On April 1st, NAG is hosting a kickoff event for a series of walking workshops held in the month of April! The evening will include a screening of the Domino Effect and a Q&A with Ryan Kounen, a former NAG employee and extraordinary neighborhood advocate featured in the film. NAG is working in collaboration with Julia Borowicz and Larissa Begault, an interdisciplinary team from the Parsons Urban Practice Graduate Program, to run these walks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Through these walking workshops we seek to address the common goals of recapturing the waterfront and advocating for the people who live and work there, making the claim that the entire community is entitled to participate in decision-making and negotiation processes affecting their neighborhood, and promoting the right to design a future vision for shared public space. The walks include: an introduction to the Williamsburg waterfront, ownership, policies and past, present and future use and management of the space; a historical and physical evolution of the neighborhood; and an overview of demographic change and the social, political and economic reasons behind these. The walks will be centered around the themes of Public space \/ Public sphere, Collective Commonality, and Multiple Belonging and Difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
About the organizers: Larissa Begault is an architect who practiced in London before coming to New York to continue embracing the multidisciplinary aspects of design with the ambition to bridge theory with a new, expanded form of practice. Julia Borowicz is an urban geographer with experience in urban planning and non profit social justice work. Her current work engages with issues of postnationalism, spaces of inclusion\/ exclusion and spatial geographies that foster multiple belonging. Julia Borowicz and Larissa Begault use walking \/ mapping \/ narrative building as primary tools for finding neutral space and platform for communication between different members of the public. These tools are the first steps towards consolidating and activating a new citizenship at the local level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"