THESIS WORKS
FPO
2020
THESIS WORKS
2020
INTRODUCTION
This pamphlet features the work of a courageous group of young people—2020 graduates of the Theories of Urban Practice and Design and Urban Ecologies program—who have completed their thesis work during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time of this writing, all of us are locked-in at our homes around the country and the world, and have worked through online platforms since early March. We are convinced that five or ten years from now, when looking back at this moment in time, we will hardly believe that such a strong work, so much dedication, and such a commitment was possible in the face of a disaster we have collectively faced. The work featured in this publication attempts to
shift
our
understanding
of
the
effective
strategies for critical urban change. Rather than cultivating an antagonistic position in relation to urban development processes and urban growth politics–which together produce unprecedented degrees of inequality, injustice and environmental degradation–our graduates have worked hard to produce effective alternative strategies for creating a democratic, just, inclusive and resilient urban space. The faculty who mentored DUE and TUP 2020 graduates in the 2019-20 academic year assumed that a proper response to this situation would be to introduce the work of the students by prefacing it with diary-like entries which attempt to capture the moment in time and briefly discuss possibilities for urbanism post-COVID-19. Congratulations Class of 2020! New York City, 7 May 2020 Jilly Traganou, Ana Fisyak, William Morrish, David López-García, Miguel Robles-Duran, and Miodrag Mitrasinovic
Join the crowd. You have done the hard research work and creative thinking to assist society, and for people to make a turn from the predatory urban “envelope of regularity” towards equitable urban ecologies and just-city practices. Stay healthy and wear your mask!
by David López-Gacía
I am constantly fascinated by the projects of students in the TUP and DUE programs. Always aiming to reframe urban discussions, on the verge of disciplines, and even bold. Engaging with the work of Parsons students is one of the best ways I know to challenge myself and push my boundaries. And what a productive semester this was.
by Bill Morrish
COVID_19 Urban Fallout.: “Hidden Figures” My contribution is a collection of thoughts drawn from my diary called “COVID_19 Urban Fallout.” I started it, mid-March 2020, when the pandemic’s curve disrupted our “envelope of regularity,” dispersed our educational working relationships into the ethernet of Zoom, and called our futures into question. The city is silent. I can now hear the birds. For some of us, this self-quarantine or PAUSE from the madness of the neoliberal city, is a tuff GIFT, midst a marathon tragedy. We are not first responders, though we try to help. What is our task given that our collective gravity has been disconnected? How do we return from remote isolation and re-occupy public life and space together? “Seeking a new return trajectory to Earth after a fire in their capsule, the Moon astronauts sent this message: ‘HOUSTON, we have a situation’” What is our trajectory for returning into our cities on Earth… What is our trajectory for returning to OUR city and our Earth… Who is our HOUSTON? More importantly where are our brilliant African-American women mathematicians who will calculate our re-entry path by hand on paper? Corporations propose the artificial intelligence of surveillance technology or BIG DATA. Let’s deploy people, gather a crowd of hidden figures to calculate the return to OUR city on our collective Earth.
We enhanced our understanding of the city we live in: New York. To name a few examples, we learned about green roofs and how the political economy of access to land above buildings makes roof agriculture an amenity of privilege. We looked at the inequalities faced by African American entrepreneurs to access the factors of production in the hair industry, and the innovative strategies used by these women to overcome such barriers. By reading about Little Pakistan, we witnessed the power of collaborative storytelling to document the history of a neighborhood and preserve it for future immigrant-descent generations. We also learned about urban phenomena in cities around the world. For instance, we read extensively about Gulf Futurism, an urban epistemology that merges the production of the urban fabric with a state-building project. We were transported to the urban ecology of Rio de Janeiro, where the relationship between bodies of water and the built environment pose a challenge to sustainable coexistence. By studying Adigrat, Ethiopia, we learned how remittance urbanism has been able to disrupt the relationship between livelihood strategies and everyday social life. Perhaps most importantly, we learned about our practice as educators and students. The challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March put us to the test. Research plans shattered. Trips, which required months of planning, cancelled overnight. Our attention was pulled elsewhere as the breaking news of a pandemic developed. And despite all of this, here we are. The scopes of projects were recalibrated. Plans of work reconfigured. Students proved to be resourceful in conducting research in times of social isolation. It was inspiring to witness the array of ways in which students overcame the difficulties faced. We all got to know ourselves somewhat better through this peculiar semester.
by Ana Fisyak
This semester was an odyssey. To have played a small role in it as students explored and formulated questions and projects has been an honor. This semester students have demonstrated resilience and humility in “rerouting” (Hajosy 2020) in response to COVID-19 and to the limitations it placed, not only on their work, but on that of their partners, collaborators, cities, public spaces, businesses, homes, roommates, spouses, pets, employers, nonprofits, housing policies, privacy, airline traffic… They reshaped engagement strategies, deepened their analysis, and adapted their project to use the resources at hand. This resilience is vital—to persevere when everything stops and to commit to progress even when priorities change—and humility too—to ask what can I learn from this and how can I better respond—as we commit to social justice in shaping cities with diverse communities beyond Parsons and beyond the pandemic. I am deeply grateful to the students. This semester I learned about autonomy in preserving the history of community gardens and amplifying diverse voices of garden elders. I reshaped my definition of urban shrink to take into account social innovation from Herleen, the Netherlands. I questioned participatory practices at the MTA and how the agency can better engage young voices in Rockaway, Queens in route planning. I reframed inequity in water management in Sao Paulo, Brazil and management of NYC public spaces for public good. I also learned what role renderings play in creating mythologies and how makerspaces can be a place of community. It has also taught me how to be a better collaborator and to ask questions rather than come with the answers. (Also, how committed I am to the em-dash and author-date citation.) The questions explored by the students are more important than ever and this is just the first step on a long professional and philosophical journey. Today, we find ourselves within a matryoshka (nesting) doll of crises, a pandemic within climate change within unregulated capitalism. “The crisis is everywhere, massive massive massive. And we are small,” activist Adrienne Maree Brown has written, “but emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies. Emergence is our inheritance as a part of this universe; it is how we change. Emergency strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated words we long for” (Brown, 2017). How do we start this journey? How do we start small, start here, start now? References: Brown, Adrienne Maree. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico: AK Press. Hajosy, Callan. 2020, April. Student in conversation with the author.
by Miodrag Mitrasinovic
In her 1996 book “Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics,” Rosalyn Deutsche titles the last chapter “Agoraphobia.” Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder induced by the panic fear of open spaces, and importantly also a social anxiety induced by public transit, crowded parks or streets; basically, a fear of encountering others. As a result, agoraphobic individuals stay at home for extended periods of time and organize their entire lives away from other people. It seems that the condition of extreme urban density, paradoxically, helps agoraphobic individuals create elaborate mechanisms for survival—such as Japanese otaku and hikikomori—without ever crossing paths with anyone for months and sometimes years. It has been widely reported that both “social distancing” and “stay-at-home orders” during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have caused numerous individual- and public-health challenges. While initially individuals with varied degrees of agoraphobia found the stay-at-home regime to be a relief from their daily struggles, soon their anxiety disorders worsened. Those who never suffered from agoraphobia and other forms of social anxiety, found themselves avoiding others in nearly panic maneuvers in public spaces: crossing the street to avoid contact, anticipating the movement of a jogger from far away, letting others go first, or avoiding delivery trucks and essential workers in large circles. Jacques Tati would have watched this everyday choreography on the streets of our cities with considerable interest. For many of us living through the pandemic, the “other” is nearly everyone out there. For Deutsche, agoraphobia translates into the fear of democracy. Namely, the fear of others, and by extension the fear of public space, is driven by deep anxieties surrounding the definition of “the social.” Relentless escalation in degrees of inequality has already polarized urban spaces across the world, and in the process marginalized hundreds of millions of people. There is no doubt that the ongoing pandemic has amplified this situation,
and has been often intentionally employed by regressive political movements and the accompanying totalizing discourses to support undemocratic political ideas. Agoraphobia, not as an individual anxiety but as a political program, has forced much of the narrowing down of the spaces of possibility, spaces where we can struggle to define who we want to be, what kinds of cities we want to live in, and how we want to practice as urbanists. Each and every abstract in this volume, in one way or another, critically addresses this tension. Each studies and complexifies the urban condition, and inscribes the grounds for moving forward in identifying the meaning of the social, while simultaneously “putting it at risk.” After all, as Lawrence Lessig puts it, the character of an era is not marked by the ideas everyone argues about, but by those which are taken for granted. “The power in a particular moment,” argues Lessig, “runs with the notions that only the crazy would draw into doubt.” Call them crazy, but there is no doubt this group of graduates has taken the current situation seriously, with an urgency, passion, and determination to question what everyone else is taking for granted, and propose courses of action that will ultimately build alternative urban futures. Image Credit: AAPhoto, Turkey
by Jilly Traganou
When we parted in mid-December who would have known that 2020 was meant to be such a groundbreaking year. In the months before, I had watched you trying to fit into your calendars myriad aspirations for the spring semester: facilitating workshops with communities, traveling, conducting field research, working with partners. And then by mid-March we all found ourselves questioning the basics of our daily existence, configuring ways of being and acting as we faced questions that would have been unimaginable before. How might we stay healthy while not becoming dehumanized? How might we keep working together while miles apart? How might we not surrender to monopolies? How might we imagine worlds where care and repair are equally distributed? How might we develop scaffoldings of support that will also be used for building a new society? We could make an endless list of “how might we” and “what ifs.” And as the list becomes more and more generative, than simply reactive to the circumstances, it starts reminding me of something. We all know by now that COVID-19 has been a magnifying lens, a portal to the abysmal cracks of a dematerialized safety net that was always present. But it also brought out our capacity to redirect and reprioritize. As designers we know that there is never only one best solution. Out of the numerous possible articulations, we always make choices based on criteria that include both values and affordances: feasibility, economy of resources, synergies, temporary opportunities, to name but a few. I know that at these times of scarcity and isolation, you all played out such parameters one thousand times in your heads, trying to complete
a thesis that would remain true to your aspirations despite the obstacles that you were facing. And you succeeded because after this exercise of survival you came out knowing what your bottom lines are, and the most precious of your values. At this juncture of your graduation and as the world is reopening, we should all treasure this enormous learning that your theses embody. These are the antibodies that will move your work of re-constellating, of connecting the dots between the unimaginable and the real.
