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Weedscapes: When Commercial Cannabis is Your Neighbor
Daniel C. Froehlich, MSUP
Jonah Bregstone
NATURE
Land Imaginaries and Israel’s Educational Map
Lealla Solomon
16 — 19
NATURE
20 — 25
STREET
Saturday
Kurt Steinhouse
STREET 10 — 15 28 — 29
26 — 27
IN-BETWEEN
New Paradigms of Residual Space
Douglas Woodward
IN-BETWEEN
The New American (Paradoxical) Escape Guide: Illustrated
Dakota Smith
ARCHITECTURE
FICTION-scape
Jaasiel Duarte-Terrazas
ARCHITECTURE
Regenerative Food Parks: A Proposal for the Akaki Territory
Elini Kalapoda
ARCHITECTURE
Airport Religious Spaces and Meditation Rooms
Kevin Costa
HUMANS
Parallel Cityscapes: The Aesthetics of a Gentrifying Bushwick
Luke McNamara
Generations of Planning: An Interview
Eshti Sookram
HUMANS
Garażowa Alternatywa
Nikolas Michael
58 — 61
HUMANS
The Saturday Staycation
Ethan Floyd
Mish min Baris ana min Salaam: Centering Marginalized Identity as Political Speech in Contemporary Egyptian Rap
62 — 65
HUMANS
66 — 69
SOCIETY 52 — 57 70 — 75
SOCIETY
Daniel Wexler
78 — 83
SOCIETY
Jenna Dublin-Boc
84 — 85
SOCIETY
City and Desire
HaoChe Hung
INVISIBLE 86 — 87
The Digital Nomadic Footprint in Cincinnati
INVISIBLE
Mia Winther-Tamaki
VOL.
33
We stand witness to the symphony of urbanism and planning — a dance of progress, hope, and innovation. Within the intricate tapestry of our cities, we are confronted with intricate issues like opposing views of land ownership, wounded geography suffering from the effects of climate change, and unjust, limited access to green space. But amid these challenges lies a beacon of hope — a collective determination to weave a future where harmony thrives, cities embrace their citizens with open arms, and sustainable solutions become our guiding star. Together, we shall transcend boundaries, blend facts with foresight, and venture towards an urban panorama that flourishes like never before.
In the spirit of exploration, we welcome you to SCAPES — an invitation to dive into the depths of spaces, places, and ideas. SCAPES is more than a theme; it's an open canvas where the imagination takes flight. As you embark on this journey, know that SCAPES allows for boundless interpretations. Be it through thoughtful essays, striking photography, or visionary designs, SCAPES invites you to defy conventions, redefine boundaries, and dream beyond the confines of reality. As you move through these pages, submissions are set within "scape" sub-layers including nature, the street, the in-between, architecture, humans, society, and the invisible, illustrating our contributor’s courageous expeditions through a breadth of urban stories.
As future planners, urbanists, and practitioners, the path ahead beckons with promise and potential. Collaboration shall be the compass guiding your steps, as you discover the strength of unity in forging new urban realities. Embrace innovation as your ally, for within its folds lies the power to unravel urban dilemmas. Yet, as you delve into this realm of endless imagination, remember the essence of humility and the art of listening. In the whispers of space around us, the city speaks its silent wisdom. Amidst the rush of progress, lend an ear to the stories of those who inhabit these urban landscapes, for their voices shall echo in your designs, shaping cities that nurture and inspire.
This issue would not be possible without the submissions of the twenty-one students, professionals, and creatives we are lucky to feature. As you read Vol. 33, we ask you to be willing to listen carefully and immerse yourself in the elegance and profound nuances between humans and space.
If you celebrate Thanksgiving, you likely have an unknowing connection to the exurban corner of southeastern Massachusetts where I grew up. The area’s sandy soil and high water table are particularly amenable to cultivating cranberries, which grow on tight, crawling vines in low-lying, swampy depressions called bogs. The region produces a disproportionate amount of the global cranberry supply, and the industry commands a prominent place in the local economy and culture; my hometown’s master plan estimates that nearly 50 percent of the municipality’s land area is dedicated to cranberry agriculture (SRPEDD 2017). This becomes particularly obvious during the autumnal harvest: the bogs flooded with icy water, the submerged berries beaten off their vines with specialized machinery, the floating crop siphoned off the surface, all in a strange, mechanical-yet-pastoral ballet. The patchy seas of flaming crimson that result are etched into my memory as an integral element of my erstwhile agrarian landscape (Figure 1).
What was decidedly not part of that landscape, however, was commercial cannabis cultivation, though that cannot be said for many not-so-differently-situated communities in northern California (Figure 2). The Counties of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity constitute the Emerald Triangle, an historic epicenter of cannabis cultivation described in one place as “the cannabis bread bread basket of the Pacific Northwest” (Lee 2012). Originally associated with the counterculture and backto-the-land movements emerging in the 1960’s, cannabis cultivation in the region became an increasingly lucrative economic activity with the collapse of the local timber and fishing industries and rising levels of drug enforcement in the decades following (Corva 2014). Experts agree that, though difficult to quantify, the Emerald Triangle’s legacy cannabis industry contributes billions of dollars annually to local economies otherwise lacking in opportunity (Short Gianotti et al. 2017).
California became the first American state to legalize medicaluse cannabis in 1996 through ballot initiative, doing so without benefit of a comprehensive, statewide regulatory framework and setting off a two- decade cannabis industry free-for-all known as the Green Rush. Not until 2018 did California finally establish such a system for both medical- and recreational-use cannabis, finally positioning local governments to directly regulate cannabis-related activities through their zoning and other police powers.
Recognizing the fundamental socioeconomic role cannabis cultivation plays for its communities, legacy growing jurisdictions drafted their local regulations to include special accommodations for pre-existing cultivators. In the ordinances it adopted starting in 2018, Mendocino County created a unique zoning mechanism allowing for the establishment of Cannabis Accommodation Combining Districts. Through a process functionally equivalent to a rezoning, neighborhoods with legacy cannabis cultivation could petition to have the special district overlaid on contiguous parcels of consenting property owners The combining district relaxed to 20 feet the otherwise required 100foot setbacks between cannabis grows and residential structures on separate parcels and the 50-foot setbacks from property lines; with a discretionary land use permit, the property line setback could be absolved altogether. The County enacted four such districts in December 2018, thereby creating neighborhoods where commercial cannabis cultivation could remain uniquely integrated into the local landscape.
Having spent a disquieting amount of time researching local cannabis land use regulations, I find this whole situation rather intriguing. So, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) -based methods, I set out to investigate: what would be the impact onto legacy cannabis cultivation in these combineding districts if not for these special accommodations?
My study area is the combineding district in Laytonville, a rural, residential neighborhood in north-central Mendocino County. Mendocino is a relatively data-poor jurisdiction, so I had to build my spatial datasets from scratch. I georeferenced and digitized planning department figures and maps to create parcel boundaries within the combining district; I then crossreferenced the parcels against the jurisdiction’s online property search applications. From there, I identified and digitized residential structures from readily-available aerial imagery and then examined that same imagery for evidence of cannabis cultivation on each parcel. A suspected grow site needed to conform to one of four typologies common to legacy cannabis cultivation in northern California to be included in the analysis (Figure 3). With my custom-
built datasets, I first calculated the 100foot, offsite residential structure buffer and then added the 50-foot property line buffer in order to quantify the reduction of usable area on each parcel (that is, the area not occupied by a residential structure) and the reduction in existing cultivation that would result from the otherwise required setbacks without the combining district (Figure 4).
FIGURE 3a - A suspected grow site needed to conform to one of four typologies (not mutually exclusive) common to legacy cannabis cultivation in northern California to be included in the analysis:
(a) regularly-spaced plants or ground disturbance within a perforation in the forest canopy; (b) regularly-spaced plants or ground disturbance within an enclosure for screening and/or security purposes; (c) a series of agricultural structures like greenhouses or hoophouses; (d) a smaller agricultural structure adjacent to regularlyspaced plants or ground disturbance.
4 - A
view of
setbacks that would be in play without the Cannabis Accommodation Combining District. The residential structure (A) on Parcel 1 casts a 100foot setback (B) on adjacent parcels. Parcel 1’s property line also casts a 50-foot setback (C) on adjacent parcels. The portion of Parcel 2 not controlled by the setbacks (D) represents the remaining usable area. The portion of the cannabis grow on Parcel 2 intersected by the setbacks (E) is eliminated, with a small portion of existing cultivation area remaining (F).
Through this process, I identified 101 cannabis grows in the district, amounting to 16 acres of cultivation area. I was surprised to find that the residential structure setbacks alone had fairly little effect. They eliminated only about four percent of usable area on grow site parcels and only about one acre of existing cultivation area overall. However, factoring in the property line setbacks had substantial consequences. The full setbacks eliminated over 50 percent of both usable area and existing cultivation area. They rendered six grow site parcels fully undevelopable, with another 14 rendered severely constrained (Figure 5A), defined as containing less than 2,500 square feet of usable area (that is, the upper canopy area limit for the smallest state cultivation license type issued by the California Department of Cannabis Control). In terms of the existing cultivation area, as presently configured, the setbacks completely eliminated 21 grows and rendered an additional 46 severely constrained, with less than 2,500 square feet of cultivation area remaining (Figure 5B)
In a hollow attempt at sophistication, I also ran multiple regression models to explore what factors most significantly constrained grow site parcels when accounting for the full setbacks. However, the characteristic that most often landed on top was the most intuitive one: parcel area. As parcel area decreases, the proportion of usable area lost to the setback restrictions increases. Though disappointingly straightforward, this is particularly important in the Laytonville combining district, which is dominated by small lots developed with single-family
and mobile homes. Among grow site parcels, those below the median area account for only 14 percent of the total area; however, they hold more than a third of the total existing cultivation area and over half that was eliminated by the setbacks (Figure 6). In other words, the smallest landholders in the combining district would bear a disproportionate loss of the cultivation area while also possessing the least capacity to
Indeed, Laytonville’s viability as a legacy growing community would be harshly stifled if not for the available setback reductions provided by the combining district. While this is exactly what I set out to demonstrate quantitatively, my most important finding, perhaps, is the simplest one. While the Laytonville district encompasses nearly three hundred parcels, only 35 percent of them host identified cannabis grows. Since owners had to consent to their properties being included in the district, this indicates that a majority of residents and property owners— though not necessarily involved with the cannabis industry themselves— were at least tolerant, if not outright supportive, of their grower-neighbors’ ability to continue cultivating in the era of liberalization. Laytonville, therefore, is a unique case study of a community’s efforts to utilize planning mechanisms in preserving its cultural and economic landscape. It is also a reminder to those working in the built environment disciplines that one group’s locally unwanted land use (LULU) may in fact be another’s hard-earned livelihood.
Though scarcely comparable, Laytonville may provide lessons for closer to home here in New York City. With the recent proliferation of illicit cannabis retail storefronts, commercial cannabis has begun to have an increasingly discernible impact on our urban environment (Figure 7). Despite what the streetscape might suggest, there are (as of this writing) only four recreational use establishments in NYC holding valid state cannabis retail licenses (OCM 2023), and, by all
accounts, the City appears to lack any comprehensive strategy for siting and regulating cannabis-related facilities, much like California jurisdictions during the Green Rush (Southall 2022). I venture not to offer solutions here, but I do pose some questions for planners and other government functionaries to consider. How do policymakers avoid “one-size-fits-all” cannabis controls that may not reflect every community’s values? What are the actual land use impacts of cannabis-related facilities, rather than the normative judgments held about people who grow, manufacture, sell, and use cannabis products? How can cannabis regulations balance public health, safety, and welfare while acknowledging and accounting for those groups most disadvantaged by historic prohibition?
New York State’s cannabis regulatory system is unique in that it prioritizes justice-involved applicants and non-profit organizations in the retail licensing process. NYC’s first legal recreational dispensary is operated by Housing Works, an advocacy group for homeless and low-income persons living with HIV/AIDS. Only time will tell how such a model will function and if it can meaningfully and equitably address the harm done by decades of cannabis prohibition. In the interim, though, you can take a trip to the East Village, contribute to a worthy cause, and contemplate your own landscape—rural, hyper-urban, or otherwise—from a new perspective.
Jonah works at the United States Geological Survey's Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab where he studies the relationship between native plants and pollinators.
Written by Jonah Bregstone
Native pollinators provide vital pollination services to many ecosystems. In NYC, community gardens and other forms of urban agriculture are dependent on ‘wild’ bee populations for pollination (Matteson et al, 2017). In some studies, urban areas have been found to have a higher diversity and abundance of native pollinators than neighboring rural or ex-urban areas (Matteson et al, 2008). As human created environments (cities, highways, suburbs) cover more of the globe, it is important that ecosystems within the built environment be encouraged and conserved. Native pollinators are key to the creation and restoration of urban ecosystems. Planning for pollinators ensures the success of urban agriculture, increases biodiversity, and supports density (Bergmann, 2019).
Native pollinator populations are supported best by a network of foraging and habitat space. An ecological sink is formed when only an isolated patch of the urban environment is landscaped to support pollinators. This can lure a pollinator to visit an area in search of
foraging resources but it is not enough to support a sustained pollinator presence. One community garden, backyard or public space landscaped to encourage pollinators is not sufficient. Instead, a network must be created within an urban space. This idea is articulated in Sarah Bergmann’s Pollinator Pathways Project, which encourages communities to plan corridors of foraging and habitat resources to increase the abundance and diversity of pollinators.
The relationship between native pollinators and native plants is vital to many of the ecosystems in North America. Native Bees have spent millennia cultivating a symbiotic relationship with native plant species. This coevolution is seen in the positive correlation between the length of a pollinator's proboscis (mouthparts) and the length of the floral tube of native pollinating plants (Dohzono, 2008).
This deep relationship distinguishes native bees from non-native domesticated bees like the European Honey bee (Apis mellifera). Non-native
bees, while very effective at pollinating monocultural row crops, are not as effective at pollinating native plant species. Domesticated non-native bees are generalists and are able to thrive and spread in many ecosystems in North America. These bees often outcompete native species for habitat and foraging resources, depriving an ecosystem of pollination from native pollinators. Monitoring the abundance and diversity of native pollinators is key to ecosystem resiliency and preservation. Despite this importance, there is a dearth of information on the flower-preferences of native pollinators.
The Native Bee Lab uses repeated photography in our non-lethal pollinator monitoring experiment. The lab retrofitts donated cell-phones turning them into deployable bee-monitoring cameras. The phones are placed in the Patuxent wildlife preserve to take repeated photos of individual pollen producing blooms. After a day of photo capture, the phones are collected and
the data is uploaded for future analysis. Metadata about the capture event, including weather, time and location are all recorded.
The research team records pollinator arrivals and approximate dwell times from the photos. Secondary analysis is completed by pollinator-ID specialists who attempt species-level classification
of the photographed insects. The pollinator arrivals are a heuristic for pollinator flower-preference. Once complete, this flower-preference analysis can be disseminated to gardeners, ecologists and urban planners. This data will ensure that future pollinator-focused landscaping is conscious of native pollinator flowerpreferences.
FIGURE 1 - A recycled phone takes timed photos of yellow-tickseed (Coreopsis). A shade has been placed over the phone to keep the device from heating up in the Maryland sun.
The histogram in Figure 3 shows the preliminary results of our data analysis. The ~67 hours of photo data collected over the summer has been grouped into three-minute increments and the number of arrivals for each three-minute increment calculated. These three-minute increments have then been normalized. The graph represents the percentage of time we observe x number of pollinator arrivals. This analysis shows that most observed increments were not uneventful. Roughly 91.5% of all three-minute windows did not record a single pollinator arrival.
FIGURE 3 (left) - A histogram of pollinator arrivals bucketed into three-minute increments.
The arrival behavior can be modeled by the Poisson probability distribution. The Poisson distribution models success of a trial (i.e. arrival of a pollinator) over time. This distribution describes natural phenomena, including the rate of particles emitted by a radioactive source and the frequency of customers entering one’s local grocery store. The descriptive powers of the Poisson probability distribution underpin whole fields of mathematics.
Using the Poisson process as a foundation, our team can model the environmental context for the observed pollination activity. The pollen producing flower is a resource with a queue. Competition for this resource can be measured with photo analysis. A network of such queues simulates the interactions between pollinators and different pollen-producing plants. This type of network is referred to as a stochastic processing network.
