Designing and Phasing Appropriate Parameters

This study has become increasingly focused on the design and analysis of a more appropriate development paradigm within marginalized communities through the appropriation of community legislated activities in the form of impactful, actionable architectural interventions throughout derelict neighborhoods. The project at Glenham Farm accords closely and tangibly with this investigation in its mission to give formal dimension to community motivated (and required) activities. In the same way that many earlier investigations sought to predict and direct the effects of applying conventional architectural parameters of site, structure and program to the "informal," unregulated activities of Third World slum communities, the intervention at Glenham Farm is aimed at introducing a workable set of design parameters and elements to the community that can be modified, critiqued or rejected by the users, and potentially deployed on others sites to accomodate similar types of community activity. This type of engagement, rather than being conceived of and ordained as a prescriptive, absolute solution, is intended to be a solution that users can interface with easily and assume a certain level of authorship of for themselves.

The infrastructure supplied to the site at Glenham is designed around the concept of a negotiable, constructed ground that can be reconfigured depending on occupancy, use and season. The panelized ground system accomodates both an explicit gardening program while additionally providing customizable spaces for gathering, seating, and enclosure. Vertical elements provide the infrastructure for both enclosure and growing, and engages the street in much the same way that convnetional street-tree schemes do.

Locating Glenham Farm in the context of a grander strategy of urban interventions is a more theoretical excercise and one that is conceived of in a series of varying scales and phases. The common denominator between both the program and design of Glenham and any putative interventions within South Providence is focused on how readily and successfully the design and construction parameters employed at Glenham can be reappropriated and deployed to activate other vacant lots within the city to supply communities with more accessible spaces for gathering, learning and gardening.

Strategically programing and building on select sites throughout South Providence could happen in successive phases that would metasticize from one modest site in a localized neighborhood until it has achieved a truly urban presence. The diagram above illustrates these phases by progressively consuming derelict properties and phasing out from the scale of a neighborhood block, up to the metropolitan scale. The drawing below, represents both the exisitng forms of community outreach programs in the city as well as the proposed appropriate program allocations within South Providence. The following maps show the proximities and accessibilities of the programs and institutions to each other throughout the city.

The next four and half weeks will be focused both on fleshing out the design and construction for Glenham Farm, while simultaneously locating the intervention in a broader social and theoretical context, through more specific drawing and mapping exercises designed to illustrate the effects and phases of the interventions on both the neighborhood and urban scales.

Building on Glenham: Appropriate Intervention Strategies and Amendments in South Providence

“There is a social history here that the people [in this neighborhood] are a part of that has kept community values from growing into any real type of pride. Getting the community involved and educating others is the only way to effect real change. This type of engagement…it can free people.”

- Joe Blackwell
South Providence Resident

Linked closely, if not inextricably to Southside’s mission with Glenham Farm is a grander, more fundamental concern for social equity and community dignity. While modest in both scope and scale, Glenham Farm is unequivocal in its conceptual vocation and accords incisively with South Providence’s need and desire to rally itself out of inner-city indigence and into the mainstream of metropolitan consideration. Joe’s comments speak abruptly and beautifully to South Providence’s need to discover and implement more effective development strategies, and it is pointed in its recognition that these strategies need to engage the residents, rather than marginalizing them to the position of passive recipients of policy ordained interventions. S.C.L.T. is in many ways heralding this effort with Glenham Farm, an intervention that promises to have far greater catalytic effects on development than the dissipative results observed by the government outreach programs and SWAP developments stippling South Providence today.

“My son and I drive around our neighborhood several times a week feeding the local homeless people and making sure they’re ok. We need to look out for our neighbors…we have more hungry, homeless neighbors than we do sheltered, employed ones. We need to feed and shelter this neighborhood -- SWAP can’t do it, HUD [hasn’t been able to do it]. We have the space [here], and the desire… we need the attention and the capital.”

-Joe Blackwell

Joe’s comments soberingly articulate the weight and urgency of the socio-economic afflictions in his community, but they also reveal the power and promise latent within the community to initiate reform for itself, and on its own terms. This attitude demands an opportunity to see locally ordained initiatives realized, and Glenham Farm may be only a modest example of one such intervention, but it is one that promises to induce subsequent, local development, in powerful and normative ways.

