Overlaps

Curious Landscapes in Kingsessing

Instructors: Sean Burkholder

Fall 2020 (Deep Pandemic)

This project explored Bartram’s Garden in Southwest Philadelphia and its context through routine visits and sitebased experiments. The course prompted us with weekly themes around which to design our own experiments. The methodology emphasized direct experience, observation, and making over traditional research. In the isolation of COVID, starting out in a new city, and a virtual first year of graduate school, visiting the place became an act of meditation, experimentation, and quiet joy. Throughout the semester, my guiding question emerged: “How can I uncover the overlapping narratives between people, plants, objects, and place?”

My initial experiments focused on the contrasts between the garden, its context, and the edges between them. The garden is a manicured colonial remnant amidst the Bartram’s Village Public Housing complex, Sankofa Farm, and the surrounding grit of warehouses, railroad corridors, overpasses, salvage yards, vacant lots, and oil terminals. I explored these contrasts by observing, interacting, and tinkering with the plants and objects that inhabited those environments.

I also learned by engaging with the people - neighbors, families, urban cowboys, dog walkers, plein air painters, maintenance workers - that bring social life to these curious environments. Our masked conversations rarely lasted longer than a few minutes, but the connections became defining memories of the place.

Channeling John Bartram, I collected ruderal species from disturbed trailsides, fencelines, cracks in the sidewalk, and vacant industrial lots. I attempted to cultivate them at home in a variety of soil media. The cultivation was... Unsuccessful.

I also made routine visits to a specimen Franklin Tree in the garden and a Spotted Laternfly-infested Tree of Heaven growing in the fenceline of a storage warehouse for the Streets Department. Every week I recorded the light, weather, and seasonal change. While I sketched observations, many different people and animals passed by.

The land surrounding the gardens was unmistakably in a state of transition. Through later coursework and experience, I learned that swaths of this vacant industrial land were being remediated for industrial scale cell and gene therapy manufacturing labs. Now I wonder what effects they’ll have on the surrounding low-income neighborhoods of color. Will they become an agent of displacement, an economic development lifeline, or somewhere in between?

The cycle of waste and dumping at the edges of vacant industrial lots was ever changing. For seven weeks, I revisited 51st street between Grays Ave. I would descend the street on bike, making my way slowly past a shifting topography of sofas, matresses, old clothes, appliances, construction debris, party supplies, TVs, abandoned freight trucks, and many, many tires.

These kinetic debris piles were a mystery because the Streets Department operates a Citizens Sanitation Convenience Center (where anyone can drop off large trash) right across Grays Ave. The back of their sanitation truck depot also overlooked the street through thickets of Ailanthus, Knotweed, and Paper Mulberry. I decided to roll a tire into the Convenience Center, expecting to be turned away or told they were full. Instead a kind man nodded to an orderly bin of tires and gave me a thumbs up.

Each experiment opened a door into new unknowns.

Embracing the overlaps and unkowns, my final experiment drew contrasts and dichotomies of the site and beyond into diaglogue through projection collages.

Production to the People

From Monolith to Mutualism at the former PES Refinery

Instructors: Ellen Neises, Colin Curley, Todd Montgomery

Community Partner: Philly Thrive

Partner: Allison Nkwocha Spring 2021

Environmental justice for the former PES Refinery site must include a transfer of productive land back to the South Philadelphia community that has long endured harm by the site’s operations. This productive space inverts the former refinery’s extractive economy by breaking down the monocultural scale of industrial land, ceding ownership to the community, and providing the infrastructural framework to support a variety of community-cultivated industries. This project defines and designs productive space by metrics of flexibility, scale, visibility, and connectivity. Flexible spaces support a variety of uses and operations at scales appropriate to the neighborhood. Their intentional visibility and connectivity create a feedback loop of access, laying groundwork for overlaps, collaboration, and growth. By stitching formerly inaccessible urban land back into the neighborhood fabric, this project seeds restorative structures for local livelihoods and ecosystems. Drawing on the legacy of the site and its varying configurations of access and ownership over time, this project centers new frameworks for co-operative development and collective ownership to envision a future that counters the consuming void and harm created by the refinery.

FLEXIBILITY

Facilitate overlapping and shared uses. Allow spaces to be adapted over time (short term and long term) so the community can build and produce what they want.

VISIBILITY

Make industrial, ecological, and social networks and processes legible. Provide places for demonstration and participation. Signify connection across disparate spaces.

