Redistributing Access: Local Food + Play Ecologies in Jacksonville, FL by Genesis M. Rodgers

Redistributing Access: Local Food + Play Ecologies in Jacksonville, FL Genesis M. Rodgers ARCH 4011 / Fall 2020 / Design-Thinking Design Research Manual for Spring 2021 Thesis Studio Architecture as Ecology with Prof. Lucia Phinney

Kings Road, New Town

TOPIC

research questions annotated bibliography literature review

INSPIRING WORK three precedent studies

JACKSONVILLE, FL

CONTENTS

regional map historical timeline

NEW TOWN SUCCESS ZONE concept diagrams

UNDERSTANDING SITE neighborhood map landscape scenarios

PROJECTIONS workflow

TOPIC

Food deserts are a result of selective distribution, not food scarcity. Urban deserts are a result of selective distribution, not resource scarcity.

‘Redistributing Access’ is about designing small-scale interventions to increase connectivity between existing food, play, and education landscapes in New Town, an African-American neighborhood in Jacksonville’s urban core. Numerous industrial parks and vacant lots surround New Town homes, providing few outdoor spaces residents can share. As a reaction against racialized urban abandonment since the 1960s, small-scale design proposals for New Town will increase feasibility and allow for gradual social adjustments within the community. Since 2008, the New Town Success Zone social program has worked to support educational programming for students of all ages. My project aims to amplify their mission by enhancing public spaces.

New Townâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s legacy of municipal neglect and its resulting urban vacancies require acknowledgement â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in the form of reclaimed urban spaces that cultivate better resource distribution. Broad Street, Downtown Jacksonville

Food + play + education towards public-wellness. 7

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bartley, Abel A. “Keeping the Faith: Race, Politics, and Social Development in Jacksonville, Florida, 1940-1970,” Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000.

This book examines the political struggle of African-Americans in Jacksonville, Florida during Reconstruction in the 20th century and debunks the myth that black s were ‘passive victims of the Jim Crow South’. Historical anecdotes and other political figures illustrate the spirit of activism and demands for meaningful economic development. Considering the contemporary conditions of municipal abandonment in Jacksonville’s urban core, this book illuminates a history that has been spatially erased. Stories like these should be commemorated and highlighted in my thesis proposal.

Bulit, David. Abandoned Florida project. 2020. https://www.abandonedfl.com/?s= jacksonville. Accessed Ocober 2020.

David Bulit’s photography project documents abandoned, destroyed, or demolished historical places throughout the state of Florida. These images of urban abandonment show physical weathering but also indicate spaces that were not worthy of preservation or continued investment. With further reading, what materials are most common? What program types are commonly abandoned? What social or political events contribute to abandonment? What do these histories reveal about current conditions in Jacksonville’s urban core?

Interboro Partners firm website. http://www.interboropartners.com. Accessed October 2020.

Interboro is a an architecture, urban design and planning firm based in Brooklyn and Detroit. Their participatory, place-based approach emphasizes inclusion, community partnerships, and empathetic research. The theme of ‘redeveloped vacancies’ addresses the cause of urban abandonment: 20th century exodus to the suburbs. The results of this are highly racialized and politicized. I appreciate the way this firm tackles wicked problems with small, incremental, inexpensive interventions for Detroit in response to its urban residential exodus and for low income communities in the Bronx.

Litman, Todd. “Affordable-Accessible Housing in a Dynamic City,“ Victoria Transport Policy Institute, 5 June 2020. Digital access October 2020.

Compared to Wolff’s housing market analysis methods from 1953, Litman’s analysis in 2020 tackles tenant affordability over industry profitability. Dynamic city planning principles and other development strategies present more foresight than Wolff’s analysis. Also, the acknowledgment of low income neighborhoods is absent from Wolff’s book – were low income neighborhoods non-existent or unrecognized in 1950s America? Might Litman’s acknowledgement indicate changing social values about equity and inclusion? How has public planning policy in Jacksonville changed to reflect or counter this?

Local Initiatives Support Corporation website. https://www.lisc.org. Accessed November 2020.

LISC Jacksonville is a creative leader in community revitalization and a strong advocate for equitable development in diverse low-income communities. The company lends capital, awards grants, conducts market research, and advocates for policy in Jacksonville’s urban core. This organization represents a key stakeholder in community development – corporate investment. Even with a mission oriented toward low-income neighborhoods, corporations operate to generate profit. This isn’t always evil, but sometimes controversial. What projects has LISC funded that have been successful? What do they deem unfeasible project investments, and why? What neighborhoods characteristics attract organizations like this? How does an investor’s interests influence community changes? What do community members think about corporate investment changes?

Massey, Douglas S. “American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.” E-book, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.31525. Accessed 8 Nov 2020.

Commissioned to systematically study racial segregation in the 1980 census, Massey concludes that “racial residential segregation is the principal structural feature of American society responsible for the perpetuation of urban poverty and remains the primary cause of racial inequality in the United States,” (iix). For Massey to have made this claim in 1993 and for it to still ring so true is proof that racism prevails in the US. Later chapters in the book explain certain cultural and policy failures as a means to provide insights for moving forward. Lessons from this work will be reiterated in my analysis of New Town.

Paarlberg, Robert . “Food Politics, What Everyone Needs to Know,” Second Edition, Oxford University Press, 2013. Kindle e-book access.

From the perspective of a political scientist (rather than a social scientist, biologist, economist, or journalist), this book broadly addresses food politics, considering global and local scales, material and cultural agendas, and the tension between agriculture and industry. Paarlberg’s work provides a framework to analyze the food system operating in Jacksonville’s urban core. I need to read more to excavate insight about obesity, food freshness, access and transportation, market types and affordability, and policy advocacy. This reading will reveal program types that could be meaningful and meaningless in New Town.

Slocum, Rachel. “Thinking Race Through Corporeal Feminist Theory: Divisions and Intimacies at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market” 2008, in Food and Culture: A Reader. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Analyzing the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market, Slocum explores how racialized bodies emerge in divided and intimate food spaces. Her analysis contrasts literature on ‘embodied geographies’ by deploying feminist theory about corporeal materiality, rather than representations constructed through performative relations. Her paper directs discourse about physiological experiences away from only intangible meanings and towards spatial movement, clustering, and intersection. Reflecting on physical and biochemical properties in food, in the space, and between bodies reminds designers to consider the race is spatialized in existing spaces and to advocate for more inclusive physical spaces in their projects.

Weyeneth, Robert R. “The Architecture of Racial Segregation: The Challenges of Preserving the Problematical Past,” University of California Press, The Public Historian, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Fall 2005), pp. 11-44 2005.

Using the perspective of historic preservation, this article proposes a framework for examining racial segregation as a spatial system and analyzes the influences of white supremacy and Jim Crow architecture on everyday life for African-Americans. This article uniquely addresses blacks’ philosophy of avoiding segregated spaces and of establishing alternative spaces. Another challenge is recognizing this architecture as “oddly invisible” rather than absent. In other words, there is a tendency to forget the material legacy of these structures in contemporary America. What spaces have been forgotten in New Town, and why? How do I-95, the rail yard, vacancies, and municipal buildings work to overshadow the historic urban fabric? Where can we see specific examples of Jim Crow architecture in New Town?

Wolff, Reinhold P. “A Short Term Forecast of the Housing Market in Jacksonville, Florida,” Division of Housing Research, June 1953, digital access.

