Community Based City Planning
- Enrique Morales
- Graduate Fine Arts Department, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
The lot in the Six Corners neighborhood of Chicago at the center of Enrique Morales's community-based planning project.
Enrique Morales will engage in the first stages of a community engagement and development project for a six-acre lot on Chicago’s Northwest Side, which will culminate in a design master plan. As an artist, this project is part of Enrique Morales’s ongoing social practice, which takes the form of a 501c3 organization, the Northwest Arts Connection, of which he is a co-founder. The motto of Northwest Arts Connection, now in its 10th year of operation, is “building community through the arts.” The proposed project is to reimagine the Six Corners neighborhood through the lens of cultural infrastructure on a six-acre lot, the former property of People’s Gas. Six Corners was the city of Chicago’s largest commercial district outside of downtown Chicago for decades until it started to decline in the 90s, and now sits mostly vacant, equaling about 14 acres of empty lots and buildings. The vision is to spark sustainable urban renewal through the lens of cultural infrastructure, starting on this six-acre lot. Northwest Arts Connection defines cultural infrastructure to be anything from a physical structure to house cultural activity: theatre, dance, music, as well as visual art spaces; to open, green, space that would enhance the walkability of the district. The project seeks to build on the work the organization and others have done throughout the past ten years.