Remaking Cities Institute

In Spring 2025, the Heinz Architectural Center and Carnegie Mellon University’s Remaking Cities Institute hosted a three-part conversation series alongside the Carnegie Museum of Art exhibition Tatiana Bilbao Estudio: City of Rooms. Each salon unfolded in a different “room”—from living room to kitchen to bedroom—bringing together leading architects, students, and the public to explore how domestic spaces connect to questions of care, community, and the commons.

In fall 2024, the Master of Urban Design (MUD) students traveled to Chicago and Detroit for immersive experiences at the Sweet Water Foundation and Freedom Dreams. Taught by Jonathan Kline and Stefan Gruber, the Commoning the City thesis studio explores community-led transformation of cities towards more equitable, regenerative and self-determined futures. Each year, the studio travels to experience and learn from inspiring commoning initiatives around the world and documents the fieldwork in a growing archive of case studies known as “An Atlas of Commoning.” This year, the studio was generously hosted by Emmanuel Pratt and his team at the Sweet Water Foundation on Chicago’s South Side, as well as Communiversity partner Freedom Dreams in Detroit.

Karen Abrams, Director of City Planning at the City of Pittsburgh presented the 2023 David Lewis lecture on Urban Design and Social Equity, opening the Architecture School Spring 2023 Public program on Extractivism.

Architecture faculty Stefan Gruber, Jonathan Kline and Christine Mondor represented Carnegie Mellon at the 111th ACSA Annual Conference “In Commons,” that took place from March 30. to April 2.2023 in St. Louis. Key notes were presented by Sharon Egretta Sutton and Francis Kéré. (…) Christine Mondor presented a co-authored paper on "HELIOStudio and the Energy Commons: The Third Generation of Energy Landscapes," Jonathan Kline presented on "Reorienting Urban Design Methods for Commoning," and Stefan Gruber, who served on the conference's steering committee, facilitated a special session on "Decommodifying Housing" and presented a paper on "Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives - Uruguay's Public-Commons Institutional Ecosystem."

Liz Ogbu, designer, urbanist, and spatial justice activist, delivered the 2020 David Lewis Lecture entitled "Do No Harm: The Role of Design(ers) in Complicated Times." According to Ogbu, spatial justice means that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of access, services, and outcomes is a basic human right: "A lack of spatial justice isn’t just about the deprivation of physical resources like housing or parks, but also the wide range of devastating interrelated social, economic, and health repercussions."

Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman opened the Symposium "Designing for a Commons Transitio" with a keynote exploring how citizenship can be reimagined not as a fixed legal status but as an inclusive, emergent practice cultivated through co-produced civic spaces and solidarities—especially in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. A post-lecture discussion took place in the exhibition "An Altas of Commoning" at the Miller ICA, where we gathered on Manuel Herz's carpet inscribed with the Unviersal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Symposium “Designing for a Commons Transition” (Sept 19–21, 2019) accompanied the travelling exhibition An Atlas of Commoning at the Miller ICA, presented by ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) in collaboration with ARCH+ and Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture. The three-day program brought together architects, urbanists, artists, and community leaders to explore the role of design in advancing pluralistic, radically democratic, and just cities. Highlights included Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman’s keynote Unwalling Citizenship, panels on Pittsburgh’s community design legacy, curator and artist tours, and a bus tour of local commons-based initiatives. Speakers include Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, Renée Tribble, Kristin Hughes and Mary-Lou Arscott, Tobias Armborst, Antje Steinmuller, Karen Abrams, Anne-Marie Lubenau, Terri Baltimore, Stefani Danes and Christina Howell.

Organized by Stefan Gruber and Jonathan Kline, the symposium was supported by the Graham Foundation, the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, the Sylvia and David Steiner Lecture Series, Carnegie Mellon University, and ifa.

Architect and urban designer Peter Calthorpe discusses the role of cities in addressing climate change in his 2015 David Lewis lecture. Listen to Calthorpe advocating for new forms of growth and development that reestablish a sense of place, scale, history, and environmental balance within the built environment.