Global Urbanism Studio Dispatch | 2020-21 Edition by WashU Sam Fox School

Studio Goes Global From Home +

BUCKY’S SPACESHIP EARTH RE-BOOT

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Dymaxion projection showing locations of our virtual workshops and studio collaborators.

Notes on Pandemic Teaching

Multiple Urban Constellations

Derek Hoeferlin, Associate Professor and Chair, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design

Jonathan Stitelman, Senior Lecturer Studio Lead & Editor

From Places journal, April 5, 2020

For the past several years, at our urban design program, we’ve been running a Global Urbanism Studio. It’s been a fantastic opportunity for students to experience such complex cities as Johannesburg and Mexico City—but when I started as chair last fall, I had a gut instinct that the whole concept of the studio needed a reboot, especially in these precarious and divisive political times. I started to question the merits of traveling studios in these days of hardened borders and pervasive xenophobia. And more, I started to wonder: do our schools of design need a new ethics of global engagement? The rules of the (international) game seemed to change overnight after the 2016 election here in the United States. How does a global pandemic further complicate the fragile system? Now, looking ahead to a world that’s post-COVID-19, how can we rewrite the rules of engagement for our students, for our profession? Since our summer traveling studio cannot travel this summer, what if we optimistically start a new experiment that is ambitiously international in scope even as it remains rooted, or sheltered in place, in our school in the middle of the North American continent? I’m envisioning a global urbanism studio that re-energizes Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion World Map—a new studio that radically engages all seven continents on Bucky’s Spaceship Earth. Now is the moment to galvanize our international network to develop new pedagogical models that will deliver the best virtual studio possible for our students, and to create teaching models that reconnect systems, transmit new ideas, and encourage greater collectivity.

The Global Urbanism Studio pivoted, like everything, in the first weeks of March 2020. I had been in the planning phases of the annual studio—which marks the final core studio for students in our Master of Urban Design program—with associate professor Derek Hoeferlin, chair of landscape architecture and urban design, when the global pandemic turned the world upside down. In past years, we travelled far afield, guided by the belief that experiencing other cities and seeing how life unfolded across many cultures made for the best design training. Now, however, we were presented with the challenge of delivering a comparable design studio from the safety of home. We re-conceptualized the 2020 Global Urbanism Studio to be run completely remotely. Instead of trundling across the globe together, we assembled an amazing group of designers and educators who brought the world to us. As a visiting assistant professor that summer, I led the studio, which worked with an international network of designers— representing all of the continents plus the oceans— who introduced us to new cities and design processes. The workshops were a space to directly respond to the pandemic’s impact on specific contexts in those regions, and to open the possibility of addressing other, already simmering challenges facing urbanism around the world, including climate change. Teaching and learning abroad brings a certain immediacy to the work. The reason we travel is to respond to the place. For example, students’ experiences navigating the dense labyrinth of Nakasero Market in Kampala, Uganda for the Global Urbanism Studio in the summer of 2019 shed light on the complex and highly orchestrated social

SUMMER 2020/2021

Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

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GLOBAL URBANISM STUDIO

STITELMAN HOEFERLIN BERNSTINE ADENGO AHIMBISIBWE GMÜR SCHULZE CARTER KOKORA CORREA DAVIDSON SHEPPARD WHITE KIM

Contents

Notes on Pandemic Teaching. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Hoeferlin Multiple Urban Constellations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Stitelman Open Air. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Stitelman Summer 2021 Studio: Open Air Markets. . . . . . . . . 3 Summer 2020 Studio: Strong & Weak Systems . . . . 4 Dispatch from Kampala. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Adengo, Ahimbisibwe & Stitelman Market Photos: Kampala. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Tony Blackwolf Market Photos: Zurich. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Jurg Schoenburg Dispatch from Zürich | 2020. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Gmür Dispatch from Zürich | 2021. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Gmür Dispatch from New York & Hong Kong . . . . . . . . 16 Kokora & Carter Dispatch from New York. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Correa & Dobrowalski Dispatch from Brisbane. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Bowstead, Davidson, Hill, Gausachs Dispatch from the Toronto. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Sheppard & White Dispatch from the Oceans. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Kim Acknowledgements & Additional information. . . . 28 interactions that had to be recognized in any design speculation. In light of the pandemic, we trained our spotlight on our own surprise, in real time, at the novel disruptions to daily life in cities around the world. In this case, the immediacy was all around us, and the questions of how cities would respond, adapt, and endure were at the forefront of our minds. What made this studio different than previous years was that we were in the midst of a culture of not knowing, watching our own cities and the ways we navigate them change before our very eyes. When leading a

study abroad studio, an instructor hopes that being on the ground, eating the food, meeting the people, and seeing the site, squelches generic responses. In this workshop-based, fully remote studio, it was my hope as an instructor that the significance of the moment would allow each student to directly reflect back their own perceptions, fears, and aspirations for the city in a time of crisis. We took inspiration from Buckminster Fuller, who looked to creativity and the tools at hand to propose specific yet speculative projects at multiple scales. In the most optimistic frame, one that we are privileged to occupy as designers, we speculated on how crisis may afford an opening to rethink the future of cities, in terms of density, human-ecological relationships, economic stability, and the inhabitation of new territories. In the first phase of the 2020 studio, students were asked to identify systems that had been revealed by the pandemic to be strong or weak. Students worked in groups to draw the discrete strong or weak systems at the global scale, and then to identify a set of touch points, building and spatial typologies, that were the physical expression. We called these touch points constellations. They grounded our conversation about the effects of crisis, focusing our attention on the sites that had latent potential to affect urban resilience. In subsequent workshops, students continued to work in groups and could either build on the concept of their constellation or respond to something particular to each new context and design process. In Kampala, we worked with Doreen Adengo, Achilles Ahimbisibwe, and students from Uganda Martyrs University, and focused on adaptations to Nakasero Market. For this workshop we commissioned Tony Black Wolf, a photographer in Kampala, to document the market in the early days of the pandemic. Each group proposed an alteration to an element of the market, imagining how a small change could leverage a significant positive impact for safety or economic stability for the vendors and shoppers who rely on the market. In a comparative workshop, we focused on a set of markets in Zurich with Patrick Gmür. His prompt had us look at the square as a central but underutilized space in the city. Each group was given a research question as an inroad to understanding the political, historical, and ecological conditions that an adapted Helvatiaplatz could affect. Marcus Carter and Michael Kokora led a workshop jointly that mirrored their practice in Hong Kong and New York City. Their workshop, Displacing Density, focused on the physical form of the city. Students removed 1 unit of density from the urban context and added 1.5 units of density back in an altered form. They developed their ideas using physical models, transforming them according to operative verbs. For the workshop on Manaus, Brazil, we were joined by Felipe Correa and Devin Dobrowolski. They challenged us to tell a story of the city using five scales of maps, with the goal of making them so suggestive that, without designing a specific intervention, the latent tensions and potential of the city were laid bare. Lola Sheppard and Mason White introduced us to their research in the Arctic and a design process grounded in narrative drawing. Students developed comics of human and non-human stories in the Arctic, loosely speculating on future contexts, technologies, and adaptations. On the other side of the globe, James Davidson, Sam Bowstead, Leonor Gaosachs, and Britt Hill invited us to speculate about how landforms and density could be used to bolster resiliency in the Rosalie neighborhood of Brisbane, Australia. And finally, we went out to sea with Elisa Kim in a workshop that asked us to draw the world from the position of the oceans, their immense expanse, and contested space. This workshop drew us back to our constellations to think about global interconnectedness and the necessity for the long view of stewardship, as

