Maryam Heidaripour, Illinois Institute of Technology
New Orleans 2019: Imagining
Parallel City is a conceptual space that opens up the process of future-making. Shaping futures is primarily dominated by elite white male perspectives from the Global North, which reinforce modernist, linear, and masculine models of progress. By incorporating other forms of knowledge in exploring potential futures, Parallel City allows the future to be known in its plurality. In particular, this project focuses on economic futures: envisioning a city with a plural mode of economy.
It includes three phases: 1) new patterns for the future are generated through collective participation, 2) collectively developed patterns are fed into a machine-learning system to get remixed, 3) selected patterns are embedded within designed artifacts and spread across the city; the goal is to push the thinking and actions of mainstream beyond the confines of the dominant economy.