Sam Holleran of the Center for Urban Pedagogy stopped by OpenBag this week to talk about CUP’s urban educational projects.

What’s CUP? Well, “CUP collaborates with designers, educators, advocates, students, and communities to make educational tools that demystify complex policy and planning issues.” Chances are that you’ve seen CUP’s work – in poster form, in YouTube videos, in gallery shows or in the reception area of the OpenPlans office.

CUP assembles resources and all these different modes of working to produce videos, posters and pamphlets that answer the questions many of us have often wondered, like “What’s it like to get arrested?”, “How do new subway lines get planned and built?”,  ”Where does waste water really go?” or “What’s up with predatory mortgages?”.

CUP generally covers topics in these categories: Urban Investigations / City Studies / Envisioning Development / Technical Assistance / Making Policy Public. CUP then assembles a wide range of people – middle school students, legal professionals, policy makers, elected officials, graphic and web designers, politicians, industry leaders – to demystify these complex issues. There’s a lot of research, fact digging, fact checking, designing and refining that go into each CUP campaign.

Sam gave an exhaustive run down of CUP’s projects. Some of the several of those which he shared: