ATLANTA AFTER PROPERTY
URBAN DESIGN STUDIO II: AMERICAN CITIES & REGIONAL CONTEXTS FALL 2021
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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY GSAPP A6820-1 Fall 2021 Urban Design Studio II
AMERICAN CITIES + REGIONAL CONTEXTS PROGRAM DIRECTOR
STUDIO PARTICIPANTS
Kate Orff
Avani Agarwal Bianca Bryant Riya Chadha Giulia Chagas Junfan Chen Lianghao Cheng Surabhi Dahivalkar Cesar Delgado Daniela Deu Tanuja Dhanasekaran Samuel Dye Lamisa Haque Jiamin Huang Howie Jiang Yasmine Katkhuda Changbin Kim Jisoo Kim Minsung Kim Jie Kong Siyu Rae Lei Jiaxin Li Shuhua Li Zhifan Li Shinan Liu Hao Ma Gloria Mah Aishwarya Mathukumilli Achmad Maulana Lucas Coelho Netto Galina Novikova Javier Ortiz Rhea Pai Kimberly Ramirez Sydnee Sampson Praditi Singh Rongxin Tang Yuxin Tian Jake Tiernan Govardan Rajasekaran Umashankar Carmen Yu Curran Zhang Jiayi Zhao Kenny Zhou Lipeng Zhu
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR David Smiley
INSTRUCTORS Emanuel Admassu, Coordinator Nina Cooke John Chat Travieso Lexi Tsien
TEACHING ASSOCIATE Nupur Roy
TEACHING ASSISTANTS Yasmine Katkhuda Jake Tiernan Govardan Rajasekaran Umashankar
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ATLANTA AFTER PROPERTY
URBAN DESIGN STUDIO II: AMERICAN CITIES & REGIONAL CONTEXTS FALL 2021
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TABLE OF CONTENTS 06 INTRODUCTION
Studio Overview A Brief Introduction Timeline
14 PROJECTS
01 Cabbagetown 02 Atlanta University Campus 03 Reynoldstown 04 English Avenue 05 Pratt-Pullman Yards 06 Bowen Homes 07 Chattahoochee River 08 Cop City 09 Studio City 10 Airport Logistical Area 11 West End
104 COLLECTED SAMPLES 150 READING LISTS 152 COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT 154 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 156 EPILOGUE
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“The practice of refusal is also a spacemaking intervention—one that reclaims and embraces the space of the quotidian to create new possibilities in the face of negation.” – Tina M. Campt1
ATLANTA AFTER PROPERTY FALL 2021
Arthur Jafa APEX 2013
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Previous: Studio Sites Map Atlanta Metro Area, GA On the Cover: Ad-Wo, Neimeir
How can we disentangle urban design and architecture from property? How can we use this moment of environmental and institutional reckoning to disassemble the exploitative regimes of speculation and displacement that anchor the built environment? In other words, where do we go from here? This studio aimed to identify temporal slippages and spatial practices that carve out moments of liberation from the limits of property. Studio participants developed a collective intelligence, by gathering samples from various cultural and political geographies, to experiment with ways of seeing beyond the privatized enclosure in the Metropolitan Atlanta region—the city and its sprawling suburbs. The aim was to design a region (with hopes of building a world) that is not tethered to individual ownership, but instead, predicated on collective stewardship and care. This work was done by recognizing, drawing, and modeling ordinary spatial practices that operate against the hegemony
Atlanta (Ga.) ANNEXATION MAP OF ATLANTA 1952
of real estate—systems that value people over property—in order to develop a dynamic catalog of spatio-temporal constructs.2 Through radical reinterpretations of historical and contemporary interventions where the everyday struggle begins to approach the surreal—or even, the sublime—we aimed to liberate urban design from its historical commitment to “borderization.”3 We celebrated undervalued spatial practices that actively dismantle the Cartesian frame of racial capitalism, as a gathering of performances committed to imaging a different world, because the status-quo is untenable. Atlanta After Property reframed the discipline of urban design and reimagined the city of Atlanta in solidarity with contemporary movements of Black liberation, anti-coloniality, and mutuality; working against the ruthless policing, dispossession, and displacement of marginalized communities.
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EPISODE 01
EPISODE 02
Two Participants: Identify and diagram two ‘Samples’ and one ‘Site’
Two Pairs: Merge and contribute two ‘Samples’ and one ‘Site’ to the collective catalogs
RESEARCH: SAMPLES & SITES
TRANSLATE: SELECT & CATALOG 01 SAMPLE
01 SAMPLE
01 SITE
E+F
Part A: transfer to another pair 01 SAMPLE
01 SAMPLE
01 SITE
A+B
01 SAMPLE
01 SITE
01 SAMPLE
01 SAMPLE
E+F
01 SAMPLE
01 SITE
G+H
01 READING
A+B+C+D
Part B: merge to form a group of four
READING 01
READ: ARGUMENTS & DIAGRAMS Four Participants: Analyze and generate a short visual presentation on one of the readings—each participant will read two additional texts (min.)
01 SAMPLE
01 SAMPLE
PART C: Group Contribution to Collective Sample Catalog ALL STUDIO SAMPLE CATALOGUE
spatial concept that SITES: existing spatial conditions SAMPLES: can be used to imagine a world in Metropolitan Atlanta that can be used as representative examples of the schema that defines the contemporary regime of property.
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after property.
E+F+G+H
01 SITE
PART D: Group Contribution to Collective Site Catalog ALL STUDIO SITE CATALOGUE
This studio challenged participants to imagine and design zones of liberation within the loosely defined region of Metropolitan Atlanta. Each group worked on a specific model of collective care and stewardship that goes beyond the extractive model of private property. The proposals acknowledged the human and more-thanhuman factors, and indigenous cosmologies, which frame the ambiance of place chosen for research and intervention. Therefore, instead of imagining an ideal client or a limitless budget, the aim was to refuse contributing to a world where arbitrary values are ascribed to human bodies and land. It is a willingness to live with difference and care instead of a false sense of security. This vision is supported by multi-scalar spatial practices—from the infrastructural to the quotidian—that are simultaneously generous and uncompromising, radical and visionary, building a world after property. EPISODE 03
EPISODE 04
EPISODE 05
Group of four: Redesign one of the sites using two samples.
Group of four: Iterate and reconstruct the site to reflect various forms of cohabitation (human and morethan-human)
Group of four: Present your vision of Atlanta after property
DESIGN: ARGUMENTS & MODELS
RECONSTRUCT: ITERATE & STUDY
Following clockwise from top left: Atlanta History Center DOWNTOWN CONNECTOR 1962
01 SITE
READING 02
READ: ARGUMENTS & DIAGRAMS
01 SAMPLE
PRESENT: DRAW & MODEL
01 SAMPLE
Four Participants: Analyze and generate a visual presentation on one reading
Atlanta Journal Constitution Tenant Protest at Capitol Homes 1978 Photographer? Location? 19xx Photographer? Location? 19xx
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ATLANTA: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION SPLIT The Muscogee Creek people were the Indigenous stewards of
the land and territory that is now known as Metro Atlanta. When Creek towns reached a population of approximately four hundred to six hundred people, they would split, with about half moving to a new, nearby site. These transient communities retained “mother-daughter” relationships between new and original towns/villages. Relationships between the parent and offspring settlement were complicated by the desire to maintain autonomy from, and connection to, the original settlements. These Indigenous spatial practices of mobility and stewardship were absorbed and subverted by settler colonial logic: a condition where bifurcation was often fueled and materialized by covert and overt racial animus—rendering one side as a zone of accumulation and the other as a zone of extraction. Infrastructure built to facilitate the mobility of European settlers often doubled as a fort or embankment that limited the mobility of Black and Indigenous people. This contradiction was maintained by the train lines that gave the city its current name and the contemporary highways that maintain these logics of segregation.
SELF—DETERMINATION
From being at the forefront of voting rights (and continuing the tradition to this day with the work of Stacey Abrams and others) as well as Black political and economic power, to being
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an educational haven for Black Americans with Atlanta University Center—a consortium of four pioneering and distinguished HBCUs that include Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, and Morehouse College—to being the one-time home of SCLC, SNCC, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young Jr., John Lewis, Rev. C.T. Vivian, Dr. Roslyn Pope, Constance Baker Motley, and so many more, Atlanta in many ways has been the gravitational center of the struggle for Black liberation in America. The tactics employed by these activists—sit-ins, kneel-ins, and lay-ins, picket lines and boycotts, barriers destroyed and bodies blocking traffic, church meetings and university organizing, Black residential expansion and school desegregation—also have been met with bitter opposition through arrests, police brutality, white supremacist violence and intimidation, restrictive deeds, exclu-
sionary zoning, literal segregation walls, voter suppression, and white flight.
DISPOSSESSION
The codified dispossession of land, thinly veiled through the aspirational discourse of ‘Neighborhood Improvement’ or ‘New Urbanism’ has razed all of the public housing in Atlanta. This narrative relies on long-standing genealogies of spatial exclusion that span from redlining to predatory lending practices; eventually leading to the complete transfer of public housing over to the private sector in 2008—Atlanta built the nation’s first federal housing project in 1935. The ongoing displacement and dispossession facilitated by contemporary urban remediation projects like the BeltLine, rely on similar narratives of private ownership while providing no protection for poor and lowincome tenants and homeowners (median rents are up 28% since 2000—3rd in evictions, nationally).
to the speculative real estate market (property value). Instead of maintaining a consistent quality of public education, students who are born into working class Black and brown communities in Atlanta are forced to attend schools that are designed to maintain the “value gap.”
ENCLAVES Atlanta’s film industry
is one of the fastest growing economic sectors in the region. Film production companies are encouraging each county to maintain specific features, landmarks, and histories. The camera-ready communities program commodifies the differences between neighborhoods as a sales pitch for film producers. In addition, a growing number of production studios are being built in and around the city, including Tyler Perry Studios, Trilith Studios, and Studio City. These mini-cities have their own socio-spatial ecosystems. At the opposite end of the spectrum, these enclaves of affluence are contradicted with concentrated enclaves of poverty: higher costs and long commutes are intensifying hardships for low-income residents that are currently being displaced from the city and trapped in the suburbs due to inadequate public transportation. housing over to the private sector in 2008—Atlanta built the nation’s first federal housing project in 1935.
(MIS)EDUCATION
By and large, Atlanta’s public schools segregate student populations based on race. The geographic outline of the school districts continue to be re-drawn in order to sustain and/ or intensify segregation. The State’s unwillingness to educate Black children is augmented by limiting the physical mobility of low-income Black families— rejecting the expansion of the Marta and other public transportation options—and entangling the quality of schools
“The dream of Frantz Fanon was not the replacement of one unjust power with another unjust power; it was a revolutionary humanism, neither assimilationist nor supremacist, in which Manichean logic of dominant/submissive as it applies to people is finally and completely dismantled, and the right of every being to its dignity is recognized. That is decolonization.” — Zadie Smith 4
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TIMELINE
1965 Photographer xx Summerhill Riots
1900 - 1950s Atlanta entered the 1900s in a haze of rapid urbanization in the name of realizing the ambition of a ‘New South’. Local policy fostered the diversification of the economy from agriculture - perceived as a marker of the ‘Old South' - to make way for investment in industry and education. While Georgia Tech and Coca Cola established themselves in the cultural imagination of the city, its population was growing at the pace that became difficult to keep up with - all under the cloud of the Jim Crow laws. Competition between the middle class Caucasians and members of the black community for jobs and homes supplied a tension that persisted through Atlanta’s role as a major aircraft manufacturer throughout the US’s involvement in WWII.
1950s - 2000s Following Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the racial tensions erupted into overt acts of violence in tandem with the expansion of Atlanta’s city limits into the
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1935
Photographer xx Capitol Home, GA Darker than Blue 2
wealthy white towns in its vicinity. The subsequent enlargement of white leadership led to the resurrection of previously outlawed urban planning intentions by way of practices like ‘blockbusting’ which gave way to the creation of enclaves. While the city became a major organizing center for the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s, it also witnessed the largest demographic shift in its modern history. By the 80s, white flight had taken full effect with wealth moving out of the city and into the suburbs leaving a trail of racially motivated infrastructural disinvestments in its wake.
1957
Photographer xx Downtown Atlanta I-20 Construction
2000s onwards
2011
1972 Georgia State Uni. Maynard Jackson Housing Movement
Photographer xx Atlanta, GA Housing Demolition
While the 1996 Olympics attracted international investment to the city, it also triggered a wave of ‘makeover' projects that permanently displaced the Black urban poor. As the stadiums, parks and transportation system received upgrades, scores of economically distressed neighborhoods were razed in favor of new housing projects that were well beyond the means of legacy residents. This trend of development via displacement continues to plague the people of Atlanta. Over the last decade, the detrimental effects of neo-liberal urbanism have been made apparent by projects like the Belt-Line and subsequent adjacent aspirations. The institutionalized racism that they are born of has been laid bare by the staggering devastation applied by COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd.
1994 Curtis Compton The Atlanta-Journal Const. FREAKNIK ATLANTA
We are now at the crescendo of the regime of property. By drawing from acts of subversion, we might begin to visualize a world after property.
2020 Photographer xx CNN Building Atlanta BLM Protests
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PROJECTS
Sites were considered existing spatial conditions in Metropolitan Atlanta that can be used as representative examples of the schema that defines the contemporary regime of property. Samples are seen as existing global practices that defy and question this regime of property. In adopting samples as site strategies, a series of provocations arose in thinking and working towards a world after property. UD STUDIO II AAP
01 CABBAGETOWN “Community Through Domesticity” 02 UNIVERSITY CAMPUS “Atlanta University De-center” 03 REYNOLDSTOWN “Right of Living” 04 ENGLISH AVENUE “Vacancy Re-defined” 05 PRATT-PULLMAN YARDS “Enclave of Resistance” 06 BOWEN HOMES “Collective Reparations” 07 THE CHATTAHOOCHEE RIVER “De-centralize the River” 08 COP CITY “After-Police” 09 STUDIO CITY “Buford Productions Supercharged” 10 ATLANTA LOGISTICAL AREA “(In)efficient Systems” 11 WEST END “Urban Soil: An Agro-Industrial Imaginary”
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01 CABBAGETOWN This project engages samples 02 Enclave Spaces + 03 Lilong
COMMUNITY THROUGH DOMESTICITY Shirley Chen Jie Kong Sydnee Sampson Jake Tiernan
We envision a future for Cabbagetown where property is not the central pillar of domesticity. Legacy residents have the agency return, while also inviting those who are in need of homes. Semi-nomadic occupation of houses will expand domesticity beyond property and blood relations to the community at large. RIGHT: DOMESTICITY TIMELINE
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When the Fulton Bag Mill shut down, owners sold many of the factory homes out from under residents. Investors seeking to turn Cabbagetown into a “Gingerbread Village" bought up properties, which then sat vacant due to speculation and transforming the homes into AirBNB's. To disrupt the speculation over vacant and AirBNB homes, these homes are then reorganized around a new domestic structure and support the needs of multiple families by blending them in the process. As this unfolds, the barriers of the domestic space breaks down by bleeding to the outside. By adapting and transforming the typical shotgun house floor plan allow different uses of the space and various degrees of openness. With sliding doors placed at the facade and interior wall, a fluid circulation can be created from front to the back, from alley to alley. The flexible interior organization created by the sliding and folding walls generate different degrees of porosity, and these interior arrangements can be determined by the spatial needs for the occupants. 01 02 03
PORCH TYPOLOGIES TYPICAL SHOTGUN HOUSE FLOOR PLAN FLEXIBLE FLOOR PLAN ARRANGEMENTS
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SITE 01
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Porches are used to create different levels of connections and expansion to both the public realm and domestic sphere, generating a series of interweaving platforms that blur the boundary between domestic and public spaces. Self-constructed, flexible communal spaces are created in between houses, becoming a series of connecting tissues across the street and backyard for more fluid movement and circulation. The occupation and construction are based on what people need. The semi-nomadic lifestyle leads the community to expand the domestic sphere beyond property and blood relations.
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SITE 01 01
01
PORCHES BEFORE EXPANSION
02
PORCHES AFTER EXPANSION
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SITE 01
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02 UNIVERSITY CAMPUS This project engages samples 08 Ciqikou Sichuan + 16 Villa 31 and Porches
ATLANTA UNIVERSITY DECENTER Changbin Kim Jisoo Kim Lamisa Mashiyat Haque Govardan Rajasekaran Umashankar
Atlanta University De-center re-appropriates knowledge from structures of power and re-defines education’s role in society. The Atlanta University Center has been troubled by racially motivated financial injustice since its inception in 1929. Today, the federal government is attempting to right these wrongs by a series of policy based changes. Our project is an attempt to spatialize these course corrections as a form of urban infrastructural reparations. RIGHT: DE-CENTERING LEARNING
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SITE 02
In the proposal, AUC will act as an agent in liaison with local activists and organizations, to disperse federal endowment to the university and the surrounding neighborhoods. Spatial boundaries are deconstructed to create more equitable spaces of learning. These interventions mediate the dispersion of education throughout the city and expand the definition of “knowing“ by absorbing and validating previously discounted informal systems of learning. Resources for this new “knowing” are dispersed in the nuanced neighborhood fabric as determined by the community. We envision the AUC playing a significant role in redefining the relationship between the city and the university towards promoting vibrant possibilities and opportunities of learning.
LEARNING AFTER-PROPERTY LEARNING SPACE
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01
SPACES ARE ARTICULATED THROUGH ACTIVE PARTICIPATION OF COMMUNITY MEMBERS IN TRANSFORMING THE URBAN FABRIC INTO INCLUSIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
02
SPATIAL STRATEGIES TRANSFORMING EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE (CAMPUS + CITY)
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SITE 02
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SITE 02
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03 REYNOLDSTOWN This project engages samples 05 DMZ + 07 Bed-Stuy Urban Environment
RIGHT OF LIVING Achmad Maulana Javier Ortiz Carmen Yu Curran Zhang
The idea of possession and hierarchy has vanished. Property, no longer a static entity, is a shared commodity predicated on equal opportunity for all. Access and ownership are no longer determined by geographic rigidity. Rather, they are incorporeal qualities defined by flexible mobility. RIGHT: PROPOSED SITE PLAN
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SITE 03
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The lack of affordable housing due to the presence of the BeltLine in Reynoldstown is in direct contradiction to housing as a fundamental human right. Our project explores policy based spatial changes to the urban fabric that would advocate for cost-effective multi-generation housing options for the growing community. Our project is articulated through two steps: the reinterpretation of ‘right of way’ and the disassembly of historically observed fences. These strategies are strategically located in the neighborhood to redefine the influence of the BeltLine on the community in a way that ensures unprejudiced socio-economic equity. BELOW: CENTRAL REYNOLDSTOWN FACING NORTH
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SITE 03
Critical to the regional success of our interventions is the neighborhood’s ability to leverage it’s access to existing pubic transit infrastructure - specifically the Inman Park Metro Station - to ensure the dispersal of positive change across the city.
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SITE 03
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04 ENGLISH AVENUE This project engages samples 07 Bed-Stuy Urban Environment + 12 Tulou
VACANCY REDEFINED Daniela Deu Samuel Dye Haotian Jiang Minsung Kim
Property centers individual value on our relationship to land possession. Land as a commodity can be accumulated until maximum value is extracted, and property has been weaponized to perpetuate concentrations of power, at the expense of the many. In pursuit of a world after property, we seek to challenge accepted definitions of value; to prioritize human intangible forms of wealth building over financial gain. Our intervention is located on the vast footprint of vacant lots in English Avenue. By celebrating their institutionally neglected socio-cultural wealth, we have attempted to redefine these spaces as the new centers of communal growth and well-being. RIGHT: REDEFINING VACANCY BY BUILDING UPON EXISTING ACTIVITIES
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SITE 04
01
COUNTERING VACANCY WITH REFURBISHED SPACES OF CARE AND COMMUNAL GROWTH
02
COMMUNITY ASSET MAP SHOWING OVERLAPS OF VACANCY, TANGIBLE AND INTANGIBLE NETWORKS
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SITE 04
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At the neighborhood scale, the modifications of the community anchors creates a new rhizomatic network of connections between anchors and previously vacant homes. This strengthens the constellation of different spheres of influence over the neighborhood and intangible social networks. This will in turn foster an agile system of development that will change with community needs as time progresses. As vacancy is not an issue exclusive to English Avenue, the model can become the inflection point in an expanding constellation of vacancy redefinitions in other neighborhoods in the Atlanta region at large.
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SITE 04
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05 PRATT-PULLMAN YARD This project engages samples 02 Enclave Spaces + 06 Collective Farming
ENCLAVE OF RESISTANCE Avani Agarwal Bianca Bryant Riya Chadha Gloria Mah
In a world after property, enclave spaces dissolve their borders in defiance of external manipulators. In our world after property, this subverted enclave creates an antagonistic relationship with developer-owned land through a community land trust while simultaneously dissolving property lines, removing vehicular roads and deconstructing the single family home. As a result, the urban fabric here fosters community expression and collective living through fluid, rhizomatic growth over time. The act of divorcing wealth from property allows for a new social capital system to form, encouraging a sense of belonging and equity for both humans and other-than-human participants. RIGHT: SOCIAL - SPATIAL SYSTEMS
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OPT IN
OPT OUT
+ DONATE PROPERTY + DONATE CAR + WORK AT AN ANCHOR
+ ACCESS ANCHORS
LEGACY
RESIDENTS
LA
BO
R
LA
N
D
RE
SO
UR
CE
HO
US
E
O
BJ
EC
TS
AFTER PROPERTY
As the community land trust grows, so would systems of mutual aid, thus building community wealth by pooling both tangible and intangible resources. A new formal fabric emerges, defining the trust in a physical manner by blurring the lines between what is existing and what is new.
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SITE 05
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The physical form of the land trust emerges through the deconstruction of the single family home. By expanding and merging, dissolving boundaries and morphing into a rhizomatic structure it creates fluid, multigenerational relationships between the individual and the collective.
01 02
INCREMENTAL GROWTH UNFOLDED SECTION X PLAN
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SITE 05 00
EXISTING FLOOR ABOVE
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EXISTING FLOOR ABOVE
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SITE 05
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06 BOWEN HOMES & HOLLOWELL PKWY This project engages samples 12 Tulou + 22 Modular Urban Insertions
COLLECTIVE REPARATIONS Cesar Delgado Lucas Coelho Netto Galina Novikova Praditi Singh
Property is a constructed system of spatial and psychological parameters projected onto lands, bodies and minds. Invisible and visible boundaries and borders lay weightless claims to ownership aimed to restrict and exploit the marginalized from the right to movement and expression of self. Power then is manifested through property, and it systemically overpowers the property of the person-hood itself. 01 02 03
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STATE EN-ACTED CRIMES BOWEN HOMES DEMOLITION SOCIAL - SPATIAL SYSTEMS
+ 01 CHATAHOOCHEE
+
BANKHEAD COURTS
+ +
+
I - 285 HIGHWAY
+
BOWEN HOMES
HOLLOWELL PKWY
MENTS
2
MOBILITY The meaning and power associated with movement.
3
DISPLACEMENT Demolition is used to justify crime and control resource
02
03
PRODUCING
CARING AUTO REPAIR
LIVING COOKING
LEARNING
RECYCLING
DINING
LIVING
EXISTING STRUCTURE
WOOD STRUCTURE
MASONRY WALLS
RECYCLED MATERIAL CLADDINGS
SELF 3D PRINTED CLADDING
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FOOD ACCESS DIAGRAM 02 TIMELINE COLLAGE AND DEVICES 03 AUTO REPAIR AND FARMING CROSS- PROGRAMMING (IMMEDIATE) 01
CONSUMPTION
DISTRIBUTION
PRODUCTION
CONSUMPTION
DISTRIBUTION
PRODUCTION
PROPOSED DEVICE MUTUAL AID NETWORK EXISTING
PROPOSED DEVICE MUTUAL AID NETWORK EXISTING
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SITE 06
DE-FUNDING A Series of failed urban policies and disinvestment in social infrastructure turned the Bowen neighborhood into an inaccessible area, where fast food chains replaced locally owned businesses. In response to these issues we envision a self-sufficient system for the community wherein production, distribution and consumption of food can happen locally. Automotive repair and fast food stops in conjunction with dense green areas become sites for collective caring. Pocket farm and local markets evolve additively while socioeconomic ethos evolves as residents begin to grow these modules for self sustenance and create learning experiences.
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MOBILITY (HOUSING + TRANSPORTATION DIAGRAM) 02 TIMELINE COLLAGE AND DEVICES 03 BUILDING OFF OF OBSOLETE GAS STATIONS (MID TERM) 01
PROPOSED INTERIOR SHARED SPACE MOBILITY INTERIOR - EXTERIOR
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SITE 06
FORCED SETTLEMENT Forced settlement implies forced domesticity and mobility through repeated spatial expressions, gendered spaces and lack of access and connections. To the community, it meant power associated with movement. Our tactic reorganizes the communal and private nature of typical living units wherein private components flexibly intertwine with common spaces and ecology. A former gas station turns into an ecology centered daycare and after school. A catalyst for additional modules of mutual care: housing, transportation and spaces for cultural and educational pop-ups expand based on inhabitants' needs. Private and shared balconies host gardens as spaces for production of assets and create varied levels of opacity.
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01
ECOLOGY DIAGRAM
02
TIMELINE COLLAGE AND DEVICES INDUSTRY TO ESTABLISH AGENCY TO ECOLOGY (LONG TERM)
03
RECYCLING WASTE TO ENERGY
WASTE COLLECTING
RECYCLING WASTE TO MATERIALS
LEARNING + RECYCLING HUMAN MOBILITY
MONITORING WATER
ECOLOGICAL MOBILITY
PROPOSED INTERIOR SHARED SPACE MOBILITY INTERIOR - EXTERIOR
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SITE 06
DISPOSSESSION Dispossession can be seen through the overpowering impact of auto-centric infrastructure, highways and industry upon ecology and residents, which resulted in polluted landscapes, deforestation and neglected tire dumping grounds across the Hollowell Drive. We propose that Ecology becomes the protagonist, in order to reverse trends of pollution and harm. In the process of remediation, industrial facilities transform into sites of sustainable production. Recycling the materials from demolitions empowers the local residents to become active stewards of the land. The Chattahoochee river gains agency, and flows beyond defined edges, under an elevated regional bike path that claims the right of way underneath transmission lines.
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07 THE CHATTAHOOCHEE RIVER This project engages samples 05 DMZ + 13 Personhood of Property
DE-CENTRALIZE THE RIVER Surabhi R. Dahivalkar Rae Lei Zhifan Li Aishwarya Mathukumilli
In the regime of property, the river and its spaces are commodified, privatized, and claimed by individuals and entities. After property, we imagine the world as strategic possibilities where ecology is the primary stakeholder. In this world, humans coexist with ecological systems by respecting space as defined by the hydrology of the Chattahoochee River’s watershed. RIGHT: NON- SPATIAL + SPATIAL ANALYSIS
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CENTRALIZATION Rivers have long been integral to industrial activity. This has resulted in the deterioration of biological and hydrological systems via overuse and encroachment.
The negligence of the role played by the creek system resulted in its destruction and increased local dependence on the river alone for both life and industry.
350AD - 650AD
1000BC
1820-1832
270m 260m
268m 254m
Lake Lanier
250m
Buford Dam
Morgan F
ANCIENT CIVILIZATION COLONIZATION
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SITE 07
DE-CENTRALIZATION
The commodification of the river as defined by capitalist development also meant the superimposition of the accompanying social hierarchy on to the topography of the Chattahoochee watershed. Those at an advantage continue to benefit from the river as a resource while those at a disadvantage don’t.
By riving the creek system, we image a world after property where the hydrological language of the land supersedes the oppressive cartesian regime of ownership.
2021 - ?
1963
1912
1944-1945
Falls Dam
2021
232m 222m 214m
198m
INDUSTRIALIZATION
AFTER PROPERTY
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Our intervention is defined by three spatial movements. The first step is daylighting the Creeks in removing cover soils and bringing the underground creeks to the surface. The second step is Managed Retreat. Here, the process illustrates removal of any structure that stands in the way of the creeks and Preserve structures that can be used as a shelter for animals and plants. The last step is Integrated Re-development where new structures are imagined to emerge into nature, defining a new co-existence of humans and ecosystems. 01 02 03
PHASING STRATEGY ESTABLISHING NEW RELATIONSHIPS OF HUMANS + ECOSYSTEMS SITE VISION: EVOLUTION OF SCALAR PHASING
CREEK UD STUDIO II AAP
FLOODING ZONE
RESERVED ZONE
GREEN SCREEN
SITE 07
FISH SHOAL
HUMAN HABITAT
VEGETATION SHADING AREA
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SITE 07
In the buffer between the water system and human habitation, the goal is to reestablish the sense of belonging people hold to land, to be a sense of belonging based on contributions to these new systems that cater to the ecology. The new structures built would be able to nourish ecology where humans coexist with nature. The structures will adapt to house flora and fauna whilst also being homes for people. Apart from conserving and preserving natural resources, we believe we have to create a way where we can cultivate and care for these non-human factors so that even they are increasing in health. LEFT: LOW WATER LVL - CONTRACTING RIGHT: HIGH WATER LVL - EXPANDING
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08 COP CITY This project engages samples 03 Lilong + 15 Bartram’s Garden
AFTER POLICE Jiaxin Li Shuhua Li Rongxin Tang Jiayi Zhao
Public funding should be shifted from the policing system to systems of care. In our world after property, these systems of care will directly oppose existing socio-economic hierarchies and empower historically disadvantaged communities. We have attempted to demonstrate this new world through spatial interventions that address public health and safety as determined by community based activism and leadership. RIGHT: AFTER POLICE DIAGRAM
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My daughter enjoys building bird houses with her classmates.
