About this Event
Join the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), Mobile Makers and World Business Chicago for Community Conversations about the future of Chicago. All are welcome!
Mobile Makers: Material Afterlives Chicago 2050 Conversation Series
Chicago Cultural Center Welcome Center - Saturdays, Noon - 2 p.m.
June 27 - Katherine Darmstadt (material afterlives)
Join Katherine Darmstadt (founder and principal of Latent Designs) and Mobile Makers to learn about adaptive reuse practices and futurity in Chicago.(materials of communal and economic freedom)
July 25th - Andrea Yarbrough (material culture & placemaking)
Join Andrea Yarbrough (founder of In Care of Black Women and co-founder of Cooperation Racine) and Mobile Makers to discuss how to design as a tool to create circular economies and communal economic freedom.
August 29th - Liú M.Z.H. Chen (artistic material interventions)
Join Liú M.Z.H. Chen (oral historian at the National Public Housing Museum) and Mobile Makers to discuss the objects and practices that define culture in Chicago.
September 19th - Amanda Williams (archival materials)
Join Amanda Williams (AW Studio Art) and Mobile Makers to discuss the futurity of architecture, design, and art.
Neighborhood Pop-ups
- Thursday, July 2, 5-9 p.m. - Explore Uptown at Asia on Argyle Night Market (Argyle between Kenmore & Sheridan)
- Sunday, August 9, 10a.m.-2p.m. - Southside Sanctuary at Bronzeville Farmers Market
- Sunday, August 23, 1-4 p.m. - North Lawndale Pop-Up at Douglas Boulevard between Central Park & Lawndale (back to school lit fest)
- September 26 - 1-3:30pm - at The Chicago Tool Library
World Business Chicago: Conversations with Horizon Lines Visions for Chicago 2050 Finalists
Fridays at the Chicago Cultural Center Welcome Center:
- July 17, 11 a.m. - Noon - Reconnecting Communities: Capping Highways And Reconnecting Chicago's South and West Sides
Metropolitan Planning Council invites you to an open house to learn more about our bold, future-focused proposal for highway caps along the Eisenhower and the Dan Ryan Expressways. This project builds on decades of conversation and community engagement about how to reimagine our aging transportation infrastructure with residents in mind.
During the 1950s and 1960s, major highway construction reshaped Chicago in ways that accelerated regional mobility and economic growth, while also imposing significant costs on many communities. More than 10,000 residents were displaced, over 400 businesses were forced to close, and neighborhoods were divided in ways that reinforced patterns of segregation. These impacts continue to shape opportunities and quality of life for residents today.
Today, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink this infrastructure. Through the use of highway caps, we have the chance to innovatively leverage infrastructure to foster local economic vibrancy, enhance well-being for residents and local ecosystems, improve the transit rider experience, and reconnect communities.
In essence, our proposal advances a coordinated and innovative vision for aging infrastructure: a vision that acknowledges local context, history, and centers on designs that put people first.
Join us to explore this vision, share your ideas, ask questions, and help shape a more connected, equitable future for Chicago and its communities.
- August 28, Noon - 1 p.m. – Agriflats
Chicago has a proud history of feeding the world — yet our own neighborhoods have food deserts and empty lots. AgriFlats answers both, combining climate-controlled Dutch-style greenhouses with housing and community space. Growing more food with 90% less water creates 230 permanent jobs, puts fresh produce on the kitchen table, and frees rural farmland to return to prairie. AgriFlats doesn't just grow food, it grows community.
At the Little Village site, thirteen aspiring growers each run a one-acre greenhouse, backed by a new cooperative that pools resources and handles marketing and distribution. With produce bred for taste instead of surviving a truck ride, new possibilities abound in Chicago’s emerging Food District, supporting chefs, food processors and families alike.
The design runs on sunlight and waste, not fossil fuels. Greenhouses capture solar warmth directly, while rooftop collectors bank extra heat in insulated underground tanks for winter. Food and plant waste feeds an anaerobic digester, producing renewable gas that fuels a Combined Heat and Power plant — generating electricity and useful heat in one efficient step. Even the CO₂ from that process is piped into the greenhouse, where the plants absorb it to grow. Prefabricated construction keeps both costs and the building's carbon footprint low.
Join us for an overview of how these interlocking systems — greenhouse, housing, and energy — deliver year-round jobs and a model aligned with the Living Building Challenge, the world's most rigorous green building standard. Help us grow growers.”
- July 24, 11 a.m. - Noon - Hiding in Plain Sight
- July 31, 2-3 p.m. - Re-Loop
- August 14, 11 a.m. - Noon - Green City Rising
Green City Rising is an ambitious, equity-centered vision to create a living, green network of tree-centric neighborhoods across Chicago. At this panel discussion with audience Q&A, hear from The Morton Arboretum team behind the proposal. Learn how Green City Rising is a tested, scalable, data-driven, and impactful vision that would position Chicago as a leader in climate resiliency and environmental equity.
Panelists include:
- Jill Koski, President and CEO, The Morton Arboretum
- Zach Wirtz, Director, Chicago Region Trees Initiative, The Morton Arboretum
- Andrea Brennan, ArbNet Manager, The Morton Arboretum
Through Green City Rising, a connected system of neighborhood-scale arboreta, or tree collections, would be planned directly by the community and function as both ecological infrastructure and civic assets.
Trees across the Chicago region already yield more than $400 million in annual economic benefits. Green City Rising ensures that all neighborhoods realize these benefits. It’s about climate resilience, jobs, better health, safer communities, and activated business corridors.
With extreme weather intensifying and population patterns shifting, Chicago’s future depends on adaptation. Neighborhoods with trees are at least 10 degrees cooler. But tree coverage in Chicago is inequitable. We have a rare opportunity to rethink and to be a national model for how the region evolves.
Green City Rising is inherently collaborative, driven through new and longtime partnerships with community-based organizations, including Blacks in Green and the Urban Growers Collective, civic groups, and agencies. It builds upon regional green planning and investments, including Our Roots Chicago and the Arboretum’s community forestry work.
- August 21, 11 a.m. - Noon - Wonderways!: Reimagining Chicago's Boulevards as a Network of Climate Commons
Chicago has always been a city that meets big challenges with bold ideas. More than 150 years ago, its historic boulevard system connected neighborhoods with parks, public spaces, and a shared civic vision. Today, climate change presents a defining challenge and an opportunity for Chicago's historic boulevards to once again help the city meet the moment.
Wonderways explores how Chicago's 26-mile boulevard network could once again become one of Chicago's greatest civic assets. Instead of thinking about climate infrastructure as something hidden underground or tucked behind fences, what if it became beautiful public space?
Wonderways reimagines the boulevard system as a connected network of Climate Commons. These landscapes help manage flooding, reduce urban heat, restore habitat, improve walking and biking, and create new places to gather, play, and connect. Rather than building something entirely new, the proposal builds on infrastructure the city already has. By aligning with existing capital improvements and beginning with pilot segments in neighborhoods facing the greatest climate vulnerability and historic underinvestment, the network can grow into one connected, citywide system.
Join the Wonderways team for an informal conversation about the ideas behind the project, the inspiration drawn from Chicago's planning history, and the process of imagining Chicago's future. Explore renderings, ask questions, and learn how design can help communities respond to climate change while improving everyday life.
Event venue & nearby stays
Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington Street, Chicago, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.