Global Urbanism Dispatch | 2

untold ecosystems and cities will become unliveable in the future if the delicate balance of the ocean is disrupted. Along the way our studio was featured in Archinect and the Ugandan newspaper New Vision. This publication is composed of dispatches from studio collaborators over those two pandemic summers that reveal how this tumultuous time has shaped their attitudes toward design, practice, and the city,

Following the typological analysis we turned our attention to Kampala and Zurich, to test how our observations about the performance and requirements of open air markets could be applied to real urban spaces in two distinct contexts. Doreen Adengo and Achilles Ahimbisibwe (in Kampala, Uganda) and Patrick Gmür (in Zurich, Switzerland) opened their cities to us and gave us space to think about and design the constellations of urban systems, at many scales, that will be required to meet the demands of the future.

Open Air

Jonathan Stitelman, Senior Lecturer The market is understood as both a global phenomenon of cultural and economic transaction as well as a physical space, an infrastructure of exchange and cosmopolitan expression. The term “open market” is intentionally broad, and each student worked toward describing a particular typology of open market in order to understand the realities of urban form and materiality. This was the origin point to speculate on how something so simple as an open space of exchange could become a site to meet the demands of future generations: climate change, population density, and ecological function. These challenges can be thought of as requiring large, systemic change to move the needle in the right direction. But we started looking in the other direction by testing ways the current physical form of cities, in particular the space of the open market, could be designed to effect change. The summer 2021 studio continued the workshop format of the previous year but focused on a single urban typology and two distinct contexts: Zurich and Kampala. The studio was run in an in-person/remote hybrid format. Over the course of the semester we went out into the field several times to see the many urban spaces that converge in the market. Susan Taylor, the director of the Municipal port of St. Louis, explained how the city’s port infrastructure is intertwined with road and rail infrastructure regionally and nationally. We visited Tyrean Lewis’ Heru Urban Farm, where he grows fruits and vegetables that connect him to his heritage, as the descendent of Texan farmers. He sells what he grows at farmers markets and in food deserts in St. Louis. We also visited Dail Chambers’ Coahoma Orchards, a formerly vacant lot in the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood now planted with rows of fruit trees. Finally, we rented space at the Hyde Park Farmers Market and sold postcards of the markets in Zurich and Kampala, so we could understand through direct experience what it meant to be a vendor. Students joined these field trips remotely on Zoom as well as in person—including to help Chambers weed the orchard. We also had a robust lecture series. Landscape architect Alex Wall gave a talk on his seminal work Programming the Urban Surface and Victor Gruen’s mastery of the mall typology. Dr. Guy Trangoš, an architect and researcher based in Johannesburg, South Africa, lectured about his research on radio towers and the types of urban space they construct at small and large scales. II Luscri, assistant vice provost for innovation and entrepreneurship at Washington University, talked to us about interdisciplinary collaboration and spaces of innovation. And to bring it all back to the St. Louis context, Fatimah Muhammad, entrepreneur and CEO of Apiary @ the Park gave a lecture on her work developing a farmers market in the Hyde Park neighborhood, with the goal of providing fresh food in a food desert and making space for entrepreneurship in the north side of the city. Each of these lectures and field trips gave us insight into the ways markets create stability and have an intrinsic, strategic logic. In parallel with the field work and lectures, students did precedent analyses of open market typologies, developed ways of representing urban spaces of commerce, and declared the demands for the market of the future to respond to. The images to the right are part analysis, part speculation of three distinct types of open air markets.

The entrance to Heru Urban Farms, at Confluence Farms in St. Louis County, 2021.

Tiffany Dockins and Catherine Hunley selling post cards at the Hyde Park market, summer 2021.

Lecturer and Associate Director of the Office for Community Engagement Matt Bernstine tends to bricks at Dail Chambers's orchard. STUDENT PROJECT DESCRIPTION Yu Tang began the semester studying river markets. She observed how the market constructs proximity in a fluid landscape. The locus of exchange inverted the fabric of the city: long, thin boats navigated rivers and gathered into clusters at the edges of the river. The buildings at the edge of the river turned toward it, creating openings between the dry and wet city. Her observations of the river market revealed a literal fluidity of exchange. At the end of the semester, she created the black-and-white drawing to the right, which depicts the many scales of labor and exchange that occur in river markets, both at the bank of the river and into the hinterland. Teresa Lu studied the street market, a special kind of space where the street leads directly into buildings without a change in ground material. At the core of her study was a question about how the section of the street revealed distinct relationships of movement and commerce, and how a method of drawing those relationships could reveal small margins to adjust the programming and physical infrastructure of the street. Catherine Hunley looked far from dense cities to remote markets in the American West. Her approach was to identify the minimum condition, where the market served sparsely settled places to create brief moments of intensity at intersections or remarkable locations. Her hybrid drawing to the right shows how markets find strategically important locations in the landscape, a critical dimension of commerce and a source of strength for the market as a site of adaptation.

Yu Tang: Fluid Market Urbanism | 2021.

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Teresa Lu: Adapt the Street | 2021.

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Catherine Hunley: Constructing Proximity in Remote Landscapes | 2021.

