MA THEORIES OF URBAN PRACTICE
The MA Theories of Urban Practice is a research-driven graduate program for curious urban thinkers and makers interested in exploring new avenues beyond conventional urban planning and design to gain a broad understanding of the social, political, economic, and environmental forces that affect cities.
INTRODUCTION by Victoria Marshall
Assistant Professor of Urban Design
This pamphlet highlights nine theses from the 2015 graduates of the Theories of Urban Practice program. Each of these works significantly shifts our understanding of effective strategies for urban change, and intervention through theorizing the ways we might shift urban practice. Together the theses form a shared body of work that embrace the idea of praxis as actionable theory, and practice as research-in-action. Therefore they expand and deepen the subjects and objects of urban practice. Three types of actions can be distilled in all the theses. These are further explored in the Theories of Urban Practice exhibition at Industry City, Brooklyn that is part of the 2015 Parsons Festival. The first action aims to create a shift in the way theory questions history. The graduates argue that important theoretical concepts such as identity and belonging are often erased in the way history is produced. Through careful analysis, and engaged participation they have shaped urban practices that value and disseminate absent knowledge. Second is action that is situated in an urgent and immediate present. Rather than cultivating an antagonistic position to the urban processes that produce inequality, graduates have created effective strategies of productive negotiation towards democracy. Broad ideas such as public, space, design, and community are analyzed and reorganized into tactics that activate citizenship. The third action is performing and reflecting upon the ever-increasing list of tools for public engagement. Graduates
explore alternative urban practices that value accessible exchange, for example walking tours, workshops, visual narratives, video, interviews, and an exhibition. Their motivation is to invent, elevate, and lead urban practices that are not hegemonic. In other words, they want to emancipate practice. The distinguished list of secondary advisors (listed alphabetically) are Joseph Heathcott, Associate Professor of Urban Studies; Aseem Inam, Associate Professor of Urbanism; Brian McGrath, Professor of Urban Design; Kevin McQueen, Adjunct Associate Professor of Policy; Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism; William Morrish, Professor of Urban Ecologies; Robert Sember, Artist; and Jilly Traganou, Associate Professor in Spatial Design Studies. The graduates invite you to participate in their praxis as a starting point rather than simply accepting what they have made as a conclusion. They have a goal of creating a significant contribution to the continuing production of urban knowledge, as well as diversifying urban practices globally. However in order to do this, a community around actionable theory must be created first. They hope you will join them in this important, thoughtful, and creative endeavor.
Schedule
May 14, 2015 WELCOME OVERVIEW Victoria Marshall 2:45 - 3:00
May 15, 2015 WELCOME OVERVIEW Victoria Marshall 9:30 - 9:45
01. 02. 03. My Future, My City - My City, My Future: Rethinking Processes of Revitalization Through Curriculum Connections in Reading, PA
Al-Ahmadi: The Golden Days // Excavating Alternative Narratives of Kuwait’s First Colonial Company Town Between 1946-1975
Collectively Curating Alternative Narratives of the Past Toward the Co-production of an Equitable Future
Nora Elmarzouky 3:00 - 3:30
Rania Dalloul 3:30 - 4:00
Renae Reynolds 4:00 - 4:30
04. 05. Complicated Landscapes: A Critique of Ambient Intelligence as a Future Vision for Urban Spaces and Lives
Interrogating Branding: Collectively Curating Alternative Narratives of the Past Toward the Co-production of an Equitable Future
Katerina Vaseva 4:30 - 5:00
Sara Wallis Minard 5:00 - 5:30
06. 07. 08. Re-Framing Diversity Politics and Engaging Pluralism as Transformative Urban Practice
Beauty is a Verb
Reconstructing New Landscapes of Consumption and Production: Multiple Publics, Belonging and Productive Agonism
Nadia Elokdah 9:45 - 10:15
Kat Horstmann 10:15 - 10:45
Larissa Begault + Julia Borowicz 10:45 - 11:30
09. Publicly Designed Privately Owned Public Space
Sam Wynne 11:30 - 12:00
01.