Stochastic processing networks model a range of systems from cloud computing resources to a simple traffic intersection. These networks abstract a system to just the factors that influence the system’s ability to meet service demands. Through this abstraction, stochastic processing networks become useful models of resourceutilization, including the resource of pollen and the utilization by pollinators in our study. Customers in need of processing, including pollinators in our ecological setting, traverse these networks and queue at processing
nodes. The customers are subject to stochastic arrival rates, processing times and the routing of the network (Williams). However, while a traditional stochastic processing network assumes that the resource is available all the time, in an ecological setting, the availability of the resource changes over time and in response to weather. To extend the traditional network and make it useful for our study, we must incorporate these covariates.
This model translates the physical relationships that native pollinators have with pollinating plants into the digital realm. The results of the study will be meaningful from both ecological and mathematical perspectives. This model will predict pollinator abundance and diversity for different landscaping strategies. These predictions will inform urban planners and urban gardeners who choose to proactively plant for native pollinators.
The Native Bee lab is completing analysis of the first year of data. Along with the photo data, the lab recorded ~21 hours of video which, when analyzed, contain the “true” counts of pollinator visitation. The team will measure the efficacy of the sampling method through the comparison of the photo data to the video. If there is alignment between the data sets, the team will have confidence in the monitoring method. If the datasets do not align, adjustments will be made to the frequency of photos in our methodology. Changing the frequency of photos must take into consideration the labor of analyzing photos and the cost of storing more photos.
Ultimately, the team would like to use this monitoring method on an entire metro-region. Our first-year analysis will document processes and resolve potential impediments to scale. The Native Bee lab specializes in pioneering monitoring methods that can be scaled into citizen-science projects. Through the lab’s vast network of volunteers and bee enthusiasts the monitoring experiment can be repeated with proper instruction and resources. By expanding data collection and aggregating photo monitoring from a wider group we can better inform our model and glean more information about the abundance and preferences of native pollinators.
It is important to acknowledge all of the guidance given by the team at the Native Bee lab including Sam Droege, Sydney Shumar and Claire Maffei. It is equally important to acknowledge all of the work done by our incredible team of interns Tashane Freckleton, Reyna Farley, Amelia Coriell, Dorcas Ogunbanwo and Osten Eschedor without whom this work would not be possible.
FIGURE 2 (left) - A honey bee lands on a burmarigold (bidens laevis). The flower is attached to a stake in order to keep the flower from moving during the capture period.
Two recent articles focus on the relevance of the Green Line in the Israeli-Palestinian territory; In the first, Meron Rapaport reflects on the May 2021 wave of violence between Israeli and Palestinian forces while focusing on the character of The Green Line, arguing for its blurification and irrelevance in a reality of constant change, crossing and settlement building¹. In contrast, 40 miles away from the line Or Kashti writes to Haaretz about a recent scandal; the decision of Tel-Aviv's municipality to include the Green Line in educational maps. As Rapaport argues for a porous territory, bringing forward many forms of illegal tactics, governmental annexations, organized modern planning typologies, peace organization, police/settler, and Palestinian violence, Kashti's article focuses on the simplified view of a line, in the binary reality of depiction or erasure. The contrast between these two depicts the difference that will be argued in this article; between land ownership complexities and flattened imaginaries of land.
The complexity that Rapoport refers to is vividly depicted in Weizman's Hollow Land, where the continuous fury in the “wild frontier” between the ‘youth of the hill’, Palestinian civilians, IDF forces, and the armed Palestinian militants, constitute the chaos of the West Bank². He describes the frontiers of the Occupied Territories as elastic transformative borders, adding to Zvi Efrat's depiction of Israel's "borderline disorder" as a net that morphs and changes according to the situation at hand³, and strongly dismisses the idea
of a linear one⁴. The back-and-forth operation of setting up an outpost by settlers, who then clash with Palestinian farms, to only be combated by the IDF, to be combated by Palestinian militants, to then establish more outposts as punitive measures, forms the continuous fuzziness of the space. This is shown in a clear mapping (image 1) of the West Bank, where Weizman illustrates “an incessant sea dotted with multiplying archipelagos of externally alienated and internally homogenous ethnonational enclaves”⁵. This, which is elaborated thoroughly in Hollow Land, contributes to Rapaport's borderline claim and formulates the complex reality of the Israel- Palestinian territory.
In contrast to that, and in relevance to the second article, I must bring forward a personal story. Born and raised in a suburban town in the center of Israel, I grew up thinking that Palestine did not exist, it was a country in the past in when Israel was declared, just disappeared. It is not that I was explicitly told that or read about that, but it was the absence of Palestine from my education that formed its complete historical insignificance. The most generous and vivid proof of this absence, that can be historically traced, is the educational map, hung up in every class and refered
1 Meron Rapoport, “The Line Separating Israel From Palestine Has Been Erased—What Comes Next?,” August 10, 2022, https://www.thenation.com/article/ world/green-line-apartheid-equality/.
2 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, New edition (London New York: Verso, 2017), 3.
3 Zvi Efrat, The Object of Zionism: The Architecture of Israel, 3.
4 Weizman, Hollow Land, 6.
5 Weizman, 7.
to when necessary. The map (image 2) containing a topographical representation of hills and valleys is given a holistic character due to the contrasting depiction of its neighboring countries. Palestinian territories, in the most simplified way, are depicted by the same topographical representation, and thus, are imagined as part of Israel's land. A twelve- year length of observation, lead to complete ignorance of the land, which defined my military service, political opinions, and daily life. Recognizing this personal experience as a systemic arrangement, this story must be further historically explored, theorized, and situated in the larger picture of Israel's relation to land. The aim of this text will be to understand what is the work that the educational map does for Israel's relation to land, or in other words, how it enables land to be rendered possible as negotiable, extractive, ready to be conquered, demarcated, and controlled, and how it is part of a historical enterprise of land imagery. To center the discussion around land I will first give a capture of relevant theories of its possession in relation to its appropriation, resource establishment, and communication. Then I will dive into the historical events that led to the Jewish imagination of land, from the construction of the agrarian Jew to the establishment of the Green Line, and the political discourse that led to its current depiction. Finally, I will connect the dots between map-making, identity production, and relations to land, to reveal the implication of them on the current perception of land through the educational map.
Recent work by historians has enabled the critique of historical processes of land
possession, such as the colonization of the New World, Africa, and more. They show us that they do not only entail the arrival on land and the wave of a flag, as depicted in many historical paintings and imagery but necessitate a fundamental structure of international law, institutions, cultural framework, acquisition processes, survey making and more. Land titling is a complex process, in which to be accepted by the relevant audience must be planned and structured in a national effort. The following synthetic view of theories of land possession will draw these processes into a framework that will tie large-scale land appropriations with their community's small scaled cultural meanings, claiming the intricacy and complexity of land possession, national identity, and culture.
In “Land-Appropriation as a Constitutive Process of International Law” Carl Schmitt, a figure of complex political history but one whose contribution to the thinking of territory in the 20th Century cannot be avoided, offers the important relationship between constitutive acts and constituted institutions in the historical European colonial acts of land appropriations.
To him land appropriation is possible with the aid of two terms of legal history; “those that proceed within a given order of international law, which readily receives the recognition of other peoples, and others, which uproot an existing spatial order and establish a new nomos of the whole spatial sphere of neighboring peoples”6. Thus, he differs between constitutive acts and constituted institutions; the constituted lies within the space of state legality,
where the origin of it is a mere fact in the functioning system and the constitutive, in relation, are the ones prior to the constituted, serve as the fundamental ground of legitimacy to other acts. In the delicate formation of land through appropriation, where the existing spacial order changes, constitutive acts set the legal foundations for future social relations in terms of land possibilities, and serve as the spacial boundary of neighboring acts.
While the constitutive act renders the land visible, it is not on its own enough to make the land work. Tania Murry Li, who is a current anthropologist in the realm of land, labor and capitalism, writes in her 2014 essay “What is land? Assembling a resource for global investment” about the global land rush about a series of following acts that could turn land into a productive object and draw its potential users' attention. To her, this process “requires regimes of exclusion that distinguish legitimate from illegitimate uses and users, and the inscribing of boundaries through devices such as fences, title deeds, laws, zones, regulations, landmarks, and storylines.”⁷ In other words, to make the land into a resource, a state not natural or internal to it, official institutionalized work has to be done. Official measuring of the land, material calculations, statistical picturing, marketing strategies, and more make practices on land thinkable, imagined, and relevant from a distance. They offer modernist legitimacy to a list of future land uses that transform the land into a productive and profitable resource for its potential future owners.
The combination of land appropriation, which involves changing theexisting
social arrangement, andtheprocess of rendering land as a resource, creates demand for it, which could lead to land ownership frictions between those who previously cared for the land and those who are now its legal possessors. In this situation, according to Carol M. Rose, a professor at Yale Law School who focuses on property, land use, and environmental law, communication of ownership is the key to continuous clear possession and the way to avoid forms of its loss. Thus, the clear act of the first appropriation is followed by a series of continuous acts that make visible its occupancy. To her “acts of possession” are “texts” which are “"read" by the relevant audience at the appropriate time,”⁸ and are “published” under useful circumstances. They are actions that have “interpretive communities” that can read the claim and give it significance within the cultural context. For example, acts such as agricultural work, front lawn manicuring, clearing out the mailbox, having lights on at night, and more, can be interpreted in an American suburb as common occupancy and will keep intruders away. In the entangled case of colonial appropriation, these acts are not only a matter of local culture but are definitive for colonial legitimacy and can normalize illegal events within the process of land grab.
These three, which differ in scale, time, space, and recurrence, form a process of exclusive land possession that is entangled with national law and culture. The combination of constitutive acts within an international legal framework, official work that renders land as a resource that drives up demand, and the constituted cultural communication that keeps the land possessed and owned, is bound
up with its national institutions. In the process of the emergence of a country, this does not only constitute the title of land ownership but produces a set of national cultural identities and practices that are parallel to it. Understanding the existence of these two processes will help, in the following pages, to analyze how in the process of colonizing the land of Israel a national culture of land emerged and reveal how and why this cultural history still exists fully today.
The previous example of land ownership complexity should not be taken as a given fact. Israeli citizens did not simply arrive in Palestine, they did not settle in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, or Tel-Aviv only because of mere individual will, and they did not always see the land as the one to be 'taken back'. According to Efrat, The Zionist movement was “a peculiarly deviceful architectural movement”9, which was in an operative “mode of space-planning, place-making, terrainmarking, land-grabbing, landscaping, facts- grounding, settlement-setting, rural-prototyping and urban-reforming”10, and involved politicians, architects, engineers, and other experts. While this large enterprise cannot be fully articulated in one paper, pinpointing
6 Carl Schmitt and G. L. Ulmen, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, 2003), 82.
7 Tania Murray Li, “What Is Land? Assembling a Resource for Global Investment,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39, no. 4 (October 2014): 589.
8 Carol M Rose, “Possession as the Origin of Property,” 2022, 84.
9 Efrat, The Object of Zionism, 14.
10 Efrat, The Object of Zionism, 14.
three land-related historical strategies; the biblical back- to-land mythology and Zionist Jewish Autochthony, the strategic negotiable demarcation of land, and the land's cartographic public imagery could offer an explanation for the current educational enterprise of the imagination of Israel's land.
First, as I explained before, for land to be settled from afar, work has to be done to render it as a resource. In the "The Epos of Jewish Autochthony" in The Object of Zionism, Zvi Efrat comes to describe the important nature of the Jewish 'backto-land' ethos, rooted in the turn of the nineteenth century, as a luring approach for potential settlers. As Zionists argued for the need “to forgo urban areas for rural life on Palestine's moshavot”,11 they combined the land's cultivation potential with the Jewish biblical calling. Theodor Herzel in Old-New Land entailed a didactic narrative to settle the land where he “meticulously built an exhaustive and seductive mise-enscene of sumptuous landscapes inhabited by well-informed, happy farmers and creative urbanites.”12 The Zionist narrative produced an enterprise of architectural typologies, propaganda, fiction, literature, and preparation schemes, that rendered land barren and ready to become a resource to potential settlers. Thus, the work done to form the imaginary peasant utopia of Palestine was a calculated, wellthought Zionist venture that pushed the Jewish diaspora to see the land as a future possibility.
Aside from this production, land demarcation strategies turned out to be fruitful in rendering the occupied land negotiable and thus, available for possession. Its legal roots can be pinpointed to the 1945 Declaration of independence
when “David Ben-Gurion registered his opposition to drafting and announcing the borders of the imminent State”13 and insisted on waiting for the end of the war. This halt later transformed into an “openended project-a diplomatic, military, and colonial enterprise subject to ongoing negotiations”14, where possession of the land was subjected to physical existence on it. In other words, Rose's theory could not be more evident, where the one who speaks louder, with all the violence entailed in it, is the one who owns the land. Efrat describes this tactic as a net that morphs and changes according to the situation at hand, which later transformed into a continuing “openended project, a diplomatic, military, and colonial enterprise subject to ongoing negotiations”15.
Leading Israel's perception of land ownership, this strategy was used in a particular way in the border changes that occurred due to the 1967 war. Before it, the boundaries were almost identical to those of mandatory Palestine except for the addition of the Green Line which was drawn in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip according to the position of military presence at the time of the cease-fire16 (image 3). Now the 1967 war brought about the expansion of the territory that Israel controlled; according to Eyal Weizman, “Soldiers were deployed behind clear territorial boundaries of mountain and water: the Suez Canal, the Jordan River on the Jordanian front and the line of volcanic mounts about 40 kilometers into the Syrian Golan Heights”17. In this particular situation, Israel tripled its presence on land and erased the existence of the Green line, an action that required a supplementary constitutive system in order for it to be
accepted by international law. In other words, presence on land was not enough and another kind of work had to be done.
This system came forward through deliberate decisions of Israel's security cabinet made after the 1967 war and took the shape of a national cartographic project, the new public map. First, on December 1967 a decision to erase the 1949 "Armistice Agreement's Green Line...from all atlases, maps, and textbooks”18 took place. Then, in representing the new picture of reality Menachem Begin ordered the map's colors to be those that portray reality as it is, and advocated for a cohesive
topographical representation; green for a valley and brown for the hills. The use of other colors, to him, “could highlight the two hypothetical things”19, a situation that he did not want to be on display. Finally, he suggested naming the map “Israel- The Ceasefire Lines from June 1967”. To him, adding the word ‘State’ to the name was not necessary, ‘Israel’ alone was a known concept as it is. Serving as a cartographic base for future public maps, these political decisions were crucial in Israel’s imagination of land.
According to To John Pickles in A history of spaces: cartographic reason, mapping, and the geo-coded world, maps have a significant role in providing “the very conditions of possibility for the worlds we inhabit and the subjects we become.” To him, maps do work; when they are read social spaces are produced, not vice versa. Henri Lefebre describes this production as a process where spaces exist but are
then modified and reorganized by the state; they are “at once a precondition and a result of social superstructures.” Thus, it is important to understand that social imagination is not only defined by the division of class, or related to the means of production but is tied up with relations to land, where communities are imagined through territorial boundaries. In our case, the land was seized by war, but then was reorganized by the cartographic map, to only then be reproduced by the imagination of its audience. In this imagination, the land was reproduced as whole and empty, as a clean slate for modern architectural configuration.
These three depictions of land possession strategies differ in time, scale, and cultural conditions, but produce the same image of land; the first renders the land as a resource and uses historical production to legitimize ownership of land, the second uses international law and a strategy of physical presence, and the third uses constitutive cartographic imagery to showcase the availability of land and mark it in national institutions. Projected to a certain cultural audience, whether the Jewish diaspora coming back to their land, the 'state pioneer' ready to work the land or the growing child in today's hinterland, they showcase the same wholeness of Israel's land and produce a social order where land is historically legitimately owned, and absent from its previous order; from Palestinian culture and historical significance. Thus, it is not just a fifty shekel map sold in a bookstore and hung up in class, but a cultural systemic enterprise of a national imaginary of land.
