ACTIONING SUMMIT 1: How to work collectively now (in cases of community engagement)?

With Supawut Boonmahathanakorn (Jai Baan Studio, Community Architects Network), Alejandro Echeverri (URBAM/TEC Monterrey), Allyson Martinez (Brooklyn Level Up), and Chelina Odbert (Kounkuey Design Initiative)

Interventions by Erica Avrami (GSAPP), Joseph Zeal Henry (GSAPP, Sound Advice), and Kaja Kühl (GSAPP, youarethecity).

Chelina Odbert is the co-founder and executive director of Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), a non-profit that uses urban planning, landscape architecture, research, and community organizing to build a more just public realm. Straddling different disciplines, scales, and project types, her work is linked by a common purpose: to build community power and ensure that where you live does not determine how you live.

A leader in her field, Chelina has been recognized by the United Nations, the Aspen Institute, the Knight Foundation Fellows, and Ashoka Changemakers. Because of her ground-breaking work addressing the un-public nature of public space, she and her firm won a 2021 Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York. In 2022, KDI received the prestigious National Design Award in Landscape Architecture from the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Museum.

Chelina has held teaching appointments at Harvard Graduate School of Design, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and the Claremont Colleges. She lectures extensively about equitable communities and has written about sustainable development in a range of publications, including authoring The World Bank Handbook of Gender-Inclusive Urban Planning and Design and contributing to Just Urban Design, Designing Peace, and Now Urbanism.

Chelina earned a Master of Urban Planning from Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts with High Honors from Claremont McKenna College.

Supawut Boonmahathanakorn is the co-founder of Jaibaan Studio, a design firm based in Thailand focusing on architecture, rewilding landscape and place-making. His works aim to enhance the harmonious living between man and nature, communities and its value that can carry toward the common future.

He also worked at Asian Coalition for Housing Rights as a community architect and coordinator of Community Architects Network in Asia since 2011. A regional network of architects, planners, and academics working support urban poor communities to acquire a housing security and having housing policy through participatory approach.

In 2013, he is awarded the Architects of the Future 2013 by Waldzell Collection through his life works and initiatives. In 2015, the work of Community Architects Network was selected in short list of the 2015 Fuller Challenge Award by Buckminster Fuller Institute. Recently, he is awarded the Placemaker of the Year 2021 by Placemaker Awards ASEAN by turning an old dumpsite into the public urban farm for all people during COVID’s pandemic.

Professor Alejandro Echeverri is an architect, urbanist, and Colombian academic. He is co-founder and director of URBAM, a center for urban and environmental studies at EAFIT University in Medellín, Colombia. He is Distinguished Visiting Professor in Urbanism at TEC in Mexico. He is Harvard GSD Loeb Fellow. Between 2004 and 2008 as Director of EDU The Urban Development Institute, and as city’s director of urban projects of Medellín, he led the Social Urbanism strategy making the city a blueprint for the future for other distressed cities worldwide. He has collaborated as a professor, lecturer, and jury member with various international institutions. Jury of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize, founded by the College of Architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Has been design critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. As lecturer at LSE Cities Master program at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Has been researcher and professor at LUB, Barcelona Urban Lab at the ETSAB, and in other academic centers and urban labs worldwide. His experience combines architecture, environmental urban planning processes, and social issues in developing countries as an international consultant and advisor to UN-Habitat and the World Bank, especially in countries with weak political and institutional structures. His work has earned the Obayashi Prize 2016 in Japan, the 10th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design from Harvard GSD in 2013, the Curry Stone Design Prize in 2009 in US, the Colombian National Architectural Award ant the Pan-American Biennale in Urban Design among others. He is a member of multiple international advisory boards of institutions and centers related to urban issues. His intellectual production includes publications and articles focused on architecture, urbanism, and environment. And he is active in design through his studio focusing on projects with low environmental impact for tropic regions.

Allyson Martinez, Esq., a native Brooklynite, received her B.A. in English and American Literature from Brown University and a J.D. from The George Washington University Law School. Allyson is Co-Founder of Brooklyn Level Up (“BKLVLUP”), a 501©(3) non-profit community development corporation, maximizing BIPOC entrepreneurs’ access to small business resources through its BKLVLUP Entrepreneurship Collective, seeking to build affordable residential, commercial and communal spaces through its BKLVLUP Community Land Trust, and working to address environmental justice issues in Flatbush, East Flatbush, and Flatlands, Brooklyn through its BKLVLUP Cultivate initiative. Allyson is a practicing start-up business law attorney and licensed real estate broker on the Dima Lysius Team at the Corcoran Group. She is a Co-Founder and Co-Trustee of the Flatbush African Burial Ground Coalition that seeks to preserve the sacred ancestral burial ground of enslaved Africans found in Flatbush, Brooklyn. She is also a Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum Advisory Board Member, and former Brooklyn Community Board 17 Land Use Committee Co-Chair. Ultimately, her passion is finding ways to help her community to thrive by building networks, leveraging creativity, increasing knowledge, as well as fusing art and technology in the process of community-visioning.

The ACTIONING SUMMITS are an unprecedented effort to affirm how architecture, planning, development, and preservation are anticipating desirable and alternative futures. During a period of eight months, these summits will convene activists, architects, artists, designers, developers, ethnographers, historians, planners, policymakers, politicians, thinkers, and community organizers from around the world to address together eight crucial methodological shifts in the way the disciplines of the built environment operate and collaborate with each other.

The summits will offer a space and opportunity to situate specialized knowledge within specific histories and contexts. During the ACTIONING SUMMITS, participants will discuss a concrete methodological shift elaborated through the tools, practices, protocols, and forms of engagement that have unfolded as part of specific projects or processes they have actively participated in.

Please visit GSAPP’s event calendar to learn more about each ACTIONING SUMMIT. All summits will be live streamed on GSAPP’s YouTube channel.

The ACTIONING SUMMITS are curated by Andrés Jaque, Dean, and Bart-Jan Polman, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programming and Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery.