The Green New Deal & Resilient Dwelling In Cincinnati | Asst. Professor Ryan Ludwig ARCH 4002 - 004

The Green New Deal & Resilient Dwelling in Cincinnati: An Integrative Reconstructive Approach

Poster design by Sarah Bloom / Creative Action Network

ARCH 4002-004 - Assistant Professor, Ryan Ludwig STUDENTS: Sneha Ameya Cameron Berling Maya Dakel Jakob Evans Sam Gottsegen Nadia Kmetich

Hannah Loftspring Spencer Morgan Maddi Nuss Sabrina Ramsay Hajar Saksaka Josty Sieverding

Will Smith Jacqueline Stapleton Trevor Strohm Jaelynn Tibbitts

“What imparts a profoundly critical function to ecology is the question raised by man’s destructive activities...The truth is that man has produced imbalances not only in nature but more fundamentally in his relations with his fellow man – in the very structure of his society. To state this thought more precisely: the imbalances man has produced in the natural world are caused by the imbalances he has produced in the social world.”

–Murray Bookchin, from “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” (1964)

“All flourishing is mutual.”

–Robin Wall Kimmerer, from “The Service Berry” (2020)

This building design architectural research studio explores an integrative reconstructive approach to the design of urban housing in the Lower Price Hill neighborhood of Cincinnati, OH, whereby architecture may facilitate opportunities for varying points of inter-personal and eco-personal spatiality,1 helping to foster sustained community resiliency through intentional organizational, programmatic, technological, and aesthetic configurations.

This reconsideration of urban dwelling explores alternative models that challenge current modes of market driven for-profit housing development and the industrialized food system – regarding them as different aspects of the same fight for sustained community resiliency. The benefits of enacting such an alignment, in conjunction with a social-ecological approach,1 has the potential to address aspects of the primary goals of the Green New Deal by reducing effective energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, urban heat loads and solid waste, while simultaneously engendering access to fresh healthy food, affordable living arrangements, social resiliency, clean air, environmental restoration, and “employment” opportunities to residents through the direct sale or Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscriptions of food grown within the neighborhood.

In total this integrative reconstructive approach aims to adopt a more inclusive, self-supporting and selfsustaining footprint that is at once hyper-localized (i.e. street, neighborhood, city), but also acknowledges its participation in many diverse networks of planetary exchange (i.e. geographic, climatologic, atmospheric, hydrologic, energetic, economic, etc.). The studio explores such an integrative reconstructive approach to urban dwelling, by proposing forms of more collaborative living (i.e. co-living, co-housing, intentional communities, cooperatives, ecovillages, age in place, etc.) and on site urban food cultivation, asking the primary questions: How might architecture engender lasting opportunities to co-produce sustaining, inclusive, resilient, equitable, and regenerative approaches to dwelling in the contemporary city through models of more collaborative living and urban food cultivation?

How can architecture sponsor new and strengthen existing relations amongst residents toward the creation of more equitable social and environmental urban neighborhoods?

This design studio participated in the “Green New Deal Superstudio” sponsored by the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) in association with the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology and others. Through its participation in the Green New Deal Superstudio the studio contributed to a national conversation amongst different collegiate institutions, professional design offices and local community partners, concerning the spatial manifestation and visualization of principles and policy ideas encapsulated within the Green New Deal (H. Res. 109 of the 116th Congress).

The underserved and severely impoverished community of the Lower Price Hill Neighborhood provided an effective area of investigation for the studio to consider how targeted social-ecological investment in the form of strategic architectural intervention aligned with goals of the GND, may play a part in reinforcing and fostering forms of community, ecological reclamation, restoration, and resiliency. The studio also collaborated with local community organization Community Matters and the Civic Garden Center of Greater Cincinnati to foster community interaction and to help identify existing assets in the community that we might help to amplify through our project proposals. “inter” or “eco” –personal spatiality here refers to relationships or communication between people and between people and ecologies brought about by specific organizations and/or occupations of space.

2 See Murray Bookchin, “What is Social Ecology?” in Social Ecology and Communalism (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007) 1

Hannah Loftspring

Josty Sieverding

Will Smith

Sabrina Ramsey

Nadia Kmetich

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Sam Gottsegen

OHIO RIVER

Jaelynn Tibbitts

Hajar Saksaka

Cameron Berling Spencer Morgan

Trevor Strohm

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Jacqueline Stapleton

Maddi Nuss

Sneha Ameya

Maya Dakel