So it is not surprising then that Eyal Weizman's map of cheese-like cartographies in Israel's land is not sold in every bookstore, or that the decision to showcase the Green Line in Tel- Aviv's schools produced such political backlash. The tremendous work that has been done to erase the Green Line and the holes from Israel's consciousness and to render the land as a continuous blank sheet of possibilities, has historical roots and evident political and economical significance. Such work entails the deployment of national resources, efficient use of international law, creative use of media, and the clever selection of what to represent and what to erase from the collective memory. Thus, a powerful enterprise as such cannot be dismissed with a single alternative.
In contrast, theories of possession of land can make us rethink how the establishment of a disciplined society is formed. How rendering land as visible, as possible for extraction and exploitation, can produce an army of ready-to-serve citizens; ready to fight for their land, for their right to settle, cultivate and even die for it. To us, the disciplined society, Israel is not a hollow land and never was, it is a continuous horizontal surface of the land, from sea to river, and from Eygpt to Lebanon. We see it as a resource, a blank biblical Jewish land of milk and honey, a land of heroic possibilities, as ready to serve us as we serve it. It is the homeland that was marketed and showcased to us in the turmoil of Jewish European persecution, won by us after the 1967 war, and declared by us through public imagery and physical presence. It is not a question of the binary existence of the Green Line, but of an enterprise of a disciplined society.
11. Efrat, 25.
12. Efrat, 27.
13. Efrat, 14.
14. Efrat, 3.
15. Efrat, 3.
16. Efrat, 3.
17. Weizman, Hollow Land, 11
18. Weizman, 15.
19. Adam Raz, “‘If we give them a map, they will see how big the areas are.’ This is how the green line is deleted,” Haaretz, accessed November 24, 2022, https://www.haaretz.co.il/ magazine/the-edge/2022-08-31/ty-article/. highlight/00000182-f327-d9fb-a1c7fbef5d800000.
Video by: Kurt Steinhouse
Every time we attend a public meeting and a parent who shows up because they care about traffic on their block has dragged along their sniffling seven year old who ends up playing on their iPad at full volume and their parent has to inevitably leave the meeting 40 minutes early because their kid is dragging the sleeve of their sweater arm because it’s 8 pm and they haven’t had dinner yet and their science poster board is due tomorrow and they forgot to buy it, we feel terrible.
At their very best, public meetings are designed to keep kids out of the way: offering childcare or vouchers, intentionally held at times when parents don’t need to bring their children, or providing Zoom options. While these interventions are important in reducing the gendered division of childcare labor that prevents parents and women from attending more planning meetings, we want the sniffly seven year old to be a decision maker with agency in planning spaces.
As planners that work in public space activation for children, we see how kids are the most frequent and creative users of public space within the city. For everyone, but especially for children, public space usage subverts the confines of daily routines: more unstructured than the classroom, more communal than the schoolyard, more flexible than the backyard (or tiny bedroom shared with your two siblings). These public spaces, from playgrounds, to sidewalks, to open streets, to vacant lots, to random patches of grass, are spaces full of potential: potential for activity and expression, free of constant adult supervision, fostering independent individual growth, while simultaneously providing a space for building community and building relationships.
Public spaces are crucial to what makes being a kid a kid. But public spaces are never designed by children. When we think of public spaces for children, we often focus on playgrounds, soccer fields, baseball courts, parks, and gymnasiums. A new successful but underfunded (and in our opinion, unimaginative) city-wide initiative, Open Streets for Schools, has created the potential for outdoor public play spaces for children outside of or adjacent to their buildings. While this program is primarily created to reduce traffic fatalities and congestion at pick up and drop off, schools have adapted it for so much more: hosting outdoor classrooms, parades, holiday festivals, community events, vaccination clinics, and environmental justice workshops.
Sabina is an organizer for a nonprofit that tries to create new school streets in neighborhoods of color that lack open space, as most of the schools that have these are white, affluent, private, and in Manhattan. In doing so, she’s worked to apply for school streets and talked to teachers, administrators, PTA parents, CEC leaders, neighbors, elected officials, small business owners, and community boards, but not a single student other than the spontaneous passerby at tabling. In contrast, in a project with PS32 the Belmont School, in the Bronx, Jim is helping the school in building out their own version of a School Street as part of a larger vision of using the spaces in and surrounding their school as part of a “Community Fitness Hub.” Jim’s help in this project was to lead a community engagement process aimed at ensuring this space was built with the community and not for the community. This meant engaging kids in the design process, working with a class of rambunctious second graders through weekly workshops to learn their perspectives and gather their feedback and ideas, centering them as the
Public spaces are crucial to what makes being a kid a kid, but public spaces are never designed by children.
protagonist of the design process. These second graders show up to the workshops engaged and invested and full of energy and enthusiasm: with each workshop they continue to learn and grow with the project. Impressively, the students are retaining the concepts and already applying them to thinking about a reimagined space. While the students’ understanding of certain higher level terms and concepts like the logistics of street design and infrastructure delivery may not immediately be translated into formal planning terms (one student aptly described a “hub” as being a space for the Avengers to come
together to save the world), they provide sharp, creative, and tangible suggestions for the future of the project.
Between running the workshops at PS32 and working with schools to apply for school streets, we’ve gathered several key takeaways in working with children and positioning them as design protagonists. We also think that these strategies are useful for planning with adults (make sessions exciting! Host them in lively spaces like breweries! Use movement based exercises!). We think that… 1
Planning meetings can be inclusive, important, empowering, radical, and still boring. This is not to say that kids aren't able to understand important concepts with gravity. But, in order to engage students, particularly under 12, we need to create engaging activities that kids find fun and exciting and will want to proactively participate in.
Moving by dancing, running, jumping, being silly and imitating animals, makes the experience fun and approachable. Aside from fun, movement is a tool in the design process that helps kids make connections between themselves and their environment, and tap into their embodied knowledge of place.
It’s beautiful seeing the students at PS32 gain a stronger understanding, awareness, and connection to the built environment around them. It’s creating a more informed project, but embracing the co-design process also empowers students to become urban planners (experts) in their own worlds. Are you designing something for kids? Why not design a process with them instead! Try co-creating a community
Instead of confining design meetings to the classroom, pick a space that is fun and different from their traditional learning environment (even if it’s just a different classroom than math class). It’s also important to balance finding a space that students have ownership of, where trust can be built, and where they feel comfortable.
Instead of confining design meetings to the classroom, pick a space that is fun and different from their traditional learning environment (even if it’s just a different classroom than math class). It’s also important to balance finding a space that students have ownership of, where trust can be built, and where they feel comfortable.
visioning performance on the street, playing design charades, writing songs that’ll get stuck in their head, designing coloring books that they’ll take home to their parents, making a board game together, sending them on disposable camera scavenger hunts, taking them into the neighborhood and walking/running/ jumping/screaming around the block - all focused on asking them what they want…
If a city has a memory, then the legacy of discarded infrastructural works forms an important part of that memory.
-
HanMeyer, City & Port
Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery
That was and still is, my ideal scenery.
- W.H. Auden, “Letter to Lord Byron”
[The design of the High Line was inspired by] the melancholy unruly beauty of this post-industrial ruin.
- Liz Diller Written by Douglas WoodwardDuring a brief pause in the intensity of the pandemic in the summer of 2021, Sybil Wa and I led a workshop on the topic of New Paradigms of Residual Space
Bringing together a cohort of students from many of GSAPP’s disciplines: planners, architects, urban designers, real estate students, and curators¹, we took advantage of New York City’s recently enhanced ferry service to visit spaces along the East River routes in East Harlem, Brooklyn, the Upper East Side, and other neighborhoods. For residual spaces in all of these places, the group devised solutions to activate neglected areas and to create new public spaces within and below existing infrastructure, both abandoned and working. They devised these schemes in collaboration, showing the strength of using the most important of GSAPP’s resources—its human capital.
But what is residual space? In her introduction to the Jephcott and
Shorter translation of Walter Benjamin’s Einbahnstrasse (One Way Street), Susan Sontag mused about Benjamin’s Berlin reminiscences as “fragments of an opus that could be called À la recherche des espaces perdus².” Since Benjamin’s study of the spaces of Paris and Berlin, the taxonomy of lost spaces in the city has continued to produce a bewildering array of descriptive terms and examples.
Referred to most commonly in the design and planning literature as “terrains vagues,³ after its coinage in Ignacio Sola Morales’ brilliant 1995 essay, “Terrain Vague,”⁴ the common thread of these widely diverse interstitial spaces is a mis- en- scène that is visually reminiscent of the imagerepertoire of Japanese shonen manga urbanism, Italian neo-realist cinema of the 1950s, and Piranesi’s Carceri, all images dense with an articulate gloom, what Junichiro Tanizaki in his book on
1 The group included a brilliant mix of GSAPP students from different disciplines: Zakios Meghrouni-Brown, Yoo Jin Lee, Yuqi Tian, Dhania Yasmin, Alfonso Jose Larrain, Andrew Magnus, Mariana Kazumi, Majima Ueda, Max Goldner, and Sori Han.
2 Sontag, Susan, from Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott & Kingsley Shorter, NLB (London, 1979), p. 13.
3 The terminology and naming conventions describing these spaces is revealing in its mostly negative associations. The spaces have been called “derelict land,” “zero panorama,” empty settings,” “dead spots,” “relingos,” “vacant land,” “wasteland,” “il vuoto” (the void), “urban sinks,” “el space,” “dead zones,” “transgressive zones,” “creuze,” “caruggi,” “superfluous landscapes,” “neutral zones,” “in-between spaces,” “counter sites,” “blank areas,” and “SLOAPs” (Spaces Left Over after Planning). See Patrick Baron, At the Edge of the Pale, for a longer, annotated list with sources.
4 Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubio, “Terrian Vague” in “Anyplace,” (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1995) pp. 118-123.
5 Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans, Gregory Starr. Sora Books (2017, Tokyo), p.72
In 2015, working with the Design Trust for Public Space (DTPS) and the NYC Department of Transportation, a group of DTPS Fellows (Chat Travieso—now at GSAPP, Susannah Drake, Neil Donnelly, and Douglas Woodward) co-authored a publication on New York City’s 666 miles of elevated infrastructure that included plans and policy direction for creating public designs in the spaces beneath.⁶
The Under the Elevated project, and a subsequent follow-up the next year with a different group of fellows, resulted in the establishment of a program at DOT that funded designs for what DOT’s head of Urban Design, Neil Gagliardi, called “El-spaces.” An evocative essay in the book by Tom Campanella, a scholar from Cornell, captured both the history and the poetry of these spaces, mainly in a paen to the old elevated train system in New York and the dappled, theatrical spaces it created underneath.
Although my research focus has been primarily on terrains vagues (or el space) beneath elevated infrastructure, typologically these spaces are
multi-spatial in size, configuration, and location. For instance, the Geistbahnhofe (ghost train stations) of Berlin are perfect terrains vagues. We have one of our own here in New York that I wonder how many people know about though they may pass it every day: the phantom 91st Street station on the West Side IRT train line, closed in 1959, whose darkened platforms and ads from ‘50s can still be glimpsed fleetingly from the windows on the #1 between the 86th and 96th Street stations.
The idea that prompted the Under the Elevated project was conversations I had with Liz Diller from Diller, Scofido + Renfro, and work we commissioned Moed, de Armas & Shannon to do on spaces beneath the High Line, which seemed perfect for seasonal use.
There were thirty spaces beneath the High Line and they matched well with the scale of the smaller traditional great European arcades in the geometrical enclosure beneath the train bed. Unfortunately, the West Chelsea area was an exceptionally hot area for redevelopment, and within a year,
90% of the spaces had been acquired by private developers, making the continuous complementary path to the High Line above impossible to design.
A Joint Architecture/UP studio to Genoa, Italy, with Richard Plunz, uncovered a whole new set of narrow, uncanny, ancient, interconnected pathways in the historical center called caruggi and creuze which tied the neighborhood together both physically and socially. The City also studied ways to create public space underneath the Sopraelevata, a longer version of the Boulevard Périphérique or Périph of Paris. The great architect and urban theoretician, Robert Venturi, pointed out in his 1966 book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, that Residual Spaces are not unknown in our cities. I am thinking of the open spaces under our highways and the buffer spaces around them. Instead of acknowledging and exploiting these characteristic kinds of space, we make them into parking lots of feeble patches of grass—no-man’s lands between the scale of the region and the locality.⁷
And this is a problem we found under most elevated infrastructure: it was often parking, and that was hard to negotiate to move, and when it was able to be moved, the new design for simplicity’s sake often simply used the cliché of converting space beneath the bridge abutment into a skate park, and rarely considered more complex and interesting spaces that could be created.
Finally, let me mention several excellent GSAPP-driven works that have been accomplished or begun in several of these spaces.
First, an award-winning submission for activating spaces in a redesign of the Brooklyn Bridge (“Do Look Down”) by a team of Shannon Hui (’24), Kwans Kim, and Yujin Kim. And forthcoming, a design for this year’s Venice Biennale of a corridor (a frequent typology for terrains vagues) by a team that includes Sarah Abdallah (’23), Michelle Chen (’23), and Aroosa Ajani (’24), along with colleagues from Architecture and RED, under the direction of James Orlando (Faculty) a co-designer of those Astro Boy-like big Red Rubber Boots that are all over the Internet), and Patrice Derrington, head of the RED program and the motive force behind the Biennale effort.
All the cities I’ve visited and many I’ve investigated have some version of terrains vagues, neglected areas that have been used as pop-ups for boxing matches, meeting places for covens, or, famously, as in Paris, areas beneath bridges and bridge supports where clochards slept in bad weather. My interest has grown in nooks and crannies that will support pop-up uses and occasionality—the property of uses that happen and then disappear. These spaces are ideally suited to just that kind of rhythm-the alternation of celebration and neglect.
Boogie-Down Booth by Chat
Secret Raves, Boxing, Covens— Residual Spaces Attract Uses that Find It Difficult To Be Accommodated Informally
From Summer Workshop, GSAPP: New Residual Spaces
Boxing Match Beneath Manhattan Bridge Overpass in DUMBO
The New American (Paradoxical) Escape Guide: Illustrated was written for the purpose of helping individuals find freedom from the worldly plights they deem too hard to swallow. This document gives answers to the question american citizens face when deciding which side of the fence to stand on. Should I stay or should I go?, occurs when any form of woe ensues. Deal with the situation or avoid it - run, hide? Choosing the latter is the decision to escape - leaving one place for another; physically, mentally, metaphorically, spiritually, etc. What will it be, Red Pill or Blue Pill?
The following excerpt contains Escapes #49 - #53, of the 99.
Words and photographs by Dakota Smith
a
Sick and tired of everyone calling you crazy? Leave those intolerant people behind - surround yourself with like minded individuals that don't have a single contrasting opinion.
b
You're not wrong, they are. Go out into the world and liberate all confined to their misguided thinking. Persistence and tenacity are key when imposing your ideology.
a
Take a step outside yourself and enter the ether - an altered state. Avoid the mundane or situations that weigh the most on the mind, with; music, recreational drugs, books, prescription drugs, writing, psychedelic drugs, quilting, street drugs, etc. Run, attempt to hide from the inevitable.
b
Why leave when the answer is right outside your front door? There's NOTHING a little fresh air and sunshine can't cure. Our ancestors didn't have the technology or luxuries we do today; look how they
The New American (Paradoxical) Escape Guide: Illustrated
a
Sellout - making money for you and your boss is a lot more important than any sum of the little things in life. Working 90% of your life allows you to be completely and utterly free for that last 10%.
b
Make that hobby of yours full-time or even pursue that niche degree you've always dreamt about. Take out that student loan for tens of thousands of dollars. Banks would never loan you the money if you couldn't pay it back. If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life.
WAKE UP - don't you see through all of these lies?
Your source can't be trusted because my source, that doesn't have a source, says your source is not reliable because they do not agree with the information your source gets from their source.
b
Would the government or media really lie or cover up information to protect the assets of a few and not act in a manner that is in the best interest of the people?
Are you doing enough to keep your carbon footprint down? Handle your footprint like the impressive corporations do. Use monetary assets to limit monitoring, or purchase commodities like carbon offset credits to disguise the smog.
a
We have reached, and surpassed, the point of no return. It's only a matter of time until it's all underwater and boiling. Pack it up and find the coldest place to live - that will be the last to go.
truth lies somewhere in the middle…
In the fall of 2020, I naively began contemplating the current state of architecture and its various conditions— conditions which, through drawing, stood out and struck me as odd, backwards even, to the architecture which I had studied and came to appreciate. This piece will be framed by studies in drawing and the subsequent internal monologues I had between then and now.
