CHAMPAIGN — A local group that advocates for land-use reform and walkable cities is hoping to bring attention to the housing needs of Champaign-Urbana.
The CUrbanism Club transformed Quality, a bar in downtown Champaign, into a different kind of community hub on Friday — one where C-U residents could learn more about barriers to housing and potential solutions through an interactive art exhibit, “The Policy of Possibility.”
The exhibit was part of the Boneyard Arts Festival — a three-day event featuring hundreds of local artists, with exhibits across more than 80 venues.
The aim is to make Illinois “a place where people of all incomes can live and thrive,” said Jared Fritz, a founding member of CUrbanism Club who helped organize the exhibit.
He said much of the work the group does is behind the scenes, and the exhibit serves as a way to share it with a wider audience.
“I think we see this as kind of an opportunity to activate the community and show them the role that they can play in pushing for these changes that we want to see,” Fritz said.
Some of these changes include zoning and ordinance reforms to increase housing affordability and housing supply, he said.
The goal established by the latest City of Champaign Housing Needs Analysis is to create 7,000 new units by 2035.
According to CUrbanism Club, it’s not as simple as building these homes. Zoning codes restrict “third places” in residential areas and walkable amenities, strictly separating where residents live and work.
CUrbanism Club aims to allow more housing in every neighborhood and remove these barriers. According to Fritz, there are real steps people can take to reach this goal.
“It’s going to local city council meetings,” Fritz said. “It’s being in touch with our local policymakers and talking to them about the things that we care about, and showing them the things that we think are important to invigorating our community, and really improving the accessibility and affordability of our community.”
The exhibit featured work from local artists and displayed data, maps, photography, collages and architectural designsfrom architecture students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“We’re kind of trying to pull these threads together and show that this is a community-driven, bottom-up process of advocating for the type of beauty and connectedness and community that we want to see,” Fritz said.
One design was by Brianna Parziale, a third-year architecture student. She, along with other students in the school of architecture, was challenged by U of I assistant professor Joseph Altshuler to reimagine the Urbana Civic Center and how spaces like this build community.
The Urbana Civic Center was a community space built in the 1970s. Over the years, it was used for community meetings, exhibitions, weddings, family reunions and banquets, but it has been closed since 2019. It is now considered the site for the new mass transit district bus station.
“Rather than the easy way out, which is to demolish the building and start over, I challenge the students from the Illinois School of Architecture to think about how the existing structure could be reimagined, renovated or added on to,” Altshuler said.
Parziale wanted to incorporate Urbana’s history into her design.
“That’s what we wanted to kind of reinstall back into Urbana with our proposal,” Parziale said. “We chose to keep the Civic Center as it was and add on to it to create … a metaphor to connecting Urbana’s past to its present.”
Altshuler partnered with MTD and the City of Urbana to share ideas on the re-imagination of the Urbana Civic Center. He said that the next steps are uncertain.
“I think there’s really an opportunity here to celebrate the city’s history,” Altshuler said. “To not freeze the building in time or to restore it to what it once was, but to completely reimagine it as one piece of a broader development that the MTD is really committed to bringing to downtown Urbana.”
After allowing people to walk around and observe the art on their own time, Fritz led a guided walkthrough. All throughout, Fritz highlighted the exhibit’s interactive elements and encouraged attendees to write down things they would love to have in their neighborhood that aren’t currently there.
Fritz says that CUrbanism Club’s goal is to make community members aware that they can enact change. This exhibit was one way to do that.
“We see this as kind of an opportunity to activate the community and show them the role that they can play in pushing for these changes that we want to see,” Fritz said.