The Chicago Open Properties project surveys and reinvigorates the real estate of the city. From the unclaimed easements along roads and train yards, to the alleyways already in a condition of real estate annexation, to land both owned and unowned and through all of the public properties within Chicago, from all of these places comes life-forms already in existence, already perfectly well stable, reproducible, and creative. Items of comfort, shelter, art, and pleasure are built into the city in all of the places not expected. The opening of these rituals into the public eye becomes a utopic polity with only the free spirit of the citydwellers guiding its actions.
Within the Open Properties a variety of lifestyles and regenerated rituals occur daily. Inhabitants construct shelters, houses, workshops, laboratories, dog kennels, places of other business and recreational apparatus. The function of these spaces almost never gives rise to type, because it is not relevent. Forms appear and decay, this is normal because it makes the dwellers happy. Rituals include: changing ownership, conversion of unacquisitioned spaces, ceding property rights based on citizen's imminent domain disputes, offerings of charity in the form of civic spaces, personal advertisements and services, spiritual affairs, etc.
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This project was honored in the 2003 exhibition "Speculative Chicago."
