The development of residential districts and the efforts to reform them have profoundly affected Chicago. From Jane Addams’ efforts to the Plan for Transformation, Chicago has been particularly important in the development of social housing policy as well as the understanding of how home and community are intertwined. Panel participants address these issues and the contemporary life that has been shaped by them, ultimately considering how the city has changed and how home has changed with it.

Moderated by photographer and sociologist David Schalliol, the panel includes: Iker Gil, director of MAS Studio and editor in chief of the design journal MAS Contex; D. Bradford Hunt, author and associate professor of social science and history at Roosevelt University; Natalie Moore, author and reporter for WBEZ, and adjunct professor at Columbia College Chicago; and Emmanuel Pratt, executive director for the Sweet Water Foundation, Artist-in-Residence at the Hyde Park Art Center, and Ph.D. candidate in Urban Planning at Columbia University, New York.

More about the participants:

Iker Gil is the director of the design firm MAS Studio and the editor in chief of the design journal MAS Context. In addition, Iker is the director of the architecture series at the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago and an adjunct professor at the School of Architecture at UIC. Iker is licensed as an architect from the School of Architecture in Barcelona (ETSAB) and obtained his master’s degree in architecture at UIC. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Architecture of Barcelona (ETSAB) developing his thesis about the transportation infrastructure of the City of Chicago.

D. Bradford Hunt is associate professor of social science and history at Roosevelt University. He is the author of Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2009 and winner of the Lewis Mumford Prize from the Society of American City and Regional Planning History. With Jim Fuerst, he compiled an oral history collection of former members and staff of the Chicago Housing Authority entitled When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago (University of Illinois Press, 2005). He is also the chair of the programming committee of the new National Public Housing Museum.

Natalie Moore is the reporter for WBEZ’s South Side Englewood bureau, for which she covers news and community issues in the neighborhood and the surrounding communities. She is coauthor of the books Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation, published by Cleis Press, and Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang published by Lawrence Hill Press. She is an adjunct instructor at Columbia College Chicago and is the former program chair for the Association for Women Journalists.

Emmanuel Pratt is the executive director for the Sweet Water Foundation (http://sweetwaterfoundation.com/) in Milwaukee, an organization dedicated to building intergenerational and interdisciplinary educational programming for sustainability with a focus on the potential of urban agriculture and aquaculture in post-industrial cities. He has been invited to spend the next several months in residence at the Hyde Park Art Center to examine his art practice as a way to digest his recent Chicago venture, the Mycelia Project. The Mycelia Project is an innovative and educational collaboration with Chicago Public Schools, Urban Gateways, and the Woodlawn Community Development Corporation (among others) that seeks to unite the various Chicago communities via hands-on, experimental projects that promote learning focused on food, soil, water, and energy sustainability.

Recorded Sunday, November 13, 2011 at the Hyde Park Art Center.