L.S. “Joe, if you had a million dollars to put towards helping people in your neighborhood what would you do?"

J.B. “Well, there’s no one single thing I’d do, but I’d definitely step up my efforts to feed and help out my neighbors -- we just need to feed people…it’s as simple as that.”

Joe’s contention that the community needs to “feed and shelter” itself offers a provocative and charged opportunity to “formalize” a local, “informal” activity. In the same way that the “informal,” marginalized activities of Third World slum dwellers was hypothesized to be validated through a formal architecture that engaged formal sector infrastructure and social sectors, so too might Joe’s “informal” enterprise to care for the homeless in his neighborhood be qualified and given dimension through a local intervention that could even potentially work off of or even with the S.C.L.T gardens in the community. The specific program and logistics for such an intervention are vague but would undoubtedly begin with Joe’s basic efforts to feed and shelter people in the neighborhood-- basic activities that accord closely with S.C.L.T most fundamental mission to promote self-sufficiency and social equity.

Such programs are given legitimacy through the impassioned and opinionated voices and actions of local residents like Joe Blackwell and touch on far broader, more requisite issues concerning the effectiveness of planning strategies, financing policies and authority mandated design. This operational distinction between centrally administered programs, which substitute for activities that are traditionally controlled locally and the provision of support systems that enable local action is critical in ways both nuanced and profound. This general concept is illustrated in the comparative diagrams below. On the top, a normal distribution of levels of action and authority is presented, in which central governments’ role is to guarantee equal access to basic resources, in which municipal government’s role is to provide infrastructure, and where local communities and private enterprises themselves are responsible for the construction/realization of the project. On the bottom, is depicted a common distribution of levels of action and authority, in which central government’s dominant role is the provision of built environments, and in which land and finance are controlled mainly by the private sector. The last diagram highlights the importance of appropriate matching and coordination of levels of authority and action as well as their dependence on local circumstances. The practical and pedagogical issues of user or citizen involvement in any complex socio-urban problem are to be solved by answering a basic question in ways that fit particular circumstances -- i.e. Whose participation in whose decisions and whose actions might be the most effective? This diagram illustrates participation as a function of who decides what should be done, and who provides the means. In conventionally sponsored self-help housing projects for instance, participants provide the labor and the most common form of self-help is neither sponsored nor authorized and the majority of people decide and provide for themselves. In most democratic systems on the other hand, sponsors or authorities provide what the users cannot built or manage for themselves within the limits set by planning legislation.

Notes:

John F.C. Turner. Housing by the People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. Marion Boyers Publishers, London 1976.

Site Perceptions, Contexts and Networks in South Providence

Preface

Born of a broader, more conceptual interest in product and material reuse, this investigation has become increasingly focused on understanding the socio-urban effects of material and spatial appropriation on community revitalization. This study aims to build off of this more notional investigation as a means of discovering and implementing a more effective development paradigm in struggling or contracting communities.

Perceptions of Conceptual Intervention Sites and Strategies

An intervention site cannot be effectively conceptualized as one, localized parcel. “Site” is more productively perceived on the level of the neighborhood and community at large, in which the center is surrounded by constellations of community-programmed civic spaces, giving dimension to different cultures and activities, and connected through and exacerbated by existing urban amenities. The invention and implementation of “event” is the creation of a single occasion, precisely defined in time and space -- the “event” is a form of centralization and revitalization.

Understanding the Neighborhood at Large as Cohesive Site

Potential Interventions Sites, Networks and Existing Urban Amenities Around Glenham Farm

Networking Urban Activity in South Providence

Glenham Farm: Designing a Development Paradigm in South Providence

Preface

Born of a broader, more conceptual interest in product and material reuse, this investigation has grown quickly into a much more involved study of urbanism and development, focused increasingly on understanding the socio-urban consequences of material and spatial re-appropriation on community revitalization.

Fundamental Points of Consideration:
Is the conflict between the objectivity that comes with studying areas from afar, and the inevitable subjectivity of working in and observing local communities misleading/dangerous in trying to develop a more effective development paradigm?