My Future, My City My City, My Future: Rethinking Processes of Revitalization Through Curriculum Connections in Reading, PA by Nora Elmarzouky
Revitalization processes in struggling postindustrial US cities can be made more inclusive by acknowledging the indispensible knowledge of local residents, reflected through students. As decision-makers strive to rebuild the identity of the city, so too are students discovering their membership into the social world through, in part, required attendance at school. Urban revitalization builds a future for which these young people are part, and will inhabit. Students represent current
lived experiences and a history that has led to daily experiences, which are often brought with them to school. While education and urban revitalization are often not discussed together beyond economic development terms, public schools are one of the most accessible urban social institutions that provide a link between people of multiple communities and the urban realm. Public schools are sites of social practice and production. By shifting the paradigm of reform and purpose of schooling they can become vehicles for community development in relation to the endeavors of revitalization. Through activating situated learning, a long-standing theory of learning, schools can foster creativity and provoke critical thinking towards collective and civic participation. This thesis probes the political, social, and economic history of Reading, PA, focused on contemporary efforts of revitalization and public education development. The critical lenses of Zukin, Brenner, Marcuse, and Foucault are used to analyze goals and visions of revitalization, and their current and potential impacts. They provide frameworks for investigating who decision-makers are and how power is currently exercised for the purpose of increasing the exchange-value of the city - a process that is often to the detriment of the use-value for current inhabitants. Furthermore, these lenses aid in interpreting how current residents are represented in relation to the rhetoric of progress and development. In other words, their roles are often assigned, delegitimizing their current role in city-making, while limiting their future rights to the city. To address these threats, this thesis proposes curriculum connections for activating student’s situated learning, rooted in Freire and Hooks’ critical inquiry, in which students are guided in understanding their experiences in their ever-changing contexts. The curriculum design draws upon multiple preexisting models of participatory and experiential education, and is coupled with principles of co-design. In addition, analysis of media, multiscalar legislation, revitalization plans, maps, incentives zoning and other official documents related to revitalization and education have provided insight into the dominant narrative of reviving Reading. To understand these contemporary processes
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on the ground, ethnographic research was conducted in the form of interviews, participatory observation, and advocacy. The research uncovered particular ways in which education and revitalization impact socio-economic and political intersectionality. The coterminous border of the city and the Reading School District highlights their spatial intersectionality as well. This relationship should be utilized for the consideration of possibilities for transforming these processes to foster institutionalized change in social relations. In the immediate present, “My Future, My City” is a proposed experiential service-learning program that was prototyped as a ten-week internship for high school students at the local charter school in spring 2015 - although intended for the Reading Public High School. The prototype aimed to generate a community of practice around activating students’ critical consciousness and meaningful learning through research, planning, and executing real world projects in collaboration with urban practitioners. Student explorations have reverberated throughout multiple communities of Reading, garnering engagement from local institutions, companies, organizations, and individuals initiating this community of practice. They have provided space to run the program, virtual and actual platforms to share and engage in student work, and financial support. Additionally, community members have worked with students directly, presented their own work, and offered symbolic support by circulating the buzz about student involvement. This urban practice aims to widen the consultation, participation, and impact of revitalization processes by offering a model for curriculum reform where the city is the classroom to generate a community of practice. In experiencing practical involvement in the process of urban transformation, students gain awareness, tools, and skills necessary for navigating urban issues, while elevating multiple voices from their communities. Institutionalizing such curricula can reposition public schools as anchor institutions, advancing students’ sense of responsibility as active participants with and for the betterment of their communities for strengthening a democratic society.
...public schools are one of the most accessible urban social institutions that provide a link between people of multiple communities and the urban realm.
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We were all Palestinian.
We were Iraqi, Palestinian, even Yugoslavian.
We were Christians, Muslims and Jews, and there wasn’t a difference between us.
02.
Al-Ahmadi: The Golden Days // Excavating Alternative Narratives of Kuwait’s First Colonial Company Town Between 1946-1975 by Rania Dalloul
The British protectorate of Kuwait gained its independence in 1961, and subsequently, procured the nationalization of Kuwait Oil Company (KOC), formerly British-American owned. Ahmadi, an outlying town from the main port city of Kuwait, was built to host both KOC’s burgeoning infrastructure in 1946, and a growing population of employees from several countries across the world. In its first decades, Ahmadi was as a colonial company town, where English, American, and European senior employees of KOC, coexisted alongside thousands of Indian, Pakistani, and Arab clericalists, technicians, laborers, and their families. Between the senior and junior employees, housing policies, civil rights, access to amenities, and issues of belonging, disparaged the latter community.
