lecturesHAA is pleased to announce its 2011/2012 program: “PROVOCATIONS: Challenging Detroit’s Design Discourse”.  This bi-monthly lecture series will begin in June and continue through the end of 2012.  Each panel discussion will invite local, regional, and national figures to discuss what makes Detroit provocative.  Set in a variety of under-utilized, contested, and historically charged spaces throughout our city, each event seeks to challenge the participants through candid discourse and direct engagement of the built environment.  It is the aim of each panel discussion to explore new urban strategies that promote social equity and advocacy.  We believe good design (and good design discourse) is a proactive and critical act, toeing the line between conflict and resolution.  While each event exists for only a moment, the entire series will provide a lasting catalogue of constructive dialogue, informing Detroit’s shared creative consciousness.

I've never met an interactive map I didn't like; until now.  I mean, are you serious about the number of bridges I use on a regular basis that are considered "structurally deficient"?  I guess, at least Michigan isn't Pennsylvania, the single most structurally deficient state in the country.

The Michigan Campaign for Justice, which fights for a fair and effective public defense system in Michigan, is seeking a Campaign Director to implement a statewide campaign for the achievement of the following goal:

PUSH Buffalo, one of GLUE's favorite local organizations, received exciting news today one of its programs is a finalist in an international competition devoted to sustainable urban housing and sponsored by HUD, the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Planning Association.
The Green Development Zone combines cutting-edge green-design affordable housing, sustainable landscaping, community planning, urban agriculture, and green jobs training in a twenty block area on Buffalo's West Side.  At present more than fifty parcels of property in

The Van Alen Institute has issued an open call for design ideas that imagine an America transformed by high speed rail.

GLUEsters especially tend to understand intellectually the difference that high-speed rail could make to our cities.  This competition is a chance to use all your creativity to represent that transformation--culturally, economically, and environmentally.

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Government leaders and private sector practitioners in clean energy efforts, especially those using Energy Efficiency Community Block Grants, may want to head to DC in June to swap best practices and highlight the need for greater federal investment in local clean energy initiatives.

In a brilliant move, the Rust Belt to Artist Belt conference, started and run successfully for two years by the Cleveland Partnership for Arts and Culture, is now bringing its arts redevelopment focus to Detroit (I love the idea of organizations sharing a conference--so different from the territoriality that we often encounter!). Now hosted by the relatively new Detroit Creative Corridor Center, with partnership from ArtServe and Techtown, the conference hopes to: ...

Starting to feel like this week has a vacant property theme to it (see yesterday's post on news in Youngstown, and a post earlier this week on the 2011 Land Banking Conference). At least we're all solutions oriented? Open/Closed, the first conference in St. Louis dedicated to vacant and abandoned property is coming up on March 18-19, 2011. The conference seems, more than just a series of speakers, to be a call to collaborative action to deal with the vacant properties of St. Louis...

Today, the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative is releasing the results of its 2010 survey of every parcel of land in Youngstown. From MVOC's press conference announcement: Notable findings from the data include the city

Land banking has emerged over the last decade as a prominent strategy for mitigating the problems of vacant land and buildings. The 2011 Land Bank Conference, run by the Center for Community Progress, a national leader in education and capacity-building for land banking, is coming to Detroit this June. The conference, which is designed primarily for practitioners in the field,"will help you identify how land banking and tax foreclosure strategies can catalyze development of effective solutions to unlocking the value of vacant, abandoned, and problem properties." ...