Remaking Cities Institute

In March 2026, RCI convened the three-day symposium Making Alive! Reworlding Cities across sites in Pittsburgh, bringing together scholars, designers, activists, and community partners to rethink how cities can move from extraction toward stewardship, regeneration, and collective care. Featuring keynote conversations with Arturo Escobar and David Bollier, the program explored ownership, infrastructure, metabolism, and collective agency as foundations for more just and pluriversal urban futures. 

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In Fall'25, the Remaking Cities Institute hosted a series of faculty-led dialogues. Each session brought colleagues together around a shared theme, highlighting ongoing design-research at CM–A and opening space for genuine exchange, critical positioning, and mutual support. Collectively, these conversations chart pathways toward more just, resilient, and self-determined urban futures, while shaping RCI's agenda for the years to come.
 

In November 2025, RCI co-organized a two-day symposium commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Penn Plaza evictions and the 75th anniversary of the Lower Hill demolition, two defining episodes of displacement in Pittsburgh. Bringing together scholars, advocates, and community leaders—including keynote speaker Edward Goetz—the program examined the legacies of urban renewal and explored strategies to advance housing justice and prevent future displacement.

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In Spring 2025, RCI and the Heinz Architectural Center co-hosted a three-part salon series alongside the Carnegie Museum of Art exhibition Tatiana Bilbao Estudio: City of Rooms. With Tatiana Bilbao, Anna Puigjaner, and Michael Maltzan, the series reimagined the home as a site of politics, care, and collective life. Each conversation unfolded in a different “room”—living room, kitchen, bedroom—using domestic space to open larger questions about housing, gender, community, and the commons. Curated by Stefan Gruber and Raymund Ryan.

In Fall 2024, the Commoning the City studio traveled to Chicago and Detroit for immersive fieldwork with Sweet Water Foundation and Freedom Dreams. Taught by Jonathan Kline and Stefan Gruber, the Master of Urban Design thesis studio examines how communities shape neighborhoods through stewardship, self-organization, and collective design. Each year, students travel to learn from commoning initiatives and contribute new research to the growing archive An Atlas of Commoning. This year’s visit formed part of a broader exchange with CM-A’s inaugural Watson Chair Emmanuel Pratt, facilitated by RCI.

In conjunction with the 2024 Tbilisi Architecture Biennale Correct Mistakes and the opening of the travelling exhibition An Atlas of Commoning, RCI hosted a daylong symposium, bringing together local practitioners to explore how commoning can shape informal education, cultural stewardship, and neighborhood regeneration in Tbilisi. Through roundtable discussions on arts, ecology, technology, and heritage, the event highlighted community-led practices of shared learning, care, and collective ownership in a Post-Soviet context. 

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In 2023, Karen Abrams—Adjunct Professor and former Director of Pittsburgh's Department of City Planning—delivered the David Lewis Lecture on Urban Design and Social Equity, inaugurating the school's Spring public program on Extractivism. In her lecture, Abrams outlined the Just Transitions framework and its role in shaping Pittsburgh’s new Comprehensive Plan then under development. At the school Karen teaches a graduate seminar on Public Policy and Planning for Masterof Urban Design students.

RCI-affiliated faculty Stefan Gruber, Jonathan Kline, and Christine Mondor represented Carnegie Mellon University at the 111th Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Annual Conference, In Commons, in St. Louis. Presentations addressed energy commons, urban design methods for commoning, decommodified housing, and Uruguay’s mutual-aid cooperative housing system—advancing debates on how design can support collective ownership and shared infrastructures.

In 2020, Liz Ogbu delivered the David Lewis Lecture, Do No Harm: The Role of Design(ers) in Complicated Times. A designer, urbanist, and advocate for spatial justice, Ogbu argued that justice has a geography: the equitable distribution of access, services, and opportunity is a basic human right. Her lecture challenged designers to recognize that spatial inequity extends beyond the absence of housing or parks to include deeply interconnected social, economic, and health consequences.

In September 2019, RCI brought the international exhibition An Atlas of Commoning to Pittsburgh’s Miller Institute for Contemporary Art and launched the three-day symposium Designing for a Commons Transition. Architects, artists, organizers, and civic leaders gathered to ask how design can help build more democratic, plural, and just cities. Highlights included Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman’s keynote Unwalling Citizenship, conversations on Pittsburgh’s community design legacy, a curator-led tour, and a bus tour of local commons-based initiatives. 

Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman opened the symposium Designing for a Commons Transition with a keynote exploring how citizenship might be reimagined not as a fixed legal status, but as an inclusive and emergent practice shaped through co-produced civic spaces and solidarities—particularly in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. A post-lecture discussion with students from the Master of Urban Design program took place within the exhibition An Atlas of Commoning at the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art.

In collaboration with Uruguay’s Center for Cooperative Housing, RCI exhibited ongoing research on Uruguay’s Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives at the 2024 International Architecture Biennial of Rotterdam entitled “Nature of Hope”. Our project Community Condenser chronicles the evolution of Uruguay's self-build housing movement and the ecosystem of public and intermediary actors who enable the scaling of cooperative housing.

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Since 2018, Carnegie Mellon’s Urban Collaboratory Studio has partnered with Community Forge to help transform the former Johnston Elementary School into a thriving civic hub and shared neighborhood resource in Wilkinsburg. Through participatory design workshops with local youth and residents, the studio has helped translate Community Forge’s vision into a long-term revitalization strategy delivered through incremental phases—from design for a playscape and the main atrium to current plans for a community event space and black box theater in partnership with Bricolage Production Company.

The Remaking Cities Institute is partnering with the Shadyside Chamber of Commerce to improve public space and enhance the Walnut Street experience in Shadyside. In an initial pilot phase, the strategy envisions a series of parklets designed by STUDIOGRUBER as a playful reinterpretation of Pittsburgh’s infamous parking chair.

An Atlas of Commoning is a traveling exhibition developed in partnership with ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) and ARCH+. Since its premiere in Berlin, the exhibition has traveled to Pittsburgh, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Tbilisi. Developed by Stefan Gruber with the Master of Urban Design studio 'Commoning the City', the central Atlas installation incorporates new case studies in each host city, expanding a growing archive of commoning initiatives from around the world.

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A conversation between Miguel Braceli and Stefan Gruber titled Porches, Playgrounds & Other Schools, originally published in after school  book, is now publicly accessible in La Escuela.

after school  is a long-term research project developed by Theodossis Issaias, Alyssa Velázquez, and McKenzie Stupica at the Carnegie Museum of Art, examining the spatial, political, and social infrastructures of public education in the United States. Through this wider inquiry, Braceli and Gruber reflect on how learning environments are built, dismantled, and reimagined across generations.

Read the conversation 
 

The Smart Sidewalk Guide presents a new framework for rethinking sidewalks as climate and mobility infrastructure. Authored by Suzy (Zekun) Li and Vivian Loftness, the guide shows how sidewalk investments can improve walkability while addressing urban heat, flooding, and EV charging through integrated design strategies.

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Congratulations to the graduating class of the Master of Urban Design 2026! Their thesis projects are currently on display at 6555 Penn Avenue through Saturday, May 9. Ranging from urban transformation strategies for informal settlements, refugee communities, post-disaster recovery, and post-industrial transition to questions of aging in place, gender equity, and mobility, the projects rethink ownership, governance, and spatial practice across scales—from placemaking to systems-level change.

Check back soon for more details and featured student projects.

In the Fall 2025, the Commoning the City studio traveled to San Diego and Tijuana for an immersion at UCSD's Center on Global Justice led by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman. Highlights included visits to several Community Stations including a participatory theater workshop at Casa Familiar and a day-long convening with the transborder collective INSITE LAB at the Alacrán Community Station.

Since 2021, the Master of Urban Design Systems studio led by Nida Rehman has partnered with residents in Braddock and North Braddock to confront the environmental burdens of a historic “sacrifice zone.” Through collaborative research and design, the studio explores how community knowledge can shape new strategies for air quality, public health, and environmental justice, including the Taking Back the Air initiative with North Braddock Residents For Our Future and General Sisters.

Their work has been featured by PublicSource and received support through the SOM Foundation Research Prize.

Jonathan Kline presented his paper Reorienting Urban Design Methods for Commoning at the 2023 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture conference. Drawing on the Master of Urban Design thesis studio co-taught with Stefan Gruber, the paper reflects on pedagogical experiments that reposition urban design as a participatory practice rooted in collective stewardship and shared resources. It calls for methods that enable commoning through participation, stewardship, and shared decision-making.

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In Fall 2022, the Master of Urban Design Placemaking Studio, led by professor Stefani Danes collaborated with Oakland Planning and Development Corporation to envision five Community Service Hubs identified by the Oakland Plan to provide gathering space and access to after-school programs, child care, Wi-Fi, technology, and other services. Review the students’ design as presented to the public on OPDC website here.