Drawings by Jaasiel Duarte-Terrazas
Drawing, like other forms of thinking and expression, afforded me a chance to contemplate certain attitudes toward the building culture of our time—a culture in which the everyday person becomes entangled. Architectural sections in particular led me to conclusions which began to inform my practice, if I may call it that. The topic of this paper concerns just one of these conclusions, which is that the architectural section, as fiction-scape, is dually radical and canonical in its critique of architecture and urbanism. It affords a radical expression of a fictional reality directly contradicting our own, thus the fictionscape nomenclature, while at the same time remaining canonical in its persistent delegation as the preeminent “architect’s drawing.” Sadly though, architects have malapportioned the section to that-thing-which-thecomputer-spits-out. Where the tool allowed for abstract thinking in search of new fiction-scapes, it is now only an abstract notion itself. Aside from the hegemony of starchitects drafting bizarre buildings—unbeknownst to them and purely as a means to an end— seldom is the section’s realm of fiction in contest with the reality that afflicts our cities; nor does it ever appear to be indebted to the human body and human appropriateness. I will share some things I wrote about tension, thickness, and opportunities for life’s activities, just to provide an idea of what I was thinking and how I came to this
Architecting, designing—whatever you want to call it—is informed by one’s understanding of habit, ritual, and movement. Why, we should ask ourselves, do our spaces have no opinion toward people and the ways we can move? It appears we amble aimlessly or strictly from point A to point B. A perspectival dimension to a section drawing encouraged me to make a verdict about such things as light and shadow. The section asked me to define what is here and what is out there and especially all the things in between, finding comfort in things which were ambiguous. In contrast, spatial ambiguity is made uncommon and discordant by today's building culture which values speed, plainness, and monotony. As I draw, it is apparent that the spaces I inhabit and the streets I walk disregard mystery and are too honest. It sounds harsh but it’s the reality in many cities. The notion of tension is important because it acknowledges a good friction—one that motivates movement and participation; this led me to some other questions. I wondered why architects don’t talk about curtains much. They imply and define space like a screen but are malleable and bend to the force of wind; positive characteristics, I think. Further, they are ambiguous in form which intrigues and obscures, inviting touch. Perhaps in their unpredictability, the curtain is too much of a liability and requires a strenuous orchestration of movement between things. This is all purely analogy of course, but you see how a section drawing anticipates the conscious crafting of tension and friction, encouraging more meaningful
The section recalls that things can have thickness. Without it, where is compression and relief? Where is concavity and convection—fluctuation? The delineation of a wall has more left to inspire in a section than simply the separation between this and that space. When churned out of a computer, as is common now, the section neglects considerations sensitive to scale and humanness. So I ask, is the invitation to carve a seat or a place to rest too laborious and intrusive? Is it so perverse as to think a surface could inspire any bit of imagination? Moreover, where else do you explore the relationship of things to the street if not in section? Thickness takes only two lines and
the conscious comfortability that stuff happens between them – and that space in between can invite different forms of interface. On another note, architects spend a considerable amount of time attempting to find the right “products”, resulting in stale and flimsy architecture. In this sense, we inhabit buildings which are at once full and empty—full of stuff and empty of meaning. It can feel as though we move through this and that product, over that thing, next to that other thing, without ever framing our experience within the space and participating with it. In regards to these questions and observations, I accepted that there ought to be thickness and so I had to
I stated briefly that the section signals an invitation to question the validity of things, in turn evaluating the potential habits and behaviors of other people. In that time when the pencil touches paper, opportunities are infinite. The straight line is invoked to turn a number of times before feeling right. Hypothetical scenarios and scripts of daily routines should inform these decisions so that simply drawing a wall or barrier no longer fulfills the designer’s duty. As I draw, I recognize that I possess a stubborn refusal to ignore the number of invitations dispatched to a drawer. Why should I not petition for light from above, a bench here or there where one can feel the weight of a surface against their back—or even, a descent toward the dimly lit to then find refuge in sunbathed space further along? Naively, and I mean this in a positive sense, each opportunity can be scrutinized. The section is fiction, remember, and it can be revised, adjusted, and calibrated until the feeling is appropriate. On a final note, before I wrap this up,there is of course that matter of appropriateness informed by a myriad of factors outside of the designers control. I am speaking about things of budget, material availability, and the proximity to the right craftspeople; the things that when in limited availability dissuade critical exploration. To that I say that unless it is drawn and evaluated, can you really be sure of the proper fitting of space in relation to people and to other buildings. And unless you demonstrate to others to believe as you do by bringing forward a new fiction-scape, that which is proper will be dismissed.
What I find so wonderful as I draw is that it's precisely in the milieu between pencil and paper—through the creation of thickness, tension, and opportunities for life’s activities—that I can encounter a fiction suitable for the beginning of a radical new taste for space—space that is saturated with human sensitivity. I hope this doesn’t sound funny, but it's like a conversation where you go back and forth, building upon what was said before and perhaps reiterating until the content of a sentence is fully seasoned and articulate. I find this analogy interesting because language is particularly human and we all participate in its fluid state and tailor it to our feelings, thoughts, and experiences. All of these are suitable forms of being in space. Additionally, it is through drawing that the architect can exercise similar empathy and be mindful of the body in space. The architectural section imparted a critique of the building traditions and patterns that so many loathe by simply offering a means to contradict them. And as lessons on how designers and planners can have more agency in defining the direction of the built environment, it is not a stretch to say that a fiction-scape is a good place to start.
Regenerative Food Park envisions stormwater management landscapes and new urbanism typologies that promote new integrated living experiences. These experiences synthesize ecological restoration with sustainable domestic affairs, socio-economic relationships, and connected, productive ecologies for improved livelihoods and well-being for all indigenous residents. As the backbone of the proposal, eco-urban infrastructural typologies are proposed that retain clean water and remediate agro-contaminated soils, thus securing sanitation provision and stormwater regulation while envisioning sustainable integrated agro-based living futures.
Submission by Elini KalapodaThe problems the Akaki Territory (focus area) faces are mainly due to spatial, environmental, and socio-economic factors such as overcrowding caused by migration, poor water quality because of sewage pollution in rivers near settlements, and displacement from a long-lasting development policy)
The project envisions a new co-op scheme to sustain and implement a new land-occupying framework that restores the indigenous community's water-based ecologies, economies, and cultural practices. Promoting a mutually beneficial framework of touristic development that enables both the local ecologies and the
people (city government and the indigenous residents) to co-exist in the territory creates a more integrated living and thriving future. By doing so, the augmented displacement strategy and relocation scheme to high-density public housing clusters that the government proposal suggests will be reversed. This new land-occupying framework takes the form of a new public space plan (Low ground, Middle ground, and High ground strategy) along the riverbed that integrates agriculture, waste-water recycling, flood adaptation, and informality to leverage ecourban infrastructural typologies that promote equitable socio-economic and environmental futures for the Akaki’s indigenous community.
One of the main goals of this new
public space plan is to create a series of interconnected hydraulic buffers and topographic adjustments (spines that are vacant territories, agricultural terraces, water retention and processing ponds adjustment to safe ground bands for new settlement provision) that will make it possible to see the process of wastewater treatment while providing multi-functional public spaces. These spaces can serve as integrated socio-economic and environmental opportunities for residents in Addis Ababa.
The hierarchies of these topographic manipulations and hydraulic buffers are based on their proximity to either the bottom or the peak of the river valley. The lower part of these hierarchical topographic manipulations involves a
more significant number of incomegenerating functions, including seasonal trade and commerce as well as water retention ponds, maturation tanks, and an open public space network (Bio-Park) that is integrated with the settlement arrangement, which accommodates elevated singlefamily housing on stilts in the event of coastal inundation.
Closer to the peak, there is more wilderness and various educational and training functions related to waste recycling and eco-construction skills training infrastructure. Additionally, next to these facilities is an urban street purification ravine (for removing pollution from city streets), initial wastewater treatment bio-basins (used for treating water before it enters a river or ocean), retention ponds, and emergency tanks used for storing excess stormwater during the wet season when it's not being discharged into rivers or oceans. This system provides community irrigation opportunities using permaculture techniques during the dry season. It is integrated with the high-ground settlement arrangement (on-the-ground single-family housing with ground-floor retail or smallscale manufacturing space facing the commercial street. Rainwater harvesting collectors are situated outside each house's backyard to help collect and store water for use during periods of drought.).
There is a transitional zone between the two extremes, where community agricultural production functions (including crop terraces and orchards) are more common and public spaces that connect residents (event venues and public squares). The
transitional zone exists within an integrated middle-ground settlement arrangement involving flexible multi-family housing typologies.
As each intersection between the three topographic hierarchies (low ground, middle ground, and high ground) and the
major road network is created, new amenity confluences and job hubs are located. These complexes integrate working landscapes, public space, and structures (public toilets, kitchens, daycare facilities, classrooms/training spaces) aimed at water retention through permaculture practices and water-based ecological restoration.
Three amenity confluences and job hubs
are envisioned, combining the convenience of multiple amenities into one location:
•The cultural confluence (low-ground zone)
•The agricultural intersection (middle-ground area)
•The wilderness confluence (high-ground zone)
Cultural Confluence: It involves the transformation of the landscape to mitigate flooding (Bio-Park). The cultural confluence includes production and trade related to seasonal floriculture, wastewater recycling, and socio-economic infrastructure such as a flood adaptive floriculture market, leisure and vendor platforms, and elevated Jacaranda groves as touristic attractions along with placemaking)
Agricultural Confluence: It allows diverse grading options that accommodate a diversity of terracedagrarian production methods, such as alley cropping (native food crops and orchards). Additionally, it accommodates food processing infrastructure (including restaurants), culinary education facilities, and community events sites. Furthermore, it was chosen as an area to place agave plants as identity markers (placemaking).
Wilderness Confluence: It stabilizes the riverbanks and stores rainwater for potable community use. It restores the native vegetation while offering new socio-economic opportunities through the proposed waste recycling facility and the eco-construction training infrastructure. In addition to these benefits, it will create a network of tourist paths, gathering shaded areas and viewing platforms accessible from
Regenerative Food Parks: A Proposal for the Akaki Territory
the nearby Acacia grove ecosystems.
By utilizing Akaki Territory as a pilot intervention, policymakers can learn how to preserve more spontaneous urbanization arrangements and strengthen the socio-economic and environmental capital of Addis Ababa.
[Image credits]: Eleni Stefania Kalapoda, Minjung Lee, Sophie Lee, Hala Abukhodair. The initial research was produced as part of the Spring Studio III’s (2020) curriculum / MSc. Architecture and Urban Design at Columbia University (GSAPP) in New York)
(Excerpt from a book project currently in progress)
Text and images by Kevin Costa
The first airport religious space in the United States was built at Boston’s Logan Airport in 1951 by the Catholic Archdiocese so that Logan’s Catholic workers would not miss Sunday mass. Over time, many airport chapels have evolved into interfaith prayer and meditation rooms that serve passengers as well.¹
The utilitarian design of many American airports is reflected in these spaces. The typical room is 300-500 square feet and located in a sparsely populated area of the terminal. One of the walls often has one small, abstract stained-glass window (or plastic facsimile), while other walls are blank. Chairs are simple, often made from pine with fabric padding in the back and the seat. Occasionally, leather chairs are borrowed from the terminal, blurring the distinction between contemplative space and what is outside. Prayer rooms around the world are similarly utilitarian. Included here are spaces designated for Muslims in Paris, Bangkok, Dubai, and Cochi (India).
Over time, many chapels have evolved into multifaith spaces of prayer, contemplation, and meditation. Most American rooms have a copy of the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran; prayer rugs and meditation mats; a bulletin board listing religious services; and a welcome from the attending chaplain(s). Sometimes the Qibla (an arrow showing the direction to Mecca) is hand-written on a wall or the ceiling. San Francisco Airport is unique in that it has both a meditation/reflection room and a Yoga room (pictured).
These spaces are sometimes built for particular purposes. Braniff Airways, once one of America's largest airlines, ceased operations in 1982. Its operations were based in Dallas, and one of the DallasFort Worth Airport chapels celebrates its employees. Perhaps the most beautiful space displayed here is the Dusseldorf Airport non-denominational meditation room built to commemorate the 17 victims of the terminal’s 1996 fire.
What do these prayer rooms tell us about interfaith relations? About designing for disparate groups? About the demographic changes in America and the world? These questions will be considered in the book. For now, ponder the possibility that the mostly anodyne sameness of these spaces is symbolic of our age; indeed, viewing many of the photos is kin to Warhol’s Campbell soup cans or Brillo pads. But we can only hope that as people experience the quality spaces in San Francisco, Dusseldorf, and elsewhere, airport managers will work with communities to provide better-designed places for prayer, contemplation, and meditation.
1 See Cadge, Wendy. 2018. "The Evolution of American Airport Chapels: Local Negotiations in Religiously Pluralistic Contexts." Religion and American Culture 28 (1): 135-165. doi:10.1525/ rac.2018.28.1.135, Cadge’s scholarship includes studies institutional religious spaces in institutional settings.
Gentrification is on everyone’s minds and lips nowadays, from those who study urbanism to those who experience it daily. It comes to mind for me quite frequently, especially since moving to Bushwick, Brooklyn this past fall. As a white, middle-class male, with a bit of a hipster attitude, it’s easy to cast me into the gentrifier archetype. What brought me to Bushwick was not just its atmosphere, but its cheap housing prices. It is a common phenomenon that gained infamy with the transformation of Williamsburg in recent years: young New York transplants (even those transplanted from a 45-minute drive away like me) are seeking housing further from the Manhattan core so they can afford to live and work within city limits. Not only is this phenomenon transforming the economic landscape of New York and displacing some of its most vulnerable residents, but it is also changing the very cityscape itself. Gentrification has been something most people can sum up with the cheeky phrase “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”
The impetus for writing this piece was a story from a few weeks ago in Curbed, the New York Magazine
website centered on urbanism and city life in New York. The story detailed the exploits of “The Neighborhood,” a new community of twenty-somethings sprouting up around the Morgan Avenue L Train stop (two stops away from where I currently live). The Neighborhood, is a project initiated by a New York couple, the Roses, who want to “bring high-agency, emotionally intelligent New Yorkers within walking distance of one another.” The Roses first looked at Williamsburg to base their development. They then looked to Bushwick, based on the idea that “culture follows the L Train” and Bushwick is where that process all begins.
Why not Williamsburg though? The neighborhood has been the center of all things hip and cultured for young New Yorkers for years now. According to Priya Rose, Williamsburg, which she calls “A Charming Mall,” has too much of a “plastic” feel, and a feeling that the neighborhood has “sold out.” She describes her cynical characterization of the neighborhood as the stomping grounds for “boys running crypto scams, and girls in yoga clothes exclaiming “oh my GOD! It’s so cute!!” at dogs. This description may fit a lot of our ideas of gentrified neighborhoods. A walkable community with vitality
for sure, but a fauxthentic, almost bourgeois vitality, with high-price consumption at its center. This can certainly be described as an aesthetic of gentrification, but what was more interesting to me is the perceived aesthetic and authenticity that brought the Neighborhood to Bushwick in particular.
“The Morgan Neighborhood” straddles the border of East Williamsburg and Bushwick near the Morgan Ave L Train stop, providing the cheap rents and culture the organizers were looking for – especially after Maximum New York, a civic group focused on governmental reform, pitched to them that the “less seemly” aspects of the community could be an opportunity to improve civic infrastructure. The group has worked on adding new trash cans to the street, spot-cleaning garbage, and petitioning for adding a stop sign to slow traffic. The long-term vision is to help transform this area into “the best place in the city to raise healthy, high-agency kids,” citing the Hasidic communities in Williamsburg who allow children to run free and have strong community ties due to the “co-locating around shared infrastructure with values-aligned people.”
(Top) Bushwick at the height of its disinvestment in 1982. Arson and theft were common, and the Blackout of 1977 devastated thoroughfares like Broadway, with more than 100 stores being burnt to the ground.
(Right) An advertisement for an Indie festival held in Bushwick for several years, targeted towards the newest members of the community.
(Below) The Domino Sugar Factory redevelopment in Williamsburg on Domino Park.