by Miguel Robles-Duran
In uncertain times, new urgencies appear and new directions are required. Even though we part with this new generation of graduates in a way that was unimaginable when their graduate studies began, I am confident that they will be the ones to define the way we tackle future urgencies and define new directions ahead. Our cities and their inhabitants are more vulnerable than at any time in modern history, but this vulnerability exists due to decades of inadequate policies that prioritized private gain over the welfare of the collective that constitutes the very essence of cities, humans. COVID-19 is the most recent crisis, exacerbated by the failure of governments to take care of their people, but we can extend this failure to times before COVID-19, when climate change, homelessness, hunger, exploitation, racism, lack of healthcare and the basic needs for a dignified living were ignored in favor of the enrichment of the few. If anything, this crisis should bring more hope. Hope that younger generations, tired of all the catastrophic wrongdoing of their elders, finally decide it is enough. That they decide to form completely new organizational structures which challenge the destructive forces of the present time; that they decide a new world is truly possible and begin to spread the true hope to come. What an incredible time to graduate, what an incredible task ahead. Equipped with a critical vision and a hunger for change, all the graduates of this generation have what it takes to fuse their knowledge into the worldwide movement that will decide our great future. I congratulate all of them in advance for the many amazing directions in which they will stir our cities into being spaces where social and environmental justice principles are prioritized over the private gains of the few.
CONTENT
TUP THESIS
DUE THESIS
LIFE ABOVE BUILDINGS
ROOFTOP AGRICULTURE AND THE CREATION OF A SUSTAINABLE NEW YORK
RENDERING THE FUTURE OF MART 125
Jessica Schwartz
INSTITUTIONAL POWER, IDEOLOGY, AND THE SEMIOTICS OF ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION
page 8
Paul Beasley page 10
REMITTANCES
IMPACT ON THE URBAN FABRIC OF ADIGRAT, ETHIOPIA Saba Aregai page 12
RECLAIMING NARRATIVES OF AUTONOMY AND ACTIVISM IN NEW YORK CITY COMMUNITY GARDENS Matthew Morowitz page 14
NON-SUSTAINABLE EGOSYTEMS
GULF FUTURISM & QATAR Maha Al-Khater page 16
ENGENDER(ING) IMMIGRANT SPACE EXPLORING COLLABORATIVE STORYTELLING TO REDISCOVER LITTLE PAKISTAN Sana Akram
HEERLEN
MINING FOR SOCIAL INNOVATION IN A SHRINKING CITY Regis Hijnekamp page 20
A PROCESS FOR INCLUDING STUDENTS IN PARTICIPATORY TRANSIT PLANNING Maanasa Sivashankar & Callan Hajosy page 26
IS IT ALL ABOUT WATER?
AN ATTEMPT TO NAVIGATE THE POTABLE WATER CRISIS IN THE ANDEAN CITY OF AYACUCHO, PERU AND THE REALIZATION OF THE ‘WICKED PROBLEMS’ THAT ACCOMPANY IT Courtney Sprigg page 28
WHEN PDFS AIN’T IT THO USING BLACK COMMUNICATIVE ART FORMS TO MEASURE RESILIENCE MOTIVATIONS AND LANDSCAPE CHANGES IN BLACK “DISASTER PRONE” COMMUNITIES Akiera Xavina Charles page 34
EQUITY ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND BLACK WOMANHOOD Obianozo Jessica Chukwuma page 22
page 18
RE-ROUTE!
URBAN BEAUTY
HOUSING DIALECTICS Aditi Nair page 36
MAPPING RESPONSES
FOR ‘WATER SECURITY’ IN SÃO PAULO IN THE LIGHT OF THE DROUGHT OF 2014–2015 Ana Lago page 30
RESILIENCE PLAN FOR MARGINAL PROTECTION STRIPS
IN RISK OF FLOOD, EROSION AND LANDSLIDE, IN RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL Mariana Kiwi Barros page 24
THE QUEST OF LEADERSHIP MODEL
AN ASSESSMENT TOOL OF THE URBAN PUBLIC SPACE’S MANAGEMENT MODELS AIMS TO REVERSE THE COMMODIFICATION OF PUBLIC GOODS Amy Ameera Issa page 32
LIFE ABOVE BUILDINGS
ROOFTOP AGRICULTURE AND THE CREATION OF A SUSTAINABLE NEW YORK by Jessica Schwartz
8 TUP
Urban Agriculture Climate Change Adaptation Food Systems Food Security Urban Political Economy
New York City imports 85% of its food supply, with one week’s worth of food available at any given time. How can we as a city be better prepared in case of a disaster or break from the supply chain? Many New Yorkers have begun to see what this could do to daily life during the COVID-19 pandemic that quickly brought the city to a halt in March 2020. It created panic and fear across the city as people raced to stockpile food and brought to light the need for a backup plan. While the United States food supply chain is said to be stable, the response to the pandemic has been a clear sign that more autonomy is needed. Due in part to a rising interest in local food systems, urban agriculture has become a growing industry in the 21st century. Although it is not possible to replace traditional agriculture with urban farming, it is an innovative alternative that has the potential to reshape how the city eats. This thesis argues that strategic placement of rooftop agriculture projects within food deserts can address food insecurity, help meet the city’s climate goals and create a more sustainable New York. The basis of this argument is placed within the theoretical framework of urban political economy, determining that the uneven development of New York City has contributed to deep social inequality and the destruction of the environment. This thesis is supported by a combination of qualitative primary and secondary research including direct observation, semi-structured interviews, a data collection survey, text-analysis of city-level plans and policy documents and a comprehensive literary review. Local case studies and a global comparative study of Berlin and Copenhagen inform the current landscape of food access as well as how climate-focused cities are addressing sustainability goals in relation to urban agriculture and food access.
New York City is currently confronting the reality of climate change. While there is great emphasis put on reaching carbon neutrality, fortifying flood plains for the next storm, and meeting environmental benchmarks, there is another side to climate preparedness: the ways in which residents get food. It may seem that there are more options for purchasing food than ever, with hundreds of grocery stores, bodegas, and farmers markets located across New York City, not to mention home delivery such as AmazonFresh and its many competitors, but there are two realities for residents. While the majority take advantage of these offerings, over 1 million New Yorkers are still food insecure. Food deserts, high cost of fresh produce and uneven economic development have contributed to the fact that many community districts struggle to eat healthfully. The rise of food desert neighborhoods has created a variety of issues for those living in them, including diet-related diseases. Food deserts are primarily located in poor districts, with high minority populations and the inequitable distribution of healthy food options is a glaring reminder of the ways in which urban development has failed these communities.
Image 1 (Main Image) Credit: Dustin Partridge, Little Italy NYC Image 2 Credit (upper left) NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Image 3 (upper right) Stephanie Kale, Boswyck Farms
The topic of food sourcing and distribution has taken on increased urgency with the sudden rise of global pandemics spurred by climate change, and it is now time to take action in order to ensure that all New Yorkers have access to healthy food in a sustainable environment. This thesis argues that expanding urban agriculture, and more specifically rooftop farming, to targeted community districts including Bronx District 1, Brooklyn District 16, and Manhattan District 10, can help mediate climate issues such as heat index and stormwater runoff, provide a safety net of fresh produce, and bring healthy food to these vulnerable populations.
