Housing Justice and Community Power | BMI Summer Institute on Environmental Justice
Black Midwest Initiative Facilitator Talk Series
July 23, 2025
10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities
Address
1007 W. Harrison Street, Suite 153, Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FileFree and open to the public. Visit the Black Midwest Initiative website for more information.
10:00am | Presentation: “From Energy Inequity to Empowerment: Housing Justice in Black Neighborhoods” | Tonika Johnson, UnBlocked Englewood
Tonika Johnson is an award-winning, multidisciplinary social justice artist and photographer whose work explores segregation and its enduring impact on Black communities in Chicago. She is the creator of the Folded Map Project, a nationally recognized multimedia art project that connects residents who live miles apart on opposite ends of the same Chicago streets—in segregated neighborhoods—highlighting how systemic segregation continues to shape lives, housing, and opportunity today. Her latest initiative, UnBlocked Englewood, is a reparative public art and housing justice project that revitalizes a single block through home repairs, creative placemaking, and land reclamation by residents directly impacted by historic housing discrimination.
11:15am | Presentation: “Vacant Stares—Dwelling on Open Space” | Adrienne Brown, University of Chicago
Adrienne Brown is Associate Professor in the departments of English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, where she is also Faculty Director of Arts + Public Life. She is the co-editor with Valerie Smith of Race and Real Estate (2015) and author of The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (2017) and The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership (2024).
Date posted
Jun 10, 2025
Date updated
Jun 10, 2025