MS Design and Urban Ecologies and MA Theories of Urban Practice/Thesis Works 2021

SEEKING

ALTERNATIVE THESIS WORKS DUE/TUP 2021 MS DESIGN AND URBAN ECOLOGIES MA THEORIES OF URBAN PRACTICE

URBANITIES

When we welcomed the MS Design and Urban

designers, organizers and activists—have

Ecologies and the MA Theories of Urban Practice

captured the acute opportunity to create openings

student cohorts in Fall 2019, we could not have

for thinking otherwise, to shift the world and coax

imagined how radically transformed the planet

it towards more desirable, equitable and just

would be in May 2021. As we deserted our

production and distribution or resources, “justly

classrooms and went on the lockdown in March

arrived at.”

2020, the world as we knew it collapsed in front of our eyes. Projects, fieldwork, community

Over the last year, the 2021 MS DUE cohort

meetings, and our day-to-day life in Studio 1108

explored new social arrangements, novel

were suddenly disrupted and lost their urgency as

alignments, and emergent practices towards

we experienced the unimaginable. Even though

spatialized justice building relationships and

we theorized and practiced models of urban

partnerships with communities disproportionately

transformation, the pandemic brought about a

affected by systemic injustices and the ongoing

type of transformation we had hoped to never

crisis. Their projects were designed to have a

experience. We understood more than ever the

lasting impact in such communities.

importance of being a part of a community, of working collaboratively with each other, and of

Daniela Castillo’s thesis delves into the

supporting others in their newly found fights and

transformative qualities of mutual aid networks

struggles in a time of grief and desperation.

of care and relief which became increasingly vital for communities impacted by the pandemic in

Although each and every aspect of urban

New York City and beyond. She utilizes critical

life was impacted in New York City, the

mapping methodologies and historical analysis

most disproportionately affected were the

to spatialize the distribution of these networks,

communities we have worked with, working-class

and to frame them within the context of already

neighborhoods and communities of color. This

existing and compounded crises presented as an

cohort realized the urgency of the moment and

interactive platform with tools and as part of a

the value of their commitment and work. They

larger capacity-building program.

not only found creative ways to frame, research, analyze, strategize, design and implement

Daniel Chu’s study responds to the climate

ongoing work, collaborations and interventions,

dilemmas facing Marshallese people by delving

but by the end of this academic year they were

into theories of Traditional Ecological Knowledge,

envisioning emergent urban theories and critical

disaster anthropology, historical archives, and

urban practices in an unprecedented global

activism. Acknowledging Marshall Islands’ deep

context and with an equally uncertain future in

connection with maps and mapmaking, his

mind. It has been clear that most do not want

thesis uses maps to analyze further how local

to return to the world we had, the old way of

histories shape islander communities at home

doing things. This cohort of MSDUE and MATUP

and abroad. He proposes a platform as a tool for

graduates—as many other critical thinkers,

local and global policy change that recognizes

INTRODUCTION INTRODUC TION

the intersectionality of crises and a need for

together female urban practitioners to co-create

environmental and social care beyond built

a technical and political community able to open

infrastructures.

up and construct a dialogue with city and state agencies in Mexico.

Emily Bowe examines ways to understand civic data-based practices through the lens of critical-

Ashley Lehrer delves into public policy, programs,

data studies engaging with the politics of place in

and governance mechanisms and provides a

San Antonio, Texas. Through a localized approach,

comprehensive understanding of the unevenly and

her research responds to San Antonio’s data

inequitably distributed food system in New York

ecosystem, which promotes narratives about

City. Her thesis explores the growth of a localized

progress, prioritizes abstracted metrics, and uses

multimodal food port based on the principles of

existing spatial data to privilege real estate and

food sovereignty and circular urban food systems

development. Counteracting such practices, her

in East New York, Brooklyn. In partnership with

thesis proposes an online platform designed

Universe City and in conversation with local

to make existing data and other key resources

stakeholders, her thesis develops a framework

accessible so that it can be used to bring together

for a Community Embedded Food Economy and

community groups, advocate for change and

proposes a participatory planning process toward

facilitate processes for creating and sharing data

the development of a 10-year strategic plan for

for their own needs.

the growth of the local food port.

Jason Brown uses participatory mapping, digital

The 2021 MATUP cohort has attempted to

cartography, and illustrations to analyze and

radically re-imagine the urban, through both

visualize the spatiality of racial social contracts

historically and theoretically engaging with

related to new local Black reparation efforts

urgent questions, as well as by proposing new

in Evanston, Illinois. His findings are compiled

courses of urban action.

into an online atlas accessible to the local community, which visualizes and synthesizes

Jorge Cabanillas tackles school segregation in

interviews, policy and program analysis, and

Queens Community Board 3, in an attempt to

cartographies spanning from local efforts to the

investigate whether under the regime of neo-

historical advocacy for the national reparations

liberal capitalist economy urgent issues—such

bill, HR40, and its representative geographies.

as racial polarization, economic inequality and

This living atlas is envisioned and proposed just

lack of participatory parity—can be resolved

in time as local strategies grow and cartographic

through the ‘non-reformist reforms’ and the

collaborators gain interest in the growing

concept of ‘just city.’ After the in-depth study

reparations movement.

of CB3, he suggests that we ought to expand our conceptions of ‘freedoms’ and ‘rights’ and

Jaqueline Castañeda investigates and celebrates

develop new urban, reformist practices capable of

the vital role of women in supporting daily life

successfully re-imagining and re-organizing the

and the production of cities. Delving into different

school system.

women-led and feminist groups, her thesis recognizes women as intermediaries in urban

Sara Devic studies another form of oppression

processes. She proposes a platform to bring

in the cities of New York and Belgrade: the

neoliberal housing regimes. Upon identifying

technical systems, his work creates spaces of

the operational logic of neoliberalism vis-à-vis

resistance to the clock-time and clock-based

the housing question, Dević suggests that the

systems of labor oppression.

immense accumulation of housing activist and advocacy knowledge produced in New York City

Dalia Amellal explores the phenomenon of

since the 1970s ought to be systematized and

anonymity and by extension the spatial-material

mobilized to other neoliberal cities in need of

dimensions of urban anonymity. Amellal studies

such experience, such as Belgrade, Serbia. Dević’s

the production of surveillance spaces and the

thesis conceptualizes the transfer protocol and

apparati of urban control, and subsequently ways

proposes two initial domains of knowledge to be

in which artists have managed to subvert them

mobilized: ‘vacancy mapping’ and ‘mapping and

and employ anonymity to enable production

data visualization.’

of new social relations. She codifies the body of knowledge and practice emerging through such

Blake Roberts puts forth a neologism: Homeokin.

critical art practices, and establishes a design

Homeokin is both a conceptual framework for

framework for the production of spaces of urban

understanding notions of queer kinship, and a

anonymity. As a way to operationalizing the

socio-spatial infrastructure of inclusion, thus

framework, she has created a new platform, a

simultaneously a theory and a set of practices.

zine named Urban Anonymity dedicated to ‘future

Roberts recognizes that neither queerness nor

spatial practitioners.’

homeokin are geographically restricted to cities, however his research into queer organizing and

As thesis faculty, we had the privilege to work

queer governmentalities leads him to suggest

with this group of students on the profound

that they are constituted through some of the

questions described above, and to be led by

basic aspects of urbanity: proximity, density,

their earnest search and persistence for ways of

materiality, crowding, solidarity, as well as

thinking and acting that are different from the

spatial contestation and struggle. Roberts thus

ones we have inherited. We had the privilege to

conceptualizes ‘queer futurities,’ as a collective

be co-learners and conspirators in imagining new

and collaborative process of producing new queer

worlds. We have no doubt that this collective work

imaginaries meant to ensure self-affirmation and

has the potential to make critical impact in the

self-actualization of queer communities through

very communities where the questions addressed

homeokin.

above have originated, and look forward to seeing it obtain new lives beyond academia.

Vincent Perez exposes the technologies and infrastructures which conceptualize and

Gabriela Rendon, Jilly Traganou, Miodrag

instrumentalize our shared understanding of

Mitrašinovićć and William Morrish

urban time, and studies on-demand work systems

NYC, 3 May 2021

and nursing as examples of the differences between ‘objective time’ and ‘relational time,’ as well as ‘task-based’ and ‘clock-based’ approaches to the organization of labor and the political economy of cities. Perez argues that by critically exploring tensions and conflicts in these socio-

content Emily Bowe

Critical Praxis, Knowledges, Infrastructures Municipally-Owned Utilities

Data Organizations

San Antonio Water System

Alamo Regional Data Alliance

Office

CPS Energy

Alamo Area GIS

San Antonio River Authority

Digital Inclusion Alliance of San Antonio Digital Inclusion Alliance of San Antonio

UTSA City of San Antonio (COSA)

SA2020 School of Data Science & UTSA Expansion 2021

West Side Subarea Plan 2020-2021?

Data from SA 2020 backs SA Tomorrow report

Orga

Proc SA2020 Metrics Report 2010

SA Comprehensive Plan 2016

REGENERATIVE GROWTH

THE NEXT WORLDMAKING

“ATOLLING” SOVEREIGNTY

GROUNDING THE DATA-BASED CITY

Ashley Lehrer

Daniela Castillo

Daniel Chu 朱景佑

Emily Bowe

page 8

page 10

page 12

page 14

WOMEN INTERMEDIARIES OCCUPYING SPACE PRODUCTION

RE-SITE-ING REPARATIONS

TOWARDS URBAN ANONYMITY

Jason Brown

HOMEOKIN IN PRACTICE: BUILDING QUEER FUTURITY

Jacqueline Castañeda

page 18

Blake Roberts

page 26

Bodies

Objects

Processes

page 24

page 16

IS DIVERSITY ENOUGH?

Dalia Amellal

THE CLOCK IS A FAUCET

Jorge Cabanillas

POLITICIZING THE HOUSING QUESTION IN THE NEOLIBERAL CITY

page 28

Sara Devic

page 32

Vince Perez

page 30

DUE THESIS

TUP THESIS

DUE 21

DESIGN AND

URBAN ECOLOGIES

Universe city nyc food port

UC CAMPUS

UC2 UC1

The current food system in NYC is unevenly and inequitably distributed physically, demographically, and culturally. There are, typically higher wealth, areas with incredible varieties of food retail businesses and other neighborhoods with one supermarket, where bodegas are the main source of nutrition, and little autonomy as to what foods are available - a situation known as food apartheid.

Additionally, New York City is heavily dependent on imported products with most of the money spent in the city enriching companies far away. There is a need for local, community owned and operated, food economies that provide opportunities for the full life cycle of goods, from production to waste management. The East New York Industrial Business Zone (IBZ) is a prime location to build and initiate the infrastructure needed for NYC to provide access to healthy foods and economic opportunities for historically underserved populations. In Brooklyn, while there have been studies and articles that reflect the need for a localized food system, a multinodal food port based on the principles of food sovereignty and circular urban food systems, like Universe City NYC (UC), has not been fully described.

This project provides a deeper formulation in phasing a development trajectory for UC to grow into a local economic engine for the people it intends to serve. The focus of this thesis is to analyse existing food governance mechanisms in NYC and 8 DUE

illustrate the measured urgency for local economic investment and increased access to fresh, healthy foods, workforce development, agri-tech education, and to local food business incubation in East New York. In partnership with Universe City (UC), utilizing frameworks of Democratic Organizing, Regenerative Economics, and Food Sovereignty, a participatory planning process toward the development of a 10 year plan has been initiated and Ashley will continue the project as UC’s Development Director.

In creating the participatory process, this thesis defines and articulates steps taken to imbue each phase of strategic development with the needs and dreams of stakeholders towards collective growth.

This process has been informed by the experiences and vision for a Community Embedded Food Economy, as imagined by the founders of Universe City and their community partners. Preliminary goals for short, medium, and long term objectives at UC have been determined by the co-founders; and through collaborative decision making activities, focus groups, and generative discussions; those intentions have been presented for contribution by local stakeholders. As part of the thesis project, the insights gleaned from those conversations have been analyzed and incorporated into the development phasing and ongoing activities at UC. Furthermore, the product of this participatory process will aid UC and their partners in

REGENERATIVE GROWTH SOWING A COMMUNITY EMBEDDED FOOD ECONOMY IN EAST NEW YORK

by Ashley Lehrer KEYWORDS New York City local food systems food governance policy analysis regenerative economy strategic planning participatory design

communicating the opportunities for NYC food governance programs to provide long term support for the East New York IBZ to ensure that the next phase of development, in a community that has been given many empty promises, is initiated through meaningful community engagement building local control and ownership opportunities for the embedded population. The combination of policy analysis and actionable strategic planning produced through this thesis, aims to highlight the interactions between conventional practices, radical approaches to troubling urban circumstances, and the activation of justice based principles needed in economic and community development plans at large.

Some of the outcomes of this research show that most established food governance policies in NYC operate through dominant extractive capitalist modes, and prioritize formal non-profit organizations and corporate entities. These current policies do not seem to support economic empowerment of local communities and may actually increase displacement. However, there are policy approaches to food insecurity that can uplift public health outcomes and promote food sovereignty. Policy and statistical analysis have illuminated the efficacy of food governance as well as the lack of initiatives that provide substantive improvements to the daily life of food insecure populations in NYC. Participatory

research and qualitative analysis of food justice discourse, conversations with UC founders, mentors, and community members have grounded the design thinking and guiding values found in this thesis. Mapping the food environment surrounding UC has provided crucial context to spatially negotiate the layered impacts of uneven soft and hard infrastructures in this neighborhood.

Findings from this thesis project suggest that access based food policies ignore the main issues that prevent food security- high cost of living and limited meaningful employment. Formal plans presented by city administrations outline desired initiatives and programs without a roadmap of how to get here. This thesis intends to present processes and goals that should be replicated to achieve justice driven and community controlled food systems that generate educational and workforce opportunities to ensure intergenerational growth and self-determined strategies for disenfranchised communities.

DUE 9

With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent implications of the imposed lockdowns and amplified precarities that followed, coordinated efforts and mobilizations by denizens have taken the form of networks rooted in care and solidarity across the globe. Embraced under the concept of mutual aid, these networks and initiatives have aimed to offer a radical praxis that is responsive to the urgency of the crisis-driven moment (food insecurity, loss of income, threat of eviction, etc.) while remaining rooted in a critical analysis of historic and ongoing systemic oppression.

Existing within a continuum of activities across the virtual realm as well the public sphere, within hyper local and larger global scales, “mutual aid” as a reaction to the public health crisis has come to constitute relief programs aimed at delivering or distributing food, raising and dispersing funds for bill/rent payments, providing additional urgent direct services, and facilitating access and connection to resources. The unique aspect of these relief efforts (particularly in the context of the United States) presents itself in the way that this phenomenon sprang up: as an immediate response by everyday individuals and their concerns for the needs of their neighbors/those in proximity to them within their networks. Burgeoning as active networks across urban-rural geographies, especially where COVID exacerbated inequalities and needs, 10 DUE

mutual aid experienced an uptick / boom in a more widespread adoption of the term, and application of the concept as a radical show of solidarity. With the convergence of the public assassination of George Floyd by state-sanctioned violence on top of the disproportionate COVID burden placed on Black and Brown communities, mutual aid gained additional significance in relation to movements calling for the abolition of the prison-industrial complex and defunding of policing mechanisms.