TUP 9
RENDERING THE FUTURE OF MART 125
INSTITUTIONAL POWER, IDEOLOGY, AND THE SEMIOTICS OF ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION by Paul Beasley
10 TUP
Architecture Visualization Rendering Visual Culture Semiotics Representation Media Harlem
In the midst of an era of intensified development and real estate speculation in American cities, architectural renderings, digitally-generated, photorealistic images of unbuilt spaces and buildings have emerged as the preeminent tools for marketing cities. Contemporary architectural production in the city has been defined more than ever by the aesthetic commodification of a lifestyle. These images have become instrumentalized in performing a kind of symbolic labor, creating an ‘aesthetic economy’ of the city. No matter how idealized they appear, renderings are complicit in the ideological shaping of cities; they indicate what kinds of people, practices, modes of consumption, and social behaviors are preferred by those with the capital and power to build and develop. More importantly, architecture schools, which train future architects in visualization practices and hone their prestige through the production of complex renderings, play a part in this aesthetic economy. In the fall of 2015, the Yale School of Architecture hosted a design studio in Harlem, a historically black neighborhood in New York City, as part of the Edward P. Bass Visiting Architecture Fellowship, a program that brings prominent real estate developers to the School to host a studio teaching future architects how to ‘think like developers’. The chosen site was Mart 125, a defunct marketplace and the last city-owned parcel in Manhattan across the street from the famed black cultural landmark the Apollo Theater .The Fellowship, started in 2005, emphasizes the role of architects to think about their projects in more than simply formal terms but also in capitalistic terms. The fellowship is unique not only because the Fellows are all commercial developers, but that it is funded by the billionaire for whom it is named and who also serves as a member of the Yale
Corporation, the governing body of the University. In 2018, as part of a larger series for the Bass Fellowship, Yale published a book of the students’ architectural plans for the site called Harlem: Mart 125.
between conflicting historic and speculative myths of a cultural urban site. Lastly, I attempt to grapple with how renderings figure into larger cultural practices of myth-making.
While critical debates about the usefulness, ideological meanings, and saturation of renderings in the sphere of architectural practice are robust in popular literature, there is a dearth of critical scholarly literature engaging with these issues, especially in rapidly gentrifying communities. More importantly, even as schools of architecture have become increasingly dependent on students’ skill in creating complex, sophisticated renderings as a sign of institutional prestige, scholars have yet to fully research and critique architecture school studios as a ground for inculcating future architects into how they think and make use of visualizations.
This thesis uses a comparative semiotic-discourse analysis methodology to examine the historic and cultural dimensions of Mart 125 as understood by the black merchants and residents of Harlem in its previous life as an open, social infrastructure and the capitalistic, closed futures imagined through the Yale School of Architecture’s endowed Edward P. Bass Fellowship Studio. It compares two visual primary sources produced in a 10-year period, both focused on Mart 125: Rachelle Salnave’s 2005 seminal documentary Mart 125: An American Dream with renderings produced by YSOA students in the 2018 publication Harlem: Mart 125. Through an intertextual and transhistorical dialogue with these sources, I problematize the future of Mart 125 proffered by Yale, a space where blackness is depoliticized and reduced to spectacle.
This thesis aims to explore the role architectural visualizations play in the contemporary spectacularization and ‘whitewashing’ of black cultural space; it also examines the mediological and ideological power institutions, specifically architecture schools possess to legitimize the fictive imaginaries their students produce as well as market and traffic those images. Through a ‘resistance’ framework, it argues that by engaging directly with renderings and the worlds they present, they resist the temptation to view them as simple marketing tools but as active cultural artifacts. I work through several research questions: firstly, I ask how digital renderings have transformed the urban landscape and how the trafficking of marketing of fictive urban imaginaries forms a ‘symbolic economy’ of urban development. Secondly, I ask how renderings hold ideological and semiotic discontinuities, emerging
TUP 11
REMITTANCES
IMPACT ON THE URBAN FABRIC OF ADIGRAT, ETHIOPIA by Saba Aregai
12 TUP
Remittances Diaspora Rremittance Urbanism Urban Development Ethiopia
Remittances are contributing in shaping the urban fabric of cities, making diaspora contributions an important point of research when discussing the current development trajectory of urban Africa. Remittances have surpassed the amount of official development assistance and foreign direct investments worldwide. There was a record high remittance inflow to low and middle income countries of $529 billion in 2018 and the World Bank predicted in 2019 the inflow will reach $550 billion and become the largest source of external financing (World Bank, Migration and Development Brief 31). In comparison, foreign direct investment flows in 2018 were $344 billion and this is anticipated to drop over the years. Although the contribution of diaspora is not a new phenomenon, at this point in history their contributions have been most studied from a monetary perspective, as the World Bank does every year in their Migration and Development Brief. Although examining the monetary figures is important in understanding just how large the involvement of the diaspora have been, what is less talked about is the impact these contributions have on residential life and how they are being spatialized. Diaspora have a major role and connection to the economic, political, and social development of low and middle income countries and remittances matter in urban development. The diaspora’s role should be further analyzed beyond just the monetary contribution, especially when Africa’s population is projected to double by 2050 with 80% of the growth occurring in urban areas (World Economic Forum). Urbanization on the continent is one of the leading forces in shaping the future of its development. With this, it is now a crucial time to evaluate the impact of
remittance urbanism and the existing and potential relationship between diaspora communities as development actors and their current and future impact on urban areas and their systems. There is immense opportunity to utilize remittances in anticipation for this growth in very productive ways but the potential impact must be analysed.
All images credited to Saba Aregai
In order to provide evidence to this claim, this thesis will discuss in depth how the relationship between diaspora communities in the West are connecting to urban communities in Adigrat, Ethiopia. In Africa, Ethiopia is the fastest urbanizing country. Ethiopian diaspora are transforming urban spaces through several types of remittances including social remittances, family remittances, migrant worker remittances, education-based remittances, and many more. In return, these contributions are manifesting into urban spaces through infrastructure, social, and cultural development. The impact can appear positive if measured against growth-first principles and practices or neoliberalization but the actual impact is unclear. There is also a potential that these positive contributions may be contributing to the creation of an exclusionary city that is putting residents in both urban and dependent rural areas at great risk. This thesis will also focus on how diaspora as a development actor are spatially transforming Adigrat, creating and supporting urban programs and systems most particularly through housing and business development, and the benefits or repercussions this has on residential livelihood, making the case/conclusion that remittance urbanism matters in global development discourse and should be further considered for large scale discussion and research.
TUP 13
RECLAIMING NARRATIVES OF AUTONOMY AND ACTIVISM IN NEW YORK CITY COMMUNITY GARDENS by Matthew Morowitz
14 TUP
Community Gardens Autonomía Activism Narratives New York City
Community gardens are radical. Since their emergence during New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970’s, Community Gardens served a variety of functions: green space, safe havens, fresh food access, but most importantly the gardens were established to reclaim disused and divested spaces within city neighborhoods. Gardens were created in vacant, trashstrewn lots, and in the place of dilapidated buildings, many of which were cleared away through the efforts of neighborhood residents and community groups coming together to remove the refuse by hand. As a result, these ignored neighborhoods did not find themselves green because of an edict or initiative by the city, but instead through the labor, investment, and sweat equity of communities looking to improve their surroundings and address key needs and concerns where the city was choosing not to provide support. The efforts of the community gardeners of the past have not gone unnoticed, and currently the City has over 550 official gardens to boast for it. Neighborhoods, like Manhattan’s East Village/Lower East Side, have even become characterized by their high concentration of these spaces. Though many of the original gardeners still live and work in the neighborhoods and gardens where they helped establish and fight for these spaces, they are reaching advanced ages. On top of that, increases in the cost of living due to gentrification are forcing them and others out of these areas entirely. The old guard of the gardens won’t be around forever; for these spaces to survive, it is imperative that new gardeners and garden members understand that community gardens exist for reasons beyond beautification. This thesis attempts to re-center the narratives of autonomy and activism that led to the establishment of the gardens
in order to show why it is important that these spaces hold onto this history. Even as the neighborhoods around them change, community gardens serve as reminders that one’s right to the city is not contingent on private property ownership, or waiting for the City to act on behalf of the most vulnerable. By using Arturo Escobar’s concept of autonomía—a situation of autonomy through negotiation—as well as discussions from writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the power of narratives, this research examines the past histories of semi-autonomous communities in NYC, in conjunction with the present situations and threats these spaces are currently facing, in order to inform a design-led project meant to aid this history in becoming a part of the regular dialogue of the gardens, their membership, and the public at large.
