It Takes A Village_Connor Bussick

It Takes A Village Connor Bussick Lyceum 2020: Belt Tightening - Bungalows for the Millennial Family Faculty Advisor: Terry Boling The people who live in the bungalows of South Chicago are facing many challenges that result from a history of systematic discrimination and lack of investment in the area. These challenges lead to symptoms like low equity, instability, lack of vital businesses, poor nutrition and vacant land. The people of South Chicago nevertheless feel great pride in where they live. One does not have to look far before finding people in the area with inspiring stories of passion and innitiative making their home a better place to live for themselves and their communities. With my project I decided to capitalize on this grass roots energy by creating a community merit system that would pool peoples’ resources and efforts along with a meeting house that connects people in order to create positive change over time.

This community merit system would be in the form of an application on a smart phone that rewards people for their efforts toward building passive production systems for the neighborhood. “Missions� such as collecting re-purposed windows, weeding the garden, or planting edible perennial plants would be rewarded with community merit. People could use their merit to request a mission or have more influence over neighborhood voting, for instance, whether to build a green house or a chicken coop in the vacant lot.

Section of Meeting House

My architectural strategy is to avoid meddling with peoples’ homes because they are very individual and personal. Instead I propose to build a meeting house and a caretakers home in one of the vacant lots in the center of the block. The meeting house would be a place to gather, grow food, host speakers, hold meetings, workshops and neighborhood cookouts. Adjacent to the meeting house would be the caretaker’s residence. The caretaker would be the one who manages the progress of the community merit system. They would be in charge of stream lining projects by getting permits and managing the requests for missions and community votes as well as being a neighborhood mentor. Both structures would be made of sustainable materials like cross laminated timber along with salvaged items brought in by the community like reclaimed windows for the greenhouse.

Elevation 1/20 Scale

2nd Floor Plan 1/20 Scale

1st Floor Plan 1/20 Scale

Over time this community merit system will result in a supplemental economy that builds equity in the neighborhood through means of passive production, small cottage industry, practical education, and the pooling of resources. The important part is that the community will have the power to decide what they create and will feel pride and ownership in what they build and therefore will value it and sustain it.