CCA Architecture Division
1111 8th Street, San Francisco
April 19, 11am-12pm
The Boardroom

Alongside growing interest in floating communities as a model for resilient development, there is an aggravating threat to the existing floating communities that historically inhabit coastal zones. This talk, the second in the Buoyant Futures series of conversations hosted by the Architectural Ecologies Lab, will present the history and current challenges facing houseboat communities of San Francisco Bay, examining their constitutive role in formation of urban commons along the waterfront. This will be a precursory presentation for the Upper Division Interdisciplinary Studio (UDIST) course offered at CCA in the fall of 2018.

Shalini Agrawal is trained as an architect and has over 20 years of community-engagement experience creating and facilitating multi-disciplinary workshops with communities of all ages, ethnicities, and socio-economic statuses as a practitioner and educator. She is Associate Professor at CCA in Interior Design, Interdisciplinary Studies, Diversity Studies and Individualized. Shalini is a contributing author to the new publications Design for Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity and Public Interest Design Education Guidebook. 

Julia Grinkrug is an architect, urbanist and an educator, researching the social role of architecture in enduring environmental and spatial conflicts. Teaching in various educational programs in Israel and the Bay Area, she has been exploring productive academic-community partnerships and engagement in the areas of cultural preservation, tactical urbanism and community development.