nal intentions, and to become a template for future gardeners to share their stories, experiences, and insights, and feel more connected into the community gardening movement’s ongoing history. Image 3 (upper right) LUNGS NYC, Great turnout today at #CityHall! Thanks for your ongoing support of NYC Community Gardens @bradhoylman @HarveyforNY @CarlinaRivera @MarkLevineNYC @CMPeterKoo! September 19, 2019, 1:10PM. https://twitter.com/lungsnyc/status/1174732536385327104/photo/1
The aim of this project, which focused on the development of outreach and archival material, is to bring to the forefront and re-center these narratives and stories about how community gardens foster community-led actions, and independent resilience efforts, so new gardeners, members, and even casual visitors will have this information more readily at their disposal. By doing so, this will not only help these aforementioned individuals become more connected to these garden spaces, but also understand the values these spaces represent and why they need to be protected. This project is grounded in the Green Oasis Garden in Manhattan’s East Village, one of the oldest gardens in the City with a rich and varied history that caters to a large cross-section of area demographics. The ultimate goal is to see this project evolve into two co-supportive directions: to become education materials for future gardeners/advocates to ensure the community gardening movement doesn’t diverge from its origi-
TUP 15
NON-SUSTAINABLE EGOSYTEMS GULF FUTURISM & QATAR by Maha Al-Khater
16 TUP
Gulf Futurism Arab Capitalism Urban Symbolic Ecology Aesthetics Qatar
Given the accelerated rate of rapid urbanization and the country’s ambition to position itself globally, Qatar’s natural resources have been exploited to fuel an unsustainable national agenda which has manipulated urban space largely out of vision rather than need, manufacturing consent among its citizens through government-led urban megaprojects. As a result, society has become spectators amid this unprecedented hyper-modern development where visions of the future are being played out through an array of contemporary and capitalist-driven projects. The thesis proposes to examine this transitioning state through the notion of Gulf Futurism1 to understand this concept and its socio-spatial impact on the lives and life in the city. Studying the symbolic dimension of the city, I hope to bring into focus the unique ecosystem which has informally enabled the country to modernize through unsustainable measures. The aim of this thesis is to develop a theoretical framework to define, discuss and evaluate this emerging phenomena by drawing connections based on existing ideas, knowledge and observations. By grounding the research through a conceptual approach, the goal is to explore and use an existing theory to evaluate and justify the key tropes which have already been defined within this aesthetic. The thesis will contribute to this area of study by laying out the foundation to interpret and analyze this phenomenon through the perspective of Urban Symbolic Ecology.2 The foundation that will support the thesis claim will be described through the various components of the contexted ecosystem which has enabled the city to grow and modernize at such a speed. The basis for using and developing this theoretical framework is to critically analyze this emerging trend in a city like Doha in order to expand its socio-spatial vocabu-
lary which would help illustrate how vision can lead to unsustainable growth. Since the sustainability of such growth and projection playing out in the state of Qatar is put under investigation, illuminating how and what urban patterns have emerged out of this speed will help represent the material side of such rapid urbanization. Moving away from the spectacle of this phenomenon, the research in this thesis is dedicated to classify and make visible the various elements of this ecosystem of built and experienced symbolic structures.
Al-Maria, Sophia, 2008. The Gaze of SciFi Wahabi, A Theoretical Pulp Fiction and Serialized Videographic Adventure in the Arabian Gulf. https://scifiwahabi. blogspot.com/2008/09/introduction. html
1
Nas, Peter J. M. (Ed.). (2011). Cities Full of Symbols: A Theory of Urban Space and Culture. Leiden, Netherlands: Leiden University Press. 303 pp, ISBN 9789089641250.
2
TUP 17
ENGENDER(ING) IMMIGRANT SPACE
EXPLORING COLLABORATIVE STORYTELLING TO REDISCOVER LITTLE PAKISTAN by Sana Akram
18 DUE
Little Pakistan Collaborative Storytelling Rhythmanalysis Interactive Documentary Immigrant Space
Spatializing — Situating — Storying: these processes act in simultaneity, engendering an act, an object, a thing into being. “Immigrant Space”—a place of convergence of multiple movements—is engendered by “innovators of meanings” (community protagonists) who create “an ensemble of meanings” by imprinting rhythms across space, time and generations. This thesis attempts to unravel this engendering process in the context of Little Pakistan, a PakistaniAmerican neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York City. The project outcome, “Little Pakistan—Future Histories,” is an interactive documentary that integrates collaborative storytelling with emerging media; their synthesis ensues rediscoveries in individual as well as the collective context of meanings. Space and place are rarely the central notions of research over South Asian diasporas (Bruslé and Varrel 2015). Immigrant space, for Pakistani diaspora in general and particularly for Pakistani-American context, remains an understudied subject suggesting a “void” in existing scholarship. Furthermore, in a post 9/11 world, the war on terror and a media rhetoric perpetuating negative stereotypes has framed the Pakistani experience. Foregrounding Little Pakistan against this, initial research exposed “gaps’’ in its narratives. Similarly, a post 9/11 lens of fear became a defining frame for the neighborhood with transformative acts of resilience by community protagonists rarely a focus of media headlines. Such experiences subjected the Pakistani hyphenated identity across the globe, fueling a counter-narrative from within. These voids and gaps around Little Pakistan warrant for a counternarrative to emerge from within the neighborhood.
This thesis proposes a system of “engendering” a space consisting of three processes: spatializing, situating and storying, developed after a cross-disciplinary literature review and study of practices. The praxis employed collaborative storytelling, psychogeography and Lefebvrian rhythmanalysis. Collaborative storytelling (in oral tradition) has a rich history in the Indian subcontinent, playing a pivotal role in sustaining histories and narratives. Its efficacy as a research, analysis and project execution strategy for Little Pakistan was evident through interviews (oral-histories and walk-along video interviews) conducted within the community. “Community,” in this context, translates to a network of protagonists involved in transformative acts shaping their neighborhood. Other strategies used during the research process included “deep hang out”, GIS mapping, observational documentary and sensorial ethnography.
aims at illustrating a neighborhood spread across three eras, each having its own rhythm, with three sets of youth engaged in transformative acts of inhabitation, organizing and resilience, taking Little Pakistan from an ethnic enclave to a concept. The aim of this thesis was to explore ways to rediscover immigrant space through collaborative storytelling. If the research and project design proposed as part of this thesis successfully engender Little Pakistan, it offers promise for replicability in context of other “places of convergence of multiple movements” where listening to, watching, acknowledging and understanding stories unravels a collective of meanings from past and present, to give forth a vision for “futurehistories.”
How can we represent immigrant space as “an ensemble of meanings?” This was a major challenge for the project design. The thesis proposes that an ensemble of meaning requires an ensemble of narrative—a non-linearity where stories unravel across space through interaction. Emerging media productions such as interactive web-documentaries offer environments suited for collective rediscovery (Lovejoy 2011), with community protagonists assuming the role of “innovators of meanings” (Lefebvre 1992) and the researcher/artist acting as a “context provider” (Daniel 2018). Therefore, this thesis proposes an interactive webdocumentary as an ideal medium of intervention. “Little Pakistan—Future Histories” serves as a dérive through the neighborhood with the audience walking along with protagonists. The experience
DUE 19
HEERLEN
MINING FOR SOCIAL INNOVATION IN A SHRINKING CITY by Regis Hijnekamp
20 DUE
Urban Shrink Creative Communities Exhibition Imaginaries Root Shock Space-Making
According to conventional definitions of the concept, Heerlen, a city in the southern province of Limburg in the Netherlands, is considered a shrinking city. Ever since the closure of the city’s mining industry in 1975, the population of Heerlen has declined. However, Heerlen challenges the traditional understanding of what defines a shrinking city. Self-labeled as De Antistad (“the Anti City”), Heerlen is attempting to ‘grow the city smaller.’ Heerlenaren, residents of Heerlen, have a word for it: teruggroeien (“to grow back”). With an unusual investment of community effort, Heerlen explores its changing urban identity, activates placemaking efforts, fosters the creation of new imaginaries, and grows creative communities: Heerlenaren direct existing resources in creative, original ways to bring system innovation to the city. In Heerlen, “Antistad praxis” is an envelope of practices enabling growth in most of the urban systems that would generally suffer from population loss. Combining a literature review, historical analysis, in-depth interviews, GIS mapping, and curatorial experience, this thesis answers the following questions: What is the definition of urban shrink and what does Heerlen do to challenge that definition? What context lies behind the population decline in Heerlen and what can future urban design interventions learn from the methods with which residents of Heerlen respond to so-called urban shrink? After the calculated collapse of the mining industry and the erasure of its past, Heerlen’s communities suffered root shock. Having functioned in a provisional system like the mining industry in Heerlen––service-providing, with close-knit residential communities, well-paid labor, an ecology connecting socio-political life and church
and leisure––the sudden ending of the paternalistic industry disabled soft infrastructure and left former mine workers with limited social mobility. Now, resourcing community connections and perseverance, De Antistad seeks a new identity in recovering from root shock. Heerlenaren contest the doctrine that a city with population decline can only improve its quality of life by reinitiating population growth. This urban economic performance doctrine––turning the city into a capitalist, commodifiable powerhouse––is challenged, if not dismantled, by community action that grows creative communities, making the recovery of topdown political and economic investment increasingly futile. Contrasting the narratives that describe the fate of shrinking regions in the Netherlands negatively, the grassroots organizing of creative communities in Heerlen is an anomalous phenomenon and worthy of amplification. Due to a variety of programs and events, the public eye turns to Heerlen more and more. Input from community organizers highlights the need for showcasing examples of social innovation in order to replicate creative community organizing. Therefore, this thesis delivers a proposal for an exhibition that aims to become a site of critical re-evaluation, a public source of trusted information, and a tool to enable new forms of collaboration and innovative community practices.
views, and holding public programs that involve workshops. 2. Unearth (hidden) examples of community organizing. Showcasing cases of individuals who organize themselves resourcefully and who promote radically more sustainable ways of urban living in the context of shrink. 3. Activate further social innovation. Connecting local knowledge and needs through a variety of exhibiting methods that aim at discovering and framing stories of local social innovation. As a result, the exhibition can serve to stimulate the target audience to consider more fully how they might build new policy, interpretations and collaborations that engage communities and develop their capacities to respond to urban shrink.