On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be a unique story here. A group of young professionals scours the city for a dynamic place to live and socialize that isn’t already consumed by an even wealthier group of young professionals. In the process, they contribute to the very phenomenon of displacement they rue. However, what really interested me about The Neighborhood was what wasn’t mentioned in any of their visions: the existing Bushwick community. They present an almost barren sort of cityscape, where the Morgan Ave area is a desolate location featuring trash, overgrown trees and traffic. The existing community in this space has some of the lowest median incomes in the borough (though it has been rocketing upward due to the influx of wealthier residents), and is majority Hispanic (65%), with many being recent immigrants or first-generation Americans. The community’s grime and grit are the byproducts of it being an underserved, disinvested neighborhood that experiences some of the highest concentrations of local truck routes in the city; a reality residents have had to live with for decades.
Despite these challenges, the existing Bushwick community has created a vibrant cityscape of its own, with barber shops, taquerias, and small markets crowding every street corner.
One of the best things about Bushwick is how decidedly un-“plastic” it feels. The community is connected and has strong ties, residents depend on each other and patronize small businesses. Since moving this past summer, I’ve frequented one or two chain stores, but the rest have been local restaurants, stores, pharmacies, and florists. These spaces are imbued with the culture – weekend farmer’s markets, roadside vendors hawking homemade traditional crafts, Spanish food trucks blanketing the sidewalks in delicious aromas, the sounds of street music or pick-up basketball or volleyball games at Maria Hernandez Park – all things the Neighborhood seeks to artificially recreate. This culture isn’t exactly what many new Bushwick residents have in mind. They seek music studios, trendy clubs and breweries, vintage stores and esoteric art spaces. This is the type of culture that the aforementioned “high-minded, emotionally intelligent” New Yorker breeds –the culture that presumably characterizes Williamsburg and other gentrifying areas of New York City.
There are things to love and appreciate about both of these cultural scenes, and many people do not fit into any one particular culture’s contours. The existing Bushwick community, however, goes unmentioned in any of the discussions surrounding the growing culture along the L Train. Does this working-class, predominantly immigrant culture not count? The Neighborhood and similar approaches to development can create a parallel cityscape, where elements of the
local Latine culture struggle to survive alongside new trendy outposts and youth-living chains, until one eventually outpaces the other.
What is my community? Thus, we return to the Morgan Neighborhood. Seeking authenticity and culture, the Roses pass on Williamsburg and set up shop in Bushwick to experience the genesis of New York’s unique new culture. As I can see around me, Bushwick is changing. I myself live in an emblem of its change; a 9-story highrise apartment building constructed in the last two decades. Across the street from me is an artisanal coffee shop. Up the block, our Key Food just rebranded to project a more premium and “authentically urban” (here we go again) feel. New vegan health stores and restaurants are popping up frequently, and on my street, there are two separate empty lots undergoing active development. Each day, I try to reckon with my own part in this complicated story. I could easily be shuffled into the same category as the Roses, an intruder looking to capitalize on cheap rents and nascent indie culture. But I don’t think of myself that way; I’m a grad student looking to maintain a decent standard of living and manageable commute while not bankrupting myself.
As a planner, I abhor the idea of using the built environment to segregate and displace, something that has happened all too much in the past. However, by my very presence in Bushwick, I am contributing to these cycles of displacement and segregation, one that has taken a new form, but is still just as destructive and harmful to BIPOC communities. Where is this line drawn? Should the blame be laid on the gentrifiers, or on the various systems that shaped this dynamic in the first place? Are gentrifiers just responding to market forces outside of their control? Figuring out where I stand in the Bushwick community is troubling as well as challenging, and my perspective may be different than many other “transplants”. My status in this community has continued to emphasize to me the importance of an interdependent and sustainable neighborhood, one where people of all classes and backgrounds have the ability to live, work, and thrive. This is how a real sense of community is developed. Until we figure out how to house all New Yorkers, particularly our most underprivileged communities, in an equitable way, we will continue to see more of the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods become a playground for plastic consumption.
(Top right) A group of locals watch as an impromptu game of volleyball takes place on the Maria Hernandez Basketball court, complete with a homemade net.
(Center) A row of retail along Knickebocker Ave, containing everything from a beauty parlor, Spanish restaurant, Italian Pastries shop and an Asian-owned toy store.
(Top left) This is my apartment building in Bushwick. It’s a great place to live to be sure, though it’s obvious from its appearance what role it plays in the neighborhood context.
Eshti, her dad (Atma), and mom (Laxhmi) are sitting in their living room catching up on the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy. When the episode ends, attempts to flee upstairs before Eshti reminds him that he promised to be interviewed by her. He sits back down somewhat reluctantly and they begin their conversation.
Eshti: Alrighty Dad, are you excited?! Let’s get this interview started. First question I want to ask you—how did you stumble upon the field of urban planning?
Atma: [laughs] Ah, well, it goes back a far way when I started my undergraduate degree at the University of Guyana. Although my major was geography, there were courses in planning I was interested in. Then when I migrated to the United States, I pursued my Masters in Urban Planning and Transportation Planning at NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
Eshti: How would you say the field at large changed?
Atma: There are a lot of changes, yet there are still a lot of things that remain the same. Urban planning is always evolving, there's always new city structures, gentrification, techniques for upzoning, there’s a lot of change in height, density, and residential development, lots of mixed use. There’s been a lot of changes especially tailored by zoning that saw a different fabric in our society in regards to urban planning.
Eshti: What were the largest challenges of planning when you first started vs now?
Atma: One of the biggest challenges when I first started was getting data to support decision making and to support the analysis. These days it's very easy to get data because of cell phone usage, for transportation which is my specialty—from cell phone pings from data like Waze, cars equipped with transponders, just from technology.
When I started this in the mid-80s, there was no data like that. You had to collect it yourself. Census data was always outdated, probably because it was lagging 10-15 years. Technology has really improved the way data has been collected, stored, utilized and transmitted.
Eshti: Was 311 your bestie? [giggles]
Atma: Yeah… [pauses to laugh], also FOIL (Freedom of Information Life), if you want certain pieces of data you would need agencies to comply and request data. It's so easy, you can just go on a website from all the city and state agencies, they all have lots of information. Even all their manuals are PDFs and available online, you don’t need hard copies of everything anymore.
Eshti: What inspires you the most about the new generation of planning professionals?
Atma: Well um… you know planning on the whole is a very
interactive profession. Planners work closely with community activists, engineers, lawyers, transportation, and zoning specialists. You’re no longer a generalist planner. You do almost everything now in planning. Especially in terms of community outreach and engagement, you have to have all your information available to present to the public. The one thing that changed is that the community itself is up to speed. They know as much as professionals do in terms of what’s happening in their society and community, but also land use and zoning, cultural and natural resources. They know what’s happening in their backyards, so planners can help them plan better for their community.
Eshti: What is the role that community plays in your sector of planning?
Atma: Community plays a very important role. These days,
transparency is key. All plans, or most plans I should say, are vetted with community boards and local advocacy groups. It's hard to get a local plan successfully implemented without the approval of the local community board in New York City. They could be a good ally to your plans or they can kill your plans too in the midst of your tracks because ultimately they know what's best for their community.
Eshti: So how do you separate your own values from planning?
Atma: [long pause] Well, planning is technical, or it may sound like you draw a plan and impose it upon people but planning is just a series of technical analyses put together in a very cohesive way. You could prove to people that what you’re planning has no negative adverse impacts on the community. There's a backbone of sound technical analysis that goes
into planning. It’s not only about what you as a planner wants to see, but it has to be supported. Every discipline in planning feeds into that decision making process. It's not a subjective thing.
Eshti: Cool, cool. What is the most important value you’ve learned from this profession?
Atma: Planning is a profession where the outcome is to make lives better for the community. One of the values I find most important is when you see a plan actually implemented and you see people benefit from it, when they can enjoy the outcome of your plan is very satisfying. In one word, the value is better quality of life for everyone. That’s what planning should be. It shouldn’t be about building stuff. It should be about improving quality of life and safety.
Eshti: What was the coolest project you worked on and why?
Atma: Hmmm. [looks up at the ceiling] That's a tough one, I worked on so many cool projects. One of my best was the Downtown Brooklyn Master Plan many years ago. It was one of my first big projects and it was transformative. It’s the home of where NYU Polytechnic is now. People who remember that area can remember it was a regular grid network, part of the city street system. There was this massive plan by Metrotech to build an academic campus there as well as other uses that transformed the whole area into this academic complex. We had to study things like closing streets,
it was a regular grid network, part of the city street system. There was this massive plan by Metrotech to build an academic campus there as well as other uses that transformed the whole area into this academic complex. We had to study things like closing streets, diverting traffic, and making everything work. It was challenging but fruitful. It's built today and functioning really well. That was one of my favorites, because it’s nothing like seeing your plan in action and built. When I drive in Downtown Brooklyn, I can say I worked on this and I recommend this street be closed. That’s the joy that comes from the work!
Eshti: What was the hardest project you worked on + why?
Atma: Lots of projects are difficult because of schedules, budget, or difficult clients. I can’t pinpoint a specific project I really despise working on. Even projects that turn out to be good can be very difficult in early phases. MetroTech had major challenges to prove to client that these things could be feasible and that a
major campus could be built without adversely affecting the community. When you work for a private firm, you always have to be mindful of budget. You don’t have an open checkbook, if not your company loses money.
Eshti: Is getting yelled at at board meetings worth it?
Atma: Oh yeah, they’re only looking out for their community. As the professional, you also have to defend your work. I went to a lot of board meetings where people yell at you or don’t agree with your analysis…
Laxhmi (mom): (under her breath) Burger King!
Atma: You have to stick by your technical analysis because at the end of the day that's what carries the day. If your technical analysis can support your proposals, that's what will hold up so that no one can challenge it.
Eshti: What’s something you wish you had known earlier in your career?
Atma: That projects wouldn’t always go smoothly, and that community members would oppose it. You could do the best job and be the best planner, but people will find something. They have legitimate concerns that you don’t realize. You do your homework and technical work, but sometimes you wish you could read the community mind.
Eshti: How has your Guyanese identity shaped you as a planner?
Atma: Coming from a minority section of the population, it relates when you speak to a community. It
helps but it does not always mean they will identify you as a know-all, and that you have the only solutions to the problem. Sometimes, mixing with people of your own background can help better communicate what you’re doing.
Eshti: Are you proud to be a Guyanese in this field?
Atma: Oh yes. Very proud. Not only a planner, but a certified planner. There are lots of planners from Guyana and the Caribbean that are practicing planning without certification. Certification is important. It sets you apart from your fellow planners. You can be AICP certified, I don’t know any other Guyanese planners AICP certified. Your credentials also help when you go in front of the community. If you’re qualified, people respect what you’re saying and you’re bound by certain ethics and professional conduct that you have to maintain throughout your career.
Eshti: Okay we’re close to wrapping up. Now, in planning, not personally, what is the difference between me and you?
Laxhmi: (laughs)
Atma: You mean like me and you?
Eshti: Yes, between Atma and Eshti!
Atma: Well, the difference in planning terms, you may feel there is a certain solution to a problem regardless of what I think. As a planner, I can say there are alternatives. A lot of times, that’s very difficult when you don’t have more than one solution to a
problem, especially with the public. As a planner, if you can offer alternatives to achieve the same objective, that’s one of the differences between a lay person and a professional planner. There's not one solution at any given time. More specifically, you’re in an academic stage. You’re broad based, which I had to do at one point too. Now I’m a specialist. As an upcoming planner, you have to make sure you know the big picture. That’s what’s so exciting about it, everything starts with planning. You can’t build an airport without planning, you need to know how many gates or how many aircrafts you’re servicing. You can’t build a road without planning, you have to know where the road goes. You have to understand the big picture first and then you can specialize.
Eshti: So, do you have any advice for future planners?
Atma: Yes. Planning is a universal profession, it's like you could be a physical planner or an interior designer planner. My advice is to be serious about your career, get certified, take as many courses outside… When you get your Masters it's only the beginning. You have to get involved with professional organizations like APA, ITE, Women’s Transportation Seminar. Whatever it is. It goes beyond your two years of Masters program. Take advantage of that. Your clients will see you in a different light when you do these things. Just like if you're a doctor and not board certified or if you’re a lawyer and you don’t pass the bar, the people you serve may not feel as confident in you. Get your certifications, get your license. Take it seriously. Planning is a rewarding profession. Everything you see around you was at one point in a
Generations of Planning
planning stage. Planners are the first ones to hit the ground, before anything is built or running or operating. I think the future for planning is really good. There’s so much infrastructure work coming out, billions of dollars worth. And have fun while you’re doing it. It's a fun career, you can get really interesting projects. We’ve worked on some of the most interesting projects… Grand Central Access, East Side Access, South Battery Park City Resiliency. Projects for private clients like wind farms in the ocean… It's all planning. Keep doing your best, get employed in a good planning firm. The future is bright, and you will decide your own fate. Good luck and you’re lucky to be in such an excellent planning school. Take advantage of your professors' advice and counseling. Stay involved. I’m sure you’ll all do great.
Eshti: Well, that’s it! Thanks for letting me interview you, dad! [stomach rumbles] I’m hungry now.
Laxhmi (mom): Ahh, time to plan dinner. You know, everything really is planning. You have to plan every single thing [in awe]
Eshti: [laughs] Haha, I’m putting this in the transcript!
“The Fiat has sat mostly unused since 2016. Sometimes my aunt will take it to the shop, and when my mom comes for summers they dust it off, charge up the battery, and drive it around. But in the winters, the Fiat sits untouched; Babcia prefers to walk.”
Written by Nikolas Michael
The men worked rhythmically through the night. The worksite was dimly lit by the waning moon and brightly lit by the headlights provided by the two of them who actually owned cars. The older men smoked cigarettes as they took a break to watch and the younger men continued to build the short walls, slab by slab. They were fueled by the kind of energy you only get by defying an arbitrary order – and knowing that in the morning you are going to annoy some bureaucrat. Like a scene out of a Wajda film, they created a spontaneous and egalitarian worksite to get what they wanted, and what they wanted were garages.
My Babcia (grandmother) recently told me that my Dziadziuś (grandfather) was one of the men who built these garages, which run along the border of the state-owned forest behind their apartment building. Despite the fact that only two people in the apartment complex owned cars, they organized to get garages, first by appealing to the Ministry of Chemistry which built the complex, and then by navigating the red tape nightmare that was municipal governance in the Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa (the People’s Republic of Poland, or PRL for short). According to Babcia, they caught a break when a friendly bureaucrat told them that she had a letter forbidding construction of the structures – which she conveniently happened to forget – so if the residents wanted to claim the land for the garages they would need to have walls standing by the next day when she would come around to deliver the letter. So, every single person in the apartment complex gathered and got to work. Babcia compared it to a partyzanka, a reference to World War II guerilla tactics. As far as I know, none of them knew how to
build, but they produced a row of boxy cement garages, still in use today. Inside the one with the green door towards the end is a little blue Fiat, and a million tools and broken fuses, cups, and whatever else Dziadziuś never had enough time to fix, but always wanted to. The Fiat has sat mostly unused since 2016. Sometimes my aunt will take it to the shop, and when my mom comes for summers they dust it off, charge up the battery, and drive it around. But in the winters, the Fiat sits untouched; Babcia prefers to walk.
I’m not sure when the garages that Dziadziuś helped put together became canvases. The neutral concrete slabs invite all manner of artists, though I think it’s mostly Piast fans. I don’t claim to know anything about the artwork that adorns them, nor the people who put them up. I do know that they provide a colorful backdrop to walks with Babcia – to the store, to the cemetery, to the salt-breathing structure whose name I still don’t know in English (and refuse to learn). When I visit Babcia, we have a ritual. In the mornings, we have a
breakfast of cold cuts, bread, sweets, and a pot of tea (I sneak a coffee before she wakes up). In the afternoons, Babcia tells me a story that she forgot that she told me in the morning. I don’t mind – I listen to the melody of her voice, which has the distinct rasp of someone who has inhaled 86 years of what history had to throw at her.