Through reimagining Ahmadi’s history of colonial urbanism, and the lived experiences of junior employees, this research confronts larger questions of contemporary urban processes in Kuwait. Pervasive issues of citizenship, laborers’ rights, identity, and belonging, are entangled in a complex co-presence of modernization, globalization, and post colonialism. A shift in understanding such relationships as non-episodic, but always unraveling, can shape new and necessary tools for future urban practices.
This thesis excavates an undocumented history of this particular space, in order to challenge and complicate the dominant narratives behind Kuwait’s modernization period (‘The Golden Era’). The research pays a particular focus to the period spanning colonialism to nationalization, a transition of only 30 years, which transformed the local demographic to nearly 100% Kuwaiti. Central to this research is the excavation of alternative historical narratives during this period, with the participation of former residents. Their oral testimonies are one example of the methods with which this research engages, in order to bring forward the lived experiences of Ahmadi’s earliest inhabitants. Alternative historical research is a powerful and subversive approach to decolonizing authorship and appraisal. An important method in this thesis is graphic visualization, which provides both the form and function for this work to be communicated to a wide audience. The graphic novel’s ability to visually represent, rewrite, and illustrate oral histories, subaltern experiences, testimonies, and spatial memories, renders it a dynamic tool for historical archiving, from the absent, buried, and invisible.
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The graphic novel’s ability to visually represent, rewrite, and illustrate oral histories, subaltern experiences, testimonies, and spatial memories, renders it a dynamic tool for historical archiving, from the absent, buried, and invisible.
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03.
Collectively Curating Alternative Narratives of the Past Toward the Co-production of an Equitable Future by Renae Reynolds
This thesis is an historical exploration into the Rockaway Peninsula, an extension of New York City’s urban fabric, and a space of multiplicity and contradiction. Drastic redevelopment occurred on the narrow 11-mile span during New York’s 1950’s post war era, creating a hodgepodge of housing types, a mixture of low and high density, through arbitrary slum clearance and destabilization of communities. This resulted in the fragmentation of the landscape as well as social fractures that persist in today’s current context. The resultant visual complexity evokes a simultaneous sensation of the urban yet not urban. Its geographic distance from Manhattan has long been a defining characteristic of its identity, yet access granted by the arrival of the subway system in 1956 seemingly overcame its isolation. However, the advent of public transportation also paved the way for a transformation from urban resort to a place for year round residency. In addition New York City’s housing policies afforded mass migration of the poorest members of its population. The arrival of New York’s poor resulted in currents of displacement as they attempted to settle, and were met with resistance from already established residents and organized forces.
PAR is used as a method to excavate alternative historical narratives among a collective body of co-researchers. This collective curative process of documentation and dissemination of history will engage young people in the co-creation of a publicly accessible archive and interactive podcast. In order to reveal previously omitted narratives, legitimizing the citizenry and identity of local knowledge brokers, this constructs a more accurate portrait of the past. It is anticipated that this will continue beyond the initial pilot represented in this thesis and be completed over the summer 2015. Without access and opportunity for more voices to be heard, and more experiences to be validated, what is hidden or unknown about the past will continue to obscure the ability of community members of the Rockaway Peninsula to collaborate and co-create toward an inclusive and sustainable future. Viewing Rockaway as microcosm within the larger framework of displacement in the urban arena, the pairing of PAR and historical analysis hold implications for more innovative strategies to activate fractured local histories, and collectively craft solutions to the most pressing urban issues that emerge, continuously.
This thesis analyzes the transformation of the Rockaway peninsula, with a focus on the vast amounts of loss experienced by former and newly arriving residents, and offers a creative solution to the consequent realities wrought by unimaginative and shortsighted urban renewal practices. While the analysis of the dense and vexing history of this urban enigma explains the shifts that occurred on the peninsula, this research transitions into the realm of practice through the design and implementation of a Participatory Action Research (PAR) workshop, which engages members of the youth population of the Rockaway community in a collaborative exploration of the local neighborhood histories. The premise of this workshop is that history can and should be a reflective tool, which supports the healing of past social fractures, brought on by previously ill-informed urban practices. In this way the history of a neighborhood and the processes that form it become a guide star toward achieving an equitable and inclusive future.
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...history can and should be a reflective tool, which supports the healing of past social fractures, brought on by previously illinformed urban practices.
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04.
