The institution
About Above | Below
Above | Below is a Twin Cities-rooted urban research and development institution examining how cities are planned, governed, maintained, and experienced.
Why it exists
City plans, models and administrative systems say what is intended. Living inside them shows what they make possible, what they hide, and what has to be maintained. Above | Below GBC was founded to hold the two against each other: the city as represented and the city as encountered. Neither gets automatic authority.
What it is
A Minnesota general benefit corporation, rooted in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, doing urban research and development. It is a convener and, in time, a place. It is not a consultancy, a publisher or a technology company looking for a brand.
Who runs it
Brian M. Dodwell, founder. The institution is in its formative years and he writes, researches and stewards it. There is no board yet and no staff; the Charter says how both come to exist.
Where it is going
A foundation building in the Twin Cities by 2028, and from there a capacity assessment for something larger: a home where practitioners from the region and abroad come to work on the city together. The building is earned by the work that precedes it.
Supporting the work
Above | Below GBC is a Minnesota general benefit corporation: a for-profit form bound by law to pursue general public benefit and to report on it each year. It is not a charity, and gifts to it are not tax-deductible. It is funded by grants, public money, earned work and partnership, in that order of preference, and it does not take equity investment. Three things need money now. Each is bounded, each has a named output, and each returns what it learns in public.
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Six months of research time on AB-RN-001, Municipal AI Adoption, plus the four specialist reviews (municipal counsel, public-sector cybersecurity, records and data practices, accessibility and civil rights) that a finding must clear before release.
Output · one claim taken to release or reasoned hold, with its evidence, after four specialist reviews · Horizon · six months
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Transit, time and equipment for a winter of weekly field sightings across both cities, and the comparative study written from them.
Output · a dated, placed record of the city as met, published weekly, and one comparative study at the end · Horizon · November to March
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First-year lease and fit-out of a small building with a shop floor, a reading room and a public table, so the work has an address and the city can come inside to check.
Output · three to six thousand square feet in Minneapolis or Saint Paul, occupied, with a public table · Horizon · first year of operation
The arms
Hover or tap a part of the crest.
- Sun and rays
- Illumination and public return. Research exists to make the city more intelligible, not to accumulate private expertise.
- Bridge
- What joins Above and Below: the record and the street, the two cities, authority and use.
- Water line
- The civic threshold. Above it, the city as planned. Below it, the conditions that feed it.
- Root system
- Infrastructure, labor, memory and maintenance: what holds the visible city up.
- Shield
- A durable body for stewardship, not a promotional emblem.