This thesis approaches these networks of care and relief within the New York City context with the nuance necessary to understand and analyze the significance, power, and limitations of their formation and/or evolution, to then consider the potentiality of building and aligning with more critical and liberatory frameworks. Righteous uprisings erupted (as they have in the past, and will continue to do so), calling for a reckoning with America’s legacy of maintaining and uplifting the violence that is white supremacy - historically, as an ongoing settler-colonial project, and through the manifestation of racial capitalism through the transformation of chattel slavery to the modernday prison-industrial complex… as well as through the instatement of inherently racist urban planning and policy.

Considering the immeasurable loss by COVID-19

THE NEXT WORLDMAKING BUILDING WITHIN + BEYOND MUTUAL AID TOWARDS “LIBERATED LIFE WAYS” IN NEW YORK CITY

by Daniela Castillo de Luna KEYWORDS cooperation autonomia worldmaking collective care critical cartography abolition geographies solidarity networks mushrooms

and the state’s inadequate response and failure in providing significant safety nets to honor and protect lives, collective fury and exasperation has continued to build with the embedded systems of organized abandonment and institutional violence.

This convergence catapulted calls for abolition to the forefront of a collective consciousness. The strength of the deluge of these demands espoused mutual re-imaginings of a society devoid of oppressive carceral and policing systems, engaging the public at large in an exercise in prefiguring and radical futuring.

By observing and delineating the intersections between the pandemic and its socio-spatial ramifications, with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement as the largest in U.S. history, this thesis considers the transformative qualities of mutual aid projects, through an abolitionist lens. With that framework, this thesis delves into varied definitions and interpretations of mutual aid through virtual ethnographic work and participant engaged research, while also delineating the difference in reactionary relief efforts vs. long term abolitionist programs through case studies. Through thorough observations, this thesis documents the spectrum of activities, range of operations, and types of relations established through these networks doing the work to “fill in gaps”, while simultaneously interrogating the ongoing negotiations between autonomous,

volunteer-run initiatives and the state.

Following the goal of deploying mutual aid practices informed by an awareness of systemic inequalities, this project utilizes critical mapping methodologies and historical analysis to not only spatialize the distribution of these networks, but to frame them within the context of already existing and compounded crises (of poverty, unemployment, disinvestment in social services, etc.) - presented on an interactive platform with guiding tools as a part of larger capacity-building programming. By doing so, this project provides a framing of sustained care ecologies constantly taking place and evolving at the grassroots level, versus reactionary measures in response to a particular event or rupture in time.

This work has ultimately been heavily influenced and guided by a strong determination against returning “back to normal”, as an act of refusal and recognition of crises to come. By placing these significant networks and caring responses in relation to deeply rooted and intentionally created inequities, and expanding upon the transformative potential of mutual aid to build capacities and strengthen solidarities, this project is offered as a framing for retrospectively facilitating repair .and practicing justice.

DUE 11

Anthropogenic climate change does not create a crisis in isolation. The consequences of our current climate crisis can compound and amplify existing rifts within our social and ecological fabrics. The forefront communities bearing these effects are low-lying atoll nations, most of which are in Oceania. By most estimates, atoll nations would be uninhabitable as early as the mid-twenty-first century. Nowhere is this issue clearer on the Marshall Islands, where a layered history of colonization, militarization and pollution results in the challenging landscape islanders face today.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands’ Bikini and Eniwetok atolls. Subsequent health effects, along with impacts of resources and cultural deprivation, makes the Marshallese uniquely vulnerable to an increasingly hostile climate. Since independence, the Marshallese Compact of Free Association (COFA) with the United States for unrestricted movement while the US continues operating military bases and missile tests in their territory. At the same time, Marshall Islands have been consequential in pushing the world to more challenging climate mitigation targets, most famously during the Paris Agreement negotiations.

An island nation that contributes a trivial amount of emissions and other environmental damage cannot maintain its habitats alone. This thesis 12 DUE

project looks at the layered disasters of the Marshall Islands and aligns them with emerging practices of remembrance, resilience, and resistance.

This thesis confronts the climate dilemmas facing Marshallese people today. Facing a seemingly insurmountable challenge, how can different levels of society a just and secure habitat? What are some of the existing strategies working to achieve these goals, and what motivates them throughout this struggle? What can I, as an ally, contribute to more effective resiliency and genuine policy change for the benefit of the Marshallese?

This project begins by conducting a historical and situational analysis of threading the current climate crisis unfolding in islander communities. I based my research on theories of disaster anthropology, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and activist optimism; and relying on historical archives and environmental reviews, this part of my thesis seeks to ground the intersectional landscapes of disasters.

Realizing Marshall Islands deep connection with maps and mapmaking, and connecting that with my skillsets, I then used maps to analyze further how these layered histories shape Marshallese communities at home and abroad.

The design components build upon previous cartographic depictions and analysis of climate

“ATOLLING” SOVEREIGNTY REFRAMING THE CLIMATE CRISIS THROUGH COUNTER-CARTOGRAPHIES OF LOLELAPLAP IN THE MARSHALL ISLANDS

by Daniel Ching-Yu Chu KEYWORDS disasters climate activism colonialism sovereignty Oceania

crisis in Marshallese communities. As the nature of climate activism work is already networked and global, the project uses an interactive web platform as the underlying thread within the design strategy.

This platform is powered by existing activism and individual voices but targets audiences unfamiliar with the struggle. By narrating the layered climate history and providing inputs from Marshallese community activists, the platform can act as a tool for pushing for local to global policy change– changes that recognize the intersectionality of crises and a need for environmental and social care beyond built infrastructures.

The Marshall Islands alone cannot solve climate change. Still, it is clear from my research that the unfolding of crises on the atolls present a clear example that our current understanding of climate change is incomplete without understanding how various historical trauma amplify accelerated climate change. For an island that cannot domestically generate enough force to overcome its challenges, it is necessary for activists from all levels of the Marshallese government and society to ensure global and local solutions towards its goal by forming coalitions and alliances along the way networked solutions. Simultaneously, we as allies must not see crises on the ground as all “doom and gloom.” Marshallese people are not (only) victims of climate change, but the vanguard fighters to an

issue the whole world faces. By creating a sense of abundance and optimism with Marshallese habitat, culture, and identity, we can fully resist the forces of colonial trauma and climate challenges and push other peoples to act the same. My thesis title, “Atolling” Sovereignty, reflects upon the process of a growing coral atoll as a metaphor for the growth of systemic, climate-oriented resistance and activism that ensures a future of true independence of the Marshall Islands and other Pacific peoples.

The design strategy of this thesis is created in consultation with Cofa Alliance National Network (CANN). This Oregon-based social welfare organization fights for the rights of COFA migrants in the US, mainly through targeting changes to state legislation. I am incredibly thankful for their participation and feedback that makes the project more viable to communities on the ground. Like most others within the same fold, the scope and scale of this project cannot solve the state of the climate crises in the islands. This research and design project represents a phase in the many routes for climate sovereignty, but the work itself cannot and will not stop here.

DUE 13

Emily Bowe

20201214 Final Review

Critical Praxis, Knowledges, Infrastructures Municipally-Owned Utilities

Data Organizations

San Antonio Water System

Alamo Regional Data Alliance

Office of Innovation SmartSA 2019

CPS Energy

Alamo Area GIS

San Antonio River Authority

Digital Inclusion Alliance of San Antonio Digital Inclusion Alliance of San Antonio

Bexar County

UTSA City of San Antonio (COSA)

SA2020 School of Data Science & UTSA Expansion 2021

VIA (Public Transit)

West Side Subarea Plan 2020-2021?