Complicated Landscapes: A Critique of Ambient Intelligence as a Future Vision for Urban Spaces and Lives
In 2001, the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, a branch of the EU Commission’s Joint Research Centre, published a report on the future of ambient intelligence and the information society. Speculatively titled “Scenarios for Ambient Intelligence in 2010”, the report was based on four fictional scenarios which “aim to describe what living with ambient intelligence might be like for ordinary people in 2010”(ISTAG 2001).
by Katerina Vaseva
The four scenarios describe a day in the life of five individuals inhabiting ambient environments who travel, communicate, shop, commute, and study. The rhetorical purpose of the document is to provide “food for thought”, rather than being prescriptive or predictive, and to create a discourse for the development of the technologies and frameworks behind such environments.
Ambient intelligence (AmI), the term preferred in Europe (compared to “ubiquitous computing” in USA, or “ubiquitous networking” in Japan), refers to the study and design of smart environments that react to human events through data-mining devices and platforms, and are capable of adapting over time. The paradigm gained momentum over the past two decades as a discourse and strategy to manage the complexity and density of urban life.
I argue that the scenarios present a frictionless, human-centric world in which technology is rendered as nothing more than an extension of human agency. Conditioned by a complex array of technologies and networks, AmI spaces should rather be seen as complicated landscapes of agencies situated in spaces which are in constant communication with each other, and within which the purely human one takes on a much more ambiguous role. The collage and the books critique those landscapes by shifting the focus to the underlying complexity of the networks, devices, and algorithms that sustain those worlds. The three collages portray spaces depicted in the ISTAG scenarios, and six thematic books explore through illustration some of the issues conditioning AmI environments: Networks, Hardware, Algorithm, Identity, Machine vision, and Product.
The thesis consists of a theoretical text and a collage with a series of illustrated books attached to it. The text uses the report as a starting point to examine the role of scenarios as a tool for urban planning and its imaginaries. It argues that their role is to create a discourse by outlining an array of issues and questions that can inform further conversations about the topic; in short, to direct us as to what we should be talking about when talking of AmI. It attempts to analyze the particular discourse activated by ISTAG and its influence on subsequent developments in policy making technology. Thirdly, the thesis looks in depth at the particular scenarios, through a number of questions: Which issues are highlighted as critical? What is omitted? How is human agency framed within the AmI landscapes, and how does it coexist with other agencies? What sort of spaces and landscapes are imagined? How could those imaginaries, often orthogonal to each other, be employed within future spaces?
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Conditioned by a complex array of technologies and networks, AmI spaces should rather be seen as complicated landscapes of agencies situated in spaces which are in constant communication with each other, and within which the purely human one takes on a much more ambiguous role.
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05.
Interrogating Branding: Collectively Curating Alternative Narratives of the Past Toward the Co-production of an Equitable Future by Sara Wallis Minard
The challenge over how to redevelop, alongside the need for job creation and housing amidst growing inequalities in cities, continues to dominate both public conversation and political agendas throughout the United States. There is a trend for commercial developers, sometimes working in partnership with local or state government, to take on entrepreneurial roles in revitalizing post-industrial spaces. Going beyond upgrading infrastructure, some of these developers propose visionary plans that advocate social benefits, such as creating stable and well paying jobs. Within this process of valorization there exist contradictions that revolve around themes such as identity, labor politics, and design. The thesis acknowledges that these contradictions contribute to large-scale redevelopment being discredited as serving only real estate interests. Yet, while this thesis recognizes these contradictions as perceived, it is also imperative to look deeper at the processes taking place in order to uncover potential opportunity for more inclusive social benefits. An investigation of perceived contradictions alongside new interpretations of urban processes allows for an in depth examination of both the threats and opportunities of large scale, long-term, multi-phase commercial redevelopment. In order to address these issues, the thesis focuses on the fissure between promises made by commercial developers through branding strategies and what is actually happening on the ground. It argues that the process of branding is under theorized in the urban realm. To leverage both public and political support that is vital for large-scale commercial development, developers use marketing strategies to ‘sell’ their vision to multiple audiences through promises of economic development, job creation, and infrastructure improvements. Buy in from the public and government paves the way for necessary rezoning and the allocation of public funds for these sites. In this way, the branding process directly affects how space transforms, but there exists a danger that raising land value will only benefit real estate investors and commercial developers rather than fulfill promises made by the brand for a wider public.
