Nils Norman explores ways
that urban regeneration efforts often homogenize public space and 34 35 searches for alternative approaches. He draws on past and present utopian experiments in the United States and Europe, as well as activist tactics for urban intervention. Norman creates artists' books as well as drawings, models, and murals that blur boundaries between art and design. He has transformed some of these proposals into functional objects and structures but frames his practice primarily as an investigative and speculative endeavor.

For Beyond Green, Norman created a new mural-sized, brightly colored banner. The central part of this fantastic landscape presents structures culled from his research on "adventure playgrounds"- a term used to describe vacant lots in Britain that have been turned into lively public spaces through community and child-centered design processes. Norman combines structures from different playgrounds to envision an idealized playspace and emphasizes its utopian possibilities through the inclusion of faceted geodesic domes like those designed by the visionary architect and engineer Buckminster Fuller. "Notebooks" flank this space and present ideas for two possible mobile structures. One shows Norman's designs for "The Solarized Hydrogen Powered Public Space Research Vehicle"; the other de-picts simple, portable water filtration systems that could be built primarily from cast-off materials and used to purify wastewater. The artist presents these projects in different representational strategies, ranging from didactic (the notebooks) to architectural (the play structures) to cartoonish (the gloved hand). The surreal blend of visual styles and structures, set within a landscape in which grass becomes a comic-book parade of acidic drips, suggests a certain skepticism-or maybe just a dash of black humor-about the possibility of actually implementing any of these progressive structures on a wider scale.

During fall 2005, Norman explored related ideas with University of Chicago students during a residency during which he taught an interdisciplinary course, "Spaces of Utopia: Contemporary Arts and the Environment." This nomadic class used the city as its classroom; as Norman notes, it was "designed to function outside of the traditional classroom space. An experiment in interdisciplinary education, the class investigated the production of social spaces and considered the city as a multitude of ecologies. It included field trips to parks, gardens, arts spaces, and official environmental initiatives and their self-initiated, community-based counterparts or ‘parallel' sites."