CONNECTIVITY

Use space to create new, strengthen existing, and re-activate old connections, infrastructurally and socially.

Spatial Organization Concepts

SCALE

Bridge the scale of industrial operations with the neighborhood fabric. Provide the infrastructure that allows community livelihoods to flourish at multiple scales.

Regenerative Production at 3 Sites and Scales

SIGNAL PIXELATE PATCH/STITCH

CONNECTIVITY SCALE

CONNECTIVITY SCALE

Social-Industrial Stitch

SOCIAL-INDUSTRIAL ZONES

FLEXIBILITY VISIBILITY

FLEXIBILITY

GRAYS FERRY CO-LAB

INDUSTRIAL VEHICLE ACCESS

PEDESTRIAN ACCESS

GREEN CORRIDORS + BUFFERS

EXISTING INDUSTRIAL ZONE

PEOPLE’S DEPOT EXPANSION

SIGNAL MIXED MANUFACTURING ZONE

PARKS + PUBLIC SPACES

SCHOOLS + TRAINING CENTERS

PUBLIC HOUSING

PROPAGATION STATION

PEOPLE’S DEPOT

Where community builds capacity.

Where co-operative ownership expands.

Designing a Green New Deal III

Mississippi Delta

Instructors: Billy Fleming

Partners: Asha Bazil, Amy Liu-Pathak, Leeana Skuby

Fall 2021

The third iteration of the Designing a Green New Deal studio elucidates the histories and realities of land and labor exploitation in the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia, which serve as the bedrock of racial capitalism in the United States.

Working in interdisciplinacy teams of Landscape

Architecture and City Planning students, we created field guides to each region, which analyze the built environment through three interconnected systems of exploitation: the carceral state, industrial agriculture, and the fossil fuel industry. Secondly, a how-to manual details steps for dismantling the Plantation-to-Prison Pipeline in the Delta and the Coal Field-to-Prison Pipeline in Appalachia. Lastly, climate fiction stories envision the events preceding the passage of the Green New Deal, as well as daily life in these regions thereafter, through a lens of radical renewal and reparations. Throughout the process, we consulted with scholars, activists, policymakers, and movement leaders to build our research and frame our forecasts.

The Community that Prison Labor Built

The impacts of incarceration reach far beyond the prison walls and into the daily lives of surrounding residents. Beyond the physical facilities of the prisons, there is a constructed system of relations that reinforce the carceral state as an engine for economic and political hegemony. Shown above is a delta community behind the levees of the Mississippi River.

In x-ray view, we see the regime of exploited labor that underlies daily life in the communities that prisons built. We see this legacy reflected in the infrastructures and industries that sustain the Delta region.

The legacy of forced labor reaches into the everyday spaces and objects in the community as well. Public parks, roads, schools, and churches all benefit from incarcerated labor, whether it is through the inmate work crews that maintain and build them directly or the goods and services that prison factories produce and distribute.

The Industries and Infrastructures

From the Carceral State to Climate Justice

A series of publications for each region illustrate and narrate scenarios of climate justice and reparations for the communities most impacted by the economic and political domination of the carceral state. The concluding booklet is a work of climate fiction that imagines The Green New Deal as a vehicle for radical re-investment in structures of community-based care and liberation. Delta Uprising tells a an intergenerational story of social action, reclamation, and ecological renewal on the sites of the Delta’s three most exploitative prisons.