In delving deeper, the thesis investigates the early stages of redevelopment to argue that creating a brand is an essential initial step and that branding is in itself a form of urban process. Rather than an apparatus that exists in the background, branding is a mechanism that influences, transforms, and produces space. The thesis explores how branding works at the frontline of urban change through a comparative study of Industry City in New York and the Wynwood Arts District of Miami. These projects are chosen based on similarities in how they have been imagined by commercial developers, working with the city, to develop both infrastructure and economic opportunity in low-income and historically immigrant-based neighborhoods - while at the same being marketed to a global elite. This research intervention interrogates the intersections between design, and government reports, policy analysis, media coverage, alongside research, fieldwork, and interviews. Both Industry City and Wynwood Arts District are in the early days of redevelopment and have not yet entered public process reviews. However this is the time when branding strategies are imperative to imagining the future. At this juncture, developers use culture and image to attract investment by creating a brand to sell ideals and solutions to urban problems such as unemployment. These ideals are projected in the media, art installations, and building design. They aim to attract a new demographic while masking the already existing workers and neighbors. In accepting branding as an urban process and integral to the transformation of space, it is possible to navigate ways to negotiate the rhetoric used around these spaces even before already existing legislative procedures are utilized. As a process, branding should be understood from the very early transformative stages in order to secure promises made at the outset by the brand, and ensure that they are upheld.
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In accepting branding as an urban process and integral to the transformation of space, it is possible to navigate ways to negotiate the rhetoric used around these spaces even before already existing legislative procedures are utilized.
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06.
Re-Framing Diversity Politics and Engaging Pluralism as Transformative Urban Practice
by Nadia Elokdah
Through the lens of identity, culture, and the urban imaginary, the thesis critically examines the discursive process of city making through everyday practices in order to understand how our urban context changes, and by whose influence. The thesis positions cities as dynamic systems perpetually reproduced through negotiations and practices of a myriad of complex internal actors and things, as well as forces of external connections. This perspective also fosters an understanding of cities as active sites of collective imagination, invention, and intervention. Positioned together, these frames contribute to a notion of perpetual urban transformation, shaped by active engagement and lived experience. To interrogate this further, the research presented in the thesis begins by identifying a disconcerting pattern that has emerged in contemporary cities: the co-optation of diversity alongside reductionist notions of culture. Not only is this of particular relevance due to the systemic nature of cities as repositories for cultural diversity and cultural production, but also, cities are increasingly moving toward new constructions of a diverse urban vision regardless of critical or scrutinized approaches. The critique of this pattern is primarily in the way that notions of diversity are wielded by power structures, such as city governments or anchor institutions. Rather than offering the city as an active and pluralistic platform, diversity, used in this way, is often constructed as a veil of representation in the urban realm masking the richness of multiplicity and pluralism. This thesis aims to redirect this flow. In collaboration with Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, an arts and culture non-profit organization based in Philadelphia, a new idea of diversity touches ground. Through the design of an interactive exhibition embedding identity within the urban realm, on display from February through April 2015 at Philadelphia City Hall, along with interview based research, a proposal is made for new paradigms of governance of these important concepts. This repositions actors from City Departments and Programs, midsized Arts and Cultural organizations, and small-scale, community based NPFs and NGOs as collaborators. They are seen as informing and supporting one another, symbolically and through
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functional platforms, that can activate, and ultimately co-design, spaces of plurality toward urban transformation. Within this, key actors are located as intermediaries able to wield power to affect transformation. As such, these actors are fundamental to bridging the gap between local, nuanced knowledge of grassroots or communitybased organizations and top-down, reductionist practices often found in urban governance. When thinking of cities as shaped by active engagement and lived experience, conversations involving multiple voices from multiple actors are possible. An important moment is when the formation of strategic alliances begins to manifest. If these alliances prioritize complex identity as a foundation for diversity and cultural initiatives, they might be able to consciously move toward a practice of co-design using the urban imaginary as a vehicle for inclusivity of multiple voices and aspirations. The exhibit was a prototype of this. Recommendations stemming from the use of the urban imaginary as transformative urban practice might then form a pluralistic framework for arts and culture within urban governance in Philadelphia. The thesis concludes with a larger question. How might actors, such as those working toward strategic alliances, better navigate through current power structures toward urban transformation, while also offering an expanded notion of what constitutes valid knowledge of the urban? In calling for broader definitions of knowledge of the urban this necessarily becomes a project of making inclusive urban epistemologies.
When thinking of cities as shaped by active engagement and lived experience, conversations involving multiple voices from multiple actors are possible.