Conducted before official Consolidation (of Jacksonville’s urban core and Duval County) in 1970, this report presents a new, cheaper statistical method for estimating the economic climate of regional housing markets. Introductory comments illustrate the motivations of this study and its primary audiences – being local governments but also the Department of Defense in Washington DC. Housing construction in post-war America was closely related to the defense construction industry, which reveals the motivations driving development. This book doesn’t explicitly address race (that I’ve read yet), but rather characterizes the start of the American suburban housing boom. For me, this explains how Jacksonville has developed since the mid-20th century and now suffers from urban sprawl.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Since observing a graduate landscape architecture review exploring ‘food justice + racial topographies’, I’ve been curious about cultural food studies. Using my anthropology background, I want to pursue a design thesis about food access. I also want to study my hometown, Jacksonville FL, because it’s a site that I’m intimately familiar with but haven’t critically analyzed, especially beyond my own lived experience. I also want to focus on a neighborhood that needs care and attention – New Town – because I’m deeply invested in diversity + equity through design. In a high school studio lab, I designed an adaptive re-use aquaponics-farm/market/restaurant/co-op for downtown Jax; I wanted to expand this project here. With these elements, I figured I could increase food accessibility by inserting a large market co-op into New Town. However, my research subverts that assumption. Bartley’s book explicates Jacksonville’s racial history (through political elections), which is mostly absent from the whiter suburbs of Jacksonville - where I grew up. This racial history has shaped a spatial footprint reflective of political bias and municipal neglect during the 20th century. Slocum, Weyneth, and Massey similarly illustrate the spatial and embodied experience of race for African-Americans. Housing segregation, discriminatory resource distribution, and cultural separation characterize parts of life in the urban core. In this way, food access is a single issue within a multi-layered racial phenomenon that reorganizes my design priorities. Further inquiry into these urban conditions revealed an architecture of vacancy and abandonment. Bulit’s photography project portrays historical remnants as a network of forgotten spaces, with a number in Jacksonville’s Urban Core and the Northside. Interboro’s folio of urban revitalization projects offers inspiring ways to address how these vacancies 1) don’t generate property tax revenues for the city and 2) render the neighborhood landscape to ecological carelessness. Other Interboro planning projects, Local Initiatives Support Corporation’s (LISC) website, and Litman’s housing report relate to the call for a new urbanity in disenfranchised neighborhoods by providing vision for ‘revitalization’.

My thesis aims to address race, revitalization, community, and accessibility through the (spatial) lenses of food, play, education, and public-wellness. Paarlberg’s book, “Food Politics” is helpful for understanding and prioritizing health and wellness through food. When education and play can be used to amplify the effects of food access and healthy lifestyles, community revitalization becomes more comprehensive, and hopefully more sustainable. 11

food access

How has the changing value of industrialized food shaped our conceptions about social categories? What are the implications of this on marginalized urban housing communities’ access to food?

ecological beauty

How to measure the effectiveness of green space? What existing spaces + programs offer potential, versus designing new construction? How to approach incremental ‘landscape’ interventions?

educational excellence

What opportunities are there to engage K-12 students, as well as post-secondary students at Edward Waters College? When education is central to a community, what processes are made easier?

economic revitalization

What does a comprehensive economic redevelopment proposal look like? What is already being done? What economic elements do community members, political leaders, and corporate figures prioritize? Where can we meet in the middle?

historic commemoration

As a result of urban renewal, some stories were uprooted, displaced, or completely forgetten. Who wants to tell their untold story? How?

public memory

Considering texts about ‘design anthropology’ as a methodology, where can I extract field research that engages local users? Is the conventional ‘community-engagement’ model useful here?

circumstance

site

program

poverty

assembly incremnetal interventions

Jacksonville, Florida

people-first streets

food access

pocket parks

structural racism

‘green’ pavilions

bus stops, sidewalks, crosswalks, seating

New Town

public health + well-being

educational development

urban renewal or urban vacancy

ecological beauty public realm

industrial park

play + exercise

architecture of abadonment

temporary, mobile farmer’s market

local art murals + black culture facade rehabilitation

gardening inner-city neglect cultural erasure

disconnected

outdoor gathering

planting trees

Edward Waters College

public memory + historic commemoration

local + democratic

Harlem, NYC Pittsburgh, PA South Los Angeles

wayfinding system

INSPIRATIONAL WORK

The design development process should be accountable to the retired veteranâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dog too.