How does the issue of “permanence” (of program, use, location, structure etc.) effect or inform the success of an architectural intervention? i.e. is longevity and effectiveness of intervention contingent on how prescriptive the program/design is?

Does there exist an appropriate scale/scope for an effective intervention?

How far can and should a “theoretical” intervention go in order for a thesis to be adequately realized?

Glenham Farm II

Conecptual Planning:

Early planning strategies for Glenham Farm are negotiated around the logistical need to accomodate a seasonal influx in planting and user occupancy, while also allowing for and encouraging a sponteneity of individual uses and multiplicity of community programs. Each scheme presented below is conceived of not merely as an urban garden, but more conceptually as a catalytic type of civic space, in which community activity is given dimension around and in between the programmatic objects of the garden itself. Planting beds are conceived of in their planning as the elements that define boundaries, thresholds and direct circulation within the site, while also distinguishing the site as a kind of community "hub" that preserves the parcel's perception as a valuable center of community activity throughout the year.

Garden Accessibility and Proximities in South Providence

Property Vacancies in South Providence

Interpolated from the Providence Tax Assessor's map, the diagram below illustrates the availablity of neglected space in South Providence and their proximities to existing neighborhood elements and to each other. The potential for community integration and even renewal is increasingly suggestive in the higlilghted areas if necessary program is implemented on the sites with appropriate design.

Developmental Design Applications in the First World

In an effort to more tangibly manuscript the integrative effects of contextually appropriate design on the re-enfranchisement of marginalized communities and materials into prevailing considerations of socio-urban activity, an objective series of hypothetical cases was created, each of which represents an important and distinct combination of socio-urban and architectural consequences, and all of which have very real, local, first world analogues and applications.

If observed within their designated contexts, each case has very clear and much broader socio-economic and urban consequences that are both readily applicable and replicable in other contexts as well. The construction and strategic situation of a “labor station” for instance, in many ways legitimizes an activity and a demographic that is typically considered “informal” by virtue of the fact that it is not centralized and unregulated. A “formal” architecture for the housing of this activity is both a symbolic and pragmatic gesture towards the integration of a marginalized user and activity into the mainstream of socio-urban consideration. Similarly, the design and location of water purification centers within the context of a developing city can have enormously inductive economic consequences within a community, as well as inestimable health and environmental effects. The concept of designing and locating garbage or refuse trading posts in and around the peri-urban settlements of developing cities is also a particularly suggestive way of provoking sector integration, both by “formalizing” an informal and prolific activity by applying the architectural criteria of site, structure and program to it, but also through the program’s potential to inspire more development in and around the outpost sites. Architecturally representing these types of activities creates a franchiseable typology of revitalization that takes as its inspiration the immediate and unique circumstances at hand, and responds with appropriate solutions that employ the most fundamental and unprescriptive architectural criteria to effect a more substantive and enduring form of change.

The community garden programs sponsored by the Southside Land Trust in South Providence may offer an ideal context in which to apply and test the social, architectural and urban contentions purported by these protagonistic Third World cases. The development, refinement and invention of architectural and urban program, coupled with the use and reinvention of disenfranchised space and materials promises to be an effective and relevant local context in which to test the hypothetical depositions described above. The potential for community revitalization latent within community garden programs in general is a promising and impelling rationale for working with SLT, but the opportunity to push and reinvent the perceptions and uses of the gardens as something more than merely cultivated city lots is a fantastically potent and substantive challenge, and one that stands to be an accessible and verifiable method of realizing the broader aforementioned ideas. Reinventing the urban community garden to be not only a source of food or supplemental income, but also an integrative civic space and learning center that may be engaged throughout the year to inspire and renew communal values has distilled and refocused the methods and goals of this study in ways both subtle and profound.

Understanding Development Models in the First World

The revitalization and reintegration of marginalized communities and materials is not a challenge unique to the peri-urban settlements of the developing world, nor does it belong to the exclusive perview of inner city policy debate. In fact the amenable conflation of these two scenarios can be found and studied in the contracting cities of the developed world -- cities in which twenty-first century models of industrialized economic dependency and inadequate infrastructure resources have proven unable to sustain twenty-first century socio-urban activity. It is in these cities, the third world of industrialized society, where new development models are required that stand to effect change and induce a more enduring form of socio-economic urban re-enfranchisement.