SITE ANALYSIS
DESIGN STRATEGY
CONNECTIVITY
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SITE 08
PROPOSED SYSTEM
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OUTDOOR SCENARIO
INDOOR SCENARIO
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NEW COLLECTIVE CENTER SECTION
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OLD PRISON SECTION
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09 STUDIO CITY This project engages samples 08 Ciqikou Sichuan + 17 Spaces of Social Cohesion
BUFORD PRODUCTIONS SUPERCHARGED Jiaming Huang Shinan Liu Rotina Tian Kenny Zhuo
The film industry is transforming Atlanta. The spread of new studios as gated communities form enclaves, the effects of which are further exacerbated by the recent push towards the creation of ‘camera-ready communities’ that effectively turn people’s backyards into studio property. The recent ‘Studio City’ proposal will bring precisely this kind of exploitive relationship into the Buford Highway community. Our proposal is an equitable alternative to this extractive regime. With infrastructure built into local culture, Buford Highway will be transformed into a supercharged cultural corridor that fully embraces the liberation of cultural production. The film studio is Buford Highway and Buford Highway is the film studio. RIGHT: BUFORD PRODUCTIONS SUPERCHARGED
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Column + Cap System UD STUDIO II AAP
Delivery as Performance
Food Stall
SITE 09
shuttle route shuttle station
Mini Stage
Equipment Sharing + Livestreaming Space
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TEXT (250 WORDS MAX TOTAL) Reriam, sam, is de sandam iur? Qui ut aperit pa conet fuga. Fugitat qui natium doluptaquo volorempor autassendi ab ipienestint eicipsunt, qui ut delic tent. Dent rem quidus doloreheni odiatibusam quam quas sit, vendaep ratius. At explabor sitiae none laudae sequi omnimod eicimaio. Unt velibus repe quibus arume mos et labore sit pres dolorehendae prehent ideriat iunderia idero berumqu aturit qui architam raturep eritaqu oditas restion nectaquae sequate odi nobit faccat eos vit inulparibus magnis illoreperist maxim nitatio vendaeptate cus moloriatius eossimi, nonserepudis enia idebis sunt pa sunt voloribus. Equodit est, volorest labor si accus repudae. Ut que eume asit autas et reror aut aperchicatio magnistrunt modia ipsa doluptatia am intion culpa et est qui dolum estio. Delectur arumqui volorat voloreh endandis el et quia sim nonsecatio derum qui net volore volorio blatquos sam iusa sum quae nos sunti
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SITE 09
TEXT (250 WORDS MAX TOTAL) / IMAGE Mus perae qui sequiam sum et fugiati orionsed eos illoruptia cumenis inciatur autem aut ut faceper eptatus, omnis volupie ndisque aut delis dolore pos earunto dolores cipsand aepuda cusant. Bit, offici bearcid untibus eius dolupta volori unto eos de nestiam evelitiis dolupiet intiuntiam, cone pe consectam voloris sequost inctiss edione quiae nus idundanis sa vellaceatum quunt aturibus voluptatur molestrumqui odi rescid magnis pratur, nestio. Namet abores aliquodi optatius dunt vendam quatin necest escid ma quideleni destincienes in perfero dolupta issimin velit, con nem et es andiae. At as ent. Voloremoluta sequia es es aut moluptatem alia pratur sus reperferchil in percia nonsequas sumque derum sequid excea plibus quasperume omnim faccabo rporepe nobit vernam quatemp oribus. Facepudam, occaepe lluptam, ius iniendi tinist quisi omnimus cipsand elitae consequam quam
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We can attach lights and equipment on the columns. This provides for a safe way to experience our abundant nightlife.
The column system liberate the strip mall by extending activities and sharing spaces.
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SITE 09
Our food bazaar and black box studio make a pair of spaces that empower us to promote authentic culture.
I want to show off my food to the world, so more people can understand the traditions and culture behind them!
♯ ♪ ♫ ♫♪
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10 ATLANTA LOGISTICS AREA This project engages samples 09 Kumbh Mela + 18 Lunch Basket
(IN)EFFICIENT SYSTEMS Lianghao Cheng Hao Ma Kimberly Ramirez Lipeng Zhu
Our vision of a world after property is premised upon the disassembly of time as a tool for socio-economic exploitation. Instead of the value systems imposed by companies like Amazon, which are based on hyper efficiency, we imagine a world that celebrates various forms of inefficiency - everyday relationships and engagements between people that produce outside of the profit margins of these companies. RIGHT: SITE PLAN
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ATLANTA AIRPORT LOGISTICAL AREA “AFTER” 02 AFTER-PROPERTY POWER STRUCTURE 03 RE-IMAGINING EFFICIENT SYSTEMS 01
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SITE 10
In an after-property world, existing power structures are dismantled, and contributing elements are re-imagined to allow for new collectives to emerge. The physical structures of fulfillment centers and other hyper-efficient systems like the Atlanta Airport are considered scars within a world after property, and are now seen as areas of opportunity for spaces centered around gathering and sharing in inefficiencies.
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At the neighborhood scale, the boundary between public and private, work and life, artificial and nature is blurred. Here, both the warehouse and the individual home are re-imagined, each working at different scales to distribute inefficiencies throughout the neighborhood. In this world after-property, road systems are disrupted and now work in service of inefficient activities. Within this after-property world we imagine that in-efficiencies are celebrated as efficiencies fall behind. Efficiencies are only necessary now in order to allow for people to complete tasks “quickly” to later share in “slow” or “leisure” activities. Within our model, there will be no distinction between one or the other.
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SITE 10
01 02
INEFFICIENT DISTRIBUTION PARALLELED IN HOME / WAREHOUSE BEFORE / AFTER “DISTRIBUTED” NEIGHBORHOOD SCALE
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YEAR 01
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YEAR 05
YEAR 20
SITE 10
YEAR 10
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11 WEST END This project engages samples 05 DMZ + 20 Rhizomatic Roofs
URBAN SOIL:
AN AGRO-INDUSTRIAL IMAGINARY Giulia Chagas Tanuja Dhanasekaran Rhea Pai Yasmine Katkhuda
In the delimitation of territory that has historically borderized land ownership as it relates to cultivation, agency now extends beyond the human to encompass other than human actors. Processes that take place in this transitional landscape are of the Earth reconnecting with nature against capitalist ways of existing. It imagines a new direction for regenerative development where there is duality and expansive potential reclaiming soil as resistance in this alternative entry to West End. RIGHT: OF THE IMAGINARY - 2050
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From conception to realization, food production becomes simultaneous to cultural production within a landscape that is understood in its continuity - perpetually in flux, changing and adapting to the earth and its constituents. This exploration is positioned against industrial practices of land homogenization, extraction, and exploitation which echo into the Belt-line’s domestication of nature. It brings together the built or existing, and the potential or possible in reasserting an agency of nature in synthetic scenarios, towards re imagining agro-industry and food accessibility within and beyond systemically vulnerable communities. Weaving through social, ecological and infrastructural systems that reclaim the agency of soil and non-human entities over five short-and long-term foreseeable phases, agrarian culture that has grown contested in rural-urban discourses is re-injected into West End as a proxy site. 01 02 03
RE-WILDING THE BELT-LINE SOIL REMEDIATION UNFOLDINGS AGRO-INDUSTRY BUILDING SCALE
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SOIL REMEDIATION & NEIGHBORHOOD NETWORKS 02 ECOLOGICAL, SOCIAL AND INFRASTRUCTURAL SYSTEM UNFOLDINGS AT THE URBAN SCALE 01
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Soil has a material organization with its own scales, contexts and behaviors. It has no reference as to which precedes it, seeping into and altering other earthly beings. In its otherness, soil offers a critical depth in understanding our disciplinary conventions, translating aggregate and organisms within the soil in their abstraction and extrapolation. Thus, extending the conversation to questions of ecology, of the environment and our constructions of nature within this discourse. 01
BORDERIZATION + GROWTH MODEL
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URBAN SOIL + COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
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REGIONAL SCALE + BELTLINE RECLAMATION
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In crossing scales and agencies of human and other-than-human actors, this world after property envisions a future of cultivation not entangled in land as value - but rather the revaluation of soil towards another agrarian path that is possible through the interconnectedness within and beyond territory.
