Presidential Lecture: Mindy Fullilove and Ron Shiffman on Main Streets

*This event is occurring as a live webinar. Registrants will be emailed a link to access the program.*

As part of the Center for Architecture Presidential Lecture Series, Mindy Fullilove, MD, will discuss her forthcoming book, Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects us All, which will be released in October of this year. She will be joined in conversation by Ron Shiffman, professor of planning at Pratt Institute.

Fullilove’s book will addresses the integral role that main streets play in the health and vibrancy of cities and the interactions of their inhabitants across racial and socioeconomic divides. Amongst other topics it discusses how architects and planners can and must play a role in creating functional main streets.   

Speakers:
Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, LFAPA, Hon. AIA, Professor of Urban Policy and Health, The New School
Ron Shiffman, Professor, Grad Center for Planning, Pratt Institute 

Moderator:
Barry Bergdoll, Hon. AIANY, Board President, Center for Architecture

Mindy Thompson Fullilove is a social psychiatrist and professor of urban policy and health at The New School. Since 1986, she has conducted research on AIDS and other epidemics of poor communities, with a special interest in the relationship between the collapse of communities and decline in health. From her research, she has published numerous articles, book chapters, monographs, and books, including The House of Joshua: Meditations on Family and Place, RootShock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It, and Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities.

A third edition of Homeboy Came to Orange: A Story of People’s Power, which she helped her father, Ernest Thompson, write, was released in May 2018. She is co-author, with Hannah L. F. Cooper, of From Enforcers to Guardians: A public health primer on ending police violence. Her forthcoming book, Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All, will be released in October 2020.

Ron Shiffman is a community-based planner who has worked with low-income residents to improve neighborhoods since 1964, when he co-founded the nation’s oldest university-based public interest architectural and technical assistance center at Pratt, PICCED. In 1968, he worked with the people of Bed-Stuy, the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council, and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy to launch the nation’s first community development corporation. In the 1990s, he was appointed by Mayor David Dinkins as a NYC planning commissioner.

Shiffman sits on the boards of Race Forward/Center for Social Inclusion and Shared Interest, a South African impact loan guarantee fund for businesses and farms. He has received awards from Architects, Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility, the AIA, AICP, the Municipal Art Society, and a number of community-based organizations. He is the recipient of two prestigious lifetime achievement awards: the Rockefeller Foundation’s Jane Jacobs Lifetime Achievement Award and the American Planning Association’s National Planning Pioneer Award. He was honored by Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation with their Franklin Thomas Award.

Shifttman is now Professor Emeritus at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, where he continues to teach as the Founding Director of PICCED.

Barry Bergdoll, currently President of the Board of Directors of the Center for Architecture, is a historian and curator of modern and contemporary architecture. He is Professor of Art History at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1985, and served from 2007 to 2014 as Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. At MoMA he pioneered a format of interdisciplinary design workshops leading to exhibitions on central issues of contemporary practice of architecture and urban planning. The 2009-10 exhibition, “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront,” which addressed sea level rise and climate change, is the model for the RFP that will be relaunched in the wake of this inaugural Presidential Lecture Series.

About the Center for Architecture Presidential Lecture Series:
This summer the Center for Architecture is launching its inaugural Presidential Lecture Series. Spearheaded by Barry Bergdoll, Center for Architecture Board President, the series is tied to an exhibition that will display responses to an RFP on new modes of conceiving inclusive environments, from dwelling to workplace to the public realm. The RFP will be relaunched in early autumn with the exhibition to follow by the end of 2021. The lecture series and the RFP explore design’s role in envisioning new dynamics of living and community.  

The series will be organized as multi-disciplinary conversations between an architect and a practitioner from another field, moderated by Bergdoll. The conversations are intended to inform work to be commissioned for the exhibition next fall. The basic hypothesis is that contemporary American culture and society have long been, and are increasingly disconnected—fractured even—with people divided by needs, generations, and beliefs, as well by race and income level. In the face of social isolation, the exhibition will explore how environments that foster cooperation, interaction, and mutual assistance can be an antidote to the intense divisions in American life. Issues of equity, health, aging, and racial disparities are among the vital issues at stake.

Other Lectures in the Series:
Presidential Lecture: Sarah Wigglesworth and Karen Kubey on Building for Aging, Monday, August 3, 2 PM 
Presidential Lecture: Dagmar Richter and Marc Norman on Cooperative Housing, on Monday, August 10, 2 PM 
Presidential Lecture: Victor Pineda and Kat Holmes on Capabilities and Mismatch,  Monday, August 17, 2 PM 
Presidential Lecture: Peter Robinson on the Work of BlackSpace, Monday, August 24, 2 PM