Piast Gliwice is the local soccer team. When I was growing up they were in the second or third league, but recently, they’ve been promoted to the Ekstraklasa , which, crucially, means that you can manage them in FIFA. Piast refers to the first dynasty of Polish kings, which always struck me as an odd choice for a Silesian coal and steel town that was more German than Polish until 1945. Silesians would call my family krzoki , or bushes, as opposed to ptoki (birds) or pienioki (tree stumps). We’re not Silesian, but my grandparents moved to Gliwice in the 1960s with an infant daughter to work at Prosenchem , the state chemical company, that built the apartment complex where my mom and her sister grew up, where my grandparents lived and loved for 60 years, where I learned to walk, where we stayed when my aunt got married, where I book a ticket to see Babcia as often as I can. Krzoki set down roots.
Technically, I suppose, everyone has a Babcia and Dziadziuś , but to me, no other Babcia and Dziadziuś exist. They used to adorn packages they sent us across the ocean “ JJ Bednarczyk ” - Janusz and Julita Bednarczyk - a thin signature that probably did not mean much to the postal worker bringing it to me and my sisters, but meant the world to us. The packages were always immaculately wrapped in coffee-brown paper that survived the journey from the post office on the corner of Chorzowska and Dąbrowskiego to Jamaica, Queens. Inside there were usually some gifts: pajamas, shirts, some kasztanki and ptasie mleczko , and always a card that I tried to read out loud to show off how well I could read Polish (and my grandparents’ sprawly handwriting.) I don’t remember what we sent in the packages that would travel with us to Maspeth on Saturdays to be dropped off while we were in Polish school, but based on the roughly
400 photo albums on the bookshelf in Babcia ’s apartment, I think the packages were full of photos of us growing up. Today, my sisters keep the tradition alive; pictures of my niece and nephews are slowly filling up every corner of the tiny apartment the same way they have invaded my camera roll.
Peeking over the background of this garage, you can see the green spire of my family’s church, which has sat on Chorzowska for over 100 years. My aunt got married in this church. My sister got baptized in this church. Babcia still goes every week. The Catholic Church has become so intertwined with Polish identity that it is hard to remember that this is a recent phenomenon – a byproduct of a political church that pushed back against the state atheism of the RPL and wrapped the protests for bread, political freedom, and worker control in a spiritual cloth. The political church allied closely with the conservative elements of the Solidarność movement, which bought political power with the help of the church and neoliberal Western economists - at the price of the demands of the workers. Now, the church celebrates its total political victory over Polish society by pursuing an agenda of resisting the “LGBTQ ideology,” which mixes classic Catholic homophobia with a weirdly nationalist and anti-Western flavor. I say weirdly because American internet culture and culture wars have percolated into the discourse of the graffiti of Piast Gliwice ultras – maybe flavored more by Reddit than state-run television. There’s this old, creaky, wooden radio station in Gliwice where the Nazis staged a takeover by Polish nationalists as justification for the invasion that would set off WWII. What does it mean to put up an anti-anti fascist graffiti tag within view of it?
The garages lay perpendicular to the four-story bloki and form a courtyard (though that feels too formal) that serves as the (un)official playground for the kids who grow up in and around the complex. In the center, there used to be a swing where the boys in Zatorze used to lay on their stomachs and see how far they could stick a knife into the ground. When I was eight, some 12-year-olds asked me if I wanted a turn since I was
just standing there watching, and I quickly retreated to the sandbox that has since disintegrated into the dirt and grown over with weeds. Everyone who moved into our building in 1961 worked for Prosenchem , the state chemical company, which owned the land and funded the construction of the buildings which meant that there were plenty of young couples with kids who needed to make friends. My mom and Babcia fondly remember how all the kids would play in that courtyard as their parents watched over them from the kitchen windows. One of the kids who my mom played with was our downstairs neighbor, a złota rączka (golden hand), who worked during the week in Germany and would come back on the weekends and fix whatever it was that was broken that my Dziadziuś couldn’t fix himself. He was also the father of one of the boys who asked me to play the knife game. His son has taken over his grandfather’s and father’s role as the złota rączka of the bloki . Babcia claims he’s not as good, but I once watched him build a computer from scratch in the garage immediately next to ours, so I’ll save my judgment.
“Technically, I suppose, everyone has a Babcia and Dziadziuś, but to me, no other Babcia and Dziadziuś exist.”
Ethan Floyd dreamed of moving to New York City since he was a little kid. On August 15, 2022, he arrived home. He has since enjoyed several little moments getting to know his new city, seen throughout this piece.
Text and images by Ethan Floyd
Consider me your wanderlust, black sweater wearing, always down for an aperol spritz & cheese board friend. The small town turned city boy currently studying urban planning who considers traveling a prospective full time job. The one you call when you’ve touched down in a new city and need good recs. Except right now, you haven’t arrived anywhere unfamiliar. No passport. No plane ticket. No money for a hotel. In fact, you’re propped up in bed, at home, unable to fall asleep because your mind races at the thought of escaping New York City for the day.
It’s a feeling all too familiar for me. In those moments, I decide to have an impromptu saturday staycation in the City…and you can, too.
First things first, you’ll need some accessories. Little joys, as I call them, to brighten up your weekend mood:
Don’t sleep too late on Saturday morning. Daylight’s burning! Pretend you have a plane to catch and get out of bed. Press play on your album of choice and sing in the shower. I recommend one you haven’t played in a while, but puts you in a good mood. One of my favorite aspects of traveling is associating music with a place or a trip. I listened to Fine Line in Budapest. I kept singing Frank by Amy Winehouse in London. It’s not a bad idea to play some Rihanna or Lizzo either.
Apply your SPF, put on sunglasses and pack a tote with a book, magazines, a tiny notebook or all of the above. Then, make your way to St. Jardim a block away from Christopher Street station. Snag a tiny table for one in the corner and order your favorite coffee. Drink it slowly and let time pass by as you flip through the pages of Vanity Fair, Wonderland, British Vogue.
Feeling caffeinated and inspired, head to a local gallery in Chelsea and enjoy a variety of artwork. When you see one painting or sculpture that strikes you, grab a pen and sketch it in your notebook. I recently went to the Pace Gallery to see Pulse Typology (2021) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
To finish the staycation day, head to a quaint, intimate dinner spot in your New York neighborhood of choice. When they ask how many are in your party…politely, unapologetically say, “just one.” Tonight you are your own date. In a city of millions, consider yourself grateful for exactly who you are and where you are. Make friendly talk with the wait-staff and bartenders, order the pasta that brings back a memory of a trip, sip an international wine, and most importantly, resist the urge to look at your phone. Whether it’s Cafe Cluny, St. Mazie, or Commerce Inn, enjoy your solo soirée. Listen to that same album you played in the shower on your walk home as you reminisce about your simple Saturday staycation.
those cast iron walls e. floyd high line, 2022
that pinch-me moment e. floyd as seen from the west village, 2022
Written by Calvin Harrison
As hip hop has spread across the globe from its roots in the American inner city, its musical and aesthetic tropes have been adapted over and over again to fit into local contexts, including in the Middle East, a region with its rich history of folk, classical, and popular music. While hip hop and rap have served as vehicles for political speech across the region, notably in Palestine, where artists like DAM, Shabjdeed, and Daboor use their lyrics and videos to speak up against Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies, the lack of free speech protection in Egypt means that such open politicization of music is not possible. But even in Egypt, rap is far from apolitical, as evidenced by government and industry efforts to silence up-and-coming artists in the genre. In the face of increasingly tight government control over artistic production and dwindling economic opportunities for the masses of lower-class Egyptian youth, the music and video clips of rappers 3enba and Double Zuksh represent a form of political protest by asserting an identity rooted in Cairo’s marginalized cultural geography that serves as a direct challenge to the dominant patterns of consumption and behavior promoted by Egypt’s government and ruling classes.
Drawing upon previous scholarly work about economic pressures and urban change in Cairo, this paper primarily analyzes three early hit songs released in 2020 (“Huna al-Qahira,” “Tayarat,” and “Fokak,”) from a group of three rappers (3enba and Double Zuksh, the duo comprised of Zuksh and his brother Young Zuksh) from Madinat al-Salam, a poor, peripheral neighborhood in Cairo. Following in the footsteps of scholars like Walter Armbrust (1996) and Walid El Hamamsy and Mounira Soliman (2013), it engages with rap music specifically and popular culture generally as “a form of cultural resistance against different forms of global and local domination”
(El Hamamsy and Soliman, 2013, p. 7). The paper first traces the history of political music in Egypt, then outlines the socioeconomic geographies from which 3enba and Double Zuksh sing. It then analyzes the trio’s work both in terms of how it localizes itself in Madinat al-Salam and how it projects a vision of success outside of prevailing neoliberal norms. Finally, it explores how the work carries political valence despite not making explicitly political claims. By reading both the songs’ lyrical content and through visual analysis of the accompanying music videos, the paper seeks to better understand the interplay between an increasingly neoliberal and controlled Cairo and a new, dynamic art form.
Music has long been an important site of political discourse throughout Egypt’s modern history. For example, during and after the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leftist Sheikh Imam performed his collaborator Ahmed Fouad Negm’s poetry, singing in support of Nasser’s Arab socialist project while trying to expose the inequality and hypocrisy of the ruling class; after president Anwar Sadat implemented his market-oriented economic reforms, referred to as the “infitah,” Imam and Negm’s criticisms became even more pointed against the country’s leadership, exposing both to persecution and imprisonment (Booth, 1985). Importantly, this type of music was not powerful only for its lyrical content, but also in its performance and within the larger web of political and protest writing (Colla, 2020), as well as its engagement with popular imagery and folk motifs (Mostafa, 2001).
From the 1980’s onward, the traditional political poetry music of artists like Imam, Negm, and others waned in importance. This new era was defined
by sha’abi music, a highly produced style with its roots in working-class public wedding performances (the term sha’abi can be translated as “popular” or “of the masses” and carries a strong connotation of local-ness and lowerclass associations), propelled into the ears of Egypt’s masses via the new technology of the audio cassette and later satellite radio and mobile phones (Grippo, 2010). Rather than engaging with politics directly like Imam, Negm and their contemporaries, sha’abi musicians largely make a more subtle political claim via the thematic focus of their songs. Stylistically, they have popularized the sounds and rhythms of the lower-class street wedding, and lyrically, they bring to light the urban underclass in songs “about hard luck, illegal pursuits, illicit sexuality and crimes of passion, laced with urban slang [and] contempt for middle-class respectability” (Gordon, 2003, p. 76).
That said, sha’abi music does occasionally engage in direct political speech. Among the most memorable examples is the sha’abi superstar Sha’aban Abd al-Rahim’s 2001 hit, “Ana Bakrah Israel (I Hate Israel),” which includes direct references to Israeli president and prime minister Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon. While the song is certainly political, it functions differently than Nasser- and Sadat-era political music. The song’s repetitive lyrics simply give voice to overwhelming public sentiment, without advocating for a specific movement or belief; unlike Imam and Negm, it would be futile to attempt to place Abd al-Rahim somewhere on the left-right political spectrum. Further exposing the difference between these two generations of musicians, Abd al-Rahim takes pains to appease the existing leadership, praising Hosni Mubarak and his foreign minister Amr Moussa by saying that the former “has
a strong mind” and the latter’s “words are judicious” (Abd al-Rahim, 2001). Additionally, the song has been said to lack the artistry and creativity of earlier political music (Gordon, 2003).
The heroes of sha’abi music also do not associate themselves with leftism, activism, and overt political organizing the way earlier folk poets and musicians did. Quite the contrary, sha’abi artists like Abd al-Rahim put on a persona of ignorance and removal from politics that, regardless of authenticity, allows them to get away with speech that may otherwise have run afoul of state censorship (Grippo, 2006). Cultural critic Mohamed El Assiouty (2001) argues that, paradoxically, the political valence of sha’abi music lies in this persona: “the illiteracy and vulgarity of the singer are a license to circumvent censorship and thus sexual and political double entendres make their way into society unchecked.”
While sha’abi music has retained its popularity through today, it has been joined on the music scene by other genres, notably independent music that crosses between rock and pop, Egyptian rap, and mahraganat, a style reminiscent of sha’abi that also has its roots in street parties (the term mahraganat means “festivals”) in working-class neighborhood but that sacrifices traditional Arab musical structures like the mawwal for a louder, faster, and more intensely electronic style. The 2011 revolution created a space for all sorts of musical styles, including folk music, older nationalistic songs, and contemporary styles like rap and mahraganat (McDonald, 2019). These newer genres have maintained much of their popularity despite an overall political environment that, in the wake of the 2013 coup that re-established military dictatorship under Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, has left many artists with a sense of hopelessness, replacing
a desire for art-as-politics with a push for art-as-coping mechanism (Sprengel, 2019).
While Egypt’s overall independent music scene reached its peak in the newfound freedoms of 2011, mahraganat and rap both emerged after al-Sisi’s crackdown on freedom of expression, meaning that the styles have developed their voice within a context in which explicit political speech, be it the radical poetry of Imam and Negm or the raw, perhaps ignorant emotion of Abd al-Rahim, is off limits (Anonymous, 2020). In this context, then, songs cannot necessarily be read for political meaning on the surface, nor expected to make explicit claims or demands of the system in the way earlier music may have. Instead, the political assertions inherent in Egyptian rap, particularly the music of 3enba and Double Zuksh, are more subtle.
Salaam City: On the Margins of the Neoliberal Metropolis
To interpret the works of 3enba and Double Zuksh requires not only an understanding of the music industry in which they operate, but also the urban context from which they hail. The three rappers are from Madinat al-Salaam, a neighborhood just north of Cairo’s airport that dates to the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was built as part of a housing development scheme by the Cairo Municipality on land belonging to a state-owned poultry firm. While the area is not one of Cairo’s ashwayi’at, the crowded neighborhoods of auto-constructed apartment blocks built without permission usually on agricultural land, it is solidly workingclass, even poor: part of its buildings were specifically geared towards manual laborers, with ground floor workshop spaces, and another significant portion of its population is made up of families relocated from areas slated for demolition and urban renewal (Sims, 2010). Today,
the neighborhood is lumped together with other poor but formal districts like Imbaba and seen as impoverished and crimeridden, corroborated by a search of April headlines mentioning the neighborhood in local daily newspaper Al-Ahram: “Arrest of Entire Family for Trafficking Narcotics in Madinat al-Salaam,” “Life Imprisonment for Heroin Dealer in Madinat al-Salam,” “Security Forces Succeed in Arrest of Man for Illegal Possession of Firearms in Madinat al-Salam,” and “Arrest of Suspect in Killing of Young Man in Madinat alSalam.”
While it is of course quite common for rappers to hail from less-than-savory neighborhoods, the symbolic weight of 3enba and Double Zuksh’s foregrounding of their home district is intensified by the rapid changes in Cairo’s geography. Since the 1990s, Cairo’s urban growth has been fueled by two related trends: an ongoing housing crisis that is pushing more and more Egyptians into precarity and informality of all types (Shawkat, 2019) and a narrative of fear that paints the existing city as a lost cause and “as a place of potentially unfathomable corruption and loss,” pushing those with means into gated compounds in desert satellite cities like New Cairo and Sixth of October (Denis, 2006, p. 55). These neighborhoods, which are accessible only to the wealthy, are largely modeled on developments in the Gulf, representative of increased state securitization and a new, neoliberal vision of what Egypt should look like (Elsheshtawy, 2006). As more and more Cairenes are forced into housing precarity while the lucky few revel in their conspicuous consumption, the city’s spatial fragmentation has increased more and more, with neighborhoods like Madinat al-Salam falling on the wrong side of the divide.
The expansion of residential compounds also serves as the spatial manifestation
of overwhelming social pressures that push a certain kind of consumption onto Egyptians in all facets of life, not just housing. This pressure has its roots in the 1980s and 1990s, when Egyptians began migrating in large numbers to the oil-rich states of the Gulf for work; this migration meant that visions of success, modernity, and respectability, became increasingly determined by Gulf lifestyles, which are inherently more difficult to achieve than local standards (Ghannam, 2002). The pressure falls heavily on men to find employment and make money, be it in the Gulf or at home, in order to save for marriage; however, fewer and fewer jobs are available for less and less money, leaving many men unable to live up to the vision of masculinity that is enforced from all around by families, potential spouses, and the police state (Ghannam, 2002; 2013). Within this socioeconomic context, which asks men not only to provide for their future families but to do so while abiding by highly prescribed rules of behavior and presentation, it becomes possible to see Egyptian rap as a kind of protest against these neoliberal norms in and of itself.