Data from SA 2020 backs SA Tomorrow report

Organization Connection Process Connection

SA2020 Metrics Report 2010

SA Comprehensive Plan 2016

This thesis examines ways to understand civic data-based practices in San Antonio, Texas through the lens of critical data studies. With the rise of “civic technology” and advocates for “smart city” approaches to policy and planning, there is a need to critically examine the ways that data becomes a tool within policy and advocacy. Much of existing work around these issues takes a “zoomed out” view, considering the use of data practices locally as an abstract, generalized concept. This thesis seeks to root this discussion in a single place: San Antonio, Texas. It is rapidly growing, majority non-white, and traditionally considered a working-class city. In many ways, it is the opposite of many cities known for their data resources, practices, and institutions, which makes it a worthy site of study.

Building on scholarship in media studies, science and technology studies (STS), and data science, critical data studies has emerged as a field prepared to productively critique society’s increasing reliance on data as an objective source of knowledge. Much of critical data studies literature is situated at a global scale, not specifically engaging with the politics of place or surveying a wide range of projects happening in different physical contexts. But recent scholarship from scholar Yanni Loukissas in his book All Data Are Local advocates for understanding datasets as situated in “data settings” that require close analysis to understand the limits of data.

14 DUE

In order to analyze these local ideas of datasets and data settings in San Antonio, this thesis relies on historical research, interviews, discourse analysis, and geospatial analysis. The roots of the thesis are in my experiences working in and around data practitioners for five years before graduate school, so there are moments of the thesis that are also autoethnographic in nature. These research methods work towards a broader action research methodology by placing the creation of new knowledge for community partners at the center of the project. I engaged with individuals from two organizations, the Alamo Regional Data Alliance (ARDA) and SA2020, to better understand the current understandings of the use of data for policy and advocacy work. Additionally, research responding to the February 2021 winter storm event that forced much of Texas into power blackout.

Building on this research, the thesis argues that San Antonio’s data ecosystem is structured to aid in telling narratives about progress for the city, which at times can prioritize abstracted metrics. Notably, a majority of existing spatial data is focused on uses that privilege real estate and development.

COVID-19 has reshaped the landscape of community data in San Antonio. This community data reflects the materiality of the systems, networks, institutions, and people that create the data themselves, reflecting the idea that the production of data

GROUNDING THE DATA-BASED CITY A PROPOSAL FOR GRASSROOTS DATA PRACTICES IN SAN ANTONIO

by Emily Bowe KEYWORDS critical data studies local infrastructure San Antonio

is both a fractured and political process. Data intermediaries, such as ARDA and SA2020, have emerged in attempts to bridge these spaces.

This research builds to identifying gaps between the intended uses of public community data infrastructures—namely transparency and accessibility—and actual uses in for-profit tech, real estate, and engineering. In order for more local, community-driven organizations to use existing data for advocacy, new resources must be designed that can connect both people and knowledge.

This project proposes an online platform that can provide the basis for connecting community groups advocating for change with existing data resources and also resources that allow them to create processes for creating and sharing data for their own needs. This platform is the starting point for conversations and planning for an inperson exhibit that can bring together critical narratives of conceptions of data in San Antonio’s urban development and organizing materials and strategies that can help provide a base for grassroots knowledge-making and advocacy into the future.

DUE 15

Urbanism is political, and it is not neutral or genderneutral; public spaces, infrastructures, and systems generally reproduce existing power structures in gendered societies. To date, the production and reproduction of space have been dominated by a small group of thinkers, primarily architects, planners, or economists, removing the conversation between users and the territory. Women, almost all the time, are left out of this conversation, or when they are part of it, their practice supports the patriarchal capitalist system, or if not, their names are forgotten. Women have a significant role in producing the city. When practitioners have a feminist or transformative approach to the production of the built environment, they can question and challenge gender roles and power relations in space. Women-led and feminist urban practices and groups worldwide respond to their context and conditions in different ways, as a way of contestation to extractive models of urbanization and development. The majority of the groups have two things similar; they diversify practices, institutions, systems, and processes that challenge and transform the existing patriarchal system and economic model; their practice centers life.

This thesis aims to recognize, explore and celebrate how women are involved in the production of the urban and how they create networks of knowledge and care that transform, represent and support 16 DUE

them and their communities. But, who are these practitioners? And, what are the technical and organizational capacities developed by these women-led and feminist urban practices?

By engaging with theories, such as Feminist Urbanism and urban production, and learning from the history of women’s ecology history, I started framing and analyzing how some women are involved in urban production to contest the current models of urbanization. It is essential to highlight that the involvement and search for spatial justice is also a way to fight for women’s liberation and plurality. As the second phase of exploration, I started mapping and collecting women-led and feminist urban practices. By conducting interviews and focus groups, I learned how these practitioners engage in the production of space and social interactions, their principles, elements, characteristics of their practices, needs and constraints, and the way they navigate through public policies and regulations.

As part of the research and exploration analysis, the term women intermediaries started to form. These practitioners are positioned as intermediaries of the urban process; they open the political dialogue to produce space that will impact how bodies navigate and experience public spaces and infrastructures supporting the communities and their everyday

WOMEN INTERMEDIARIES OCCUPYING SPACE PRODUCTION NETWORKS OF KNOWLEDGE & CARE

by Jacqueline Castañeda KEYWORDS women intermediaries urban practice feminist urbanism spatial justice coalition

Cd. Juarez

Bodies

Objects

Processes

Guadalajara

CDMX

life; they enhance the capacity of social production and community building; they open and sustain dialogues and circulation of public goods; they are recognized and build trust within their communities and other networks; they practice relations of proximity (social and territorial); they use their privilege, resources, and knowledge, to actionable processes for social and spatial justice; the defend the territory through the use of their bodies, objects, and processes, and make a public matter the women’s struggle.

Rivera Maya

based networks, and document & disseminate a repository of practices, methodologies, and intermediaries.

The design component for this thesis is a cocreation process for a platform of Women Intermediaries in Mexico. This coalition will position itself as a technical and political group that opens and maintains a dialogue within communities and urban processes. As a first step, a network will be created to support and share knowledge among the intermediaries. The objective is to create a space, physical and political, where women, in all-female forms - cis, trans and female-presenting - engage in conversations and activate transformation within the planning, design, production, use, and occupation of public infrastructures like transportation, public space, housing, and the women’s experience. Additionally, this platform would search to consolidate and strengthen resources to develop research and projects, build organizational capacities and links to communityDUE 17

Campaigns to pursue black reparations are changing scales. In 2019, the city of Evanston, IL committed a budget to pursue reparations through city-based programming. The City and program leaders received international praise for being the “first city with reparations.” Since then, black residents have shown both enthusiastic support and nuanced rejection of the municipal process - all under majority black leadership. Where the national conversation about federal reparations has always been multifaceted and controversial (i.e. partisan), the new localized conversation demands review of more familiar, everyday systems which residents ostensibly have more direct power over governing.

Thus, the municipalization of reparations is not simply a grand project on a smaller scale, but an entirely new project with alternative scales and democratic aspirations with which to reckon.

Cities, as the new site for reparations, must contend with political pluralism within the harmed community(ies) while deconstructing lasting spatial contracts of unequal access and agency which have precluded black citizens from full citizenship.

Although much research has been compiled recently around the lasting effects of redlining, policy and program solutions remain stagnant in agnostic, race-blind bounds which lack the promise of remedy for explicitly race-based harms.

By developing and critiquing the term “spatial 18 DUE

contract,” this research and design folio analyzes the spatiality of racial social contracts (e.g. redlining, education exclusion) as they relate to new local reparations efforts, place- and people-oriented programming.

