In many ways, 015 explores the line between an art practice, entrepreneurial work, and an architecture / urbanism practice. The work began with an earnest attempt to develop strategies to rebuild the West Side of Chicago via a focus on sustainability as well as the role that digital platforms can play in managing, maintaining, and calling attention to a particular area. The hope was that such digital platforms could serve as a scaleable service that would justify the initial investment and that would ultimately lead to investment in similar areas of cities around the country. In order to embark on this work, I spent considerable time photographing the landscape that I hoped to attract interest in. This initial engagement of the site led to further research into its history – especially the largely forgotten utopian Fifth City Development of the early 1960s – diagrams to help understand the urban form, interviews with residents, and partnerships with community groups. It through the development of a series of proposals for five sites on the West Side that I felt would be capable of catalyzing broader redevelopment. Finally, it took the form of a series of texts and books that summarized the approach. While these might not fit within the traditional boundaries of an art practice, as a guide for how to engage a specific community and use design and creative thinking to benefit that community through attracting capital to improve the physical environment, they fall in line with a recent history of socially engaged practices. They also are a clear extension from the broader body of work that seeks to interrogate sites and their histories in order to discover a material that can be used to rethink the present and possibly create an alternative future.