While traditional sha’abi music is often criticized for having uninventive or uninspiring lyrics, relying instead on repetition a la the wedding music on which it is based (Grippo, 2010), Egyptian rap takes more after its American roots, using clever lyrics and wordplay to string together long, rhyming verses. While its beats and production have grown out of sha’abi music’s electronic soundscape, Egyptian rap diverges from sha’abi by eschewing the use of a mawwal and the repetition of certain lines in favor of the verse/chorus structure of American rap. Within the rap scene, “verbal posturing” through inventive lyrics and
creative disses is an important way for artists to form and assert their identity (Mangialardi, 2019, p. 82). With this in mind, lyrical analysis of 3enba and Double Zuksh provides important insight into the details of the identity their music projects.
The trio’s most basic and repeated assertion is of their roots, often starting or ending their songs with by shouting out “Salam” or “Salam City,” referring to the neighborhood where they grew up (3enba, 2020b; 2021; Double Zuksh, 2020). In “Huna al-Qahira (This Is Cairo),” 3enba proclaims proudly over the outro “Ana ‘enaaab, min Salam (I’m 3enba, from Salam),” and in the rest of the song makes direct disses to Alexandrian rappers like “inta halfoot fi al-bahr / ana timsah fi al-nahr (You’re a fool in the sea / I’m a crocodile in the river)” and “ana mish shayif gheer al-samak / hasib min almoga l-trakabak (I only see fish / careful of the wave lest it catch you)” (2020a). In one of the trio’s more recent songs, “El 3aw,” 3enba sings, “mish min Baris ana min Salam (I’m not from Paris, I’m from Salam),” using a direct contrast between his own humble beginnings and a global capital of culture as a point of pride (2021). In both these examples, 3enba is “claiming legitimacy by implementing a kind of hip hop nationalism,” specifically rooted not just in the city of Cairo but in his marginalized neighborhood (Mangialardi, 2019, p. 82).
The connection to their neighborhood is further strengthened by the backdrop of the video clips for “Huna al-Qahira,” “Tayarat (Airplanes),” and “Fokak (Forget It).” Rather than choosing a flashy backdrop, all three music videos are underpinned by imagery of the marginalized cityscape of Cairo, namely red-brick and concrete buildings (in “Huna al-Qahira” and “Tayarat”), which dominate the landscape in Cairo’s
peripheral and informal areas, and a microbus, on of the much maligned white vans that connect peripheral areas throughout Cairo (in “Fokak”). In the video for “Huna al-Qahira” (2020), 3enba and Double Zuksh perform alternatively on a barren rooftop or in an alleyway in front of a group of boys and young men, always with the backdrop of redbrick high-rises. Similarly, in the video for “Tayarat,” the group performs on a dirt road between rows of the red-brick and concrete apartments in front of a group of choreographed backup dancers.
While these backdrops are unsurprising given that the videos are home-produced on a presumably low budget, the use of a wide shot and cutting to footage of the artists and their posse moving throughout the neighborhood place an emphasis on the built environment. The videos present their surroundings triumphantly, with kids even running through the dilapidated apartment blocks raising flags in “Hena al-Qahira” (3enba, 2020a). Far from being an unfortunate backdrop due to lack of funds, the lowerclass built environment becomes a point of pride for the artists. This statement takes on even more valence in light of the government’s efforts to eradicate the ubiquitous red-brick housing blocks from the cityscape, especially for the foreign gaze, going so far as to order the exterior painting of all such buildings, which prime minister Mostafa Madbouly has called “uncivilized,” along the highway to the Pyramids of Giza (Walsh, 2019).
Even as the production value (and presumably, budget) increased, they continued to foreground symbols of their marginality. This is evident in their video for “Fokak,” which takes place largely inside and around a microbus (Double Zuksh, 2020). Both by virtue of coming out after the trio gained popularity through “Tayarat” and as evidenced by its
cleaner graphics and more sophisticated camerawork, this video presumably could have been shot in a different location, but the artists chose to situate it in a microbus. A critical mode of transport for many Cairenes but especially the lower classes and those on the peripheries unserved by the city’s metro and publicly run buses, microbuses have also been labelled as dangerous and uncivilized, with the government aiming to ban them from the city’s Ring Road (Menacing Minibuses, 2022). Once again, the trio choose to actively promote symbols that the state has railed against.
Both lyrically and visually, 3enba and Double Zuksh are rooting their music locally as a way of forging and asserting an identity that runs counter to the state’s narratives of development and progress. Such a process is common in rap music production, particularly in the global south. As explored by Igor Johanssen (2019), hip hop outside of the West runs a fine line between connecting with global artistic practice and connecting with the local environment. Although he argues that one of hip hop’s powers lies in the tools it gives artists “to ‘overcome’ one’s material social, political, and economic surroundings” (p. 189), this trio of Egyptian rappers are choosing to use the tools of the genre not to overcome their surroundings, but to raise them to their rightful place as a legitimate and celebrated part of Egyptian popular culture. In these songs, they rely on what Susan Ruddick (2005) refers to as “the crucial role of space in the production of sub-cultures of resistance,” turning Madinat al-Salam into “fruitful ground for the production of new identities” not in spite of its marginality, but because of it (p. 344). Additionally, by performing their identities openly and disseminating it via the internet, they push back against the control of youth’s spatial freedom (Massey, 2005). The choice of their home
Calvin Harrison
neighborhood as the site of these videos carries even more weight in Egypt, where young men’s behavior is highly policed by family and neighbors within their home area and subject to the control of police and military in other areas of the city, leaving male youth particularly spatially confined (Ghannam, 2011).
“Wasleen, Gamdeen Min Ghayr al‘alaqat”: Boast as Protest
In addition to rooting their music in Madinat al-Salam, 3enba and Double Zuksh infuse their songs with a swagger that in many ways serves as a counterpoint to Cairo’s neoliberal economic trajectory. Their song “Tayarat (Airplanes)” embodies their version of “success:” “Ghayarna al-nashatat / ba’ena ntayyar tayarat / kirifna al-hawarat / wasleen gamdeen min ghayr al-‘alaqat (we changed up how it’s done / we’re flying airplanes now / all that talk made us sick / we made it, we’re awesome, without any connections)” (3enba, 2020b). The song engages in typical rap bravado, with frequent allusions to violence (“a’alint harb ‘ala ‘ida’i / qatalt hobba wa sibt albaqi (I declared war on my enemies / killed a few and left the rest)” and triumph (“kasibt sabiq fi al-estad (I won a match in the stadium)”), but interestingly does not lay claim to any physical trappings of wealth. There is only one mention of any tangible winnings from their “changing up how it’s done:” “qata’at al-wiriq, floskab / nizilt al-sabt, foloos gat (I tore off some paper, college-ruled / went out of the house on Saturday, the money is here)” (3enba, 2020b).
In “Fokak,” which can be roughly translated as “forget it” or “get away from me,” 3enba and Double Zuksh intensify their bragging but continue to take pride in an imagined success outside the confines of the formal economy. The song opens with an allusion to
abundance, either of money or perhaps drugs (“Haseeb liku hobba b’mizagi / fokak, mish ‘aeez baqi (I’ll leave you some because I feel like it / get away from me, I don’t want any change)”), and continues with a claim to greatness, again without any help from anyone else: “ihna ‘abaqra bas bidoun tadress / istabena wa ibtadena fi tanfeez (we’re geniuses without any education / we agreed and we started executing)” (Double Zuksh, 2020). Later in the song, Young Zuksh sings “mish bamashi al-dunya bi-lisan / ana mish bwaga3 al-dimagh / sahel inni arfa’ al-silah (The world doesn't turn on my words / that doesn’t bother me / it’s easy for me to take up arms),” highlighting that he can stand up for himself in a world where his voice means little (Double Zuksh, 2020).
These songs are, at their base, youthful cockiness, with the three young rappers talking about how great they are, alluding to drug use (“nashrab na’ali fi al-mazag / liff li sigara min ZigZag (let’s smoke and get higher / roll me a joint with the ZigZag papers”), and even being flirtatious (“baby ta’ali, na’ish al-yom (baby come over, let’s live a little today)”) (3enba, 2020b). While the music is frivolous and serves to entertain more than to incite action, it makes a statement in its refusal to buy into the traditional symbols of success in the Egypt. As Harry Pettit (2018) has explored, the neoliberal project of building Cairo’s and the country’s economy fuels a myth of entrepreneurship and meritocracy that keeps “young men attached to the hopeful notion that its employment and lifestyles are reachable” (p. 1059). As Pettit (2018) shows, though, this meritocratic dream is largely baseless, as most success stories come from people who have the kinds of ‘alaqat, or connections, that Double Zuksh and 3enba proudly don’t. By celebrating their success essentially outside of the dominant economic framework, these rappers are making a subtle claim that the
rat race is meaningless, and instead claim success for doing what the dominant culture would consider outside the sphere of respectability. This is perhaps reflective of their generation splitting from earlier ones, and acknowledging “the tendencies of global capitalism that have produced a future with little stable or meaningful work” (Katz, 2005, p. 141). Instead of trying to get ahead, they simply take pride and pleasure in having a few extra bucks and a joint to share.
The trio also uses their lyrics to assert a kind of cosmopolitanism and modernity that is mediated through their own participation in an international music scene rather than through approved channels, once again subverting the dominant culture. In “Tayarat,” Zuksh mixes English and Arabic together in one of his verses, saying “haseit inni Travis, highest in the room (I felt like Travis, highest in the room)” in an unmissable reference to American rap star Travis Scott’s hit song, “Highest in the Room” (3enba, 2020). His mixture of English and Arabic falls in line with a larger trend in Arab hip hop, in which code-switching helps “artists perform geographic and temporal flexibilities,” particularly among the diaspora (Drury, 2017, p. 2). But the word play takes on a different valence for local rappers like 3enba and Double Zuksh, who are writing more directly for their local audience, without the complexities of diasporic identity.
The ability to speak English well is critical to climbing through Egypt’s so-called meritocracy, although it does not in fact guarantee any sort of upward mobility (Pettit, 2018). Language is also deeply tied to the projection of respectability: it is common in Egypt for people to sprinkle English and French words into their daily interactions to perform an educated, upper-class persona, for example saying “merci” instead of the Arabic “shukran.”
In this verse, Zuksh is making a similar linguistic move at an even higher level: not only does he know at least a bit of English, but he also has cultural knowledge of the international language of hip hop. He is both “authenticating [himself] through a network of other respected rappers]” (Mangialardi, 2019, p. 82) and connecting with the global and international phenomenon of hip-hop (Johanssen, 2019). By subverting visions of economic success and projections of respectability, 3enba and Double Zuksh, like many mahraganat musicians, “carve out an autonomous sphere in which the dominant cultural meanings underpinning hierarchies of power may be disrupted” (Pratt, 534).
One notable place, however, where 3enba and Double Zuksh fail to meaningfully push back against prevailing norms in the Egyptian music industry is when it comes to gender. Despite promoting alternatives to economic expectations and respectability politics around manhood, the trio doesn’t engage meaningfully with the construction of masculinity vis a vis women. In “Tayarat,” Zuksh seductively invites a girl over after saying (in English) “I’m home alone” (3enba, 2020b). Sexism is much more present in “Fokak,” in which Young Zuksh proclaims, “khaliki mutakidda / ana kidda wa hatahabbini ‘ala kidda / ‘alaqati muta’adida / mish fadi lik iwa’i takhodi ‘ala kidda (Be sure / this is how I am and you’ll love me like this / I have a lot of relationships / I don’t have time for you so don’t dare get used to this.” (Double Zuksh, 2020). Here, he falls into the same pattern of misogyny that dominates the Egyptian cultural sphere, including perpetuating the idea that women are disposable and that men can and should have multiple relationships while such activity is not acceptable for a woman. The lyrics also represent almost a rejection of women, placing them not exactly as the object of desire but as
desirers themselves, and shaming them for such behavior. This has also been reflected in mahraganat songs, indicating an interesting but troubling trend in new Egyptian music (El-Falaki, 2015).
In early 2021, 3enba and Double Zuksh released their fourth collaboration, titled “Madinat al-Mostaqbel,” which translates to “City of the Future;” it is also the name of a desert satellite city being built between Cairo and Ismailia, part of the government’s push to develop new cities in the desert and de-densify Cairo (see Sims, 2015). The video for this song has much higher production value, and is higher concept than their earlier work: it cuts among shots of 3enba in a worn-out, almost Napoleonic military uniform in an eerily deserted playground in front of the pyramids, a woman in red niqab riding a white horse, and Double Zuksh and their fourth collaborator, Molotof, at night dancing in front of a fancy car and a fire pit. This video represents something of a departure from their earlier aesthetic, perhaps a reflection of their growing popularity and success. Another trapping of success: 3enba landed a summer ad campaign with Emirati telecoms provider Etisalat (Etisalat Misr, 2021). As the Egyptian rap scene gains more acceptance and popularity, it is unclear how much it can hold onto its status as a form of resistance, especially given that such resistance is tied to a locally rooted, peripheral identity and a rejection of the neoliberal economy. That said, Madinat al-Mostaqbel’s clever wink at the state’s ongoing development project indicates that 3enba and Double Zuksh maintain their counterculture tendencies. Egyptian rap may indeed continue to serve as a subtle but important voice against the state’s overwhelming vision.
The following map provides a glimpse into the otherwise invisible queerscape – it combines examples from my own personal queer geography supplemented with select examples from Queering the Map, which is a grassroots crowdsourced counter cartography platform which allows users to share a queer anecdote or experience by placing it on a map.
Our built and social environments were created, and have been maintained, within a specific set of normative parameters. The people, places, and things which exist beyond those brackets are deemed odd, strange, or queer. By nature of this fringed existence, queer people generate their own novel geographies.
Queer territories are derived in opposition to the heteronormative paradigm of place and space. These material, social, and symbolic constructions coalesce into a unique embodied urban experience for queer individuals. Distinct yet interconnected “constellations” constitute the queerscape; an arrangement of lived experiences which are, perforce, subversive and largely obscured from society at large (Gieseking 2020). The queerscape, therefore, is the product of “the others” exerting their right to the city; however, the queerscape is not built through traditional means of urban transformation. Rather than constructing new built environments, queer people transmute the city’s many forms by ascribing new meaning, and utility, to existing sites. In doing this, queer people have managed to create an alternative city, embedded within the existing metropolis. Markedly invisible, shrouded in secrecy, and hidden within plain sight, queerscapes adapt a built environment which was neither created by nor for queer people, to better meet their devient needs.
1 - Met up with a guy from Montreal here whose name I forget and whose number I lost. He was chugging vodka sprites (with a splash of cran) so quickly that the bartender had to tell him to slow down. He was in town visiting friends before heading to North Carolina for something school related. He was a horrible kisser. I will never see him again but I hope he’s learned to handle his liquor better
2 - Made small talk with a very tall British man named MC at 4:45am when the venue was basically empty. I should’ve asked for his number
3 - We got caught in a downpour. While everyone else ran for cover we kept strolling along and chatting, completely drenched
4 - Some straight guy pulled me into the bathroom to keep him company while he did a line of coke. Pupils dilated, excess powder on his nose, he offered me a line and told me he had the best plug in the city. Very different from the last time a man pulled me into the bathroom
5 - It was our first time hanging out before the sun had set and we had margaritas
6 - Went for a beautiful dinner with friends new and old, who have serendipitous overlap
7 - We had the be the last two people to leave the Times Square Burger King for some reason
8 - Security kicked my friend out of the bar because he was visibly queer
9 - Locked eyes with the barista for that extra half second and I knew
10 - We were chatting for so long on our first date that we had no idea how much time had passed until the park rangers told us we had to go
11 - Mother forced me to come out at a fancy French restaurant with two gay white men sitting in the corner. It did not go well. Some places are stained
12 - Sitting in my parents’ car [and] caught a glimpse of two boys holding hands. It was dark and it was brief, but it gave me hope
13 - Realized I was trans
14 - My queerness was cultivated here by many lovers who wished for my heart to grow for them. The first was the most memorable, the only one to have gotten close. Never have I felt my body so perfectly intertwined with another. I wish I knew your lips were coated in poison. I wish…
15 - We made out in an empty subway car, desperately hoping that no one would get on the train at each station. The city felt so big and so ours
“Paper Estates” is a series of collages that examines how the weekly magazine named Jet constructed an ideal of middle-class life for African Americans in the 1950s-60s through its articles and advertisements.
