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.