CLIMATE

HOWTO BLOW UPTHE COALFIELD TO PRISON PIPELINE

35PagesAppalachiaHow-ToManual EXTRACTION IN APPALACHIA: FIELD GUIDE

112 Pages Appalachia Field Guide

EXTRACTION IN APPALACHIA: CLIMATE FICTION

39 Pages Appalachia CliFi

DELTA UPRISING: A GREEN NEW DEAL STORY OF REBELLION, REMEDIATION, AND CELEBRATION

47 Pages

Delta CliFi HOW TO BLOW UP THE PLANTATION TO PRISON PIPELINE

28 DeltaPagesHow-To Manual

TOAFIELDGUIDETOTHEPLANTATION

PRISONPIPELINE88Pages DeltaFieldGuide

PART III - CELEBRATION

PLEIN AIR PAINTINGS

SITE IMPRESSIONS OF APPALACHIAN COAL FIELDS BY DANIEL FLINCHBAUGH

APPALACHIA CLIFI

APPALACHIA HOW-TO

FUTURE ARTIFACTS CLIMATE JUSTICE CURIOS

APPALACHIA FIELD GUIDE

REGIONAL ARTIFACTS OBJECTS AND PRODUCTS OF THE CARCERAL SYSTEM

LIGHT BOX DISPLAYS ILLUMINATE HIDDEN RELATIONSHIPS

DELTA CLIFI

DELTA HOW-TO

DELTA FIELD GUIDE

The Possibilist Porch

Youth Engagement and Design with West Philadelphia High School

Instructors: Ellen Nieses, Ernel Martinez, Eduardo Rega, Abdallah Tabet, Akira Drake Rodriguez

Partners: Ziying Huang, Olivia Xu, Jamaica Reese-Julien, Pedro Medrano

Spring 2022

Studio+ is an ongoing series of interdisciplinary studio courses focused on community engaged design, planning, art, and preservation in Philadelphia. Our work built on that of previous students in Akira Drake Rodriguez’s seminar course, Public Schools as Equity Infrastructure. Our cohort included 17 students and 5 faculty across Architecture, Landscape, City Planning, and Fine Arts. In a city where Public School Facilities are toxic and crumbling, we aimed to support grassroots movements and build institutional partnerships to engage youth as the designers and makers of schoolyard spaces for community.

Our work began with a collective look into West Philadelphia neighborhood assets and pressures, as well as mapping and illustrating the current movements for education justice citywide. We then designed engagement strategies to collaborate with West Philadelphia High Students in the Career Technical Education program taught by Jennifer McCullom. We ran workshops, classes, field sessions, and maker days where we drew, collaged, and mocked up site elements together to explore new design possibilities for the school’s main entry courtyard space.

We took what we generated and learned with the students to develop detailed designs and visualizations for the long-term future of the courtyard.

In particular, students and faculty were interested in a flexible outdoor space for gathering, growing, and learning. I worked within a smaller team to develop plans for the Possibilist Porch, a multi-purpose greenhouse classroom and gathering space overlooking the School’s main entry walkway.

A Space for Learning , Gathering, and Dreaming

The porch is reinterpretation of the surrounding neighborhood vernacular and drew inspiration from the writing of the late bell hooks. hooks conceptualized porches as powerful Black cultural spaces where intergenerationl exchanges occur and imagination expands.

The design combines spaces for learning and experimentation with comfortable and flexibile areas for gathering. We designed the greenhouse rooms and shading devices by recombining components taken from off-the-shelf greenhouse kits. The interior structure uses scaffolding components and connections to create a flexible frame for storage, seating, and staging.

Altogether, the Porch accommodates a wide variety of uses and programs from theater productions and celebrations to biology class with Mr. Thiebeau.

Year 1 - Hoop House Garden with Raised Beds

Possible Programs - Garden Club, Gardening Classes

Year 2 - Porch Addition

Possible Programs - Gathering, Outdoor Classroom, Production Greenhouse

Year 3 - Scaffolding Structure

Possible Programs - Student Art Display, Movie Night, WPHS Basketball Finals Screening

Year 4 - Climate Controlled Greenhouse

Possible Programs -Small performances, Year-round classroom space, Long-term science experiments, Flexibility to reconfigure interior structure to accommodate different programs as needed

Getting to Green

EPA Rainworks Student Competition at Sayre High School

Awarded Honorable Mention in Demonstration Projects Category

Community Partner: Eric Sherman, Sayre High School Nutrition Educator and Garden Manager Team: Corey Wills, Mrinalini Verma, Fall 2021

Sayre High School, located in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of West Philadelphia, has many assets; an onsite health center, a small garden program, an adjacent recreation center, and beautiful student-created murals. However, the school sits within a Combined Sewer Overflow watershed and food desert. Students and faculty also experience some of the hottest temperatures citywide due to the surrounding sea of asphalt parking lots and lack of tree canopy throughout the schoolyard and surrounding neighborhood.

The design re-imagines the schoolyard as an absorptive and shaded landscape for community gathering, sport, and stormwater management. An existing parking access drive, which aligns with Locust St., transforms into an active permeable promenade connecting existing sports fields with new cooling centers and rain gardens. The design also provides new infrastructure for the School’s urban farming, gardening, and community-based food initiatives. A new farm stand pavillion captures stormwater, while providing a focal point within the schoolyard for existing food relief programs and produce markets.