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COLLECTED SAMPLES
Photographer xxx Location xx 19xx
Samples, in critical images and analytical diagrams identify, take account, and allow us to speculate a future after property. In this context, samples are seen as existing practices that defy, and question the regime of property falling into broader themes of safe spaces as collectives of empowerment, blurring lines, negotiating boundaries, and temporal spaces. UD STUDIO II AAP
01 COUNTER PUBLIC SPACES 02 ENCLAVE SPACES 03 LILONG 04 SAGUARO NATIONAL PARK 05 DEMILITARIZED ZONE 06 COLLECTIVE FARMING 07 BED-STUY URBAN ENVIRONMENT 08 CIQIKOU SICHUAN OPERA THEATER 09 KUMBH MELA 10 TRAP HOUSES 11 STREET VENDORS 12 TULOU COLLECTIVE HOUSING 13 PERSONHOOD OF PROPERTY 14 SEIGE OF PROPERTY 15 BARTRAM'S GARDEN 16 VILLA 31 AND PORCHES 17 SPACES OF SOCIAL COHESION 18 LUNCH BASKET 19 GANESH CHATURTHI 20 RHIZOMATIC ROOFS 21 CROSS PROGRAMMING BY URGENCY 22 MODULAR URBAN INSERTIONS
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01 COUNTER PUBLIC SPACES Within the regime of property, the public sphere is a highly policed, contentious space regulated by the whims of property owners. The counterpublic appears in the cracks of this facade, negotiating their existence in the public sphere by reclaiming temporary pockets of space and forcing confrontation with dominant groups. While still heavily policed, these groups are able to remain visible and present their discourse at the edge of and oftentimes directly to the public sphere itself.
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COLLECTED SAMPLES
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02 ENCLAVE SPACES
While counter-public groups are able to confront dominant groups within the public sphere, other marginalized groups are denied entry. Enclave spaces then arise in defiance of the public sphere, allowing marginalized groups to build resistance through fostering a collective voice and expressing communal joy that is otherwise policed and restricted. As the creation of enclaves is done out of necessity, they are highly temporary, fluid spaces constructed to last only as long as needed.
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03 LILONG Lilong, means “a community centered along a lane or interconnected lanes”. They are residual spaces created between the private properties of the Shikumen housing. The high density of the neighborhood and its compact spatial arrangement leads to the spill out of activities into the lanes, transforming them into a communal space, facilitating activities and gatherings.
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COLLECTED SAMPLES
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04 SAGUARO NATIONAL PARK
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COLLECTED SAMPLES
Collective land acquisition along the linkage between the Saguaro National Park and the Sweetwater Preserve is an effort by the National Park Service and local residents against the regime of property. This collective is resisting the cycle of capitalistic development by buying, selling, and donating land parcels, to preserve rather than to monetize the pristine landscape.
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05 DEMILITARIZED ZONE The DMZ is a 2.5 miles wide strip of land along the border between South and North Korea - a buffer zone to prevent armed clashes. This wide strip is a place where two different ideologies are overlapped. This 161 miles long border has various border conditions by geological condition, agreements between South and North Korea, or attempts to invasion. Although the warfare is still going on, the buffer zone blurs the conflict in two different political ideologies and provides an opportunity for reconciliation.
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06 COLLECTIVE FARMING Collective land stewardship in India is not only a tool to protect the natural environment, but also used to undo gender and property discrimination. These farmer’s collectives impel the hitherto marginalized women towards self sustainable, self sufficient, and self governed economies to challenge the notion of land and labor ownership along gender barriers.
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07 MAGNOLIA TREE
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COLLECTED SAMPLES
The Magnolia Grandiflora tree in Bed-Stuy, championed by activist Hattie Carthan, was one of the few left in a neighborhood where the city’s disinvestment was reflected in the poor maintenance of its streets. By classifying the tree as a living landmark, it gave the space it occupied protection through the law as its root system extends far past its canopy, and the protection thus projects into adjacent lots. This designation imposes upon the regime of property as the tree’s sphere of protection restricts future development and preserves stewardship of the adjacent properties within the neighborhood.
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08 CIQIKOU SICHUAN OPERA THEATER
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COLLECTED SAMPLES
The functions and meanings of a property can be redefined by the people who use it. The Sichuan Opera troupe generated the potential of different spaces to create “theaters” during their relocation, including in parking garages. The theatre makes complete use of limited space through cohabitation, versatility, and shape shifting of temporary spaces over a period of time.
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09 KUMBH MELA Allowing the natural environment to dictate the space and time when the community can use the land defies preconceived bounds of the built environment and the regime of property. The unpredictable expansion and contraction of environmental factors determines the way people adapt and live with nature and not against it, as is evident on the site of Kumbh Mela.
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10 TRAP HOUSES By subverting traditional domestic activities associated with the private home, trap houses begin the narrative of converting small family households into public gathering spaces, thus defying the regime of property. This system can be applied to any space that emanates a specific set of expectations of spatial and functional characteristics from the exterior, but hosts seemingly dissociative activities in the interior.
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11 STREET VENDORS
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COLLECTED SAMPLES
The static conception of an imaginary boundary is challenged daily by mobile vendors in South Asia. They temporarily settle in street corners, urban nooks or plazas, carrying with them an ever-shifting boundary of property and access. The act of selling goods can also legally trespass physical borders such as fences and doors. Vendors therefore are autonomous agents who defy the enclosures of property and system of taxes.
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12 TULOU: COLLECTIVE HOUSING
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COLLECTED SAMPLES
Tulou is a housing typology in rural China based on a shared porous courtyard surrounded by a fortress with housing and shared intimate spaces. Common spaces belong to all residents and to no one at the same time. The collective space extends the interior into the exterior and vice versa, hosting daily activities, exchanging of produce, meals, and events. Individualized property is then reduced to a standardized room to create a horizontal relationship between family and neighbors.
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13 PERSONHOOD OF PROPERTY Lake Erie is the fourth largest lake in north America. It was severely polluted and exploited by the industries nearby, leading to water supply shortage to surrounding neighborhood. Later in 2020, the lake was granted with basic human rights to mitigate the pollution issue.
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14 SIEGE OF PROPERTY Siege of property is enacted through a multitude of strategies primarily against gentrification measures. The current system of property encourages an unequal public/private right to benefit from the extraction, access and use of natural resources. Here, power is subverted within and beyond political means. Examples of such are witnessed in scenarios including but not limited to Freaknik, Pizza Polling and Gerrymandering.
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15 BARTRAM’S GARDEN
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COLLECTED SAMPLES
The status of natural resource in the property regime plays an important role in how it will affect communities in the vicinity. When natural resource is considered someone's property, its value is often ignored or abused. However, when the value is recognized and set free from the regime of property, it can generate positive change in the comprehensive wellbeing of the community through a system of mutual aid between ecology and humanity.
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16 VILLA 31 BUENOS AIRES AND PORCHES
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COLLECTED SAMPLES
The area between public and private space becomes a border between the “real" world and the world of storytelling. Property owned by another subjects the user to restrictions that control their movement, activity, and visibility. Through the tradition of the porch, individuals reclaim their visibility and autonomy within a heavily policed realm by creating spaces for storytelling, care, and healing between the private and public spheres.