Using methods including literature review, participatory mapping, digital cartography and illustration, this project proposes generative rubrics for analyzing and synthesizing black reparations campaigns as they change shape away from national precedent. The analysis begins with a general review of “why” reparations, through an overview of national can local policies which sought to uplift white citizens and isolate black citizens socially, economically, and geographically. Three distinct systems of scale are then introduced and applied to two distinct cases for “how” reparations were enacted as non-federal approaches to remedy black harm.

In order to establish the layered, storied social geographies of Evanston in particular, hand-drawn maps from two years of community mapping workshops in Evanston are digitized and categorized alongside quantitative data. These maps reveal a set of rich citizen-held knowledges which expand conventional data-driven spatial analysis of the urban landscape. Situated in this context are the diverging centralized and community-based

RE-SITE-ING REPARATIONS LOCATING HARM + CAPACITATING REPAIR IN EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

by Jason Brown KEYWORDS black reparations citizenship critical cartography GIS online platform atlas urban policy

understandings of both “why” and “how” reparations should be pursued in Evanston. These perspectives, intentions, and definitions are thus mapped in both geographically and politically in ways which aspire to highlight the intense complexification of municipalized reparations, as well as prepare future researchers for what may be common themes of citizen desire and bureaucratic strategy.

This project centers analyses which are spatial, narrative, and creative to better reckon with localized marriage of the material and the immaterial.

Community voices reveal the complexity of localized black citizenship - a People whose desires pull both from decades of deferred justice felt in the black body and consciousness as well as the immediate, everyday lived experience of the black resident in their neighborhood. Understood by WEB DuBois as a “dual consciousness,” black residents in Evanston are both ready to praise their leaders for changing the game, while remaining critically attentive to how the game is being played, holding their leaders to radical standards of democratic process and representation.

geographies. This new site functions to meet multiple needs observed in the scalar reformation of reparations: as space to recollect and reflect on Evanston’s integral black heritage as well as institutional racist legacies; as a citizen resource guide to unfurl the strategy of municipal reparations taken in Evanston; as a process research tool for administrators and organizers in other communities seeking repair; as a cartographic research tool for HR40 followers and advocates who wish to examine its geographic implications. As a generative, incomplete atlas, the project leaves a raw foundation of findings to be built on in time, as local strategies grow and cartographic collaborators gain interest in the growing reparations movement.

These findings are compiled into an online atlas which synthesizes interviews, policy and program analysis, and cartographies spanning from local efforts in Evanston to the historic advocacy for the national reparations bill, HR40, and its representative DUE 19

DUE BIOS

Ashley Lehrer is a collaborative artist, participatory designer, and urbanist born and raised in Manhattan. She holds a BFA in Experimental Theater and a BA in Art History from New York University. Her decade-long career as a Set Decorator and Production Designer led her to question the impacts of hyper-capitalism in relation to waste and consumption on urban centers. Realizing that she was perpetuating the practices she sought to change, she left the entertainment industry behind. After a year working as the Site Manager for Habitat for Humanity NYC’s community beautification program, she entered Parson’s to deepen her understanding of these interconnected systems. At DUE, her work focused on visualizing and contextualizing current and historic effects of the transformation of nature on the urban environment and citizenry, to mobilize and empower NYC residents to imagine other ways.

Through her thesis research, she developed a partnership with Universe City NYC, a Food Sovereignty focused start up in East New York, Brooklyn. As their Development Director, she will continue her work producing a strategic plan to grow a community controlled circular food economy through collaborative decision making processes. If you bump into her on the street, it’s probably because she’s looking up, or into the shadowy corners of sidewalks, marveling at the persistence of nature in this seemingly hostile environment.

Daniela Castillo Influenced by the queer, Chicane, feminist interpretation of nepantla (Gloria Anzaldua), Dani engages in and reflects upon the constant negotiation, formation, and evolution of multiple worlds - within the realms of research, advocacy, art-making, relationship-building, and more. Dani embraces this pluriversality in the ontological sense, as well as in practice as someone who values processes that interrogate and make principled moves towards enacting justice and equity. Understanding the radicality hinging upon “grasping things at the root” (Angela Davis), Dani believes in the capacious potential of design when powered by collaborative knowledge production and propelled by honoring of the lives, narratives, and trajectories (past, present and future) that inform spaces and processes.

Dani values the generative nature of “in-between-ness”, exemplified by the lessons gained from having roots in Mexico, to redefining “home” in Houston, to continuing academic journeys in Philadelphia and NYC. Previously, Dani studied architecture and urban studies, and spent time with a producer-owned company in India, further germinating interest in the potentiality of solidarity networks as alternatives to current extractive, oppressive systems. Dani’s thesis further explores the nuances of collective care and the liberatory potential found at the intersection of direct aid and organizing in the face of organized abandonment at varying scales. Dani has gained invaluable experiences collaboratively working with the Healthy Materials Lab + Icahn School of Medicine @ Mount Sinai, the Airbel Impact Lab @ IRC, and as a teaching assistant this final semester. You can find Dani at their favorite local florist and plant shop, visiting art spaces big and small, and dabbling with different fibers.

Daniel Chu 朱景佑

is an urbanist, design strategist, and interdisciplinary researcher. He received his BA from The New School’s Eugene Lang College and has experience working in community based organizations, nonprofits, and government funded environmental programs. His research and design work in the Design and Urban Ecologies program focused on how environmental changes and activism– especially around the Pacific– are vanguards of the global fight to combat the climate crisis. The work is an exploration of existing and potential pathways to further decolonization, nuclear justice, and Pacific sovereignty by researching and collaborating with organizations advocating for COFA rights in the United States. He plans on expanding this body of work into a dissertation. It is Daniel’s hope that this work can play a role in building power of peoples fighting for sovereignty from contemporary empires.

Daniel lives and studies in Manhattan, but is always conscious of his roots in Taiwan and the Ocean.

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Emily Bowe is an urban researcher, designer, and cartographer. She received a BS in Environmental Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and worked in urban development and architecture in San Antonio, Texas prior to graduate school. Her time in the Design and Urban Ecologies program has been spent researching intersections between critical data studies, urban infrastructure systems, and mapmaking as a form of knowledge creation.

As part of the Urban Systems Lab, she has worked alongside a team of multidisciplinary researchers to better understand the visualization of climate risk using mapping and location-based technologies.

Her thesis research has centered around the ways that community data intermediaries in San Antonio can help provide resources for residents to better understand important urban systems around them.

She’s interested in practices that use code playfully, especially to critique reliance on anything too “smart”. In her free time, you can find her in Brooklyn knitting, biking, or tinkering with code.

Jacqueline Castañeda is a researcher and urban strategist, specialized in urban design, infrastructures and public policies. She has an academic background in Architecture and Urban Design. She has worked as a strategist and designer for different institutions of the Mexican government, international firms, and as a researcher at Parsons School of Design and Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment at The New School. Her current practice focuses on the design and opening of participatory strategies, processes, projects and methodologies for the development of balanced, equitable and fair territories. Her practice involves Feminist Urbanism through the planning, design and production of public spaces and infrastructures that support everyday life. Currently her interest is to explore the intersection of spatial justice and women’s bodies, she also experiments with fermentation processes as a vehicle for freedom and food sovereignty.

Jason Brown is a community artist, facilitator, designer, and social investigator. His BA is from Wheaton College (IL), where he studied international relations, community and public art, and urban issues. As a designer, he uses his brand, Geocommunetrics, to explore aesthetic and psychogeographic investigations into place-based identities through textiles, installations, collective cartography, and creative collaborations.