In the case below, an adaptive reuse project is presented for the Franz Building in Center City New Orleans. Inspired by the mission of an MIT / Washington University collaborative studio, the proposal operates within the studio's general parameters, addressing the same social and urban issues and working within the same site and building restrictions, but uses as its motivating program a much less prescriptive, and inestimably more potent design agenda that stands to encourage a far more enduring model of development that supports and revitalizes the community rather than displaces it.

While the MIT/Washington University studio sought to restore the Franz Building to an inspiring and nostalgic reminder of Center City's glory days so that it could be used for the GWN's city headquarters (shown above), the promise and importance of the building seem unacknowledged by both the studios' design and program selection. Perhaps more palpabley, reusing the building in a more accessible, civic way that has the potential to support a variety and density of uses for the community would be a more effective catalyst for change in Center City, and it is by operating under this premise that a more appropriate community program was selected for the counter-proposal shown below. Outlined in the proposal are ideas for a communal space that could be occupied by the New Orleans Food Cooperative, as well as any variety of community ordained incubator businesses. In this way the building's location and historic significance might be more appreciably harnassed and its emergent potential more promisingly revealed.

Degree Project Status Quo and Course of Action: Spring 2009

Project Context:

Even within individual cities, slum populations are able to support a limitless variety of solutions to infrastructural and socio-political neglect, ranging anywhere from makeshift churches, to police forces, to neoliberal NGOs and palpable socio-political movements. These activities and interactions are given dimension by the un-pedigreed built environments that quarantine them, and that have evolved as some of the most startling examples of human innovation and social settlement in our modern history. However, the re-integration of marginalized populations and materials into the mainstream of socio-economic consideration in the Global South is a complicated and often abstract ambition, rendered increasingly more unintelligible by its lack of socio-urban verifiability and unregulated supply and population influx. Despite the overwhelming scale and pervasiveness of peri-urban settlements in the Global South, the causative factors that necessitate their development have more accessible and quantifiable analogues in the backwater communities of the industrialized world, and may in fact provide more useful circumstances in which to test and measure the effects of architectural and urban intervention scenarios. This study intends to marry a compelling interest in product and technology appropriation as an increasingly necessary construction medium with the increasingly repressive need to legitimize and integrate peri-urban developments or “off-worlds” (to use the terminology from Blade Runner as Davis does) into the mainstream of urban planning and developmental design theory.

One of the most promising approaches for engaging this field of study and articulating an appropriate intervention strategy is framed by a philosophy of “acting in order to induce others to act.”[i] That is, a philosophy that offers impulses rather than prescriptions, and that nurtures an environment for change from within by cultivating and releasing the emergent potential latent within any appropriate intervention. From this type of strategy emerges an agenda of reforms to policy, legal frameworks, and standards which help to build social capital, promote social integration, reduce dependency, unlock resources and improve livelihoods. These are the forces and affects of effective peri-urban integration and can be studied on objective, macro scales by looking to the developing cities of the Global South, and tested on smaller, more tangible scales by working within the marginalized communities of local First World cities.

Derivative Criteria for Architectural Intervention

Based on the research and analysis done during Wintersession, the success of any putative architectural response to the aforementioned problem will be measured according to how well the project, 1) legitimizes/formalizes marginalized activities within the designated community(s), 2) reuses and/or reintegrates disenfranchised labor and supplies, 3) can be effectively reinterpreted and re-applied in other contexts to achieve similar ends.


Project Rationale and Working Course of Action

I. If the same developmental paradigm can be observed in the marginalized communities of the First World….
- Would the same intervention criterion be effective?
- What would alternative, appropriate intervention programs and criterion be?
- Do the community densities and proximities to urban centers and waste
- sites have the same affect on community development?

If the same developmental paradigm cannot be observed in the marginalized communities of the First World…
- What other types of intervention might be applicable?
- Are there verifiable intervention precedents that have the same type of integrative effect?
- Can these precedents be appropriated into a displacement-integration paradigm of urban theory/development?
- Would this appropriated paradigm be effective/sustainable?
- Can its effectiveness be measured according to its 1) emergent potential, 2) its ability to integrate socio-economic urban sectors, 3) and its ability to inform and direct formal sector development and infrastructure planning?