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17 SPACES OF SOCIAL COHESION NYC's stoops blur the boundary between public and private space. Public housing in Singapore employs spatial strategies to give a sense of self-ownership of one's space through the void deck, open-air hallways, and more. Colombia's Comuna 13 utilizes outdoor escalators and murals to change one of the most dangerous areas of Medellin into an area of newfound freedom for its residents.
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18 LUNCH BASKET
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COLLECTED SAMPLES
In a highly patriarchal society like India, many women are confined to domesticity. Despite these difficulties, women find ways to bond with each other, because they can only rely on themselves to share knowledge, friendship, and life advice. The Lunchbox using film as a medium to document the formation of a third space through these connections that give women the strength to exist in-spite of oppressive tradition.
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19 GANESH CHATURTHI The Ganesh Chaturthi festival is a large celebrated event where people open up their homes to others for the viewing of the festival of the street level below. The act of voluntarily allowing the public to enter their homes to celebrate creates a sense of fluidity between private spaces.
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20 REBAR EXTENDED ROOFS
Property is not permanent. It has the susceptibility to be affected by growth from both internal and external driving forces. Buildings and architectures are in continual stages of construction and deconstruction of their own timelines. The extruded reinforcement columns of Amman, for instance, become the culmination of vernacular building practices connoting temporary occupation instead of perpetual ownership.
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21 CROSS PROGRAMMING BY URGENCY
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COLLECTED SAMPLES
Temporary seizure of property at a time of “urgency" collapses scales of occupation and program in re-asserting priorities of food, shelter, and health at large. In this subversion of seemingly permanent spaces, crossprogramming rethinks inherent associations of need, of ownership and of function - from private to public - in forefronting the collective.
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22 URBAN MODULAR INSERTIONS
Beyond static conceptions of space, modular urban insertions, in their layered nature, allow for multiple understandings of and potentials within site. As catalysts of change, lowcost high-impact modules activate sites of former refusal. Consequently, playing into one's perception of public space and ownership while redefining programmatic and territorial boundaries in their conglomeration - lending to community gathering and interaction.
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READING LIST FRAMING CRITICAL QUESTIONS ON
PROPERTY Tina M. Campt, “Constellations of Freedom” Assembly, Reflection, and Repose,” in In Search of African American Space: Redressing Racism, Jeffrey Hogrefe, Scott Ruff, Carrie Eastman, Ashley Simone, Eds. Lars Muller Publishers, (September 29) 2020, p. 12-17. Brenna Bhandar. Colonial Lives of Property” Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, p. 1-32. Achille Mbembe, “Bodies as Borders,” in From the European South 4 (2019): 5-18. Saidiya Hartman. “The Anarchy of Colored Girls,” in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheavals. New York: WW. Norton & Company, 2019, p. 465-490. Mabel O. Wilson, “Mine Not Yours,” Dimensions of Citizenship, e-flux Architecture, July 4, 2018. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/dimensions-of-citizenship/178292/mine-notyours/ Adrienne Brown. “Working to Get Free at the Rent Party,” in Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality, Edited by Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt. Columbia Brooks on Architecture and the City, September 2020, p. 133-155. Pier Vittorio Aureli, Leonard Ma, Mariapaola Michelotto, Martino Tattara, and Tuomas Toivonen, “Promised Land” Housing from Commodification to Cooperation,” Collectivity, e-flux architecture, December 12, 2019. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/ collectivity/304772/promised-land-housing-from-commodification-to-cooperation/ Irene Sunwoo, “Burden of Proof”, Cameron Rowland’s D37,” the Avery Review 36, January 2019. K. Wayne Yang, “Sustainability as Plantation Logic, or, Who Plots an Architecture of Freedom?” Settler Colonial Present, e-flux architecture, October 16, 2020. https://www.eflux.com/architecture/the-settler-colonial-present/353587/sustainability-as-plantation-logicor-who-plots-an-architecture-of-freedom/ Robert Nichols. Theft Is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory. Duke University Press, 2020. Zadie Smith, “Toyin Ojih Odutola's Visions of Power,” The New Yorker, August 10, 2020.
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Horace Cort Associated Press public assembly in Hurt Park 1963
FRAMING CRITICAL QUESTIONS ON
AFTER - PROPERTY Walcott, Rinaldo, “Abolition Now: From Prisons to Property,” in On Property (Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2021) pp. 63 – 105. Allais, Lucia, “Amplified Humanity and the Architectural Criminal,” in Superhumanity, edited by Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina, e-flux Architecture (2016), https://www.e-flux. com/architecture/superhumanity/66870/amplified-humanity-and-the-architectural-criminal/ Amaro, Ramon, “Threshold Value,” in Architectures of Education, edited by Nick Axel, Bill Balaskas, Nikolaus Hirsch, Sofia Lemos, and Carolina Rito, e-flux Architecture (2019), https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/education/322664/ threshold-value/ Debord, Guy, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle Commodity (1965),” Situationist International Archive, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/decline.html Garuba, Harry, “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society,” in Public Culture Volume 15.2 (Duke University Press, 2003), 261 – 285. Kelley, Elleza, “Follow the Tree Flowers’”: Fugitive Mapping in Beloved,” in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography (2020), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111 anti.12679 Moten, Fred and Stefano Harney, “Planning and Policy,” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013) pp. 70 – 84. Muzaffar, Ijlal, “Prisoners of the Present: Transient Populations, Sovereign Thoughts, and the Depoliticization of Housing in the Postwar Era,” in After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit, edited by Lluis Alexandre Casanovas Blanco et al., (Zurich: Lars Muller, 2016), 166 – 178. Rice, Charles, “Bourgeois Inhabitations: Theory and the Historical Emergence of the Interior,” in Architectural Theory Review, vol. 8, n. 2, pp. 143– 151. Ridriques, Elias, (2021, March 29). “Abolition Is a Collective Vision: An Interview With Mariam Kaba.” The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mariame-kabainterview-til-we-free-us/ Watts, Vanessa, “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency Amongst Humans and Nonhumans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!),” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 20–34. Wynter, Sylvia, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation," in Savacou 5, (1972), 95 – 101.
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COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT While framing our after-property visions, we were fortunate enough to hold court with a host of exemplary artists, historians, policy makers, fellow architects and urban designers - all of whom are engaged in challenging the status quo with innovative approaches to collective ownership through their own work within the Atlanta Metro Region and beyond. In addition to the nuances of real-world housing mathematics and adjacent bureaucratic mechanisms, we came away from each discussion inspired and with expanded thoughts and convictions on the role we might play in advocating for a more just world through design. Our past and present are a demonstration of the inequity generated by top-down urban policy. How can we leverage community based ownership strategies to influence regionally equitable urban policy and design? Representations of the future currently exude a largely inaccessible aspirational quality which perpetuates a value system that has fostered environs of systemic injustice. How can we make images that subvert this code while inspiring the germination of an egalitarian ethos? Most spatial strategies today observe a difference between humankind and ecology - a practice that has informed most of the environmental pressures we face today. How can we remove this distinction in our world after-property? UD STUDIO II AAP
Next: Community Engagement Speakers Left to Right
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Dr. Akira Drake Rodriguez
Avery Ebron
Ifeoma Ebo
Joel Dixon
Olalekan Jiyefous
Dani Brockington
University of Pennsylvania
Creative Urban Alchemy, NYC
Visual Artist, NYC
Nikishka Iyengar The Guild, Atlanta
Nans Voron SCAPE, NYC
Ibiye Camp
Royal College of Art, London
Antariksh Tandon The Guild, Atlanta
Ashani O’Mard
Atlanta Affordable Housing Fund, Atlanta
Pavan Iyer
Eight Village, Atlanta
Zachary Murry The Guild, Atlanta
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The Guild, Atlanta
Urban Oasis Development, Atlanta
The Guild, Atlanta
Amale Andraos (Dean) Alicia O. Ajayi Amanda Rhein Andres Jaque Antariksh Tandon Ateya A. Khorakiwala Betsy Prueter Cabbagetown Mill Families Cabbagetown Artists Cecily King Dan Immergluck David Graham Shane David Smiley Ellen Dunham-Jones Ebony Ford Eric Kronberg Friends of English Avenue Geeta Mehta Jacob and Nina Elsas Jaren Abedania Jerome Haferd Jim Wehner John Skach Jonathan Park Jus Carla Jo Justin Bleaker Justin G. Moore Justin Schaeffer Karen Kubey
Kate Orff Katie Delp Kirkwood Care Laura Kurgan Lee Altman Lily Pabian Lindalisa Severo Mabel O. Wilson Margaret Marjy Stagmeier Mariann Martin Nick Forest Nikishka Iyengar OaksATL Phu Hoang Shashank Sreekar Shebha Ross Stephanie Coreas Weiping Wu Will Johnston
We thank you for your time and engagement, questions and conversations in our collective pursuits of a world after property.