As an urbanist, he is informed by local community organizing, alternative housing models, participatory planning, and expressive, iterative making practices. His graduate research examines how reparations for black Americans is taking on a new local, municipal strategy, particularly in his former home of Evanston, IL and the implications of this radical scale-shift. Carrying his curiosities about collective knowledges and collaborative space-making into practice, Jason’s current design work seeks to use digital mapping tools to replicate the intimacy of the hand-drawn, striving to remedy digital distance and abstraction with human warmth and care-full intention, in full regard of the layered issues at hand.

Recent extracurricular research has involved inquiring the potential for other New Deals critical of intersystem infrastructure failings, as well as radical models for more just housing options. In the future, Jason hopes to develop interdisciplinary, participatory mapping techniques to catalyze further radical city- and community-making, centering the voice of the local, amplifying the voice of the harmed. You can find Jason studying with black coffee in Brooklyn, seeking solace on that dynamic cluster of gridladen islands just south of his familial home state of Connecticut.

DUE 21

22 TUP

tup 21

THEORIES of

URBAN practice

TUP 23

ho m kin ho m ok ho m o-

quer i-

sem-

syn

sy

in ik un

n nki

in

quer ikin

semiokin

in syk

quer kin

semikin

kin y syn

n ki ifi un

iun

in

in

gek

kin

io-

m ho

m ho

n

iki

iok

m ho

g-

yeu

yeu

yeu

ohome

okin

home

yoke-

yokekin

yokin

H om eok in

I offer homeokin as a framework for understanding notions of queer kinship. The tenency to distinguish or qualify kinship as queer, to me, establishes kinship as a majority or normative concept therefore rendering ‘queer kinship’ less-than or in-opposition-to. Homeokin is a singular affinity—a way of relating and being—that is distinctly queer and equal to kinship. It does not necessitate a distinction or qualification (here, queer) as homeokin is reified by not having such a distinction or qualification. Homeokin is equal-but-different and equalbut-not-in-opposition to kinship.

Homeokin is a social infrastructure, one of inclusion. My inquiry primarily focuses on LGBTQ+ human-to-human relationships that are effusive, lasting, and intentional.

The ways in which queer people have fought, marched, and assembled for the right to be seen and accepted are, of course, political in makeup but sometimes the desired outcomes of those actions are indicative of assimilation into capitalistic or heteropatriarchal systems (such as marrying and producing biological offspring). The assimilation of many queers into the mainstream—or the embrace of dominant standards, identities, and modes of organization—is an acknowledgement, conscious or not, that a ‘mainstream’ or ‘majority’ or ‘normal’ exists into which it is possible to assimilate. I want to note that I see homeokin as a way out, a way up, a way to celebrate communities and individuals. All of us in the LGBTQ+ community have to find the balance between assimilation and radical liberation in our personal journeys toward 24 TUP

family building, love building, futurity building, and self actualization. Sitting in this potentially uncomfortable truth is, I think, a way to celebrate liminality and its inescapability—it is a way to invite agonism into both our individual and collective notions of a queer futurity.

As the difficult work is done to break free from confining social and cultural roles, the balance between assimilation and radical liberation is engaged. Queer liberation seeks equality for all people, not just the dominant figures (cisgendered, white gay males) in the LGBTQ+ community and that long and hard fought battle needs to continue in order to break oppressive systems. To begin, we each can acknowledge where we are—what our role is—in the process of producing homeokin. Homeokin acts as a bonding agent and is at the heart of queer identity in cities: our queerness is a unifying, relational aspect that accommodates differing belief systems and practices.

Drawing on ethnographic interviews with queer people ranging in age from 28 to their late-70s, I explore personal encounters with the production of homeokin in two spatiotemporal sites: the Queer Liberation March and Pride. What I try to prove through my research, the interviews I facilitated, and the conversations I had with friends and colleagues is that homeokin is queer relating and is, arguably, easiest to observe and understand in urban contexts. This, of course, is difficult to prove because it might, by way of presupposition imply that queerness is exclusively an urban condition and cannot be found or experienced outside the city (though this is

HOMEOKIN IN PRACTICE: BUILDING QUEER FUTURITY A STUDY OF SPATIOTEMPORAL EVENTS IN THE MOVEMENT FOR QUEER LIBERATION

by Blake Roberts KEYWORDS Homeokin queer futurity transformational routes governmentality infrastructures of inclusion agonism

a vague geolocator). This is simply not true. Homeokin is not exclusive to the city; it can be found everywhere.

However, I focused my inquiry on the people, places, and histories that have enabled the Queer Liberation March and Pride. That said, my research is based in New York City but is supported by stories and examples of queer governmentalities and organizing from around the country. In exploring homeokin as an affinity, I learned so much more about the vibrancy and spectacle in queer history and, therefore, my history.

My thesis concludes that homeokin is at once theory and practice, codifying the affinity as a praxis that can help the LGBTQ+ community build a queer futurity.

Donna Haraway’s scholarship on kinship, José Esteban Muñoz’s seminal work on queer futurities, and gay historians like Jeffrey Escoffier and George Chauncey inform my understanding of this newly formed theoretical framework. Ensuring queer futurity means ensuring self-affirmation and self-actualization. I do not mean to strip futurity of the possibility of iteration but to stress the urgency of needing to respect our present, pay homage to the past, and be receptive to a future. Queer futurity is as much about ideation as it is about consideration of and response to the present. Depictions of the future require imagination because it is something we cannot know with absolute certainty. We fill the gaps and missing pieces by speculating what could be, what we’d like to be, and how we’d like to experience it.

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Due to its social productivity, urban anonymity and anonymous social relations are becoming increasingly undesirable. From a political standpoint, anonymity is seen as threatening the ability to exercise control at a large scale. For example, the Covid-19 crisis has shown how the state largely benefits from fragmented individuals and confirms Lefebvre’s finding that ‘separation breaks the unifying power of urban form.’ The impossibility of a crowd means the impossibility of anonymity, and the slow death of the urban. Indeed, post-quarantine urbanism threatens the existence of anonymous spaces. I refer to these spaces throughout this study as being spaces that are free from identification process and intrusive surveillance practices.

Urbanites are ‘authorized’ to visit and move from one consumer-oriented space to the next, transactional urban spaces in which activities are recorded and economic value is being generated. However, we have lost the ability to disappear in the interstitial spaces that exist between confined institutional sites and locations. Surveillance, urban warfare and social-control tactics are deployed in a renewed effort to fill the gaps between these institutional sites, restricting access to these interstitial spaces of anonymity. I maintain that these spaces of encounter are essential to a healthy life in the city, these are spaces of proximity, activity, simultaneity, density and intensity.

26 TUP

While the field of sociology explores the conceptual landscape surrounding anonymity, no strong claims in favour, or against anonymity have been made.

The spatial-material dimension of anonymity calls for further analysis. In my thesis, I define anonymity as ‘the desire to be noticed and the need to be left alone.’ in a world where we have witnessed a shift from war, violence, crowds and anonymity to security, atomization, fragmentation, control and urban warfare. To establish an analytical definition of anonymous sociality and spaces of anonymity requires its dissociation from ideas around anonymity as a means for privacy — particularly in the digital realm— and a move towards a more social and material analysis. The claim for anonymity lies in the defense of the ‘unknown,’ the ability to act while remaining out of reach. It values the importance of preserving one’s ‘social space,’ as opposed to surrendering it to institutions and authoritarian regimes of social control and surveillance.

