05/17/2026
Making Alive! Reworlding Cities: Decommodified · Regenerative · Pluriversal Symposium (Tuesday - Thursday, March 10-12, 2026)
Hosted by Carnegie Mellon’s Remaking Cities Institute, in collaboration with Sarosh Anklesaria and Tuliza Sindi, this symposium brought together scholars, designers, activists, and community partners to reflect on how cities are being reshaped under conditions of financialization, ecological crisis, and uneven post-industrial change. Anchored in Pittsburgh yet attentive to broader systemic dynamics, the program considered both large-scale urban infrastructures and everyday architectures of collective life. Through dialogue, site-based inquiry, and cross-disciplinary exchange, participants explored how ownership, governance, material cycles, and shared stewardship are negotiated in practice. Rather than offering fixed solutions, the conversations invited sustained reflection on the ontologies of cities—how they are understood, structured, and inhabited—and on the possibilities of reworlding urbanism through relationality, repair, and collective responsibility.
Tuesday, March 10
Keynote Opening Conversation: Cities - Pluriversal and Alive; between David Bollier and Arturo Escobar, facilitated by Sarosh Anklesaria, Stefan Gruber, and Tuliza Sindi
The keynote conversation was guided by the question of how a pluriversal understanding of the world changes how we conceive, design, and govern cities. It asked: What urban places, institutions and practices of commoning might help defend shared wealth from enclosure and make cities more “alive” in social, ecological, and political terms?