Strong & Weak Constellations STUDENT PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Essentialness Joe Mueller & Rachel Reinhard At the outset of the pandemic, we were confronted with the idea of essential work—the areas of employment that were necessary to maintain the function of society. The global tourism industry faltered as countries shut their borders, offices closed, and people who could sheltered in place,. These two featured projects explore these ideas. Joe Mueller and Rachel Reinhard represent the global expression of essentialness and the localized constellation points of essential interactions. Their work highlights the urban spaces and typologies of the everyday that were adapted at the start of the pandemic.

ESSENTIAL CLEAN

Multiple cities, states, and countries have implemented various stay at home orders due to the continued outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. However, a few selected businesses have been deemed essential by authorities within the government. One intersection is the role of the laundromat and the essential nature to the community. Laundromats allow people, predominately of a lower socio-economic class, access to wash clothing, towels, bed sheets, and other various necessities. Additionally, by washing items it is believed to help reduce the spread of the virus. The intersection and aims to understand the duality between the individual and the physical place. Laundromats are providing an essential service as a matter of public health and hygiene, especially in light of the coronavirus outbreak. Especially during times of crisis, it is important that policymakers understand nuances around the poverty experience. Making sure that everyone has access to clean clothes is not only critical for the hygiene and health of people without a washing machine at home, but also for the rest of us who are quickly learning just how interconnected we really are.

nw a a t io s nh a l | a v$ e 2 r a / g d e

y national lockdown and classification of essential

87% of customers live within a mile of the facility

essential statewide Laundromat customers’ median household income is

undeclared laundromats during COVID-19

sources: https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2020/04/10/laundromat-deserts-coronavirus-allister-chang https://laundrylux.com/blog/laundromat-essential-business-designations-our-state-by-state-guide/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-laundromats-an-essential-service/ https://martinray.com/p-33942-key-statistics-laundromat-investors-should-know.html https://www.nationallaundryequipment.com/how-to-calculate-price-per-load-on-a-washer/#sthash.PmXN14vm.WUU5UXbK.dpbs dry wash

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ESSENTIAL SUSTENANCE

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open to public pre-covid 19 open to seniors

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cleaning pre-covid cleaning deliveries pre-covid deliveries

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“Crisis Sparks ‘Inflection Point’ For Online Grocery Services” “Increase Demand On Grocers As More People Cook At Home” “U.s. Grocery Stores Becoming Sites Of Protest”

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Global Urbanism Dispatch | 4

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STUDENT PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Tourism Khalid Aljohani & Jing Qiang

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TOURISM is essential for creating demand as an activity. It spreads demand across different industries, which helps economic growth. It motivates and requires countries to boost their developments to the high global standards.

Khalid Aljohani and Jing Qiang looked at the global tourism industry, the immediate disruptions to travel, and the various spatial considerations regarding public health and employment.

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1. Provide liquidity and protect jobs. 2. Recover confidence through safety & security. 3. Public-private collaboration for an efficient reopening. 4. Open borders with responsibility. 5. Harmonize and coordinate protocols & procedures. 6. Added value jobs through new technologies. 7. Innovation and Sustainability as the new normal.

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“TRAVEL AND TOURISM ACCOUNTS FOR 10% OF THE GLOBAL GDP ($2.7 TRILLION) AFFORD MORE THAN 100 MILLION JOBS”

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INTERNATIONAL HOTEL

PARIS

- TOP3 most visited city in Europe - 500,000 visitors/ yr - Tourism industry share 8.6% of GDP in China

- 419UNITS/ ACRE - More than 700 hotels in New york

MOTEL - 80 UNITS/ ACRE - More than 2000 motel in Paris - 60% sharing spaces

Berlin - 28% sharing spaces

NEW YORK

dustry after the Covid-19 pandemic - Restaurant have to follow strict public health regulations for dining in - Crowded dining rooms and interaction with employees are dangerous

LOFT APARTMENT - 100 UNITS/ ACRE - More than 1000 motel in

Elevator

- 1st visited city in US - 65.1 million visitors/yr - Tourism industry share 7.8 of GDP in US

- $225 BILLION of losses globally in restaurants’in-

- Public steps and theaters are parts of the cultural experience for tourists - TDF(an organization that relies on theatre and dance performances and the venues) has been seriously affected by the coronavirus seriously

RESTAURANT

COURTYARD HOUSING - 40 UNITS/ ACRE - 1580 courtyard airbnb in

Beijing - 32% sharing spaces

Outside Corridor

- 99% stuff is for tourist - The spaces have to develop new ways for flexibility and open to the world through online shopping since it lacks of diversity in products

PUBLIC STEPS

SOUVENIR SHOP

- Stops are places for waiting, which require high safety measures - designing waiting areas or seatings inside the bus and providing more air ventilation through redesigning the envelope. Courtyard

- 3RD most visited city in Europe - 40 MILLION visitors/ yr - Tourism industry share 9.7% of GDP in China - 30% declined of hotel in Paris 2020

- Tourism industry share 9.5% of GDP in China - 20.6% declined of tourism revenue in 2020- 1ST visited city in China - 322 MILLION visitors/ yr BEIJING ESFAHAN

- 4.76 million visitors/ yr - TOP20 most visited city in world (Bloomberg) - Tourism industry share 6.5% of GDP i Italy - 5.4% of employment rate from tourism industry

587 CASES

FLIGHT CAPACITY DECREASED

BEIJING

DELTA 40% AA 60% UA 60% SOUTHWEST 50%

ABBASI HOTEL - 93 UNITS/ ACRE - 57 religious hotel in Esfahan - 60% sharing spaces

359926 CASES ANA CSA CEA

88%

PUBLIC TRANSIT

70% 73%

FLIGHT CAPACITY DECREASED NEW YORK

1979 CASES LOBBY

- The essential spaces for designers to think about the vertical circulation and movement with social distancing.