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EPILOGUE
Cheryl Bray O pen hydrants attracts all age groups at Perry Homes, 1980
One question is proposed in reflecting on studio provocations, projects and conversations: Is liberation achieved before, during, or after the regime of property? UD STUDIO II AAP
In Harro’s cycle of Liberation, liberation is joy and belief that we can succeed at a collective and individual level to achieve a goal. Without the necessary framework put in place to help people understand why Cabbagetown property lines must be erased, society would have no foundation on what the future could be without property. For change to happen it has to be a part of everyday life while strengthening the new system. To achieve liberation, it must happen in the process of dismantling the regime of property.
UNDERSTANDING PROPERTY
However, in the regime of property, liberty only belongs to the privileged, those in the position of “exercising surveillance”. To be liberated from this unequal system of power, we need reflect on the Cop City harm shaped by privilege and rethink how to confront and heal from the harm as a way to build a new system of rights. The world after property rejects all kinds of exploitation and abuse of power in the name of the public good. Liberation could and should be achieved by collective resistance and empowerment.
COLLECTIVE RESISTANCE
Elements of society rise up in defiance of the regime of property to seek justice that is based on the needs of the people who form the community. We explore liberation through the formation of enclave Pratt Pullman spaces that allow marginalized groups to foster a collective voice and decenter ownership as central to identity. This world after property overthrows, dissolves, and transgresses the boundaries of programmatic spaces through individual and collective acts of resistance through the process of liberation.
SOCIETY IN DEFIANCE
The theory of liberation is intertwined as a temporal manifestation through both the rise and fall of property. While the call for liberation rests as a force awaiting to be evoked during the regime of property, it West End is finally realized in a world after property. In this search for, we chose to reclaim the agency of earth. Soil is seen as the resistance, as the beginning and the end – as an extension of life as we know it; as an entity with the agency, thought and a voice. In this imaginary, we ask you to listen to this voice and respond with solicitude. We ask you to look beyond the valuation of soil and land, and consider yourself to be a part of it – to truly value it as you would value yourself.
AGENCY OF RESISTANCE
Photographer xx Darker than Blue 21 19xx
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This process of liberation is just the same as we change as people, bodies within space, and Atlanta Logistics Area communities, changes as the regime of property shifts from one element of society to the next, combining, losing, or establishing new elements of oppression, discomfort, or exploitation. Liberation is rooted in the individual and their role in re-imagining property within the regime of property serves as a tool that exploits time and pushes efficiency to determine the value of an individual.
INDIVIDUAL VALUE
Liberation is the process by which individual fights against A STEPPED the regime of property become a collective voice of power to PROCESS institute change. It is the accumulation of concrete actions English Avenue that result in scalar and temporal interventions exponentially eroding the regime. Liberation is acknowledging how deeply rooted the systems of oppression are, and that changes often result in the violent fracture of society. It is admitting that to counter the violence of regime change, liberation is the stepped process of untangling the deep roots of property that bind value to possession (of land). It allows the space for radical destructions of the status quo or gradual alterations that move at the speed that each individual is ready to engage. Liberation is seeing the ambitious goal of countering this deep-rooted system and advancing regardless to create a world where there is nothing left to liberate; where land will merely become the space where bonds – to nature and people – are formed and fostered. We must rethink what constitutes crime that has been essential to the collectivization of modern societies. Bowen Homes Crime is no longer dictated by the state, but redirected towards harms and transgressions committed by governing regimes who have allowed acts of disinvestment, forced settlement, and dispossession against marginalized communities and ecologies to persist. Collective sustenance is achieved by the refusal to depend on existing social and physical infrastructure. Communities no longer depend on the government but on actions rooted in repair, translating legal reparations to produce new sustainable forms of living - reshaping our relationship to the land. Socio-economic and spatially temporal tactics have been built into communal zones to allow residents to claim access to basic necessities. The aim is to reverse the logic of capitalist regimes towards a more collective mode of production, mutual-aid network, and sharing. The collective is a porous enclave, actively redistributing agency to marginalized communities and ecologies.
REFUSAL OF DEPENDENCE
UD STUDIO II AAP
Andy Sharp Family Looking Out Window of New Home in the McDaniel Glenn Community Housing Project , 1986
Liberation from the formalized system of oppression and control is a process. The conversation about “after property” challenges the Atlanta University Campus very system that is facilitating this conversation, this cyclical process calls for negotiation with the normative systems that we are familiar with. However, any attempt to negotiate is immediately absorbed by the regime of property. Our process of liberation is still in the works, where we are exploring unfamiliar territories. The world after property is cleaved into the system of property itself - constantly negotiating its place.
NEGOTIATING NORMATIVE SYSTEMS
Frank Neimeir Some Techwood Home units boarded up, 1933
The act of setting something free is achieved in a regime after NECESSITY property only by critiquing the current system, and identifying + CARE and acknowledging the root of unequal opportunity. Through Reynoldstown such, we can begin to devise a system that resists the current model of capitalist development. Our present system favors the voices in power supporting capital and neglects the voices of the local community who feel the strongest impacts in the shift of property ownership. By addressing these issues and listening to local community voices, a new system can be developed to distribute property in favor of a community based on necessity and care rather than spaces that support and drive capital. While big studios are dominating film production, authentic value in everyday life Studio City activities and representation of individuality are deprived and unseen. Provided with infrastructure that was built into local activities, Buford Highway, as an example of suburban strip malls, was altered into a supercharged cultural destination that fully embraces the liberation of culture production. In the world after property, the relationship of seeing and being seen is redefined through the repossession of the agency to participate, perform, and record cultural activities that originate from self-awareness. The liberation is achieved by moving beyond the pursuit of monetary value and picking
CULTURAL VALUE
Right: Photographer xx Darker than Blue 17 19xx
The process of striving to achieve equal CO-EXISTENCE rights and status, and to unravel the discreet Chattahoochee River oppressions that are forced on people and nature by the hierarchy manifested in property and systems, is moving on the path to attain liberation. Breaking away from the capitalist agenda and centralization of systems, choosing to follow a humanitarian approach guided by faith, trust, and actions which provide a new mode of living that us, humans, should pursue to coexist with nature and adapt to the world, creates a sense of achieving liberation.
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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY GSAPP
FALL 2021 URBAN DESIGN STUDIO II UD STUDIO II AAP