As the thesis emphasises the necessity of fostering anonymous relations in the urban, it turns from the study of the production of surveillance space to the study and proposal for the production of anonymous spaces. Through an analysis of artists’ work and practices that employ anonymity as a tool to enable social relations to emerge in urban public space, I identify a number of desirable

TOWARDS URBAN ANONYMITY A SPATIAL APPROACH TO RECLAIMING SOCIABILITY IN A HYPER-SURVEILLED CITY

by Dalia Amellal KEYWORDS surveillance social control anonymity public space sociability identification artveillance publication

gestures and establish a design framework to be incorporated by future spatial practitioners. As a way to instrumentalise these practices, I propose a format and platform: a publication named Urban Anonymity. The format of this publication allows for multiple mediums to be combined ranging from architectural drawings to photographs, diagrams and illustrations, all of which serve to draw connections between sociology, the spatial world and surveillance studies.

The conceptual analysis of anonymity and surveillance studies has significant implications for the ways in which the individual moves through control spaces. The spatial and built environment is therefore very much implicated, and sometimes even responsible for the project of social control.

The publication attempts to visually communicate ways in which these realms intersect and how they might benefit from being in conversation with each other. The publication is first issue of many, with contributions from artists, scholars, and spatial practitioners. The platform hosts interviews, and project proposals envisioning forms of resistance, relating to the spatial implications of surveillance and social control practices.

TUP 27

In 2014, the UCLA Civil Rights Project’s report Brown at 60, returned mainstream attention to the racial and class segregation of schools in the United States. Since then, a flood of analytical work has raised attention to the radical segregation of American schools: numerous popular podcasts, news articles, video op-eds and graphic representations, analyze, discuss and critique the policies which brought us here today. Namely, the current disparities in educational opportunities, bias in school programs and the concentration of poverty in New York City’s most segregated schools. While the political economic factors which in large part drive school segregation are usually acknowledged, these issues take a back seat in favor of individualized, school-focused solutions. While this trend is often driven by political pragmatism, I believe it leaves open space for co-optation and regression in school-focused reforms. Several reforms that have recently gained traction take into account factors such as changing district demographics, and the racial and class composition of neighborhoods. Others consider internal factors like bias in school screenings and specialized exams, removal of police from urban schools, and the need for implementation of a more culturally-responsive education. As it stands, all of these factors are important and necessary, but rarely do we take into account how schools interact with the wider ecological context they are a constitutive part of.

28 TUP

In an effort to bring school-reform discourse and practice back into the context of larger, systemic, urban-ecological processes, my thesis explores the topic of school segregation in Queens, New York by taking into account the complex processes of the production of space within the political economy of New York City. This approach is largely influenced by the reality of our situation on the ground, where 10% (111,600) of public-school students are homeless in the most segregated school system in the nation. This is due to the fact that the city has become a “Real Estate State,” a city with a political economy largely organized around a historically racist and stratified real estate industry. Although New York City spends about 31% of its fiscal budget on education— more per-pupil than any other city in the United States— nearly half of this funding is extracted from property taxes. This dependence on the real estate industry undermines all efforts to address school inequality, because the City and the real estate industry rely on ever-increasing property values and rents, as working class jobs shift further into the low-wage service sector.

My thesis attempts to reconcile this reality of our political-economic context, and its relationship with urban spaces and schools, through the exploration of school segregation and diversity in Queens Community Board 3, (“CB3”). CB3 is composed of the neighborhoods of Jackson Heights, East

IS DIVERSITY ENOUGH? A DIALECTICAL STUDY OF SCHOOL SEGREGATION AND THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE IN A DIVERSE NEIGHBORHOOD

by Jorge Cabanillas KEYWORDS Queens spatial production enclosures race & class housing diversity schools school choice politics

Elmhurst and North Corona. This district is often categorized as one of the most diverse places in the world, yet much like the rest of the city it also has public schools which the Civil Rights Project would deem “segregated” with a 90-100% population of minority students and equally high concentrations of low-income students. COVID-19 has also laid bare many of the inequalities in CB3 and therefore further problematized the idealized pluralism that some authors attribute to the area. My thesis analyzes this contemporary situation by grounding itself in the socio-historical development of CB3, the exploration of identities and politics that arose during the implementation of school desegregation plans, and the reforms that resulted from this event.

Using interviews, historical and contemporary maps, reports, current data and secondary sources, I bridge the neighborhoods’ past dynamics, events and policies with today’s current reality.

diversity and democracy need to be understood as embedded within the dominant political economy and its spatio-temporal processes. Ultimately, this thesis suggests that we ought to expand freedoms and rights beyond the confines of capitalism and develop radically oriented non-reformist reforms/ practices that recognize the dynamic non-neutrality of space when dealing with issues like school segregation.

I employ the concept of a “just city” in order to define and study the dimensions of equity, diversity and democracy within the current situation in CB3.

Even though the “just city” framework is pragmatic, allegedly “non-reformist reform-” oriented, and ideologically compatible with the liberal administrations of New York City, I argue it is still insufficient in addressing the dilemmas faced in CB3 (and other similar localities) and why we should look beyond it. My thesis argues that rights like equity, TUP 29

In the 1960s and 1970s New York City, the abrupt withdrawal of the public provision of social services and the simultaneous overtaking of the housing question by real estate speculators, gave rise to the new, imaginative forms of communityand civil society organizing for the struggle for dignified housing. In the process, several models of community owned & managed, non-speculative and permanently affordable housing —such as housing cooperatives and community land trusts— were developed, some under the umbrella of the Right to The City movement which had just emerged in New York City. The so-called neoliberal turn of the 1980s and 1990s has halted further expansion of these ideas and practices. With global real estate making up 60 percent of the world’s assets in 2017, and roughly 75 percent of that wealth being in housing, homes for the working class have become an increasingly scarce asset. The corporate takeover of housing in NYC resulted in the severely precarious living conditions, constant threat of evictions, and an ever-growing number of homeless. Responding to the pressure to resolve the crisis of housing affordability, the liberal governments in NYC have offered inclusionary housing, treating this issue as a technocratic one.

This thesis is based on the assumption that the knowledge produced and accumulated in the activist and advocacy organizations in NYC since 30 TUP

the 1960s has become even more relevant today than at the time of its origin. Namely, the thesis argues that pressing housing questions in NYC and in other neo-liberal cities around the world should make use of this knowledge through its careful transfer and mobilization. Therefore, the focus of this thesis are present-day efforts of community organizations, NGOs and activists to employ that knowledge in NYC in order to revitalize the nonprofit, collectively- owned and managed housing models, especially the community land trust model (CLT). It follows one specific campaign of the CLT movement, a struggle to abolish the harmful tax lien sale policy and instead turn it into a pipeline for the community acquisition of properties.

Through the careful reconstruction of efforts of the #AbolishNYCTaxLienSale coalition, and especially East New York CLT at its forefront, this thesis delves into the particularities of one citizens’ initiated policy change.

In parallel, this thesis focuses on the mobilization of the above knowledge to Belgrade, Serbia, a city in which a housing question has never been adequately politicized. Even though social housing was a part of the state program of social reforms in the era of state socialism (1945-1990), forms of collective, citizens’ agency were absent; there was no contestation over the housing question. Subsequent “neoliberal turn” in the early 1990s, in which housing

POLITICIZING THE HOUSING QUESTION IN THE NEOLIBERAL CITY LEARNING FROM NEW YORK CITY

by Sara Dević KEYWORDS affordable housing neoliberal city community land trusts tax lien sale discursive activism New York City Belgrade

played a role of “shock absorber” in the transition from socialist to capitalist organization of economy, resulted in the almost complete withdrawal of the state and institutional support and public provisions for housing, and not unlike in the 1970s NYC, market-driven “solutions” became the only option available. Today, there is a high percentage of vacancy on one side and high percentage of apartment overcrowdedness on the other side. This means that at the same time, Belgrade’s housing market is remarkably productive while the majority of Belgrade’s residents are functionally homeless.

data visualization and mapping. I propose that a careful transfer of “discursive activism” knowledge from NYC would be beneficial for reimagining the advocacy, the struggles, the conflicts that surround housing practice and policy in Serbia. The thesis specifically develops two concrete domains of transfers — vacancy mapping, mapping&data visualization— and tests the overall knowledge mobilization hypothesis on these two cases.