DESTINATION CRENSHAW

South Los Angeles, California Perkins + Will, 2020 In the early 2010s, plans to extend the LA metro line through Hyde Park paired with a $500 million development project upset many longtime residents for fear of gentrification. To combat cultural erasure, this pedestrian museum engages the local community to recognize black history in South LA. Adding more parks along Crenshaw Avenue, rehabilitating decayed street facades, inviting artists to complete over 100 murals or installations, creating construction jobs, and developing an experiential narrative have inspired local residents to embrace the project.

BEWARE OF GENTRIFICATION takeaways + the threat of gentrification became a generator for collective imagination + cultural commemoration + local, public art + pocket parks countered industrialization around the new metro line construction + design process was co-authored by local govâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t leaders, longtime residents, leaders in Black activism, and architects

1.3 MILE OPEN AIR MUSEUM potential + ‘facade rehabilitation’ (or public art) make stories buried during urban renewal visible. whose stories need to be told in new town?

DESTINATION CRENSHAW

CHICANO PARK Barrio Logan, San Diego, California community residents, 2020 In the 1950s, growing industry along the San Diego Bay waterfront, US Navy base expansion, and the construction of Interstate-5 displaced thousands of Chicano Mexican-American residents. In 1970, community members learned their informal park was going to be turned into a parking lot, hundreds of Chicanos occupied the park for twelve days and reclaimed it. Activated by local art and nearby businesses, the park provides a collective urban backyard for residences with little greenery around them. In this way, Chicano Park is made most powerful by simply gathering families to spend time together in nature.

TEMPORAL TRANSFORMATIONS

CHICANO PARK

INFORMATION NETWORKS takeaways + through neighborhood commercialization and displacement, white supremacy is woven into many urban fabrics + programmatic longevity requires community members to become personally invested in the project + outdoor gathering spaces inspire culture, which can breed economic opportunties nearby

SOCIAL CHOREOGRAPHY potential + community resiliency emerges when there is a cause to believe in. what program would excite disengaged or disenfranchised new town residents?

CHICANO PARK

SIDEWALK TORONTO Toronto, Ontario, Canada Sidewalk Labs, 2017 An Alphabet Company firm based in Brooklyn, NYC spent three years developing a 250-page master plan for Toronto’s downtown waterfront. The plan proposes large-scale interventions, including urban innovations for mobility, the public realm, buildings, housing, and sustainability. Despite 18 months of community engagement in Toronto, the project raised many concerns. Citizens advocated to “protect Toronto from Google’s corporate takeover.” While the project was defunded in early 2020, this precedent emphasizes the importance of ‘public’ partnerships - corporate, political, and all.

PEOPLE-FIRST STREETS takeaways + innvoative urban deisgn must be comprehensive, addressing economics, housing, and ecology + the community cares about the interests of development investors, and when itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Google, they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like it + implementation phasing and scale depends on community readiness as much as, if not more than, funding

potential + corporate funding is often controversial, while the realistic outcomes of a government funded initiative can be a gamble. what jacksonville initiatives have succeeded, failed, and why?

SIDEWALK TORONTO

JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA

A growing city like Jacksonville, FL is not thriving if it ignores the needs of marginalized residents.

Atlantic Ocean

JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA

NEW TOWN SUCCESS ZONE

Public-wellness is a collective ideal that starts with the development of individuals. Public-wellness directly depends on equitable access to food, play, and education.

PROGRAM INVENTORY LIVE single-family homes front yards convenience stores

fencing

WORK + PLAY

cars, buses

schools + school parks

jobs

fast-food

industrial parks Rail Yard

“PLACE” VACANCIES parking lots

empty plots

abandoned buldings food desert

wide roads farmer’s market pocket parks pedestrian rest stops

green pavilions small gardens

OPPORTUNITIES

NTSZ PRIORITIES

NTSZ PROGRAMS + STAKEHOLDERS In 2008, Mayor John Peyton commissioned a comprehensive community revitalization program called the New Town Success Zone. The organization proposed a mission + strategy with key stakeholders, which provide the base for this diagram.

how might existing education + green spaces be better connected for different age groups? 37

UNDERSTANDING SITE

Urban land presents an opportunity for ecological cultivation that replaces abandoned vacancies.

