Creative Grounds & The Future of Social Infrastructure

Our democracy lives and breathes in our social spaces. Creative Grounds is an installation that invites to think spatially and geographically utilizing maps and places as visuals to reflect on the cityscape and quality of our social infrastructure – parks, schools, community centers, libraries. Using cartography and inventory less by their technical attributes, and more as tools for visualization of distribution and concentration, this installation contrasts and compares the location of closed public schools in Chicago from 2013 – the largest school closings in the history of the United States – to raise questions about investment and disinvestment, social equity and justice.

Paola Aguirre Serrano is the founder of BORDERLESS — Chicago-based urban design and research studio-workshop focused on cultivating collaborative design agency through interdisciplinary projects. With the emphasis on exchange and communication across disciplines, Borderless explores creative city design and civic engagement proposals that address the complexity of urban systems and social equity by looking at intersections between architecture, urban design, infrastructure, landscape, planning, and civic participatory processes. Paola is also an active educator, and currently teaches architecture The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has taught urban design at the Sam Fox School of Design Washington University in St. Louis and social impact design at Archeworks.