about the project
The Maplibs Project is a living atlas of the spaces that make us feel, remember and imagine community in greater Bronzeville neighborhoods. We gather residents to more inclusively pursue a shared vision for the future of the built environment. Inspired by the word game Mad Libs, the project invites you to reflect on your community by playing a word game. The game lets players fill in key parts of a story about community in their neighborhood using words of particular senses. Stretching conventional notions of maps and mapping, the project invites you to submit sounds, photos and videos of your view of community. The collection of media submissions explores the moments of memory making and imagining. The Maplibs Project is a porch for neighborhood memory, experience and imagination. You can play the word game here. You can also leave a voicemail or text your answers to 312-869-2584. If you are interested in learning more or creating the next edition of the word game about your neighborhood, you can reach her by email. Thank you to space-makers, space-keepers and everyone who shared their videos of spaces for us all to connect to in this online portal.
Chandra Christmas-Rouse is an urban planner and interdisciplinary
artist. A background in community development and environmental
justice informs her design approach of working with communities in a
participatory process to achieve place-based solutions and reimagine
systems. Her art practice is about visualizing the maps that we make
everyday with our sacred memories, cultural traditions and radical
dreams. Her most recent work entitled, “Race, Space and the Poetics of
Planning: Toward a Black Feminist Space-Making Practice,” explores
Black women creative practitioners in Chicago and how their
space-making practices vigorously reworks the meaning and significance
of urban space in ways that carry broader implications for urban
planning and development in Chicago through research, writing,
diagrams and video collage. She currently is a
2020 Threewalls RaDLab+Outside the Walls.
She earned a BA in Environmental Sciences and Policy with distinction
from Duke University and an MA in Urban Planning from the Harvard
University Graduate School of Design.