The thesis historically contextualizes the present situation, and studies today’s pioneering attempts of the community and activist groups in Belgrade to make the housing question a matter of public concern, and begin to politicize it. Despite the fact that some of the groups and their actions have been occasionally successful, no proper mechanisms or models of action are agreed upon so that the struggles for housing transformation can be scaled out and sustained.

This thesis argues that mobilizing the concept and practice of “discursive activism” to Belgrade will result in moving questions of housing provision, quality and affordability, from the private sphere into the public sphere through public debates and discussions, critical data analysis, radical TUP 31

The city is not simply a spatial construct: it is a flux.

It is in the constant process of becoming, defined by human activities which constantly produce and reproduce its configurations. Time and its organization is as vital to the city as space. One of the defining features of the ways we process time is the clock, a treacherous object which controls human relations and removes us from our experiences of “lived” time. The act of measuring time, though it assumes an objective stance, is always constitutive of human action in the world.

Thus, while clock can be understood as a symbol which produces an aether that cripples humanity, the act of measuring time is an activity that can be and has been abused but also contains possibilities for action and resistance.

The clock is a faucet regulating uneven flows of time through the city. Despite the synchronization of clock-time to precise world standards, the time of the city is stilted, disrupted and uneven. Within this tension, the clock is seen as a force which controls and one which mediates relations and coordinates activities. This thesis explores the uses, tensions, and tactics of and against clock-time in two situations: among nurses and midwives, and among ondemand workers. To do this, the thesis frames clocktime as intentionally produced by an underlying infrastructure, and as information which is then processed through and manipulated by human 32 TUP

organizations in order to structure social relations of production.

Just as the water from a faucet is not disconnected from the workers at river dams and water processing stations, the production of clock-time is intrinsically linked to the tensions, arguments, urban conflicts and struggles. However, clock-time doesn’t automatically produce the means by which our lives are commodified. Through secondary sources, I examine strategies and tactics in the uses of and resistance to clock-time and the processes and relations within which it is imbricated, as well as the positions and discourses surrounding time and clocks in the literature on the subject.

For instance, in nursing and midwifery literature, a strong opposition is drawn between ‘objective clock-time’ and the ‘relational time of care,’ due to the tensions between systematized management practices and the disruptive and unpredictable nature of care. In implementations of activities and the shift-to-shift conflicts, management literature insists on the importance of management systems which coordinate nursing activities and tend to prioritize the visibility of tasks as well as specific temporal perspectives which in turn create tensions in the processes of control. In contrast to this more traditional, managerial use of clock-time, and the struggles embedded in it, piecework and

THE CLOCK IS A FAUCET AGAINST THE FETISHIZATION OF CLOCK-TIME

by Vincent Perez KEYWORDS critical horology clocks relations

on-demand organizations proclaim autonomy and flexibility. Task-based, rather than clockbased assignment and organization of time was romanticized by E.P. Thompson against the figure of the clock in the time of industrialization. In the gig economy, we see that the dichotomy between task and time is not as straightforward, and clock-time plays an important role in organizing and coercing work in these platforms: both in treating time as a function of transportation, as well as through its incorporation into the algorithms that determine payments and job assignments. Alternative forms of efficiency thus permeate this instrumentalization of time as well, and create specific practices and forms of urban, social struggle akin to but substantively different than the conflicts described earlier.

This thesis argues that fetishization of the clock and of clock-time allows for and reinforces temporal unevenness and helps to sustain existing power relations. By critically exploring tensions and conflicts in the infrastructures which produce the clock and of clock-time, and the managerialorganizational systems which instrumentalize them, this thesis unpacks urban-social relations which are pivotal to these interactions, the situations and points of conflict for the transformation of and resistance against these systems of oppression.

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TUP BIOS

Blake Roberts is a graphic designer, urban researcher, and writer. He received his BFA from the Columbus College of Art & Design and has worked as a designer and community volunteer. Most recently, he has designed with the International Rescue Committee as a Protection Analysis Design Fellow and has dedicated time volunteering with community organizations like the Reclaim Pride Coalition. His research in the Theories of Urban Practice program at Parsons centered on how people—especially LGBTQ+ people—relate to one another in cities. This research is both an exploration of queer history and a projection of the imaginative consequences of inviting agonism into our urban planning practices.

Upon completing the program, he will continue researching modalities of kinship in more-thanhuman contexts. Ultimately, his work tries to illuminate the generative possibilities of acknowledging and celebrating more-than-human or multi-species inquiries of relationality. Blake lives and studies in Brooklyn, NY.

Dalia Amellal is an urbanist, spatial practitioner and designer from London, UK with a background in architecture.

She currently lives in New York City. In the context of the TUP program, her work has focused on establishing a positive conception of anonymity in the city, and investigating ways to reclaim increasingly scarce ‘social space.’ Her thesis works towards the launch of a publication named Urban Anonymity addressing the growing (specifically post-COVID-19) issues of surveillance and urban social control and their spatial implications. Through the bias of publishing and juxtaposing a variety of mediums and content, her work attempts to create new and strengthen existing connections between surveillance studies, sociology and spatial practices.

Jorge Cabanillas is a researcher, strategist and urbanist with a background in collective anti-gentrification work in his home borough of Queens, New York. Jorge earned a BA in Sociology from the City University of New York’s Hunter College in 2014. That same year he put theory to practice by joining Queens Neighborhoods United, a then recently formed, local, volunteer-based, grass-roots group battling gentrification and criminalization policies in his neighborhood. This on the ground experience in urban politics solidified his interests in urbanism and strategies for bringing about a Right to the City.

While attending the Theories in Urban Practice program at Parsons, Jorge has focused his research on organizations of self-determination, the production of space territoriality of political power and organization, urban planning, exclusions/ inclusions, race, class and education. In an effort to merge all of these interests, his thesis analyzes the current dilemma of NYC school segregation in a dialectical manner with the socio historical production of space. He hopes that this can help him and others approach urban issues like school segregation in a more holistic manner where strategy is not delinked from urban processes and the larger political economy.

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Sara Devic is an urbanist, researcher, and maker from Belgrade, Serbia, with an academic background in architecture and urban planning. She has been involved in urban justice movements and the city administration of her hometown, helping develop the Housing Strategy for the City of Belgrade. Her experience, at the municipality and in the streets, triggered her interest in the dynamic between activism and policy. Currently in New York City, she is part of the Housing Justice Lab at The New School and is volunteering for the Brooklyn based organization East New York CLT, a part of the wider community land trust movement. At TUP, she is delving into how housing justice groups with a long history of organizing, advocacy, and activism have managed to transform their demands into legislation. In the future, she intends to contribute to their empowerment by producing argumentation through alternative research approaches such as critical cartography and militant research. This way, she hopes to close the gap between academic thought and lived urban experiences, contributing to both envisioning a different world and actively building it.

Vince Perez is a researcher and designer. His current work focuses on urban times, temporal inequalities, and the ways these are managed, sustained, and can be resisted. For the Theories of Urban Practice program, his thesis responds to the fetishization of the clock, with the understanding that the ways we organize our time can be understood as the ways we organize our practices and so, also, ourselves. With an approach focused on interdependence and community, his work attempts to understand the clock as not only one way through which relations and inequalities are sustained, but also as an opportunity for resistance and action.

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THESIS WORKS 2021

MA Theories of Urban Practice & MS Design and Urban Ecologies

Design Jason Brown, Blake Roberts & Dalia Amellal 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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