The exhibition, “Heerlen: Mining For Social Innovation In A Shrinking City,” is a contextualization and assembly of artefacts, discourses, and approaches, curated to: 1. Define the themes most crucial for local residents. Enhancing understanding of local narratives through a combination of data analysis, historical analysis, ethnography, in-depth inter-
DUE 21
URBAN BEAUTY
EQUITY ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND BLACK WOMANHOOD by Obianozo Jessica Chukwuma
22 DUE
Entrepreneurship Black Women Equity Enterprise Beauty Hair Market Economics
Defining the term entrepreneur is complex and generally results in overly simplistic and incredibly vague characterizations, with the majority failing to address intention and the intersectionality of race. That being said, if we can acknowledge that the term itself is reasonably reliant on socially constructed narratives of the meaning of success within this romanticized façade of the American businessman, then we can begin to comprehend how the exclusion of black women has evolved into widely accepted institutional practice, and how black female entrepreneurship has manifested its own unique delineation. Black female entrepreneurialism is rooted in collective sociorelational strength as a baseline for actuating innovation and creating the means to guide family and community through complex issues regarding their ability to establish equitable livelihoods. It is not a narrative concerning the heroic individual, but rather the cumulative advancement of the entire community through the incremental achievement of each community member. It sits apart from the American businessman, its glorification of exploitation and the reinforcement of patriarchal dominance, and instead elevates the narratives of those who’ve surpassed insurmountable discrimination and socioeconomic barriers in order better their chance at equitable livelihoods through the establishment of enterprise. It personifies black femininity and within it revolutionizes the meaning of success and was birthed from the innate instinct for these women to establish their own economic framework intentionally masked by terms such as “niche”. The terminology, “niche” derived from the advent of “ethnic niche” or “ethnic enclave” economies that surfaced around the time of the Great Migration as a way to categorize segregated industries in
which black needs were excluded from the services provided by the primary labor market of the larger economy. In most cases, many black women flocked to these specified enclave industries to escape the inflexible and arduous jobs such as domestic servitude, in search for economic mobility and freedom. One of the oldest “ethnic enclave” sectors, is the black hair industry, and thus was selected as the lens for which I will be exploring the underlying mechanisms for their exclusion and the systemic implications that have created unequal access to capital on the basis of race and gender as a result of reductionist language and stereotypical generalizations. The Making of Seeing Black Seeing Black: The Unseen Narratives of the Black Hair Industry, is an Atlas centered around the concept of visibility and change. Deviating from the generic, homogenizing form of data visualization used for classical data, Seeing Black utilizes both traditional and feminist mapping methodologies to unpack the layers of intersectionality that have resulted in the undercapitalization of black business and the capital access gap that are ultimately responsible for the inability for black businesses to thrive. Seeing Black uses interviews and survey data gathered from black product artisans and black women who interact with the space, as well as census data and statistical figures to make visible this concealed ecosystem by revealing the barriers and the operating systems of the embedded context, translating these unseen barriers that frame the black beauty experience into actionable items for change to reimagine a system not built on the premise of social exclusion or economic survival but on one of deliberate creation and communal prosperity.
DUE 23
RESILIENCE PLAN FOR MARGINAL PROTECTION STRIPS
IN RISK OF FLOOD, EROSION AND LANDSLIDE, IN RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL by Mariana Kiwi Barros
24 DUE
Resilience Floodplain Urban Ecology Preparedness Drainage Plan Green Infrastructure
The key to a successful urban system is to combine built and natural environments to the right extent. Humankind, as any animal species, depends on nature to provide elements for its existence. Yet, as social species, we tend to live in communities. Over the years, communities of people have been growing in number, and today, cities accommodate millions of people in urban environments. On the ground, people have learned that man-made habitats sometimes cross a friendly borderline with natural ecosystems. Occasionally, these pushes induce a response that some call a “natural disaster.” It is important to find the balance between existing ecosystems and city development in order to maintain harmony. This work addresses floods, erosion, and landslides in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The goal is to expand knowledge about the urban ecology of Rio de Janeiro aiming to minimize the impacts of heavy rains and improve disaster preparedness. As cities grow, there is a tendency to transform small rivers into canals, straightening water paths, reducing vegetation, and decreasing drainage land by paving roads. This is the scenario in the city. Due to urban changes, the occurrence of disasters has increased, provoking material and human losses. In Rio de Janeiro, the harms during rainy seasons exceed the city’s preparedness to recover. Public agencies established Marginal Protection Stripes which, under the state law, are restricted strips of land surrounding waterways targeting the protection and conservation of local eco and hydro systems. Those pieces of land are set up according to the maximum level water can reach in rain and flood season. The main goal is to avoid erosion and landslide
while also enabling safe land for flood in case of a higher volume of water. Currently, Rio de Janeiro has irregular occupation around bodies of water in the city. The organization in charge of urban rainwater drainage, which also mitigates flood, is the Foundation Institute of Waters of the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro (Rio-Águas). They are responsible for managing the protected areas, therefore also managing irregular occupations of buildings in MPS areas. This project aims to reduce the impacts of the abundance of water during rainy seasons by creating an adaptation plan for urban developments in order to build resilient environments, maintaining a balance between man-occupation and the original landscape. To this end I look back from the lens of Ecology to create appropriate urban systems, combining both human and non-human features. This insight helps to implement natural mechanisms to a harmonious and balanced environment, avoiding the necessity of demolition or displacement.
substituted as well. With the absence of vegetation and plenty of impermeable surfaces, the same volume of water hits the ground faster and demands artificial drainage alternatives, sometimes resulting in flooded areas. In Ecology, the interaction between species is called symbiosis. When the interaction benefits one party while neither benefits nor harms the other, it is called commensalism. This concept could also be applied to cities and human-nature relations. One provides vital necessity, while at the same time, artificiality does not exploit/extinguish the original ecosystem. When urban waterways lack a development plan, it causes stronger impacts and potential material and human losses. For that reason, it is crucial to protect the land surrounding rivers, lakes, canals and other hydric bodies by observing nature and adjusting urbanization to fit the cycle and provoke no harm.
In natural ecosystems, channels are rarely a straight line. In fact, water paths have continuous curves in an ‘S’ shape, as well as layers of materials building steps on the river bed. Those characteristics contribute to decelerate the river course and to avoid flooded zones along the channel. When cities grow, many bodies of water are turned into concrete canals with no margin for expansion, the possibility for a “natural disaster” increases. Trees, bushes, and greenery also have an important role in the drainage cycle. They delay the moment when raindrops hit the ground working as barriers and slow down the volume of water that hits the soil instantly. When urbanization takes over natural vegetation, this role must be
DUE 25
RE-ROUTE!
A PROCESS FOR INCLUDING STUDENTS IN PARTICIPATORY TRANSIT PLANNING by Maanasa Sivashankar & Callan Hajosy
26 DUE
Transportation Justice Educational Access Youth Engagement Participatory Planning Co-design
Our thesis examines ways to effectively assess and advocate for student transit needs in low-income and transit-poor neighborhoods in New York City. We propose methods to engage young adults in participatory planning and community engagement processes, using the current MTA Queens Bus Network Redesign as a platform to test our research questions and design proposal. Students should not be excluded from decision making that impacts their access to education and to the city. We believe that they can contribute localized, grounded knowledge and wisdom that breaks free from embedded “professional” techniques and conceptions most often employed in planning. MTA New York City Transit’s borough-by-borough Bus Network Redesign project, part of the Fast Forward plan, has been working together with the New York City Department of Transportation and the public through a participatory process committed to including all affected residents’ voices in the redesign of the city’s outdated and, as often cited, unreliable bus network (MTA 2019). Although school students make up 16% of the weekday bus ridership in Queens (MTA 2020), their needs are not directly being assessed through the redesign process as it is currently being conducted, and their participatory planning mechanisms have not resulted in significant participation from students. Additionally, the MTA is openly pursuing a “clean-slate” (tabula rasa) approach to assessing and proposing new service patterns, failing to recognize and threatening to erase the complex history, embedded memory, and relationship of riders with the bus network. Guaranteed transportation for New York City public school students provided by the Office of Pupil Transportation (OPT) ends in Grade 6 leaving the vast major-
ity of middle and high school students dependent on alternative modes of public or private transit, or access to a personal vehicle. For most low-income families, the dependence lies heavily on public transportation—more than half the population of poor New Yorkers rely on the subways and busses for mobility (Bendix 2016). The MTA provides subsidized metro cards for use on the subway or bus which helps eliminate the financial burden of student travel to and from school; however, we found that 52% of public schools in Queens do not have access to a subway stop within a 10-minute walk, making students who attend these schools depend more heavily on MTA’s bus network to connect them to their destination. The NYC Department of Education’s (DOE) ongoing school diversity and integration efforts place additional pressure on students’ commute to-and-from school, making efficient public transportation options essential in providing all students an equal opportunity to accessing schools of their choice.
inclusion and participation. For the scope of the first pilot in Spring 2020, we have identified Rockaway, Queens, as our site of investigation which is one of New York’s least accessible districts and the district with the nation’s highest commute times. RE-ROUTE! proposes a potential model for student engagement to be integrated into MTA’s Bus Network Redesign plans across the five boroughs in NYC.