- Much islands considered marine tourism as the leading economy - Over 40 cruise ship have had confirmed positive cases of covid- 19 -Over 700 people became infected in British-regi stered Diamond Princess

- 4th most visited city in Europe - 16th in the world - Tourism industry share 14.6% of GDP in Spain

HOSTEL Balcony

LONDON

26867 CASES 6703 CASES BERLIN LONDON

PARIS

8224 CASES BARCELONA

SUPERBLOCK

- 677 UNITS/ ACRE - 60% sharing spaces - More than 600 hostel in London

- 1ST most popular city in the world - 30 million tourists/ yr - Tourism industry share 11% of GDP in UK - 21% fallen in hotel occupancy - 27% decline of REVPAR

ROME

5600 CASES 17083 CASES

- 120UNITS/ ACRE - 20,000 Airbnb in Barcelona

LA UA IAG

50% 20% 75%

FLIGHT CAPACITY DECREASED

BARCELONA

Parking Playground

Balcony

AIRPORT TERMINAL, BARCELONA, SPAIN

LOCATION: Spian, Barcelona – El Prat Airport

17083 CONFIRMED CASES

Inside courtyard

ESFAHAN

CRUISE SHIP

- 1st destination in Europe - 10 million visitors/ yr - Tourism industry share 13% of GDP i Italy - $8.3 billion lost in tourism revenues in 2020 - 90% hotel cancelled in March in Italy

ROME AIRPORT

BED AND BREAKFAST - 25 UNITS/ ACRE - 52% sharing spaces - 711 B&B in Rome - 34,000 in Italy

Outdoor common area

- Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport closed terminal 1 - Non-fliers are allowed inside airports - Security lines are packed and requires a long waiting time

The airport is essential for the future of tourism. The place where the journey starts and ends. Checking in and out across the borders is critical, especially for pandemics such as covid19. Travelers have to wait for hours and sometimes for days for their next flight, which requires long waiting time at the airport. Shutting down borders and international flights have affected the tourism industry the most.

ISSUES:

Airports’ terminals are empty due to the Covid19 pandemic. This system showed its weakness and need for design flexibility and adaptation. - Non-fliers are allowed inside many airports.

4th MOST VISITED CITY IN EUROPE 16th MOST VISITED CITY IN THE WORLD TOURISM INDUSTRY SHARE 14.6% OF GDP IN SPAIN

- Touch surfaces and digital screens. - Security lines are packed and requires a long waiting time. - Airport as an indoor space has less air ventilation.

El Prat Airport’s international security lines were packed. The question of density and compactness in airports and transportation hubs is critical for tourism resiliency. TOURISM AND PLACES FOR LIVING Resources:

1. Photos of deserted, nearly empty airports around the world show how coronavirus has decimated air travel, businessinsider.com 2. How Airport will change after Covid-19. www.cntraveler.com

Dispatch from Kampala | In Conversation: Doreen Adengo, Achilles Ahimbisibwe & Jonathan Stitelman Doreen Adengo Adengo Architects Achilles Ahimbisibwe Uganda Martyrs University Nkozi

A vendor shading herself under an umbrella in Nakasero Market, 2020. Photo: Tony Blackwolf January 21, 2022 Summer 2021 marked the third year of a collaboration between the Global Urbanism Studio and contacts in Uganda, which introduced Master of Urban Design students to Nakasero Market and Kampala, Uganda. The first of the workshops took place in person in summer 2019, while the next two were held remotely, coinciding with the global pandemic. In this conversation, the Sam Fox School’s Jonathan Stitelman and Doreen Adengo and Achilles Ahimbisibwe, who served as guest faculty, discuss the site and the previous workshops, which all focused on elements of the city and how they might be platforms for urban transformation—the opposite of a masterplan. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Jonathan Stitelman: I’d like to start by asking you to set the backdrop of Kampala, and what qualities of the city you respond to in your work and research? Doreen Adengo: I’d like to start in 2019, and Achilles will talk about 2020/21, because that's when everything changed. During our research in 2019, we were able to go to the market physically and understand how things were working. To give a backdrop, the Kampala Metropolitan Area has a population of 3 million, with a large portion predominantly unemployed. This demographic tends to find a source of income in the informal sector, working in the markets. Our research we proposed going into the market and representing non-visual and intangible conditions within the market. That was the goal at the time. Achilles Ahimbisibwe: In 2020 we had the unique experience with a pandemic, because no one knew what to expect, and people didn't know where to start. Initially, the government had shut down almost everything but the left the food markets open. Fortunately Nakasero Market, one of the oldest and most vibrant markets in the city center, stayed open during the lockdown but had to adapt to new urban guidelines and social distancing protocols. The market continued to operate; however, because many of the transport and urban mobility sectors

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were closed, there were some additional challenges. In our research we're trying to analyze these existing conditions and see if we could speculate on a possible future for urban resilience, especially in the face of not only pandemics, but also the negative impacts of climate change, which is becoming a reality every day. JS: What are the ways you see climate change impacting Kampala? AA: With the increasing rate of hardscape urban development, we're witnessing a lot of urban greening disappear, which would be one of the possible solutions to curb the impacts [of climate change]. Right now we have a lot of city flooding. We also have a lot of dry spells, which are discontinuous, very long and hot, much hotter days than before. And we have less space for people to go and rest to take a shade or to meet up in uncommercial space, so it makes the city much harder to leave and also makes walkability quite a challenge. JS: Can you describe what it's like to enter Nakasero Market, and paint us a picture of that space in the city? DA: In 2019 it was a completely different environment. The market is at the bottom of Nakasero Hill at the edge of downtown Kampala. Typically there was lots of activity: thousands of people coming in and out of the markets and taxis and boda bodas in the streets.1 One would enter the market from Dastur Street through the open parking lot and see vendors under umbrellas as you navigate through this open space. Uphill, there is an open building, where the market administration is. And then just below it, downhill and across Market Street to the south, there is one of the oldest buildings at the market, built in 1927. In that building, there is a second market that sells spices and meat. If you then go along Market Street further down the road, it would lead you to the taxi park and more of downtown Kampala. There are other markets around the taxi park, like Owino Market,

which is a clothes market, and Usafi, which sells a mix of goods. AA: During the pandemic the area around Nakasero Market became a more vacant space. Even the streets that are joining or adjacent to the market are quite sparse, with very few people walking around. The market now has designated entry points, unlike before the pandemic where one just walked in wherever they felt like. For example, some clients who already know what they want would go to the vegetable section directly. However, with the new COVID regulations, everyone uses strict entry points where government workers check people’s temperatures and have them wash hands or sanitize. The shoppers’ access ways were much wider, because when COVID started, no one knew what to expect, so the market vendors were spaced at least two meters apart and the access space for the clients was made wider. Visibility has improved because one could see so much farther—maybe 20, even 50 meters ahead—all around the market. So it is easier to navigate but also more complex for the usual market vendors to run their operations. JS: In the first few workshop, in 2019, we dropped into the market and tried to get to know it, based on the characters and elements we observed. I know that's been part of your African mobility research, and I wonder if you could talk about how these finite, granular aspects fit into your research on the city? DA: When Jonathan, Achilles, and I did this research with Uganda Martyrs University (UMU) and Washington University in 2019, 2020, and 2021, we wanted to consider elements and characters that ma de the market distinctive and to understand how that could inform a design process. We started to think of these different elements, especially in 2020 the string delineating the 2x2 meter space designated by the authorities for vendor spaces, and then the umbrella.

