Making Alive! Reworlding Cities: Decommodified · Regenerative · Pluriversal

Symposium with Keynote Speakers Prof. Arturo Escobar and David Bollier

Tuesday - Thursday, March 10–12

Hosted by Carnegie Mellon’s Remaking Cities Institute, this symposium brings together scholars, designers, activists, and community partners to reflect on how cities are being reshaped under conditions of financialization, ecological crisis, and uneven post-industrial change. Anchored in Pittsburgh yet attentive to broader systemic dynamics, the program considers both large-scale urban infrastructures and everyday architectures of collective life. Through dialogue, site-based inquiry, and cross-disciplinary exchange, participants explore how ownership, governance, material cycles, and shared stewardship are negotiated in practice. Rather than offering fixed solutions, the conversations invite sustained reflection on the ontologies of cities—how they are understood, structured, and inhabited—and on the possibilities of reworlding urbanism through relationality, repair, and collective responsibility.

The symposium is chaired and organized by Stefan Gruber, Sarosh Anklesaria and Tuliza Sindi.

All events will provide catering. PLEASE REGISTER through this FORM by midday on Monday, March 9, 2026, so that we can finalize all catering and venue capacity planning.

SCHEDULE:

Tuesday, March 10 · 5:30–8:00 pm

Keynote Opening Conversation

Cities: Pluriversal and Alive

_Site: Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, CFA, 4919 Frew Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

_Keynote Speakers: David Bollier (2026 David Lewis Lecture), Arturo Escobar ( 2025-26 Watson Chair)

_Symposium Chairs: Sarosh Anklesaria, Stefan Gruber, Tuliza Sindi

_Guiding Questions: How does a pluriversal understanding of the world change how we conceive, design, and govern cities? What urban places, institutions and practices of commoning might help defend shared wealth from enclosure and make cities more “alive” in social, ecological, and political terms?

Wednesday, March 11 · 09:00 am–7:00 pm

_(9-9:45am) Tour (incl. meeting point): Walking Tour of Downtown with Bruce Chan, Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership. Meeting point: Westin Hotel lobby, 1000 Penn Ave., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15222

Morning Panel Session 10:00 am - 1:30 pm

Ownership: Decommodified and Cooperative

_Site: 20th floor of Frick Building, 437 Grant Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15219 (please sign in at the security desk)

_Guest Speakers: Susanne Schindler, Neeraj Bhatia, Randall Taylor

_Poet: Sten Carlson, Adrea Cha

_Faculty Participants: Jared Abraham, Jonathan Kline, William Martin

_Guiding Questions: How might cities move from ownership toward stewardship—shifting cultural norms, legal frameworks, and property regimes to support collective responsibility and care? What mechanisms—cooperatives, CLTs, nonprofit ownership, temporary use, adaptive reuse—could mobilize vacant or underused buildings into shared urban assets?

_Lunch

Afternoon Panel 2:30 pm - 5:30 pm

Infrastructure: Relational and Redistributive

_(1:30pm) Bus Transfer: departure to City of Asylum, with a stop along State Route 65 between Manchester and Chateau

_Site: City of Asylum, 40 W North Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15212

_Welcome: Alexis Jabour; City of Asylum

_Guest Speakers: Karen Abrams, Jesse LeCavalier, Clare Lyster

_Poet: Charles Legere

_Faculty Participants: Sarosh Anklesaria, Christine Mondor, Richard Nisa

_Guiding Questions: How do infrastructures—physical, social, and digital—shape relations between neighborhoods, ecologies, and institutions? How might we design infrastructures that redistribute resources, risks, and opportunities across social and ecological boundaries?

_Reception at Alfabeto / City of Asylum

Thursday, March 12 · 10:00 am–7:00 pm

Morning Panel Session 10:00 am - 12:30 pm

Metabolism: Adaptive and Regenerative

_Site: Construction Junction, 214 N Lexington St, Pittsburgh, PA 15208

_Welcome & Tour: Melissa Mongelli; Construction Junction

_Guest Speakers: Lola Ben-Alon, Gideon Kossoff, Adrienne Economos Miller 

_Poet: Emily Carlson

_Faculty Participants: Dana Čupková, Joshua Lee

_Guiding Questions: How can urban metabolisms—flows of energy, materials, food, and waste—be reoriented toward regenerative cycles rather than extractive linearities? Where do adaptive reuse, circular economies, and practices of repair, cultivation, and maintenance reveal alternative metabolic relations between city and territory?

_Bus transfer to Community Forge (for students joining the afternoon session only, a bus will leave from the Margaret Morrison Rotunda a 1:20pm to Community Forge)

Afternoon 1:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Agency: Distributed and Collective

_Site: Community Forge, 1256 Franklin Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15221

_Welcome: Jackie Cameron, Mike Skirpan, Patrick Cooper; Community Forge

_(1:00-1:40 pm) Lunch

_Guest Speakers: Tei Carpenter, Gilly Karjevski, Cassim Shepard

_Poet: Robin Clarke

_Faculty Participants: Maryam Karimi, Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee, Nida Rehman, Tommy CheeMou Yang

_Guiding Questions: How can agency in cities be understood as distributed across communities, institutions, and more-than-human actors rather than concentrated within experts or markets? Where do collective design processes, civic cooperatives, and participatory or activist planning practices demonstrate how urban transformation can emerge from shared authorship and situated knowledge?

_(4:30pm) Reading Performance: Samizdat / Audience (Vaclav Havel, 1975) by Jeffrey Carpenter and Steven Michael Wilson of Bricolage Production Company