Our thesis asks the following research questions: How can the MTA better incorporate student transportation needs into their planning process? In what ways can participatory planning processes with students better account for their transit needs, creating a more inclusive, equitable, and just system of democratic planning? Our thesis—RE-ROUTE!—offers a community tool, a free online facilitation and workshop guide, to effectively engage middle and high school students in order to gather insights on their transportation needs. We analyze MTA’s current engagement process through the “Democracy Cube” framework of participatory design (Fung 2006) to establish a set of recommendations to create an ecology student
DUE 27
IS IT ALL ABOUT WATER?
AN ATTEMPT TO NAVIGATE THE POTABLE WATER CRISIS IN THE ANDEAN CITY OF AYACUCHO, PERU AND THE REALIZATION OF THE ‘WICKED PROBLEMS’ THAT ACCOMPANY IT by Courtney Sprigg
28 DUE
WATER SOURCES & DISTRIBUTION AYACUCHO CITY, PERU
Informal Distribution: 4% Puquios: 3% Neighbor: 8% Other: 3% River, Lake: 28% Groundwater: 19% Cistern Truck: 38%
STAKEHOLDERS
PUQUIOS, NEIGHBOR, OTHER
Ayacucho Crude Water Collection & Conduct Ayacucho Domestic Water Distribution: 605 l/s
Water Distribution: 700 l/s Irrigated Land: 3500 Ha 22 Irrigation Water User Organizations- Benefiting 7000 Agricultural Users
Informal Water Distribution
WASTEWATER
RIO CACHI PROJECT
IRRIGATION
PRECIPITATION
Average Annual: 507.8 mm (2,241 lps for Ayacucho City)
POTABLE WATER NON-POTABLE WATER
SEDA SUNASS EPSASA
JUDRA
RIVER, LAKE
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HYDROELECTRICITY
R
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U RO
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PTAR WASTEWATER TREATMENT PLANT Households Connected to Public Drainage Network: 81% SEDA
Water Distribution: 500 l/s Hydroenergy - Water Recycled through System
E AT DW
CIS TE
ELECTROCENTRO
RN
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UC
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Potable Water Access Urban Andes Social Innovation Deliberate Collaboration Wicked Problems
PU B
LIC
NE
TW OR
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FORMAL WATER NETWORK
UN
PUBLIC NETWORK DISTRIBUTION: 96% Inside the Home: 87% Outside the Home: 10% Pool or Pylon for Public Use: 3% SEDA TR
EA TE
D
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W AS TE W AT
W AS TE W AT ER
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The focus of this thesis is embedded within the urban Andean city of Ayacucho, Peru, and the research is broken into two phases. Initially, I investigated Ayacucho’s hydrologic system and significant water engineering strategies such as the Rio Cachi Project, the main source of potable water for the city of Ayacucho. Additionally, I navigated the formal and informal water distribution networks and the water politics, which create systems of inequality for the “informal” communities denied access to formal distribution networks, and as a result, the right to access basic human needs. Addressing the issues of water availability and access for communities in need requires exploring existing social, political, and environmental components and their interconnections through a systems-based design approach, which I intend to unravel within my second phase of research. Through participation in an international workshop, where I worked closely with a diverse group of local stakeholders, I gained insights into the water politics within Ayacucho’s urban system. While conducting two weeks of fieldwork, I collected data which was later used for maps and graphs to share with the Municipality of Humanaga-Ayacucho and provide needed access to limited data for stakeholders within the region. Additionally, I carried out over eighteen onsite interviews with local stakeholders, such as Ayacucho’s water and sanitation providers, and community leaders from the “informal” settlement of Mollepata. I designed a low-tech, inexpensive water filtering system for schools and households in informal communities to address their immediate water needs. A seemingly low-tech solution for communities
needing potable water access becomes more complex when the presence of strong institutional and social organizations are not present. Water shortage for the city of Ayacucho is a “wicked problem” in an interconnected web of other wicked problems. The first step in managing these dynamic problems and transitioning into a more ideal future is a systems-based design approach. Population growth has increased the demand for housing, and abrupt, and often, informal development of the urban landscape has limited access to public space such as parks, community centers, and other public institutions, which allow for the collective organizing and spontaneous interactions needed for collaborative change-making and local ideation. Educational institutions are dispersed throughout most of the city and maintain a prominent institutional presence within Ayacucho. The presence of UNSCH Huamanga University, the central social institution in Ayacucho, has situated education as an essential social pillar for Ayacuchanos. Ayacucho’s youth are graduating school with advanced education, while the city of Ayacucho lacks the occupational diversity and job availability needed to satisfy the dynamic interests Ayacucho’s youth possess.. Lack of social and economic variety has contributed to the presence of social stagnation and inhibited the diverse problem-solving, cross-sector collaboration, and social innovation necessary to navigate some of Ayacucho’s most pressing issues. Throughout the second phase of my research, I began to unravel these systemic issues by piecing together insights from different sources of information, includ-
ing onsite and remote interviews with stakeholders, fieldwork, data creation, and through organizing collective mapping between diverse stakeholders utilizing the virtual collaboration resource, Miro. Working with several students from UNSCH and Urban Andes, we identified the need for social collaboration within Ayacucho to address some of their most pressing social and environmental issues. Understanding the prominent social position of UNSCH in Ayacucho, it is evident UNSCH serves as a central governing body for the implementation of successful social collaboration initiatives within the region. Through my research and collaboration with UNSCH and local stakeholder organizations, we have identified several points of entry into navigating some of the complex issues embedded within the urban system of Ayacucho. This thesis aims to promote localized problem-solving and foster personal capabilities by structuring education around local initiatives, social collaboration, and idea-building, while enabling inhabitants to become agents of the change they seek. Through the implementation of the Student Leadership Program developed within UNSCH’s Innovation Lab, students will gain access to potential mentorship, training, and funding resources and act as catalysts of change within their local community. Promoting thoughtful interaction and deliberate collaboration by utilizing the strategic locality of educational institutions throughout Ayacucho may enable radical ecosystems of change. Could social innovation, as a service, develop grassroots solutions to some of Ayacucho’s most critical social and environmental concerns, turn insights into actions, and foster systemic change?
DUE 29
MAPPING RESPONSES FOR ‘WATER SECURITY’ IN SÃO PAULO
IN THE LIGHT OF THE DROUGHT OF 2014–2015 by Ana Lago
30 DUE
Resilience Urban Water Infrastructure Drought
Low rainfall in the summer of 2014 and 2015 accelerated the depletion of the Cantareira reservoir, the main water production system operated by the state-owned company SABESP, that provides water to 9 million people in the Metropolitan Region of Sao Paulo (SPMR), equivalent to the population of a country like Greece. The episode, heralded in public discourse as a “water crisis”, lasted for a two-year period and was declared over by officials in May 2016. Climate disasters expose structural inequalities. In São Paulo, the main parameters that translated the “water crisis” to the population were that period’s exceptional climate conditions and their impact on the Cantareira storage capacity. Yet, studies on the “water crisis” of 2014-15 converge in their understanding that the depletion of the Cantareira reservoir was not only a result of the drought, as claimed in the state and SABESP’s official narrative, but also conditioned by chronic divestment in infrastructure. Structural features such as topography, income and the functioning of water infrastructure networks (SIM) also contributed to water being unequally distributed during the episode of scarcity. Differentiated experiences of water scarcity were not only a result of the pressure reduction on the pipe network—one of the main contingency measures implemented by SABESP—but also due to different capacities to store water (Millington, 2019).” As a result of the “water crisis” in São Paulo, not only did water storage expand at the household level, but other alternative supply and water reuse technologies also progressed throughout the city. These methods range from low to higher technological complexity: from water storage (in water bulks, bottles or buckets), to rainwater harvesting cisterns, greywater reuse,
and wells. My research aims to codify a body of knowledge on those initiatives to understand their scope within the overall production of water in 2019, and examine if the system of water supply has become more resilient as a result of the crisis. My thesis asks the following questions: What are the alternative water supply systems and how have they been incorporated into the overall structure of water supply as a result of the “water crisis”? How would the system become more resilient and responsive to the needs of citizens and the government/ SABESP alike? How might bottom-up strategies respond to institutional failures in ways that can be productive to the institution itself?
that followed the “water crisis”, it has not necessarily become safer and resilient. This loophole in water governance has implications in the water system’s resilience. Water capturing and storage, when improperly manipulated poses health risks to the population. By not having these initiatives mapped certain populations’ that already deal with water scarcity in their everyday lives become even more vulnerable. In addition, while unmapped, the state and SABESP could (re)frame water security, by incorporating in the system citizens from passive consumers of public services to active participants in the water supply equation, capable of promoting a more synergized and resilient system of water supply.
