March 27, 2025
6:00 PM
MICA Brown Center
1301 W. Mount Royal Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21217
AIA 1.0 LU HSW
ASLA 1.0 LA CES HSW
[REGISTER HERE]
DETAILS
AIA Baltimore and Baltimore Architecture Foundation present the 2025 Spring Lecture Series, taking place on 3/13, 3/27 andd 4/10 at the MICA Brown Center.
We are happy to continue our partnership with Maryland ASLA to provide 1.0 LA CES HSW for every lecture.
AIA, ASLA and NOMA members may register at a discounted rate.
We are offering school students free admission! Please bring your school ID to show upon arrival.
Doors open at 5:30 PM. Reception with light food and drinks will be also be available immediately following the lecture at the Brass Tap near the MICA Brown Center (1205 W Mt Royal Ave, Baltimore, MD 21217).
ABOUT THIS LECTURE
Patty Heyda presents a methodology for mapping structural inequality in the American city, based on her book Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA (Belt, 2024).
Much like in Baltimore after the arrest and death of Freddie Gray in 2015, Ferguson, Missouri, became the epicenter of America’s racial tensions after the 2014 murder of Michael Brown and the uprising that followed. Though this area just outside St. Louis might have seemed like an average inner suburb, the activism that radiated from there after Brown’s killing laid bare just how long the community had been experiencing racial segregation, fragmentation, poverty, and police targeting.
In over one hundred maps, Patty Heyda charts the systemic forces that have defined Ferguson, St. Louis and the American city more broadly in the ten years since those events. Through an in-depth look at the contradictions undergirding city planning and design, it illuminates how tax incentives, housing codes, streets, nonprofits, philanthropy, and even landscaping often work against the betterment of residents’ lives. At its heart lies a key question: Just who are our cities being built for?
A profound rethinking of what maps can be, Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA challenges city planners, designers, and everyday citizens to change their perspective of public space.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Patty Heyda is professor of urban design and architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. Her interdisciplinary research explores design politics and American cities, with a focus on mapping, uneven development and spatial justice in weak market contexts and inner suburbs. She is the author of Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA (Belt, 2024), shortlisted for the national “On the Brinck Book Award,” and coauthor with David Gamble of Rebuilding the American City (Routledge, 2016) and Rebuilding the American Town (Routledge, 2024) that explore the complexities, relationships and creative design strategies used in different U.S. cities and towns as they transform to meet challenges of the 21st century.
Heyda has also worked professionally across the scales in the U.S. and abroad, in the offices of Architectures Jean Nouvel (Paris), HOK (St. Louis) and Chan Krieger Associates (Boston). Her writings and design projects appear in JAE, Journal of Urban Design, City Lab, MONU, Mutations, Planning Magazine, Urban Infill, Material World of Modern Segregation, Architecture is All Over, and other books and media. Heyda holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Tulane University and Master of Architecture with Distinction from Harvard University. In 2022, she was awarded the APA St. Louis Dwight F. Davis Award for Outstanding Planning Advocacy.
