Listening to the City

MIT CoLab, 2018

As a Research Affiliate at the MIT Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) between 2015 -18, the artist contributed to discourse and shared models of participatory research in her studio and socially engaged art practice to benefit urban planners who seek more creative methods of engagement and social innovation in marginalized communities. The artists seminal work Memory Boxes: Stories from New Denver, B.C. appears in chapters “Identifying Community Needs and Assets through Audio Mapping” and “Uncovering and Honoring Hidden Histories through Personal Storytelling” of a culminating publication Listening to the City (2018) assembled and edited by principal author Allegra Williams and research-designer Maggie Coblentz. Project partners were LA Listens and Design Studio for Social Intervention (ds4si).

Situated within MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT CoLab infuses creative methods of engagement and inquiry into planning, design, and development to cultivate humanistic understandings of complex socio-political dynamics in cities rarely captured via traditional social science practice, and to advance democracy through the activation of public discourse.