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07.
Beauty is a Verb by Kat Horstmann
What makes a place beautiful? And what is the experience of beauty? An initial response often suggests conflicted feelings of being both drawn to, and isolated from seemingly esoteric and elusive qualities. At times, contested emotions would surface in the nuances of an answer, alluding that this understanding is both universal and stunningly personal. While beauty can captivate an entire branch of philosophy, it remains detached from public reality. Too often, the idea of beauty is situated as an elitist consideration when positioned next to the many crises our cities face today. Beauty is much more powerful than this. Quickly, the question evolved to what beauty can do, and how beauty is created? My thesis explores beauty as a concept, and a verb; where and how beauty is perceived, and what beauty can do in urban practice. What began as a retrospective in the dynamics of the social welfare system at work in the South Bronx of New York City, grew into an in depth exploration of the sources of urban trauma, the pillars of a beauty foundation, and the opportunity for beauty to mitigate and potentially heal systemic traumas. Beauty is the lens, and the investigative tool, because of my entanglement in contested spaces where creating beauty served as a practice of resistance, thought it was an afterthought in design. People I worked with shared tenderness and resilience, or softly withdrew in subtle responses to the world built around them.
The thesis is divided into three parts, and utilizes a diverse set of methods that suggest multiple understandings of the scales of oppression and beauty. The first chapter explores physical and emotional landscapes of oppression through policy, historical narrative, and the shortcomings of design. The second explores perceptive beauty – how beauty is encountered through one’s day using research and personal interviews in public spaces. The third chapter builds on research and interviews in order to position beauty at the heart of the creative energy of creative communities that have been denied access to spaces of and opportunities to create beauty. Through this research, it has become clear that the responses to systemic racist and discriminatory policies are often born in spaces of beauty, both created and cared for by the most vulnerable in our society. Within this intersection of policy, planning and design, there is enormous potential for resistance and healing. Because the factors that contribute to oppression on multiple scales have been measured today, it is now possible, and necessary to search for entry points of nourishment. If beauty is an innate need, and serves as a response to crisis, an experience of resilience, can it transform into an act of defiance and ultimately, a tool for healing? This thesis serves as an exploration of the nature of beauty, the crime of her commodification, and the potential beauty holds to redefine our practice.
This relationship between the self and the built environment is therefore complex, at present for so many urban dwellers, and distressed. Intersectional research, supported by personal experience continues to expose the effects of the built environment on mental and emotional health, and reinforces the need for spaces that heal, rather than harm us. Through a micro lens of the South Bronx, this work examines the evolution of a space that has experienced years of neglect and decay, arriving at the current crisis of eviction and community uprooting at its most violent and urgent point. Beauty is rarely discussed in this context – can beauty be positioned at the heart of efforts to rebuild communities?
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...it has become clear that the responses to systemic racist and discriminatory policies are often born in spaces of beauty, both created and cared for by the most vulnerable in our society.
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08.
Reconstructing New Landscapes of Consumption and Production: Multiple Publics, Belonging and Productive Agonism by Larissa Begault + Julia Borowicz
This thesis engages in the processes and negotiations that take place in the creation of new landscapes of consumption and production. Landscape here, refers to the spaces produced through the need of surplus capital to be invested in fixed and human assets. Their built form derives from cycles of valorization and devalorization, land speculation and profit maximization and is produced for a new ascendant class identity born out the most recent labor force restructuring. Situating this within the growing trend of publicprivate partnerships we are questioning what the mechanisms are for the participatory production of ‘public’ space within which participatory and
democratic acts are possible. In order to investigate this, we are looking at the Domino Sugar Factory, a large-scale luxury redevelopment project. This is a significant site to study because it is one of the current manifestations of the production of such new landscapes being packaged through a number of provisions, namely affordable housing and open space, within neighborhoods with established communities. To what extent do these spaces meet the objectives they promise to communities, typically in need of more green space? How do these benefits weigh against potential costs of development? This thesis questions how the process of production of such landscapes and its outcomes participate in the shaping of citizenship, belonging and representation. Through actionable theory, we are establishing new openings for multiple publics to take part in such space production through a proposal for a legislated body which we have called Public Action Review Collaborative (PARC). PARC is a participatory model that seeks to expand democratic practices by including representational justice in local politics and overseeing the production and management of public space. PARC challenges the power imbalance of urban development, creating long term structural change to the process of publicprivate space production. The objective is to create a city mandated model that is replicable across New York. Applying the model of agonistic pluralism, which involves relations between adversaries who share common (symbolic or physical) space but seek to organize it in different ways, allows for the recognition that a politics without adversary falsely seeks to reconcile all interests provided that they align with the project at hand and can be part of the ‘people’ or thus legitimate public (Mouffe, 2000). PARC draws on this conception by enabling productive agonism within space production, recognizing the failure of consensus, and advocating for the necessity of multiple publics, while concurrently seeking change within the existing system.
