Appropriate Architecture: 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.