Prints
by Jenna Dublin-Boc
Materials byJet Magazine prints
The romance unfolding on Jet Magazine's pages contrasts sharply with the reality of segregation and the discriminatory lending and housing practices that Blacks experienced in postwar years.
To make the collages, magazine images representing suburban life, leisure, domesticity, and beauty were selected and printed on letter-sized paper with a simple inkjet printer. A sampling of floor plans and elevations from “ready-made” manufactured homes typical of planned suburban developments were also selected. The collages were made by passing the paper through the inkjet printer multiple times so that the overlaps between the collages' layered images and the color quality are left up to chance. The collages’ quality and colors changed as the printer ran out of ink.
A few collages broke these rules and loosely drew upon the descriptions and diagrams of canonized urban ethnographic studies of Black communities, including Tally’s Corner (1967) by Elliot Liebow and Carol B. Stack’s All our Kin (1974). Other collages were created by layering Jet magazine images and its article titles.
“這座城市對於你好像是全部，沒有任何慾望會遺落，而你自 己也是其中的一部分，由於它欣賞你不欣賞的一切，所以你就 只好安身於慾望之中，並且感到滿足。”《看不見的城市》
“The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you apart, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit the desire and be content.” - Invisible Cities
恆變無常的都市無時不展演著新活動，滯後的建築與街道硬體，時而頑固地抵抗，時而靈活地回應著眾多需求—— 人們在這新舊夾縫中生活，向城市傾倒自身的慾望，也被城市形 塑，棲身在無盡追求的動態中。人
Amidst the ever-evolving city, buildings and streets remain stagnant, unable to keep up with our ceaseless desires and the changing tides of time. Despite the immense investment of resources and painstaking planning, the physical world struggles to keep pace with our yearning for novelty and fulfillment of desires. The old and the new coexist, their forms interwoven, reshaping and evolving with each other, a dance of desire and construction, continuously reshaping the built environment. The endless correspondences between desire and the tangible world breathe life into society.
A city like New York creates an illusion that our desires are within reach, reinforcing our belief in deserving nothing but the finest. Fame, wealth, or love. We crave unprecedented experiences that no other place can offer and the sensational pleasures that come along with them. We are eager for interaction and connection, but we may be too focused on our own individual desires, where we instead become narcissistic. The city offers infinite possibilities, leaving the city dweller with the paradox of choice, paralyzing us from choosing any of these infinite possibilities. Eventually, we settled into the unsettled, and we called ourselves “New Yorkers.”
It’s a brisk Tuesday afternoon in Cincinnati, Ohio’s Mount Washington neighborhood. I am sitting inside Mom n’ Em’s coffee shop, deliberating patiently on the next application to submit, making it the third one of that hour. In between liberal sips of my double espresso, I notice a sticker on the bottom right corner of my neighbor’s laptop. It reads, “digital nomad”, something I had heard of before but never seen in physical marketing.
After some light reading on the topic, I discovered this term applies to over seven million Americans, an increasing number of which I seem to have noticed without assigning any thought. Nearly 2,000 people moved to the Queen city between 2020 and 2021. Sure, we can blame COVID-19, though due to its relatively affordable housing and growing city life, Cincinnati is now one of the fastest-growing, coolest places to live. In addition, the city ranks #4 in the country for most metro-area parks and recreation sites, right behind Washington D.C., Arlington, and St. Paul. Suffice it to say, moving to Cincinnati as a digital nomad or a small business owner in the residential rental market is a no-brainer. (Duffin, Erin. “Population of the Cincinnati metro area in the United States from 2010 to 2021”. 2022). Friends and family members who have now fully subscribed to the digital nomad moniker told me that short term rentals are critical in their newfound lifestyle. And with an increasing number of post-graduates seeking this kind of wanderlust, digital nomads continue to make their way to the Queen City.
According to an Airbnb report from 2022, Cincinnati is among the top 5 best places to Airbnb your home. (Lebus, Mary. "Cincinnati, recognized by Airbnb, named one of the 'best equipped' destinations." Fox19 Now. July 27, 2022). Digital nomads now make up about ⅓ of your corporate workforce. These individuals who travel for leisure rather than work are infiltrating some once-residential cities and states. Whereas now, that number has jumped to 10.1 million people. Remote working has made this growth possible and will continue as we approach the mid-decade of the 2020s. This massive shift in workforce management and attendance begs us to answer some questions as city planners, representatives, and business owners: how does this affect me and my neighbors? As much as traveling across urban environments for work appeals, does this digital working class expose underlying, unaddressed issues in urban planning? Especially in a predominantly black city such as Cincinnati with a rising housing crisis to boot. If we crunch the numbers, the metro
Written by Olivia McCloyarea of Cincinnati, Ohio is 40.9% black. In conjunction, the average percentage of homeowners in Cincinnati has fallen from 40% to 35% in just two years since 2020. Less than half of that 35% of residents are black residents. So while low-income housing projects and dilapidated buildings are being swallowed up by rental property owners, a majority of the city’s black residents find themselves getting pushed out further and faster. A majority of the city's history and population makeup dates back to the pre-Civil War era. Freed black families made their claims in the city limits and started their livelihoods. However, flashforward to the 1950s, black families and neighborhoods were diced up by the failed Kenyon-Barr urban renewal project. This project cut the West End neighborhood in Cincinnati in half, forcing a diced up school district to fail, the roads to become withered, and the spirit of the neighborhood to die. After decades of strife and many failed urban renewal projects, the Cincinnati metro-area neighborhoods regained strength in numbers. Thus, paving the
way for a class of white families to regain numbers in the up-and-coming neighborhoods of Over-The-Rhine. In other terms, the poorer areas of the city began to experience gentrification with the trend growing larger into the 2020 decade. While gentrification tends to have a bad rep, the economy flourished and, as of 2016, had grown significantly in small businesses and decreased crime. With gentrification, cities breed a new era of urban renewal projects, privately and publicly funded by the city. In Cincy's case, this is the City Center Development Corporation of Cincinnati, locally known as 3CDC. While this organization's practices have yielded promising urban renewal results and increased traffic to historical sites, what many residents are worried about is their community engagement department and whether or not they’re considering the needs of Cincinnati’s long-time residents. With this gentrification, rental properties have doubled, which allows us to wonder, has this new-age economic growth paved a way for short term renters to stake their claim? And, to what cost does this impact our residents?
Throughout much of 2021, Cincinnati monthly rent prices — as in permanent housing, not vacation rentals — have increased in year-over-year comparisons. At that time, people in Greater Cincinnati paid $1,025 per month for a studio, $1,155 for one bedroom and $1,275 for two bedrooms. That equates to studios going up by 2.5% over the last year, single bedrooms by 12.7%, and doubles by a whopping 21.4%. (Babka, Allison. "Cincinnati Is One of the Most-Booked Cities on Airbnb". CityBeat. November 2, 2021).
With giants like Airbnb pushing their way into the city blocks, it becomes harder to find your own affordable apartment.
Thus, leaving a huge population of residents out of rental units to choose from and an increase in their monthly rent. According to the same article from CityBeat, Cincinnati housing also is seeing a squeeze, thanks to the perfect storm of increasing vacation rentals, the pandemic, gentrification, soaring single-home prices and a rise in renters looking for housing.
In May of 2022, the 3CDC organization introduced an expanding plan for downtown Cincinnati's Ziegler Park, near the Over-The-Rhine neighborhood. Without much community follow-up, the organization signed off on a vote from the city council that solidified groundbreaking plans to move forward with the project. This push comes from an increased crime rate index for the area where the expansion would occur. However, this push would relocate several parking spots for residential housing and residents of said housing units. (Wtterich, Chris. "Ziegler Park expansion gets final approval despite turbulence". Cincinnati Business Courier. December 16, 2022). One can only speculate but is this an attempt to make the area more comfortable for newer (probably whiter) residents? Cincinnati is known for its historical relocation and razed neighborhoods of black areas, but is the boom of airbnb pushing this issue to the brink? Housing in the Cincinnati metro area has always known a crisis, but this time, we are almost made to believe the increase in airbnb and the push for a trendier city is to blame. But how do we introduce a city like Cincinnati to digital nomads properly? Certainly, we must keep business. The influx of people, no matter what, boosts economies, cultural touchstones, and residential GDP. In many ways, the first chapters begin with community
engagement and a realignment of values from our city planners. Organizations like 3CDC, should harbor and nurture said relationships. The black communities of Cincinnati, like everywhere in the country, see the hardest hit regarding a digital workspace.
Though an indirect tradeoff, digital nomads and residents need to work together to foster a symbiotic community.
For many of us, part of what is so alluring about urban life is the ability to be anonymous within the bustle of the city. Despite proximity to so many people and lights and noises, we are just one face that can easily disappear into a crowd. This can often be liberating, or help us to find calm within chaos. I often felt as if I was under a microscope growing up in a suburban neighborhood; a gated community, constantly under the watch of my mom’s friend’s friend.
But how much of this anonymity is preserved as our cities rapidly integrate into cyberspace? In today’s cities, we don’t just leave footprints, we also leave digital footprints— clicks, swipes, and taps in the digital sphere, creating a permanent life log in the small, repeated interactions with sensors, cameras, and contactless connections. Are we really that anonymous if we leave digital crumbs of ourselves as we move throughout the city?
With every tap of my phone on the glowing OMNY screen, I leave a crumb: my full last-name, what neighborhood I was in, when I was there, my credit card transaction history.
When I ask the virtual doorman for entryway permission at my friend’s apartment, I leave a crumb: the measurements of my face, the identity of who I visited, the time of my visit.
When I unlock a Citi Bike on my way to the park, I leave a crumb: the route of my ride, my gender, my biking speed.
Every time I connect to public WiFi, I leave a crumb: my browsing history, the amount of time I spent on each site, the number of clicks within each site. Every time I interact with the city, I leave behind a crumb.
The crumbs that trail behind us as we walk from street-to-street or ride from station-to-station, narrate our lives. They reveal our interests, preferences and habits. Our individual experiences are silently tracked and fed into robust analytics that archive our past and present actions— and predict our future behaviors. Data crumbs might not mean much in isolation, but they are collected and compared among many other piecemeal crumbs within a longer timeline. The accumulation of these data points generate patterns and trends that make it easier to identify, track, and cross analyze who we are, how we spend our time, who we spend our time with, how we move, and how our proclivities might change in the future. Simply by moving through the city, as normal people going about ordinary life, we are unwillingly contributing to a massive data-extraction operation. Through the media of our bodies and personal digital devices we are incorporated into the cybercity.
Hansel and Gretel left a trail of breadcrumbs to help them find their way back home from the forest. Digital breadcrumbs can similarly help us navigate, learn, and improve the city around us. It is because of data that we know how crowded our buses will be or which route will get us to our destinations most quickly. Marginalized groups might feel a sense of safety knowing that security cameras will capture footage if they were to walk alone at night. The conversation surrounding our right to privacy in the city is a nuanced one, but having access to certain data about how we relate to and use our city is valuable with the right guardrails and regulations. Data protection policies should restrict the collection and analysis of irrelevant information by both public and private entities. Additionally, smart data collection technologies such as surveillance cameras can be “dumbed down,” or taken off live-streaming to the internet and withheld from being fed into sophisticated analysis softwares like facial recognition or predictive policing.
In the Grimm’s fairy tale, birds ate the breadcrumbs, leaving the children lost in the dark night. Cities, however, are places filled with conflict, and the injustices marginalized communities face are exacerbated by digital trails. In the recent Black Lives Matter following the murder of George Floyd in 2020,
peaceful protesters were retroactively arrested because their faces were captured and identified by law enforcement drone footage equipped with facial recognition. The NYPD has abused surveillance technologies in the past to target ethnic and religious minorities; undocumented immigrants may be at risk for being digitally tracked by ICE through smart city technologies implemented through public-private partnerships, such as OMNY, that may share ridership data with NYC’s law enforcement agencies.
Shouldn’t we deserve the “freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves” — in the digital urban realm, as well as the physical one? When every movement and decision we make is logged and permanently stored, this liberty degrades within the digital restructuring of our internet-woven cities.
We don’t always know who is following our trail, what crumbs we leave, and how to protect the crumbs we do leave behind. What do we do once the crumbs are consumed and we are at a point of no return? Do we have a right to be forgotten? To disappear into the dark night of the city without being followed?
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Walsh, D. (2019). What to do about Cairo’s ‘uncivilized’ buildings? President orders and epic paint job. The New York Times, March 8. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/world/ middleeast/egypt-cairo-sisi-pyramds-ring-road. html.
Youssef, A. (2021). The controversial street music that won’t be silenced. BBC, June 13. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210608the-controversial-street-music-that-wont-besilenced.
QUEERSCAPES BY DANIEL WEXLER
EDITED BY OLIVIA JIA
Gieseking, Jen Jack. A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers. NYU Press, 2020.
For map sources, see page 77.
PAPER ESTATES BY JENNA DUBLINBOC
EDITED BY OLIVIA JIA
Dublin-Boc, Jenna. Paper Estates series Composite images. n.d.
EDITED BY OLIVIA JIA
Winther-Tamaku, Mia. Crumbs in the CyberCity series. Photographs. n.d.
CITY AND DESIRE BY HAOCHE HUNG
EDITED BY ROB SANCHEZ
Hung, HaoChe. City and Desire series. Photographs. n.d.
Images next to Playscapes, Mish min Baris ana min Salaam: Centering Marginalized Identity as Political Speech inContemporary Egyptian Rap, Queerscapes, and The Digital Nomadic Footprint in Cincinnati on the table of contents spreads were sourced from Pexels and shots by various artists.
THE DIGITAL NOMADIC FOOTPRINT IN CINCINNATI BY OLIVIA MCCLOY
EDITED BY ETHAN FLOYD
Babka, Allison. "Cincinnati Is One of the MostBooked Cities on Airbnb". CityBeat. November 2, 2021
Duffin, Erin. “Population of the Cincinnati metro area in the United States from 2010 to 2021”. 2022
Lebus, Mary. "Cincinnati, recognized by Airbnb, named one of the 'best equipped' destinations." Fox19 Now. July 27, 2022
Wtterich, Chris. "Ziegler Park expansion gets final approval despite turbulence". Cincinnati Business Courier. December 16, 2022
GABBY COLEMAN
ESHTI SOOKRAM
KYLIEL THOMPSON
ALYANA ACACIO
CLAUDIA AVILA
ETHAN FLOYD
OLIVIA JIA
MATTHEW MEYER
ROB SANCHEZ
FELIPE URRUTIA
DANIEL WEXLER
JENNA DUBLIN-BOC
JONAH BREGSTONE
KEVIN COSTA
JAASIEL DUARTE-TERRAZAS
CALVIN HARRISON
DAN FROEHLICH
ETHAN FLOYD
HAOCHE HUNG
ELINI KALAPODA
JIM LAMMERS
OLIVIA MCCLOY
LUKE MCNAMARA
NIKOLAS MICHAEL
SABINA SETHI UNNI
DAKOTA SMITH
LEALLA SOLOMON
ESHTI SOOKRAM
ATMA SOOKRAM
KURT STEINHOUSE
DANIEL WEXLER
MIA WINTER-TAMAKI
COVER and INTERIOR: SCAPES’ front and back covers are designed with a square grid slicing through a pixelated landscape composite scene made by Gabby Coleman using Midjourney, Photoshop, and InDesign. The composition was inspired by antique landscape paintings. The overarching interior theme references a summer camp aesthetic complimented with composition influences from screen printing and art galleries. The combination of all of these influences create a visual depiction of SCAPES that leans heavily into a contemporary spin on a “nature” theme.
TYPE AND COLOR TREATMENT: Headings throughout this edition of URBAN are set using the BN Route 22 font. The SCAPES logo is a manipulation of the BN Route 22 font. Subtitles, emphasized body text, page numbers, and captions utilize the Sweet Sans Pro font family. All other body copy use the Nimbus Sans font family. The color palette features greens, browns, oranges, yellows, and grays in various tints and shades.
PUBLISHING: Volume number 33 of URBAN Magazine was designed and produced by URBAN staff. Approximately 80 copies were printed. The publication was finalized using Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop CC 2023.
IMAGERY: Photos for articles were selected by their respective authors with the exception of the series of drawings and photo journals which are original and created by their respective authors.
Happy reading!
- GabbySee
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