general public’s welfare. The formulaic design typically creates predefined uses, tied to the commercial entities that are present on the site. Thus, the spaces created are commodified and depoliticized sites for consumption and passive recreation. Further, their effect is not neutral but rather they carry agency in contributing to rising land values, speculation and the ever increasing upscaling of the city. We argue that the conceived cost-benefit calculus represents a consensus amongst the status quo—public officials, private developers and the general public—and goes unquestioned. Thus contributing to existing contradictions in urban process and decisionmaking inherent in public - private partnerships. PARC responds to the current structure of urban development that falls short and affects the majority of communities who become disenfranchised within their own neighborhoods. Some these ineffective mechanisms include non-binding community board votes, ineffective incentive zoning, opaque structure of city council hearings and lack of structural accountability for minority groups. This is heightened by community fragmentation and the lack of neutral spaces and platforms for communication. PARC brings value to underrepresented groups, and spans across a variety of classes contributing to the welfare of past, present and future populations. As such PARC reconfigures the current distribution of exchange rather than use value generated from public space and new landscapes of consumption and production. Currently, the private interests, vested in these spaces, radically limit access and sense of belonging. Activating belonging and representation adds significant value to current democratic structures and enables new conceptions of publicity to be generated. This begins to dismantle the seeming consensus around such space production.
It is our contention that open spaces produced within such redevelopments participate in a broader trend of spaces of amenity for the adjacent luxury developments generated through public subsidies but not consistently contributing to the
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PARC responds to the current structure of urban development that falls short and affects the majority of communities who become disenfranchised within their own neighborhoods.
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09.
Publicly Designed Privately Owned Public Space by Sam Wynne
William Whyte once wrote of Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) as places relatively empty of human interaction despite the fact that their origins are formed within the public arena. Many of these spaces are poorly designed for the public use that they are supposed to encourage, mostly as a result of a miss-match of cultural norms. Through private control, POPs sit in various corners of the city, relatively unused and wasted. Many of these are plazas that do not require landscape redesigns, but rather are in need of a system of accountability and follow-through in what this thesis defines as public design in order to diversify the nature of their future use as equitable spaces, rather than as a display of corporate visibility.
These findings are found through an analysis of the theoretical concepts of Dolores Hayden, Margaret Crawford, Jan Gehl, and William Whyte. They are central to a definition of what is public, and what makes public space. City planning documents illustrate the systems in place that affect the public-ness of POPS, as well as various fieldwork observations. Ways are then uncovered that enforce a system where a new imagining of the public as designers can effectively change these spaces. This is what is meant by the term public design in the thesis. It is imagined that this new system of accountability can assess POPS in a way that enforces the public’s role as owner, user, and designer of these important, diverse, and plentiful spaces.
The thesis analyzes POPS through the idea that the public was neither present in the original design or the ongoing negotiation of these plazas and parks. Currently the process of POPS design is inaccessible to the general public that eventually claims the space as public through their use. In excluding the public from the essential process of negotiating the sociability of the space, and designing the form and appearance space, the public is rendered an outlier in having a say over the over 500 open spaces in the city that are privately owned, but are mandated to remain public in nature. The thesis explores the power and process of POPS design through the hands of people as equal to the power of the government and the private developer. Through an in-depth analysis of four distinct POPS in New York, and the evolution of POPS in the city generally, the research makes connections between the regulations in place that enforce and codify the design of public spaces, and the people who engage with these spaces. This finding is then used as a way to point toward a more public open space within this private realm. Interpretations of public, degrees of public, community, public design, and regulation are defined within the context of the current system, as well as acknowledging that POPS are an essential, yet relatively young creation within the urban realm.
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Ways are then uncovered that enforce a system where a new imagining of the public as designers can effectively change these spaces.
