Please join Engaging the City (ETC) for a evening looking at big box
stores in New York City and across the United States.
Engaging the City presents:
Big Box Boom Bust
A discussion with artist Julia Christensen and policy analyst Amnol
Chaddha
November 1, 2005
7 - 8:30 pm
The National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South
(20th street, east of Park Avenue South)
Free and open to the public
RSVP is strongly recommended: info@interboropartners.com
Big Box stores have long been a fixture of the suburban American
landscape, and have recently moved into urban centers, including New
York City. The next installment of the Engaging the City (ETC) lecture
series brings together an artist and a policy analyst who both study
these large built forms.
Julia Christensen is an artist from Kentucky. She researches how
communities are reusing defunct Big Boxes using digital photography,
digital video, and audio. She has developed a web site,
www.bigboxreuse.com, that provides a hub for communities throughout the
world involved in individual reuse endeavors, as well as creating an
accessible database of various reuse sites. Julia received her BA in
Integrated Art from Bard College and her MFA in Electronic Music and
Recording Media at Mills College, in Oakland, CA, and her MFA in
Electronic Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.
Anmol Chaddha is a policy researcher in the Economic Justice Program of
the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law. His research
supports policy development and organizing around issues of economic
development, low-wage work, and immigrant workers in New York City.
Recently, he has conducted research into the labor practices of
Wal-Mart and other big box retailers, focusing on the recent influx of
big box stores into urban areas.
Engaging the City is a monthly lecture series that serves as a venue
for individuals in a variety of professions who engage the
extraordinary and exciting complexity of contemporary cities in novel
ways. Lecturers are from the fields of architecture, urban planning,
and urban design, but also public policy, public art, philosophy, film,
and journalism. "Engaging the City" is organized by the Center for
Urban Pedagogy (CUP), Interboro, Daniela Fabricius and Jacqueline
Miro-Abreu.