TOPIC: “ Another Kind of Power”

What does it mean to be resilient to climate change? Many planners and architects suggest that cities must be designed with adaptable infrastructure that can bounce back from possible disasters ranging from hurricanes to volatile markets, infrastructure crashes to political unrest. And yet, critics have also denounced resilience thinking for its complacency with disaster and its complicity with gentrification. Instead, what would it take to adapt to climate change through new forms of power-sharing and wealth distribution? In this lecture, Janette Kim will share two projects she has created as an architectural designer and facilitator of public decision-making processes. The first, called Resilient Equity Hubs, is a speculative urban design project that reconfigures property ownership and redistributes wealth to a more inclusive collective. The second, called Bartertown, is a board game that invites diverse audiences to find consensus amidst longstanding debates about resource-sharing.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Janette Kim is an architectural designer, researcher, and educator based in San Francisco whose work focuses on the intersection between ecology, social equity and the built environment. Janette is assistant professor and director of Urban Works Agency at California College of the Arts and founding principal of All of the Above. Janette is author of The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform and founding editor of ARPA Journal. Her projects include the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge, the Win-Win board game series, a boutique hotel in Sichuan, Safari audio tours on urban ecology, Pinterest Headquarters, National AIDS Memorial, and the Fall Kill Creek Master Plan. Janette has worked in partnership with municipal agencies such as the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York, and the City of Newark, as well as non-profit advocacy groups such as the East Oakland Collective and the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater.