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Keyword: Layers of Reciprocity | Throughout the daylong symposium, “Reimaging the Urban,” two particular keywords continued to jump out at me – reciprocity and layers. As I thought about these as individual concepts I realized that in fact layers of reciprocity was a much more appropriate way in which to understand the complexity of collaboration and exchange necessary in order for the projects discussed to succeed.

Keyword: Street Art | “Street art” is the umbrella expression to refer to several forms of intervention that use the streets as their domain.  It covers not only visual productions such as graffiti and tagging, but also performances like skateboarding, parkour, and break dance.  The literature on street art is extensive and framed by a reference to mainstream artistic production.  “Is graffiti (or tagging, or skateboarding) art?”  seems to be an unavoidable question addressed again and again and consistently answered affirmatively.  In my research, this approach is secondary.  Instead, I am

Keyword: (In)equity, Inevitable? | Dr. Shannon Jackson, who co-organized Reimagining the Urban, opened the symposium with questions including, in summary: What kinds of creativity are valued and for whom? And how can collaborating across sectors create solutions rather than obstacles? Another question to ask here would be: solutions for whom?

Keyword: Long-term | The long-term is a durational temporality. If I set this against the continuous present of the participle, ‘re-imagining’–the keyword which leads the title of the symposium–what kind of time do I find myself in? The call for the long-term engagement is a particularly fraught one for the field of visual art practice forcing the surface a series of questions, like: how long is enough for an artist to engage a community? How long should the dialogue be? How long does the project go? How long should the artist *be* in that space, or need she be there at all?

Keyword: Restoration | In the Bay Area and beyond, ambitious creek and wetland restoration projects aim to return landscapes to an earlier, more “natural” condition. The scientists designing the projects know that it is impossible to restore a landscape to a pre-human condition when the entire watershed has been radically altered, and they make many nuanced choices in order to enhance habitats.  But the public often believes the goal is to put a site back to “the way it was.”

Keyword: Creative class | In 2002 economist Richard Florida published the Rise of the Creative Class. In it he argued that the best way for cities to revive their ailing urban economies was to remake themselves in order to attract a social category he called “the creative class.”  At the core of this group were innovative and creative workers whose importance in the new knowledge-based economy could produce new companies, attract jobs and residents, and expand consumption.

Keyword: Site-specific | That’s Not My BART Stop: One of the Triangle Lab projects we’re producing right now is called Love Balm for My Spirit Child.  It’s a series of performances sharing testimony from mothers who have lost children to violence.  We’re calling this series “site-specific” because they’re performed on the spots where each murder took place.  Site-specific in its strictest definition means a performance created specifically for a non-traditional space, often using physical characteristics of that space, or of the community who gathers there, to influence what the p

Keyword: Urban | In mainstream US media, “urban” is a pervasive euphemism for black, a way to register but not directly point at African-American culture within the post-racial political paradigm of colorblindness.