Milwaukee a Finalist for Bloomberg Challenge!

Milwaukee is one of 20 cities - out of over 300 applicants - to make it to the final round of the Bloomberg Challenge! The challenge is meant to generate local solutions to national problems and Milwaukee's entry, called "Home Gr/Own," seeks to re-invent the concept of homesteading for the twenty-first century. The plan is to tranform foreclosed properties not only into new housing - but also urban agricultural endeavors. Properties will become hubs in a new city-wide food distibution network, allowing fresh fruit and produce to make its way into "food deserts" across Milwaukee.

The winner of the $5 million prize will be announced in 2013.

For more on Milwaukee's plan: http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/entertainment/177191481.html

For more on the other finalists: http://mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org/index.cfm?objectid=E33FD330-17B0-11E2-B974000C29C7CA2F

The number of times the words "city" and "urban" have been said during the two presidential debates and the one vice presidential debate: 0.

This Friday!

                 Nicolas Lampert & Paul Kjelland, The Commandos and Father James Groppi, 2012

Come check out the opening of an amazing exhibition that addresses Milwaukee's place in the broader narrative of the civil rights movement in the North. Artists Nicolas Lampert and Paul Kjelland have created a series of prints - and baseball jerseys (!) - that tell the story of Father James Groppi (a white Catholic priest) and the Milwaukee Commandos (a collection of young African-American men). The Commandos and Groppi led important movements for fair and affordable housing in the city - and railed against the segregation that had earned Milwaukee the nickname of "The Selma of the North." Many of the former Commandos remain active in social justice work in the city to this day. Sadly, many of the issues that the Commandos and Groppi (who passed away in 1985) confronted are also still a part of Milwaukee's landscape. Lampert and Kjelland's work reminds us that racial segegration, for example, still plagues the Milwaukee metropolitan region. Yet their prints also show us that an inter-racial movement for social justice can happen, and indeed has happened in our city.

Here are the details:

Friday, October 5, 5-8 pm
OPENING RECEPTION:
Inova, 2155 N. Prospect Ave.
http://www4.uwm.edu/psoa/inova/nohl-fellows-2011.cfm

For more on the civil rights movement in Milwaukee, see Patrick Jones' The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009)

Bay View Gallery Night at Sweet Water Organics

Everyone should check out tomorrow (Friday) evening's Gallery Night event at Sweet Water Organics (2151 S. Robinson, in Bay View). Members of the renowned Justseeds collective, including Milwaukeeans Colin Matthes, Peter Yahnke Railand, and Nicolas Lampert (whose upcoming exhibition on the Milwaukee Commandos will be the subject of a new HeartLand House entry quite soon!), will be showing their work. Doors open at 4:00 - and at 9:00 pm there will be a performance by the Friction Dance Company, followed by sets by the musical acts Dark Dark Dark and Hello Death. Be there or be square.....

Nicolas Lampert's "Locust Tank" print

A link to the event: http://sweetwater-organic.com/news/single/sweet_water_bay_view_gallery_night
A link to Justseeds: www.justseeds.org
And to Nicolas Lampert's site: http://machineanimalcollages.com/

HeartLand House and Riverwest's Mamasita's Tamales

One of the goal's of the HeartLand House is to explore economic relationships based upon mutual aid and reciprocity - rather than commodity exchange and exploitation. We therefore are happy to announce that our backyard garden has supplied tomatoes for Mamasita's Tamales, a wonderful Milwaukee-based business. Here is their mission statement:

"Mamasita's Tamales is a small cottage industry rooted in Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood. Our intent is to encourage healthier eating habits by providing a fast, affordable, wholesome, and satisfying meal. Mamasita's tamales are made with love and local ingredients."

And a link to Mamasita's:

http://mamasitastamales.com/

Above, Mamasita's Michelle Jones uses HeartLand House tomatoes to make a tasty batch of tamales.

"Design for the 99%" comes to the HeartLand House!

In early September, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) adjunct assistant professor of architecture NJ Unaka brought his innovative "Design for the 99%" studio to the HeartLand House. Unaka's students are spending the academic semester working on projects of different scales at over 20 sites in and around Milwaukee. For the HeartLand House project, seven pairs of students have been charged to come up with renovation plans to help the home meet the Living Building Challenge ( https://ilbi.org/lbc ). The students hope to help the HeartLand House become a model of regenerative urban housing, one that produces the resources its inhabitants use on site (and turns such waste as food scraps, through composting, into new garden soil and even energy). Undergirding the work of all of Unaka's students is the belief that architecture should have a healing effect on the surroundings; it should not be destructive and/or intrusive. At the end of the semester, Unaka's students plan to present seven possible ways that the owners of the homes/structuures studied could make the buildings live up to such potential. We will have more on the exciting work of Unaka and his students as the semester progresses! Above, three of Unaka's students take measurements in the HeartLand House dining room....

Welcome to Urban ReNEWal, the offical blog of the HeartLand House

The HeartLand House, located in the Bay View neighborhood of Milwaukee, became a reality in September 2012. The house is meant to be a model of urban sustainability, showing how city dwellers can become more self-sufficient when it comes to things like food production, water consumption, and energy use. At the same time, it is also meant to illustrate how local products and services can be integrated into one's home life. We have chosen to buy from local stores, hire local contractors, and even hang local art in the house (and we will be highlighting those we have worked with on this site).

While the idea behind the HeartLand House is quite old (and more on this history to come soon!), the current incarnation was inspired by James Godsil, co-founder of Sweet Water Organics, an indoor urban farm housed in a formerly abandoned industrial building on the south side of Milwaukee. Sweet Water Organics has employed aquaponic systems - systems involving the cultivation of plants and fish together in a constructed, re-circulating ecosystem - as it has grown into a large-scale production center. For those interested in urban agriculture, Sweet Water has become an inspiration and a must-see attraction. But what happens once visitors leave the farm? How can they carry their interest in urban sustainability back to their communities?

It is these questions that HeartLand House hopes to address. Michael Carriere and Shelly McClone, along with their blended family of three children, have moved into a home previously owned by Sweet Water's Godsil - with the goal of using the site as a first-of-its-kind neighborhood "hub," a place that allows Sweet Water's vision to reach into a vibrant Milwaukee neighborhood. The back and front yards will serve as fully-functioning gardens (producing such things as tomatoes, raspberries, peppers, lettuce, and watermelon), while the detached garage will come to serve as a laboratory for smaller-scale aquaponic systems. We also plan to work with a variety of community groups, schools, and others in implementing rainwater harvesting techniques and alternative energy technologies. We will be documenting all of these relationships, with the goal of showing others how this can be done. In the future, we also hope to hold workshops on topics like canning and permaculture at the house itself.

In this election year, we see the creation of the HeartLand House as a political statement. We desire to reclaim the narratives of family, self-sufficiency, production, and entrepreneurialism from the conservative forces that have attempted to monopolize these potent ideas. Yes, the HeartLand House will be a place where our family lives. But it is also meant to be seen as a type of activism, of pushing our cities to re-imagine themselves. For us, the bottom line is that we want our house to work and to be a model of how the home can be a site of production - of actual goods like produce, but also of things like knowledge and community. If not now, when?