PJ Dick Innovation Fund Project Grant: Making Alive: Cities! Decommodified, Regenerative, Pluriversal, Reworlded

Making Alive: Cities! Decommodified, Regenerative, Pluriversal, Reworlded
Project Leads: Stefan Gruber, Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon Architecture; Sarosh Anklesaria, Associate Teaching Professor, Carnegie Mellon Architecture; Tuliza Sindi, Special Faculty, Carnegie Mellon Architecture

The project supports the Remaking Cities Institute (RCI) Symposium.

Cities today are shaped by the intertwined forces of globalization, profit-driven growth, and fossil capitalism — systems that generate inequity, environmental harm, and escalating climate vulnerabilities. Planetary in scale yet locally felt, these dynamics materialize through extraction, commodification, displacement and ruination. They manifest in vacancy, crumbling infrastructure, housing precarity, and uneven redevelopment — conditions shared across post-industrial and rapidly urbanizing contexts alike. “Making Alive: Cities!” begins from this recognition and asks how architecture and urbanism might shift from mechanistic and extractive paradigms toward decommodified, regenerative, pluriversal, and reworlded urban futures. Here, “alive” signals an ontological reorientation: understanding cities as dynamic, interdependent, and more-than-human ecologies rather than systems to be controlled or optimized. This framing foregrounds relation, reciprocity, care, and reworlding as foundations for imagining otherwise.

Over two and a half days, the symposium convenes scholars, architects, urbanists, policymakers, cultural practitioners, and community leaders in a series of situated conversations. To ground these discussions in lived conditions, sessions will take place at selected Pittsburgh sites whose spatial, political, industrial, or ecological trajectories make the stakes palpable. Locations such as Mill 19 at Hazelwood Green, Community Forge in Wilkinsburg, the Manchester-Chateau highway trench, and a vacant downtown office tower function as provocations — immersive environments for interrogating how hegemonic logics organize urban life and for experimenting with alternative frameworks of commoning, stewardship, circularity, ecological repair, and mutual care.

A keynote dialogue between CM—A’s 2025–26 Watson Chair Arturo Escobar and David Bollier will frame the event within broader transformations in design, commons governance, and systemic change. Building on the fall 2025 RCI Faculty Dialogues, the symposium will serve as a pivotal moment in articulating and publicly announcing the agenda of the RCI. Intended outcomes include a publication through CM—A’s new imprint, the seeding of an emerging research cluster, and the advancement of more equitable and regenerative approaches to shaping cities.
 

Image: Aerial photo of the Court of Ideas, Hill District, Pittsburgh, 1967. Designer: Architecture 2001/Troy West. The Court of Ideas was a community-built outdoor theater and cultural hub in Pittsburgh’s Hill District in the late 1960s, created as a public platform where residents could gather, speak, and assert their own narratives in the face of urban renewal and displacement.