II. Based on the answers to the above questions…
-More specifically identify local program/need and exaggerate its scope.
- locate and hypothesize specifically the program’s inductive effects (conceptual mapping/diagramming?)
- Identify appropriate/available materials and user groups to work with in articulating design strategies (i.e. massing, form making etc.).
- Understanding materiality and product uses (reuses) in designated context; working towards full scale experimentation.

III. Can designated program/intervention be backwards integrated into other contexts?
- Test intervention/variation of intervention program in formal and opposite contexts

Notes:

[i] Hamdi Nabeel. Small Change: About the Art of Practice and the Limits of Planning in Cities. Earthscan Publishers, London, England, 2004.

Community Re-Enfranchisement: Illustrating a Displacement-Integration Cycle of Development

The re-integration of marginalized people and materials into the mainstream of socio-economic consideration in the Global South is a complicated and often abstract ambition, rendered increasingly more unintelligible by its lack of socio-urban verifiability. However more and more, the activities, materials and practices of the informal sector are given promissing dimension by the effectiveness of the homemade devices and built environments that characterize them. This curious development standard is illustrated in the chart above, which is meant to describe the process by which material, products and technologies move from formal obsolencence to informal reinvention, and the corresponding socio-economic and socio-urban forces and affects that inform this displacement-integration paradigm.

In order to represent the contended developmental affects of this rationale, several examples of small scale interventions are provided below that suggest how architectural solutions may be able to help legitimize informal activities and materials by providing a kind of "pro-forma" standard of program and location. In this case for instance, a "day labor" station, sited strategically in or around the sector boundaries of a designated city "formalizes" to a certain degree an informal demographic of user simply by virtue of the program having been considered and realized in the form of an occupiable structure.

Similarly, appropriating "informal" activities as legitimate pieces of architectural program could have as inductive an affect on re-enfranchising urban and peri-urban areas as the day labor station is assumed to have. For instance, providing outposts and structures for the cumbersome, homemade water purification systems that are so prevalent in African and Asian villages may in fact be a program with great emergence potential for certain areas if appropriate locations are designated to help bridge sector boundaries, and appropriate materials are employed and reused to keep both labor and products relavent.


Still another potential architectural program inspired by informal sector economic activity might be refuse or barter kiosks-- or places where people might be able to go to sell and trade the refuse items they mine or find from formal sector communities and infills. In this way, the informal, unregulated act of selling disposed electronics and used car parts on the sidewalks is given a socio-spatial dimension that may be the first step towards legitimate community and material re-enfranchisement.

Community Enfranchisement: The Mitigation and Dissolution of Slum Density

As new theories and proposals for planning and urban design evolve, we are increasingly aware of "pre-emptive" urban interventions that can restrict or limit future growth. Instead, new planning strategies must work towards encouraging an architecture that is limitless in its capacity for use and reuse and pronounced in its greater urban potential. Recognizing the developmental promise of this type of design is arguably the most effective way of inducing substantive and enduring change in contracting communities, and latent within proposals of all scales ought to be an aggressive pursuit for the discovery of the emergence potential in both form and program.

In the diagram above, two sites are identified as promising intervention zones in Nairobi, both equi-distant from the downtown, and Dandori (the continent's largest garbage dump). If effective program is embodied in sustainable structure in the prescribed zones, these areas will become engaged by both formal and informal urban activity, and could induce a convectional form of development, potentially aiding in the enfranchisement of the marginalized slum districts within the city. In the diagram below, the mitigation of official slum districts in Nairobi is predicted by interpolating the number of districts that stand to be affected by the subsequent development that will circumscribe the intervention site.

The location and proximities of the intervention sites are specified in the model below, along with the locations and proximities of the variously zoned districts of Nairobi to each other, and to Dandori. By strategically programming and building in the specified zones, putative development is given an opportunity to grow in a predictable fashion while encouraging district integration and even potentially reducing the prevalence and density of slum districts.