Panel

“Concurrent Urbanities” brings together designers, artists, architects, urbanists, planners, non-profit and non-governmental organizations, civic and community activists, with government representatives and the private sector, in order to explore the complex production of new urban conditions across the world. Organized by the School of Design Strategies (SDS) at Parsons The New School for Design, “Concurrent Urbanities” is a series of thematically linked events. Our intent is to place global forces in relation to local, situated knowledge and practices so that emerging patterns of urbanity at large can be clearly unearthed and explored. Particular emphasis is placed on exploring new roles that artists and designers play, and the design theories, methods and techniques of visualization and communication they employ, to encourage radical democratization, forms of social resistance, economic equity, and environmental sustainability.

In collaboration with Into the Open: Positioning Practice, the Venice Biennale US Pavilion Exhibit at Parsons, and with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, SDS Concurrent Urbanities 1 will feature individuals and groups from the United States and Europe that represent a new generation of design activists whose work proposes a radical remapping of the relationships between urban practices and design through broad participatory design processes, bottom-up organizational approaches, and innovative networking, as well as through emergent approaches to field operations.

Schedule
11:00 a.m.
Welcome
Joel Towers (Dean, School of Design Strategies, Parsons The New School for Design)

Introduction
Miodrag Mitrasinovic (Chair, Urban and Transdisciplinary Design, SDS, Parsons The New School for Design)

Presentations 
Moderator
Joseph Heathcott, Associate Professor and Chair, Urban Studies, Eugene Lang

Participants
Anne Frederick and Mark Turkel, Hester Street Collaborative, New York
Rosten Woo, Executive Director, Center for Urban Pedagogy, New York
Deborah Gans, Principal, Gans Studio, New York
Vyjayanthi Rao, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, The New School

1:00 p.m.
Lunch break

2:00 p.m.
Introduction
Ivan Kucina,Visiting Scholar, SDS, Parsons The New School for Design; Professor, University of Belgrade, Serbia

Presentations 
Moderator
Vyjayanthi Rao

Participants
Marc Neelen and Ana Dzokic, STEALTH.unlimited, Rotterdam
Alexander Vollebregt, SpaceLab Research Laboratory, TU Delft
Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, NAO, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia
Ivan Kucina

4:00 p.m.
Reception