In City as Living Laboratory: Artists + Scientists + Communities Creating a Resilient and Equitable Public Realm, Mary Miss presents a transformative model for the sustainable development of urban communities impacted by climate change, crumbling infrastructure, and neighborhood disinvestment. The book chronicles Miss’s efforts since the 1970s to expand artistic projects beyond the walls of art museums and into initiatives that engage diverse stakeholders in addressing complex issues at the scale of the city. In 2008, Miss founded City as Living Laboratory (CALL) to advance the role of artists in urban planning and community revitalization. CALL’s flexible development framework harnesses artists’ exceptional talents as visionary thinkers and bridge-builders who can facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations with architects, scientists, historians, urban planners, community leaders, and residents to solve environmental, health, and equity challenges. CALL’s approach redefines the way art and the design process can transform public spaces to reflect community aspirations and identity.

Mary Miss has reshaped the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, landscape design, and installation art to create transformative experiences of the environment and catalyze collective action. Trained as a sculptor, her work emphasizes a site’s history, its ecology, or aspects of the environment that have gone unnoticed. Miss has collaborated closely with architects, planners, engineers, ecologists, and public administrators on projects as diverse as creating a temporary memorial around Ground Zero, marking predicted flood levels of Boulder, Colorado, revealing the history of the Union Square Subway station in New York, and turning a sewage treatment plant into a public space. She founded City as Living Laboratory (CALL) in 2008 with the aim of addressing the daunting environmental problems facing our rapidly changing planet. Miss has received numerous awards and honors, and her work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Harvard University Art Museum, Cambridge; and Tate Modern, London.