Nakasero Evolution Diagram Jonathan Kateega, Mark Page, Yu Tang & Chenzhang Zhao | 2021. The dimensions of the umbrella became larger for social distancing. And then there was the box, as one of those units, one of the persistent elements of the market. These became the units that were organizing the space. That’s how vendors were able to reorganize themselves and create a space that was safe. AA: What I find interesting about how it reflects on the city at large is that with a string delineating the 2x2 dimensions, these are tangible elements that city planners use to keep people in check. However, the umbrella and the box become more adaptable pieces. The umbrella was much smaller in 2020, then became much larger out of the need to cordon off a vendor’s space. And then the box would be a typical unit to adapt the space: some boxes are used for sitting, some are used for packaging material, and some are used as hard boundaries between two vendors. When it reflects on the larger scale, the city planners do one thing and then the urban dwellers add self-definition to it. DA: What kept coming up with the WashU students was the idea about what is permanent and what is temporary. On the Uganda side we felt that the umbrella was permanent. However, to the WashU students, it was temporary. In practice the umbrella becomes permanent because of the space that's designated. I thought that was very interesting.

just a flimsy umbrella. However, during operations the Zurich market ran maybe four hours and then everyone dismantled their shade and left, which seems more temporary. Yet in Kampala, the flimsy umbrella is a more permanent feature in the market. While there are some shaded, enclosed areas of the market, many vendors elect to use umbrellas to maintain their autonomy over their space. In the market now almost all the umbrellas are the same size and are picked up from one location, so there is a very consistent market for the umbrella that's brewing and I think that will persist. JS: What you’re talking about is a kind of urbanism that is so emergent, that comes from the bottom up and is super granular and grassroots. It’s interesting to picture how designers can interface with something that they don’t necessarily have control over. How do the emergent qualities we see in the market, relative to the pandemic, show up at the scale of the city?

JS: As you’re talking, it’s making me wonder what qualities of these changes will persist into the future? In 2021, we ran our workshop based on the idea of evolution. Are there ways that the market works now that you think will persist for much longer?

DA: I think the pandemic caused a decentralization of the city. In the first lockdown in March 2020, one was at home and had to source their needs from within their neighborhood. For example, in my case, I was used to being at work near Dewinton Road, where I would get my deliveries sent from Nakasero, which was close to the office. During the pandemic I couldn’t do that anymore. Once I was home on Mutungo Hill during lockdown, far from Nakasero, I started to look to things around me, going to different markets and different sources. I started to realize that people around Kampala were doing the same, finding things around their neighborhood.

AA: From an evolution standpoint, initially there were much smaller umbrellas that have now become much larger to protect more space for each vendor. It was interesting that in Zurich, Switzerland, they had more permanent structures. Each vendor would come and set up a sturdy aluminum structure with a robust frame and covering. Yet in Kampala, it’s

AA: A related thing happened with the market vendors in Nakasero Market. Public transportation was closed and they were not allowed to return to their homes. The vendors had to find alternative approaches to their regular lives. They had to stay within the market and find spaces to wash up and sleep within their stalls. They relied on decentralized approaches to source

customers, using boda boda riders to deliver produce. Payment strategies that included mobile money helped 2 the vendors remain relevant to their customers. JS: Those are interesting examples of evolution in response to the pandemic. Do you see other designers engaging with the market or with boda boda drivers? AA: Yes, three or four services: Jumia, Kwanzaa Logistics, Safe Boda, and Glovo. These deliver from restaurants as well as carry parcels and packages between customers. Now Kalerwe Market, Nakasero Market, and others are getting onto those platforms to find ways for more people to access their produce. JS: It was great to hear your insights about Nakasero Market and Kampala. I think it's important when these major disruptions happen to be thoughtful about how the city changes and responds. That’s how designers open up new frameworks for thinking about scale, program, and equity, and reassess the values we bring to our work. Thank you, Doreen and Achilles, for allowing us to do that and for guiding us through that process in Kampala, as well as for this conversation.

Nakasero Market as seen from the administration building, 2020. Photo: Tony Blackwolf 1 Boda bodas are public commuter motor cycles. 2 Mobile money refers to a mobile phone-to to-mobile phone transaction and money transfer system.

STUDENT PROJECT DESCRIPTION This workshop examined new ways of representing non-visual or intangible conditions within African urban environments. We analyzed changes made to adapt to the new government guidelines spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and speculated on possible futures in light of the current crisis. In the first week of the workshop, we focused on the physical elements of the market—the boxes, crates, tarps, and boundaries—which constitute Nakasero’s distinctiveness. Chen, Jin, and Aber studied various forms of movement in and around the market, noting how each form of mobility was scaled to either the expansive urban space beyond the market or to the dense, dynamic space in the market’s interior. Their analysis of these elements and the movement of people, vehicles, and goods led them to speculate a future market infrastructure that allowed for increased density and more fluid vertical movement for porters and carts while maintaining or increasing space for selling.

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NAKASERO MARKET KAMPALA, UGANDA | 2020

Photography by Tony Blackwolf

NAKASERO MARKET KAMPALA, UGANDA | 2021

Photography by Tony Blackwolf

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Brupacherplatz

Buerkilplatz

Helvetiaplatz

These three markets were our sites in the summer 2021 Global Urbanism Studio, co-taught with Patrick Gmür.