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BIOS Julia Borowicz
is an urban geographer with experience in urban planning and non profit social justice work. Her work focuses on critical sociospatial design interventions that engage with issues of postnationalism, spaces of inclusion/ exclusion and spatial geographies that foster multiple belonging. She is particularly interested in the production of public space as a medium for cultural values, ideologies and subjectivities.
Kat Horstmann
is an urbanist exploring the potential for encounters with beauty to inform practice. Her thesis is centered on individual understandings of where beauty is offered, encountered, and created. Her thesis, “Beauty is a Verb�, challenges the assumption that beauty is a luxury, and positions experiences of beauty as essential to equitable urban practice. horsk813@newschool.edu
boroj211@newschool.edu
Katerina Vaseva
was born in Bulgaria. She is an architect, web designer and researcher, and has lived and worked in Sofia, Istanbul and New York. She is interested in utopian/ dystopian narratives, technology, robots!!!, and the thin line between dreams and reality, as seen through urban space. Her other interests include comics, graphic novels, digital narrative techniques and writing and she is currently exploring ways to combine them with her urban studies. vasek011@newschool.edu
Larissa Begault
is originally from Belgium but spent most of her life in London. She has worked on various urban research projects in Santiago and Havana focussed on emergency housing schemes and community lead environmental projects, she then practiced as an architect for three years in london. Her work now, focuses on concepts of multiple belonging and different notions of citizenship working towards a more just, representative and participatory democracy. begal436@newschool.edu
Nadia Elokdah
has several years experience practicing architecture in the Greater Philadelphia area as well as teaching as an Adjunct Professor at Temple University School of Architecture. She is the author of Identity Crisis: Creating a Contemporary Bathhouse in Cairo (2010) and continues to work on issues of identity and diversity shaping our cities in her current research at Parsons. elokn329@newschool.edu https://www.linkedin.com/pub/ nadia-elokdah/4a/33a/496
Renae Reynolds
MA, Theories of Urban Practice Graduate candidate Renae immersed herself in practice early on in her graduate career. As an intern with the Rockaway Waterfront alliance she activates her scholarship by engaging with community members on the peninsula in strategies that support equitable, sustainable and resilient design practices in post hurricane Sandy recovery efforts. diggr075@newschool.edu
Nora Elmarzouky
Rania Dalloul
elman299@newschool.edu nora.elmarzouky@gmail.com
dallr867@newschool.edu
grew up between Cairo, Egypt and PA. BA Tufts University 2006 – Major: international relations with a concentration in global conflict, cooperation, and justice; minor: Arabic. Research, participation, and activism related to Arab families and youth, environment, democracy, culture, history, society, crosscultural dialogue, curriculum design, and facilitator of learning [in Egypt]We need to rethink the purpose and implementation of schooling.
Sam Wynne
Originally from Raleigh, North Carolina, Sam Wynne received his BA in Geography with a concentration in Urban Planning, and a minor in Urban Studies from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His thesis looks at the role of the public as designers of open space in the private realm. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/ hp/?dnr=v8x5pWP6P53mg1JY8F3pWIrHFcyg1Sq-gqm wynnw461@newschool.edu
is Palestinian-Lebanese, raised in Kuwait, with a BA in Political Science and Philosophy from Concordia University, and a research and educational practice with Palestinian refugee communities. She is cofounding part of Creative Space Beirut, a non-profit, free school for aspiring designers. Devoted to inclusive practices and literary activism, she aims to co-construct narratives and lived environments with marginalized communities.
Sara Wallis Minard
grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and completed her BA from McGill University, Montreal, in Anthropology and Cultural Studies. Her professional experience has included international work in the textile and fashion industries, where she had the privilege to travel extensively. This inspired an appreciation for cities, and and interest in rethinking access to economic development and labor opportunities. www.linkedin.com/in/saraminard minas570@newschool.edu
Parsons School of Design http://www.newschool.edu/parsons/ School of Design Strategies http://sds.parsons.edu/#highlights Design Dialogues http://sds.parsons.edu/designdialogues/ Theories of Urban Practice http://sds.parsons.edu/urbanpractice/
Book Design
Gamar Markarian Alexa Jensen
Cover Design Katerina Vaseva Victoria Marshall
Š Copyright 2015 by Parsons The New School All rights reserved. Theories of Urban Practice: Actionable Theory may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
MA Theories of Urban Practice
School of Design Strategies
MA Theories of Urban Practice
School of Design Strategies