Through ethnographic tools, I gathered qualitative data on interviews with local government officials, water engineers, local organizations, and residents of different neighborhoods of the city. In the research I learned about the weight of the SABESP tariff structure’s impact on the motives to implement alternative supply strategies, and in what ways water is being used or wasted. I also analysed through mapping methods the materiality of the water pipe network distribution within São Paulo’s built environment and their structural impact on water provision. My findings showed that there is neither an impact of these scattered alternative water supply methods on the overall volume of water consumption, nor a connection to location of those initiatives in the city. The framing of water security by the state and SABESP adopts a “centralized, top-down, and supply led approach to water” (Empinotti, 2019), which isolates the scattered co-producers from the main utility. Although SABESP reports a consistent reduction of water use in the years
DUE 31
THE QUEST OF LEADERSHIP MODEL
AN ASSESSMENT TOOL OF THE URBAN PUBLIC SPACE’S MANAGEMENT MODELS AIMS TO REVERSE THE COMMODIFICATION OF PUBLIC GOODS by Amy Ameera Issa
32 DUE
This thesis presents a pilot assessment tool and method for evaluating the management model of urban public space. This analytical tool is intended to be of value for comparative purposes (measuring the publicness of the management model), as well as a key element that contributes to the argument for shifting the urban public space from being a commodity to serve instead as a public good. The work is structured within three main chapters; the first chapter sets the theoretical framework that identifies the meaning and the matters concerned with the urban public space, the management dimension, and the adapted methodology. The second chapter introduces the study area, New York City’s subway Line 7, and explores the different management models of the urban public spaces along the line. The final chapter discusses the design and the application of the pilot assessment tool. The urban public space is a contested and complex, multi-disciplinary, multi-layered subject; therefore, it is important to set the definitions used in this thesis. First, the definition of the urban public space by Matthew Carmona: “The urban Public space is related to all those parts of the built and natural environment where the public has free access. It encompasses all the streets, squares, and other rights of way, whether predominantly in residential, commercial, or community/ civic uses; the open spaces and parks; and the ‘public/private’ spaces where public access is unrestricted (at least during daylight hours). It includes the interfaces with key internal and external and private spaces to which the public normally has free access.” Second, the management model is the set of processes and practices that attempt to ensure that public space can fulfill all its legitimate roles and fulfill the quality of public space. Through
a larger framework of five elements: the regulation for the use and the users of the space, maintenance, economics, and programming of the space as well as the coordination between the various stakeholders. Third, shed the light on the correlation between the management dimension and the quality of public space “Enhancing public space and achieving the maximum benefit of urban public space qualities lies in the challenging layer of management” (Carmona 2008). Finally, the commodification of the urban public space which is the process of transferring public goods, services, nature, and resources into objects of trade (commodities). Throughout American history,in the early 1960s a huge change in regulations, zoning, and public policies supported privatization of the public space in New York City. In the 1990s, public space as a movement became a priority in urbanism and attracted a large number of disciplines, which redefined and expanded the definition of public space and connected it to the larger public realm. The subway system plays a major role in the New Yorkers’ urban reality and daily life, and subway Line 7 is a significant thread of this system. “I took out my wallet, slid out the card and swiped it through, all done in three seconds. Sometimes you can tell if a person is a New Yorker by the speed he/she swipes her/his MetroCard. A clumsy swiper is usually a foreign tourist or a newcomer. But it is not an absolute sign. It’s an indicator.” (Tonnelat and Kornblum, 1893). The Line has been known as the “international express” because it is a diverse transit route that reflects a horizontal elevator from one of Manhattan’s richest neighborhoods to one of Queens’ poorest neighborhoods. The socio-economic characteristics along this line provide a context that reflects a sample of nearly every community of New
Public Space Management Assessment Model Commodification Subway Line 7 New York City Public Good Commodity
York City. Furthermore, along the line, there is a diversity in scale and typology of the public spaces, such as the Highline, Bryant Park, and Corona Plaza. The diversity in the typology of public spaces along the different models of management, stewardship, and different scales of involvement by community organizations and grassroots groups provides the perfect study area to explore and examine the quality of produced public spaces and provides the initial material for the pilot assessment tool. Image 1 (Main Image) I took this photo within a workshop I conducted at the International House in Manhattan, The workshop Title “The Question of Management of the Urban Public Space”. Image 2 (upper left) A photo I took from my site visits: Bryant Park, the Subway Line 7 station in Time square, Corona Plaza. Image 3 (upper right) A map I generated, “Mapping The urban public spaces along Subway line 7”
DUE 33
WHEN PDFS AIN’T IT THO
USING BLACK COMMUNICATIVE ART FORMS TO MEASURE RESILIENCE MOTIVATIONS AND LANDSCAPE CHANGES IN BLACK “DISASTER PRONE” COMMUNITIES by Akiera Xavina Charles
34 DUE
Risk Communication Justice Black Geographies Participatory Media Caribbean Self-organization Public Participation Landscape Changes Resilience Indicators Disasters
ment of Antigua, information inaccessibility and a plethora of other structural disparities, Barbuda sets the backdrop of spatializing communication injustices.
My research is concerned with documenting how information gaps, socio-cultural stimuli and reflexive thinking inform self-organization and landscape changes in Black “Disaster Prone” communities. To put it simply , my work is vexed and fed up with why resilience assessments are not culturally accessible to most Black communities. As my research points to PDFs as the standardizing communicative benchmark of doing the most bare minimum in Black “Disaster Prone” communities, it grapples with why reflexive, communicative art forms can do what PDFs cannot: spatially motivate civic engagement, self-organization and resilience. Since I want to know why communicative channels influence spatial motivation and capacity building in Black “Disaster Prone” communities, my research anchors itself in the small Caribbean Island of Barbuda. As a Black geographic site systemically impacted by the aftermaths of Category 5+ Hurricane Irma, disaster capitalism, international relief aid, state-led violences via the central govern-
As negligence, stressors, time-lag and isolation continue to rescript and mark Barbuda’s landscape, locals work toward building more sustainable, generative, flexible and reflexive socio-ecologies that can respond to these stimuli. Meanwhile, as the sudden popularity of the social media app Tik Tok motivates users to stay home and socially distance during the global public health crisis of COVID-19, spatially speaking many global streets have remained empty as a result. When placed under the right conditions, this social app could stimulate such powerful responses by motivating people to stay put and change their socio-spatial relationships. But what does this say about the future of participatory media and reflexive communicative art forms in enabling groups of people to self-organize, shift spatializing habits, engage in resilience-building strategies and drive social change agendas in the Caribbean and other Black geographies?
which all claim to create reflexive relationships–a) social learning theory, b) communication infrastructure theory, and c) memes, – and how they can function together to help situate and track gaps in communication resiliency and uneven spatializing patterns in Black “disaster prone” communities. I have in other words, “Tik Tok’d Landscape Assessments.” To effectively test the resilience-based impact of these joint processes, I track and explore how a communication resilience workshop with secondary education-aged Barbudans can lay the groundwork in measuring and assessing community-level reflexive relationships to resilience, climate impacts and landscape changes in Black “disaster prone” communities.
In the wake of the many urgencies that come with building more circular and reflexive communicative networks that promote social change in Black “disaster prone” communities, I have developed a framework that outlines, measures and tracks how resilience perspectives, and communicative actions can create more conditions for equilibrium, insurgent politics, resilience-strategizing and assessment, urban policy development, sustainable landscape changes and social movements. By defining resilience as a reflexive process that 1) shortens informational pathways and 2) uses adaptive motivational approaches, I explore three communicative spatializing theories
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HOUSING DIALECTICS by Aditi Nair
36 DUE
Urban Informality Social Mediation Housing Participatory Governance Critical Mapping Counter Practices
Postcolonial urbanization in India has produced uneven development in major Indian cities. Between 1951 to 2011, the urban population of India increased by 80.21 percent. However, states’ capacity to support such a progressive rise in the urban population remains contested. The primary concern of the resultant urbanization remains affordable housing for rural to urban migrants. Independent nations in the global south have alluded to colonial discourses on squatter settlements or slums as sites which are “unfit for human habitation,” thus supporting models of evictions, provisions, slum clearances, and resettlement as a solution to house the migrant populations.
1979 in America ( Mena Report 2015 ). My thesis documents emerging forms of knowledge produced by sixty percent of the population of Mumbai, as they resist the authoritarian housing and land rights policies. By demystifying existing bureaucratic tools like local area Development Plans that carry colonial legacies of mapping, the design proposes to decolonize and divest from liberal housing solutions and reimagine local housing needs through critical cartographic engagements. My projects take the form of a series of social mediations to read systemic implications of unequal housing policies, participate in the act of mapping, and create an atlas of counter practices.
Postcolonial theories have continued to ground post-liberalization urban policies in India by opening up urban land to private developers on the principles of economic development, thereby disenfranchising and dispossessing the urban poor from processes of democratic participation.
