Imagine you live in a house

where sharing space, kitchen appliances, or knowledge is not based on transactions, but care.

Imagine a door opens to a mini house providing a caregiver from abroad,

a single parent, or a student from another city access to a different life.

Imagine a place where children and the elderly are an integral part of a community.

Imagine a diverse group of people sitting at a table and everyone is part of the conversation.

Imagine a house where the world gathers This is the idea behind Party Wall Common.

 



The subdivision of land into private property plays a crucial role in shaping a society’s coexistence. This condition is particularly apparent in an urban environment, where the grid has become a facilitator of the right to own land, enabling humans to abstract their relationship to one another and the environment they inhabit. The resulting degradation of land and the rising intensities of weather patterns have compelled a recognition of the link between the exploitation of resources and the concept of ownership. Hence, the monetization of resources, as well as the wasteful consumption of synthetic and organic matter, suggest the actual limits of this type of thinking. In light of these ecological and societal circumstances, there is a pressing need to rethink existing systems of ownership.

This exhibition examines the concept of ownership, as well as the challenges pertaining to our disconnection from one another and our environment, by exploring the legal and spatial conversion of party walls typical of row house typology into a common ground. In such a common ground, neither the public nor the private “governs”; rather, a multitude of interactions generated by a collective body embracing a field of changing configurations, by which the duality of “I” versus “THEY” is permeated by a third entity: the “WE”. The notion of “we” is the legal and spatial materialization of a common ground in which a collective embraces a form of ownership that is devoid of exploitation and is committed for the long term, that centers around social equity and care for the environment, while sharing both material and immaterial resources. Inhabiting the Party Wall Common enables this transformation to happen.

Architect and urban designer, Petra Kempf

Petra Kempf, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. She is an architect, urban designer, and educator. Her creative practice and research speculate on how the assemblage of collective living has been influenced by urbanization. Within these parameters, her investigations are centered on regenerative ways of living, based on reflective, responsive, and reciprocal relationships, to confront the pressing challenges to the environment as well as the changing life parameters of urban citizens living in an urban environment today. As part of this research, Kempf introduced the methodology of game making into the pedagogy at the Sam Fox School as an emerging syntax in the exploration and approach to urban life.

Kempf has worked at institutions within the public and private sector, including the New York City Department of City Planning, the Project for Public Spaces, and Richard Meier & Partners. She has taught at schools throughout the U.S. and Europe, including the Rhode Island School of Design, Columbia University, Cornell University, Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, and the University of Dortmund, Germany. She earned a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Fellowship, the Architectural League of New York’s Young Architect Award, and grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Mellon Foundation. She is the founder of Confront(ing) Urbanization, an interdisciplinary research initiative with focus on how the assemblage of collective living has been influenced by urbanization.

Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Architecture Venice Biennale and Chicago Biennale, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pink Comma Gallery in Boston, and Roca Gallery in London, among other galleries and academic institutions in the U.S. and Europe, such as Cornell University and Rhode Island School of Design. She has published a series of articles and is the author of “You are the City” and “(K)ein Ort Nirgends, Der Transitraum im urbanen Netzwerk.”

Climate Action as if the Earth Mattered 

Climate Action as if the Earth Mattered: Restoring living systems as the essential foundation to solving the polycrises we face 

Please join us Friday, September 27, 2024 at noon for a lecture at the CUDC featuring Brett KenCairn, Founding Director, Center for Regenerative Solutions.

This event will be in-person and livestreamed on Zoom. Register here

Free and open to the public. A light lunch will be provided.

Brett is the Founding Director of Center for Regenerative Solutions and Senior Policy Advisor for Climate and Resilience in the City of Boulder’s Climate Initiatives Team. He coordinates the city’s nature-based solutions work. Brett has worked across the western US in community-based initiatives in rural, Native American, and other marginalized communities. He is the co-founder of multiple organizations including the Rogue River Institute for Ecology and Economy, Veterans Green Jobs, and Community Energy Systems.

Since the early 1970s, we have known that there were two fundamental causes of climate destabilization—fossil fuel combustion and land degradation. Over the past several decades, the role of land degradation has been largely forgotten in the focus on carbon accounting and energy systems change. Current climate action strategies will inevitably fail unless we reestablish a global-scale focus on restoring the more than 70% of the Earth’s living systems that have been deeply degraded—both in natural, working and urban lands.

The good news is that we have examples of large-scale initiatives of this sort that can achieve remarkable regenerative results in the scale of just a few decades. In this talk, we will walk through the limitations to current climate action approaches and outline a broader strategy that can serve as the foundation for both climate stabilization (and a number of other aspects of the “polycrisis”) and a community redevelopment strategy that can stabilize both urban and rural communities both here and abroad.