Commit to the Crit

Earlier this summer, the City of Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development announced that it had formed a Committee on Design from a volunteer coterie of architects, developers, and academics, who will collectively assess development proposals. The initiative had the veneer of a boring legislative body, and yet I was startled as I scanned the list of members. The architect Jeanne Gang stood out, as did a trio of artists: Nick Cave, Theaster Gates, and there at the bottom, Amanda Williams.

To me, the move represents a bureaucratization of those with good ideas—with skills and tools and connections to communities and critical practices. Actors who typically work outside municipal-institutional confines, have, in a sense, become the institution; their ideas, tools, critique thus risk becoming corporatized. When the city decides, as it did last year, to implode an aging coal stack in a Latinx neighborhood in the middle of a respiratory pandemi…