Photo courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial /Nathan Keay, 2020

David Brown is an Architecture Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. Brown works on The Available City, the potential of Chicago’s 10,000+ city-owned vacant lots as a community-driven collective space system, an urban design, and a future we can have today. Iterations of the speculative design have been exhibited in the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale and the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial. he was the Artistic Director of the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial, which had The Available City as its focus and theme. Following that Biennial, he co-curated, with Christophe Hutin, “Common: Community Driven Architecture / Commun: Une Architecture avec les Habitants” in 2022 at Arc en Rêve in Bordeaux, France. His essays and drawings presenting the transformative impact The Available City can have on Chicago’s South and West Sides are found in CENTER 18: Music in Architecture—Architecture in Music, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 2, and Flat Out 4.
Those essays continue his study of architecture and design in relation to structures in jazz that facilitate improvisation, which he initiated in the book Noise Orders (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Recently, he established The Available City as a non-profit organization. He is currently working on its inaugural project, “18 of a kind”, for which he is inviting 16 architects to design portable objects for performances, and 2 architects to work with community organizations to design fixed spaces in 2 neighborhoods for events in the 18 Chicago neighborhoods with large quantities of city-owned vacant land.