| Description |
About half of the world's population lives in urban areas today, and in North America approximately 82% live in urban areas (United Nations, 2018). It is projected that this increased trend of urbanization and urban renewal will continue to grow exponentially faster than rural growth. With this growth comes increased concerns surrounding economic, environmental, and social sustainability (United Nations, 2018). This thesis focuses on those social concerns, particularly community disenfranchisement during urban renewal, which urban curation seeks to eradicate. The urban curatorial process ignites the co-production of a city by ordinary people,; placing a "right to the city" back into the collective conscience (Lefebvre, 1996). To further conceptualize the urban curatorial process through community engagement, I interviewed four community curators from across the Wasatch Front. I then put that conceptualization into practice within the Sugar House business district, a community at the tail end of a drastic urban renewal process. What emerged when employing dialogic urban curatorial processes with the Sugar House community during three community sessions, was the uncovering of a collective "still point" (Ensign, 2003). This collective "still point" occurred during through the coordination, sharing, and passing on of urban knowledge between community members, to combat a collective feeling of solastalgia. |