THREE MARKETS ZÜRICH, SWITZERLAND | 2021

Photography by Jürg SchÖnenberger

Dispatch from Zürich | 2020 Think global, act local! Patrick Gmür Steib Gmür Geschwentner Kyburz

November 13, 2020 The COVID-19 pandemic has left deep scars in Switzerland, and the economic and social consequences are massive. Moreover, this crisis has a direct impact on the three levels of sustainability. This applies globally, but also locally—and this is precisely where the opportunity lies to learn from this crisis and, more importantly, to initiate appropriate changes. The COVID-19 crisis shows that political systems and society are prepared to take radical steps if necessary and can provide essential impulses for a sustainable, climate-friendly, and diverse "post-corona world." It is not only a matter of finding short-term solutions to the current situation, but also of counteracting similar crises in the long term, making our cities—and thus our society—more resilient and improving the quality of life for all. For years Zurich has been one of the cities with the highest quality of life in the world. The reasons for this are manifold. Zurich is located in the heart of Europe and is well connected with the entire world and the surrounding countries via the airport and the rail network. But also in relation to the rest of Switzerland, Zurich is ideally located and well connected by public transport within the metropolitan area as well as to all major Swiss cities. Politically, Switzerland is one of the most stable countries in the world and Zurich is one of the most important financial centers in the world. The city is also an important educational center, its healthcare system is among the best in the world, and its crime rate is low, making the city a very safe place. In addition, the city is well connected to nature. The clean Lake Zurich, together with its proximity to the intact mountains, makes the city even more attractive. Thanks to direct democracy, citizens can express themselves on all political issues and thus exert a direct influence on essential social, economic, or political questions. For example, the Zurich electorate has decided through popular initiatives that one-third of all apartments in the city of Zurich must be affordable by 2050, and that per capita energy consumption may only be 2000 watts by 2050. In addition, a new law is under discussion, according to which greenhouse gas emissions per person must be reduced to net zero by 2050. The task of analyzing the effects of the COVID-19 crisis using the example of Helvetiaplatz in the city of Zurich and proposing appropriate urban, architectural, and landscape planning interventions shows that local sites that can be used to identify possible future solutions. The crisis also reveals that the majority of the population is willing to reflect and change their own lives. So expectations are high that our society and our country as a whole will change. In looking to revive the economy following COVID-19-related lockdowns, it is imperative to find solutions that also align with urgently needed climate protection measures. This starting position allows a place like the centrally located Hevetiaplatz to be re-read and interpreted. What can such an urban open space achieve in terms of climate protection and global warming, but also in terms of a functional city center or short, local value chains? The COVID-19 crisis shows how important social contacts and mutual support are and thus the immediate neighborhood. It is therefore essential to strengthen the neighborhood streets, local recreation areas, and open spaces in the city area. The outside view of a city and a place always reveals new perspectives. This is one of the reasons why this international workshop has enormous potential. The students’ works demonstrate the great and diverse development possibilities for sustainably transforming such an urban space. What all of the contributions have in common is their desire to recognize and strengthen the value and importance of such a public space. Especially for a democratic society, the versatile and flexible use of such an urban space is crucial. In the future, all current uses such as marketplace, meeting place, bicycle exchange, demonstration site, etc., should remain possible. However, the place can be upgraded through simple and relatively inexpensive means in order to make an additional ecological contribution that is essential not only for the immediate neighborhood, but also for the city as a whole. It is also interesting to note that there are different needs for such a place depending on the seasons. All of the students’ works were convincing. What was analyzed and recognized in one week is surprising, and how this knowledge was translated into designs suitable for everyday use is inspiring. Two group-developed works exemplify this new thinking. With one intervention, various sustainable improvements are achieved. Thanks to newly planted trees, a canopy of leaves provides shade. The square thus receives a new green identity and the trees make a decisive contribution against the summer overheating of this urban area. At the same time, the square can be used in a variety of ways as before. The second work designs an object that can be used in a variety of ways and is recessed in the flooring. This serves as a support for the market stalls, and with the built-in light, a specific lighting mood can be given to the place in the evening and at night. With the built-in water jets, the object, which is arranged in a grid, can also be used as a large fountain. The water feature makes it is possible to react to the global warming. The starting point for this multifunctional, flexible idea is the world-famous Swiss pocket knife. Both works are exemplary for the overall interesting contributions on how Helvetiaplatz can be further developed in terms of the issues at hand. The COVID-19 pandemic is scary and affects us all. Even as it fades, it still offers opportunities to find answers to overarching questions and to look for new and still unknown solutions. “Think global, act local” offers a good and effective approach.

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Josiah Brown & Rachel Madryga

STUDENT PROJECT DESCRIPTION Helvetiaplatz is located at the northwestern edge of Zurich. It is an open square framed by historic and modern buildings. Twice a week, it hosts a market. Students were asked to speculate on how the market could be designed to function at a different increments of time through changes to the public realm. Josiah Brown and Rachel Madryga developed a single element with many possible functions for comfort, atmosphere, and performance. They proposed arraying it across Helvetiaplatz in a grid pattern, amplifying its multiple uses across the public space. The project by Dongzhe Tao and Haihan Qu, started with a study of the impact of climate change on Zurich. They found that Helvetiaplatz was quite vulnerable to the heat island effect and developed a planting pattern to grow a cooling forest with native vegetation. They show how this site would change with the passing of the seasons.

Dongzhe Tao & Haihan Qu

Dispatch from Zürich | 2021 Market Plus! Patrick Gmür Steib Gmür Geschwentner Kyburz

