Capturing the mystique of urban place
the essence of urban living,
while creating a community built upon shared values..

The City

The city is a special place, full of unexpected surprises and paradoxes. Those who make the city their home are a unique people; some are urban pioneers and homesteaders, others are empty-nesters returning home or simply downsizing. Some follow in a long line of several generations of city dwellers. White, Black, Latino, Eastern European, and many others; poor and rich; educated and uneducated, young and old, blue and white-collar, tech geeks, laborers and retired; each contribute their own unique energy to the mix we call urban, each has their own story to tell.
Learn how Urban Paradoxes can assist in giving voice to your neighborhood's narrative.

Urbanists learn how a city works through intimate contact with it. Experience, observation, common sense, and human value are fundamental to an urbanist's view." - Roberta Brandes Grantz, "Living Cities"

The Atelier

The studio model used by Urban Paradoxes is a hands-on and "body-in" exploration of urban neighborhoods and the issues affecting them. However, we realize that exploration is of little value if nothing comes of it. Our atelier is urban space, not design studios or academic ivory towers. What we learn in each neighborhood has practical application to every urban neighborhood.

Urban Paradoxes has refined the idea of the flâneur into the concept of "wandersmänner," urban drifts, or "WalkShops," that intersect/punctuate everyday urban experience within the neighborhood in order to explore values common to the neighborhood and to create shared vision for the future.p>

Unique to Urban Paradoxes is our ability to fuse art with the urban experience in such a way that frames and defines the neighborhood, the district, or the venue. We bring to the collaboration a full gamut of artists, both low-tech and hi-tech, that can create the exact, unique frame necessary to make your neighborhood, district, or venue exceptional.

Urban Paradoxes can do this because we are constantly exploring, documenting, and celebrating the urban experience.

Art & Technology

High-adrenaline, kinetic experiences- Art and technology fused with the urban experience, while entertainment can be so much more. Properly fused with the urban experience, art and technology will provide a unique tool with which both frames and define the urban experience in a way that challenges our traditional understanding, perceptions, and definitions of "urban.

Founder's Passion Statement

"My passion is to document the urban experience in a way that both challenges our perceptions and leads to urban revitalization and healing flows from years of involvement in the urban experience as resident, flâneur planner, educator, documenter, urban psychologist, and psycho-geographer. It is my goal not to follow the crowd or even 'a different drummer,' but to follow my own drumming. - Frank A. Mills

The Neighborhood Project, WalkShops, Modus Vivendi, Urban Puncture, Neighborhood Assessment

Urban Paradoxes recognizes that working within the urban experience requires a large tool bag. Some of the tools, such as The Neighborhood Project, Modus Vivendi, and Urban Puncture are for the urban audience at-large, while WalkShops and Neighborhood Assessment, and the creation of shared neighborhood future-vision are grass-root endeavors. Urban Paradoxes also offers a number of   WalkShops, seminars, and workshops that offer training in specific skills, many of which are suitable for Continuing Education Credit

If you are interested in learning how Urban Paradoxes can assist you or your neighborhood, please contact us. We exist to assist you in creating a neighborhood community, and a future for your neighborhood, built upon shared values.