The series of guided social mediations invites local participants from informal/ illegal settlements to explore the implications of housing policies in the city and situate their own stories. The local atlas created as a result of the designed mediations is used to co-create spatial knowledge, increase political capacity, and participate through recommendations to the local area Development Plans.
Existing bureaucratic tools in national policies allow for a hegemonic system of urban development, and any contestation is categorized along with dyadic categories, such as legal/illegal. For example, Mumbai does not recognize thirteen million of it’s living population; the city regards them as Illegal (India Census 2011). Dyadic terms like “legal” and “illegal”, or “informal” and “formal”, are used in the current discourses of citizenship and land rights in urban India. State institutions like the ‘Slum’ Rehabilitation Authority use these dyads to map neighborhoods, grab land, and allow global real estate markets to speculatively invest over these areas. This process displaces and disenfranchises low-income communities, and severely degrades the environment—a phenomenon analogous to urban renewal programs between 1949-
DUE 37
BIOS TUP
38 TUP
Jessica Schwartz
Paul Beasley
has over five years experience in fundraising, design and communications. She is currently a Development Associate at The New School. Over the last decade, she’s honed diverse skills in a variety of sectors including publishing, fine art auctions, freelance copywriting and the food service industry. Her graduate work in urbanism has prepared her to pursue a career in climate change adaptation, food systems, and sustainable urban design. Her thesis is focused on equitable rooftop farming--a proposal for which she received a research grant. She holds a dual bachelor’s degree in English Literature and History with a minor in studio art, from Hartwick College, where she specialized in New Journalism as well as US and Latin America history, graduating magna cum laude. Originally from New Jersey, Jessica has lived in New York City since 2014.
is a photographer, filmmaker, and urbanist whose scholarly work intersects with Visual Studies, Film Studies, Semiotics, and Architecture. His research explores the relationship between the built environment, experience, and visuality, drawing upon the field of Semiotics, Film Theory, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies. His scholarly and creative interests are centered on speculative and fictive urban design and the fields of architectural visualization, visual effects design, cinematography, and production design. He holds a B.S. in Design, Merchandising, and Textiles from Western Kentucky University and an M.A. in Communication, Culture and Technology from Georgetown University.
Saba Aregai
Matthew Morowitz
Maha Al-Khater
has worked on digital communications and marketing teams as a content creator for both municipalities and organizations that advocate for urban issues and city rights. With a passion for storytelling and community engagement via digital platforms, she hopes to continue to strengthen her technical and research skills in the Theories of Urban Practice program in order to reach, engage, and spark conversations with a wider digital audience around topics such as displacement, resettlement, healthcare, and much more.
is a disappointed person, but in a way that drives him to push forward and work towards better cities for all. Professionally, he has worn many hats and held positions in fields such as urban archaeology, public art, and historic preservation, and each of these experiences informed different aspects of his own urban practice. Matthew used his time at Parsons to explore urban issues at the grassroots and community level; his thesis research combines theory with practice in order to assist NYC community gardens better address their advocacy needs, and retain their meanings and values for the future.
is an anxious future thinker with a desert imagination. Her thesis work stems from the notion of the desert and its metaphor in the ancient past and the post-apocalyptic future.
TUP 39
BIOS DUE
Sana Akram
Regis Hijnekamp
is an Urbanist, Architect, Photographer and a Digital Storyteller interested in Urban Narratives, People-Space relationship, Collective Memory, Architectural & Street Photography and Documentary Filmmaking. Belonging to the culturally diverse and historically rich city of Lahore, her experiences and observations from childhood through Architecture School led to multi-faceted questions over ‘image of the city’, the inevitable changes to it with time, the repercussions these changes bring forth within the urban character and how this phenomena influences people their identity and sense of belonging. As a Fulbright Scholar from Pakistan, she aims to establish a cross disciplinary practice exploring emergent media for civic engagement.
graduated cum laude with a BSc in Governance, Economics and Development from Leiden University, the Netherlands. In addition, he completed a studio-based minor in visual arts and curatorship at the Australian National University in Canberra. Regis has been involved in community-based work, teaching at a first-generation immigrant language center and local high schools. Regis interned at Human Rights Watch in Amsterdam. During his internship at We Are Public in The Hague, Regis further developed his passion for theater and production work. Regis’s photography and painting has been featured in several local exhibitions.
Callan Hajosy & Maanasa Sivashankar
Ana Lago
Callan is a designer with eight years of professional experience in the non-profit sector with an emphasis on collaboratively addressing complex social issues. Prior to Parsons, her work focused on educational equity, youth empowerment, and community-led development within urban townships in Cape Town, South Africa. She is most passionate about working with youth, who, over the years, have gifted her with a hopeful and resilient outlook on life tempered only by a sense of urgency to fundamentally reshape our collective approach to urbanization and community well-being. Her time in the DUE program has granted Callan with a deeper critical awareness of the multidimensionality of today’s challenges and of their potential.
has an undergraduate degree in Economics, and a 4-year experience in a B-Corporation in Brazil. The discussions about positive impact and sustainability in the business realm have drawn her to pursue the masters of Design and Urban Ecologies. Her personal experience of the water drought in the city of São Paulo in the year of 2015, has led her to more specific research on disaster preparedness and resiliency.
Maanasa is an Urban Designer and a firm advocate for building city services and infrastructures that are socially just. Through her professional practice, she has partnered with government agencies and vulnerable communities in India to incorporate their needs into policy design, sustainable infrastructure planning, and public service design projects. She has focussed on using participatory design methods by creating tools to effectively engage communities and civic leaders through projects of varying scales- from road infrastructure and, public space design to public education and healthcare service design. With her work, she remains dedicated to designing strategies to collaboratively identify and address urban problems.
40 DUE
Obianozo Jessica Chukwuma
Mariana Kiwi Barros
Courtney Sprigg
devotes her time to study the relationship between cities, its residents, and natural environments. She aims to improve resilience of urban infrastructure to better recover from climate events. Her goal is to minimize the impacts dense cities have in balanced ecosystems and understand how we can coexist peacefully with nature. She has a Bachelor degree in Architecture and Urban Planning and a Master in Design and Urban Ecologies at Parsons. She is passionate about ecology and green infrastructure and believes this is the key to maintain harmony of the ecosystem. Humanity is part of Nature’s cycle, after all.
is a highly passionate, intuitive, & self-motivated urban designer inspired by the opportunity to make positive changes in the world. Over 12 years of experience working with & growing nonprofits, developing renewable energy, water, health, community equity & affordable housing initiatives, & acted as a leader on building & construction projects worldwide. I have developed the diverse background, experience, organizational leadership & problem-solving abilities necessary for tackling urban issues with a multidisciplinary approach.
Amy Ameera Issa
Akiera Xavina Charles
Aditi Nair
is an Urbanist, Passionate architect, and a heterodox economist interested in the urban public space matters and civic engagement. She was born in a multicultural home (half Romanian – half Palestinian) which influenced her choices to participate in a variety of foreign exchange programs in South Korea, Jordan, Germany, Italy & the UK. Through her practice as an architect and urban designer, Amy believes in participatory design and community role in shaping cities. As a Fulbright Scholar from Jordan, she aims to establish a cross-disciplinary practice exploring public space as a public good as well as exploring urban ecologies through the economist lense within The Middle East.
What can anyone really say other than, Akiera Xavina Charles is an Afro-Caribbean gyal with “plenty ah sauce,” who is a community strategist, entrepreneur, activator and spatial visionary. Based in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, as well as, hailing from Grenada, West Indies, Akiera brings to her many roles an array of vibrant intersectional praxis. As a resilience practitioner, she generates and plans strategic spaces for Black folks to organize, talk intentional “tea” and love up on each other. Whilst she evolves and metamorphosizes as a spatial visionary, Akiera looks to center her risk adaptive work in the Caribbean Region.
is a Community Architect and Urbanist from Mumbai, India. She has previously worked with urban think tanks on housing issues in urban and rural areas across India. She is passionate about housing rights and access in low-income neighborhoods, rental laws, housing policy, and regulations. Aditi is an India China Institute student fellow at The New School, and her current research is centered around addressing housing rights through participatory mapping exercises.
is an engineer, a designer, and an innovator. Formally trained as a Civil Engineer from Carnegie Mellon University, she uses her technical skills and analytical prowess as fuel for systems thinking approaches in her design process. As an Impact Entrepreneurship Graduate Fellow at the New School, she is currently exploring the intersections or black women and entrepreneurship through her own entrepreneurial endeavors as Co-Founder of MMARA, an online platform that connects black women to a curated selection of hair products meant to help them achieve their unique hair goals, set to launch summer 2020.
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THESIS WORKS 2020
MA Theories of Urban Practice & MS Design and Urban Ecologies
Design Blake Roberts Edition Callan Hajosy & Emily Bowe Parsons The New School for Design http://www.newschool.edu/parsons School of Design Strategies http://sds.parsons.edu Urban@Parsons http://sds.parsons.edu/urban/ MA Theories of Urban Pratice http://sds.parsons.edu/urban/tup/ MS Design and Urban Ecologies http://sds.parsons.edu/urban/due/
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