NEW TOWN + THE RAIL YARD

FOOD-SCAPES PLAY-SCAPES EDUCATION-SCAPES

Interstate construction and a busy railroad yard invited industrial development to New Town during the 20th century. Now, a disjoined network of parks, schools, and food markets have bred intense poverty, high crime, and poor health outcomes. However, the spaces in between these same networks present design opportunities for food + playscapes.

how can residents reclaim an industrial business district?

MOM, WHATâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S FOR DINNER? New Town residents live in a food desert, but food scarcity is not the issue. Inequitable distribution and market options have distanced this neighborhood from healthy food options. Small scale food internventions are a grassroots solution.

LETâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S LEARN ABOUT HEALTH OUTSIDE Education is a significant priority for the New Town community. Using educational programs as well as educational spaces, multiuse food + play pavilioins can be used to promote healthy lifestyles.

THAT SPACE IS YOURS TOO

Jacksonvilleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s urban core presents a paradoxical architecture of displacement and vacancy. Empty spaces carved out for development can be reclaimed and cultivated for more safe, accessible play.

LANDSCAPE SCENARIOS

PROJECTIONS

Economies of material access must be creative and responsive and inclusive.

FEB MA

research

analyze

document site visit inventories map existing ecologies social, architectural, green, food measure + illustrate impact of New Town Success Zone

id st

collage historical images, events, and quotes with contemporary findings

AR APR explore

design

research materials + their contexts

clarify material asssemblies

map enhanced ecological ideals

represent social + physical spaces with design additions

dentify most relevent takeholders + partners

share with New Town leadership

ocus scope of proposal to most relevant programs

relate proposal to existing + potential initiatives in New Town

CITATIONS

Anguiano, Marco. “The Battle of Chicano Park: A Brief History of the Takeover,” Accessed 18 October 2020. http://www.chicano-park.com/cpscbattleof.html destinationcrenshaw.la/ Accessed 16 October 2020. Copyright, 2020 Destination Crenshaw. Diaz, Eduardo. “Fifty Years Ago, Fed Up With the City’s Neglect, a San Diego Community Rose Up to Create Chicano Park,” smithsonianmag.com. 28 April, 2020. Accessed 18 October 2020. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/fifty-years-ago-fedcitys-neglect-san-diego-community-rose-create-chicano-park-180974764/ Doctoroff, Daniel L. “Why we’re no longer pursuing the Quayside project — and what’s next for Sidewalk Labs,” May 7, 2020. Accessed 19 October 2020. https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/why-were-no-longer-pursuing-the-quayside-project-and-what-s-next-for-sidewalk-labs-9a61de3fee3a Easter, Makeda. “Destination Crenshaw art project aims to reclaim the neighborhood for black L.A.” Jan. 30, 2019. Accessed 16 October 2020. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-destination-crenshaw-20190130-story.html Hickman, Matt. “Destination Crenshaw celebrates the culture of South Los Angeles as it parades down the community’s main drag” May 1, 2020. Accessed 16 October 2020. https:// www.archpaper.com/2020/05/destination-crenshaw-feature/ “National Landmark, Local Treasure,” Copyright 2020, San Diego Tourism Authority. Accessed 18 October 2020. https://www.sandiego.org/articles/parks-gardens/chicano-park.asp “Sidewalk Toronto, A Sidewalk Labs Project.” Accessed Oct. 19 2020. sidewalktoronto.ca. New Town Success Zone, 2018. ntszjax.org. Accessed 7 December 2020. Population Numbers by Race, https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents Walker, Alissa. “Sidewalk Labs ‘smart’ city was destined to fail,” May 7, 2020. Accessed 19 October 2020. https://archive.curbed.com/2020/5/7/21250678/sidewalk-labs-torontosmart-city-fail https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/cartographic-boundary. html https://maps.coj.net/DuvalCivilPlanning/#