Professor Marta Gutman’s A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950 has been awarded the Urban History Association’s Kenneth Jackson Award for the best North American book in 2014. Her co-recipient is Nathan Connolly, who won for his book “Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida.”

In A City for Children, Marta Gutman focuses on the use and adaptive reuse of everyday buildings in Oakland, California, to make the city a better place for children. She introduces us to the women who were determined to mitigate the burdens placed on working-class families by an indifferent industrial capitalist economy.

On Wednesday, October 21, Gutman will participate in the panel, Is This for Everyone? Design and the Common Good at MoMA from 6:00–7:30 p.m. This event will also be live-streamed online.

Held in conjunction with the exhibition, This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good, the panel addresses case studies and theoretical applications in which design intersects with ideas of the common good. Panelists look to their own work to consider how this intersection arises across social, political, economic, and cultural platforms, as presented in the exhibition.

Gutman’s co-participants include Laura Kurgan, Director of Visual Studies, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University and Raphael Sperry, architect, green-building consultant, and president of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. Paola Antonelli, senior curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, moderates.