September 28, 2021 The maxims about “learning from history” are especially true for urban planning. Every market place has its own history and is an important public space for every city. At the same time, each city has its predominant culture that informs its own specific relationship and history with its market. What might work in Kampala, Uganda, might not necessarily apply to Zurich, Switzerland. What happens at a market in Italy might be foreign in a city like Zurich. Despite major differences, there are, of course, similarities. In addition, environmental conditions are changing rapidly. COVID-19 and the climate crisis demand, more than ever, sustainable action at all levels. As urban planners and architects, we know that urban planning and architecture are good vehicles for new ideas and offer the chance to implement new, effective solutions. In Zurich, food markets fulfill various tasks. First and foremost, they sell fresh produce: meat, fish, vegetables, dairy products, and cut flowers. These mostly come from the local region, thus preventing long transport routes. The produce is also usually produced sustainably. At the same time, the markets are social meeting places. Users usually travel to them on foot or by bicycle. In this sense, too, the markets make an important contribution to an ecological, 2,000-watt food chain. Since these markets occur only once, at most twice a week in the morning, these spaces, which are important for urban development, remain empty and mostly unused for the rest of the week. The course assignment I led for the summer 2022 Global Urbanism Studio was developed with these insights in mind. How can the potential of these urban spaces be used in a sustainable and meaningful way during the market-free period, and how can these spaces make a contribution to combat climate change? We were not prepared for COVID-19. It has been amazing to see how quickly and incisively the world has reacted to this serious crisis. Climate change is happening, yet we seem to be willing to take great risks in the face of these emerging dangers because we refrain from adapting our behavior. I am convinced that the current generation of students and future graduates will have to face exactly these dangers and that appropriate holistic solutions will be part of their urgent mission. We must recognize these as opportunities to develop qualities for ourselves and our environment that are unknown today, with new and perhaps surprising solutions. It is up to us to develop new strategies in architecture, landscape design, and urban planning that help to reduce CO2 emissions and get a grip on climate change. The outcomes of the Zurich Workshop are both pleasing and convincing. The students succeeded in developing surprising and innovative solutions for the three market locations—Helvetia, Brupacher, and Bürkliplatz—in a very short period of time based on comprehensive analyses and concentrated work. Thus, students propose Helvetiaplatz be covered with a new, sophisticated roof construction and through this intervention will become the new “living room” of the city of Zurich. With this canopy, versatile and different uses are possible throughout the day and in every season. The fact that this canopy can also generate solar power makes sense in view of the abovementioned problems. Brupacherplatz will be used in a variety of ways thanks to new, differentiated street furniture and roofs that also generate solar power, and at the Bürkliplatz, nature and city will be combined in the future with the inclusion of water cycles that have been made visible to create a new square with surprising recreational qualities. All three contributions reveal new and, in the sense of a comprehensive and holistically considered sustainability, unexpected potentials and interesting ideas on how we might use public urban spaces in the future—that is, if we want to!

STUDENT PROJECT DESCRIPTION The three different types of sites—occasional street market, historic district, and modernist open space— offered students an opportunity to test various performative, ecological, and social functions in their work. Ba d

ene

rst

ras s

Helvetiaplatz Brupacherplatz Se eb

tra

ass str

sse

le Te

Burkliplatz

Lake Zurich

N 500 M

Diagram of Zurich, annotated with market locations.

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Yu Tang & Jennifer Wang Reintroduction of Nature in a New Way Softening the Edge

Reintroduction of Nature in a New Way Softening the Edge

Rachel Bennett, Catherine Hunley & Teresa Lu

Jinxin Huang & Chenzhang Zhao

Dispatch from New York Pandemics and the Resilience of Urban Density Felipe Correa & Devin Dobrowolski Somatic Collaborative

August 2, 2021 Having witnessed the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic from New York City—one of the early epicenters of this global health crisis—has given us the opportunity to reflect on how the pandemic has altered and will continue to alter urban life. It has made us rethink the role of health and urban life through three interrelated concepts. The first is the need to increase true forms of public space in our cities. The second is to rethink the role of the urban home by moving beyond the land-use zoning silos inherited from the twentieth century. The third is reimagining streetscapes. As we continue to see physical stores disappear at unprecedented rates (a phenomenon accelerated by the pandemic), we need to ask ourselves what kind of street life we want to see in a post-virus era. If there is one lesson we have learned from this pandemic, it is how essential true public space is in cities. Today we are witnessing a gradual erosion of proper public space in favor of endless models of public/private development. Yet, during such a strict quarantine, the only urban spaces that served as an escape to “sheltering in place” in Manhattan apartments that average 60 square meters are parks. While most if not all privately owned public spaces were closed, Central Park, East River Park, and Hudson River Park, among others, gave breathing room to millions of people from a broad socioeconomic spectrum who otherwise would not have had access to safe open space. Yet the pandemic has also revealed that not everyone in NYC has equal access to high-quality public open space. For example, many high-density areas of the Bronx and Queens have much less immediate access to park infrastructure than in Manhattan. Rather than fleeing from the city, we should aim to create better inner-city open spaces where we can temporarily escape the city. The pandemic has shown us that working remotely is today more effective than ever. This sets the stage for a fundamental shift in the way we conceive housing, by expanding the notions of home. For one, today we continue to live in cities with twentieth century zoning models, with office space generally segregated from residential areas. As people continue to work from home or establish hybrid models between home office and conventional office spaces, where we live and where we work might require less strict differentiation. This means that homes might have to be more multifaceted spaces with office infrastructure that goes beyond the multitasking virtues of the kitchen table. Additionally, as office space shrinks in cities, we will also have to rethink how this square footage gets retrofitted into other uses. Not only will housing units expand their office capabilities, but also office spaces might begin to retrofit domestic uses. Finally, the pandemic has accelerated an urban condition that we had already been witnessing for a while: the gradual eradication of brick-and-mortar stores. When you walk through many parts of Manhattan, you see an extremely high volume of unoccupied ground floor retail space. As the demand for this type of space decreases, there is an opportunity for cities to rethink a new urban vision for the streets—one that might bring programs and uses that previously could not afford streetfront rents. It is important to remember that cities and density have been part of civilization for millennia. While it was common at the beginning of the pandemic to blame high transmission rates on urban density, we must also acknowledge the paramount relevance of cities in bringing people together to advance the economic, political, and social objectives of our societies. It has been mentioned often that cities could pay a density penalty due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that we might see a flight to the suburbs like that of the post-World War II era. We are cautious about such prognostication. For one, the migration from cities to suburbs in the post-war era was aspirational. It was driven by the promise that every family could own their home, a model that was only possible through the urbanization of inexpensive land, impossible to achieve near city centers, and further facilitated by the proliferation of the private car. Today, we have seen that many parts of suburban and rural America are not immune to the ferocity of the coronavirus. This is the case in many parts of rural Florida and Louisiana, for example, where low-density counties are reporting an extremely high number of cases. Additionally, it is important to also remember that cities, because of their infrastructure and the capital they accumulate, have a much greater ability to put together resources to combat pandemics such as the one we are confronting today. Even at the peak of the pandemic, New York City still had a greater number of intensive care beds per capita than many suburban and rural areas of the country. For us, the issue is less about abandoning cities, and more about what we can do to make them better and more resilient to pandemics. We cannot give up so easily on the benefits of urban density.

STUDENT PROJECT DESCRIPTION The workshop began with a reading of Manuel de Sola-Morales’ essay "The Culture of Description" and a lecture about Manaus, Brazil—a remote yet populous city in the heart of the Amazon river basin. de SolaMorales’ essay suggests that one might use the layers of a map to bring about an awareness in the viewer that there are certain features of a city or terrain that are in tension or that prefigure future patterns of development. In short, the map suggests potential, but it is not a design in itself. The workshop was structured along these conceptual guidelines. Students used an overlay mapping technique to develop suggestive maps of Manaus at five scales. The goal of the set of maps was to tease out a narrative about the latent potentials in the landscape that exist between seemingly disparate features of the region. The work shown to the right was done by two groups: Rachel Reinhard and Joe Mueller looked at the relationship between schools, major transportation infrastructure, and floodplains to speculate how these three distinct features might suggest a bundled infrastructure. Jing Qian and Khalid Aljohani overlaid “igarapes” (tributary rivers of the Amazon River), water treatment facilities, and healthcare facilities. At the smallest scale, they realized the potential of a bridge to provide shared open space and clear a bottleneck in the watercourse.

Global Urbanism Dispatch | 16

Rachel Reinhard & Joe Mueller

Khalid Alhojani & Jing Qian

Dispatch from New York & Hong Kong The Crisis of Shared Space Marcus Carter & Michael Kokora OBJECT TERRITORIES

December 19, 2020

Fig. 1. Closed beach in Shek-O, Hong Kong. Photo: Michael Kokora

For all of the rampant speculation in design circles, the COVID-19 pandemic itself may leave little lasting transformation on the physical structure of the city. This would be a tragic missed opportunity to galvanize changes that should occur, regardless of our current circumstances. 2020 has been a powerful reminder that our public spaces and the quality of our shared indoor environments are in crisis.

compensate for single glazing and uninsulated concrete walls. Indoor office spaces are cramped due to high rents and sealed shut. When left unoccupied, mold grows in a few days and is painted over when rented. SARS saw most of the carpet torn out of offices, but that’s of little consequence to air quality or energy consumption in a city with no renewable energy sources in use.

We triggered this pandemic ourselves through habitat destruction and encroachment, and in turn put our urban and architectural design failures into sharp relief. Parks and public spaces are inequitably distributed and inadequately proportioned for the populations they serve. Transit is congested and reliant on personal vehicles with little space left for pedestrians or other forms of personal transportation. The vast majority of our buildings are sealed boxes with unfiltered, poorly oxygenated, recirculated air that increase exposure to pollutants and fuel the transmission of viruses while contributing to greenhouse gas production. The evidence continues to mount with only sporadic efforts and seemingly little will to change.

SARS, H5N1, and H1N1 are still fresh in the collective Hong Kong memory. Well before there were any confirmed COVID-19 cases outside Wuhan or any mention of travel bans, Hong Kong citizens went into full epidemic mode. Nearly everyone was masked and sanitizing procedures were initiated in every building. As a result, Hong Kong has been able to keep the virus in the low 100/day range at its peaks. During the hottest months of the year, beaches are one of the most popular getaways for Hong Kong residents. Worried about the scenes from spring breakers at beaches in the United States, Hong Kong closed its beaches, meaning more people went to the indoor shopping malls, a much more problematic scene for COVID transmission. Fig. 1. Taking a managed approach, South Korea created an app to reserve physically distanced spaces at their beaches; masks were provided, and one could check the population density at a given beach in order to avoid crowding. Surely being outside would be healthier than increasing the density of people inside shopping malls and restaurants. These instances reflect an attitude ofnational governments afford inglittle trust to the public to maintain their own physical distancing.

It was no coincidence the protests against the murder of George Floyd and systemic racism occurred in the sprawling asphalt parking lots of South Minneapolis. Minneapolis remains one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States, and its public park system is no exception. Considered one of the best in the country, the Minneapolis park system’s staffing, spending, and access is primarily driven by white, affluent citizens and their neighborhoods. The Minneapolis Chain of Lakes Regional Park attracts millions of visitors each year—yet in a city that is 42% non-white, only 3% of its visitors are people of color.1 Since the protests in May 2020, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board of Commissioners passed a resolution allowing people without permanent housing to stay in the city’s parks. Community members delivered meals, medical treatment, and counseling. Three months later the encampments ballooned in size to over 500 in some parks and were subsequently cleared due to increased vehicular traffic, crime, drugs, and property damage. Now, limits have been placed to keep the number of tents to 25 as long as day-to-day oversight is maintained by volunteer groups. In Hong Kong, homelessness is less visible. Hong Kong’s territory is only 25% built upon, but given the density of this built area, there are very few urban public spaces. The few that exist are poorly designed or not integrated with the urban fabric. People without housing are often forced to sleep in internet cafés or fast-food restaurants. According to Doctors without Borders, some parts have seen a 50% increase in street sleepers due to restaurant closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.2 The homeless, and those who share flats without bathrooms, rely on large, wellmaintained, naturally ventilated public bathrooms distributed throughout the city. Nevertheless, most of Hong Kong’s locally transmitted COVID-19 cases have occurred indoors: at restaurants, offices, and dance clubs. When Hong Kong lifted the limit on building heights in 1955 most of the older colonial buildings with natural ventilation were destroyed; at the same time, the invention of air conditioners proliferated on building facades of the new multistory buildings to

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In contrast to Hong Kong, Singapore has been increasing open air and naturally ventilated college campus buildings, dining halls, and restaurants despite the tropical climate. Traditional techniques for spacing buildings, raising them off the ground, sun shading, and increasing air flow are being used more and more frequently with major incentives from the government. Without a doubt this has helped reduce the impact of the viral transmission in a city that was also hit hard by SARS. Like Switzerland, Singapore has adopted a “build on built” strategy, given its limited landmass. Companies are encouraged to utilize robotics in order to free up space in industrial areas, housing density is increased by increasing height limits and providing more mass transit and infrastructure while maintaining existing parks and open spaces. Reducing human sprawl will conserve our open spaces, and lessen our infringement on ecosystems and the subsequent habitat destruction that brings humans activity in contact with dangerous pathogens. This would reduce the chances of triggering the next pandemic due to zoonotic transmission between species. In St. Louis this year, we witnessed the provocative, dangerous behavior of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who pointed guns at protestors passing their home on a private street en route to petition their grievances in front of the mayor’s residence. This one-sided aggressive confrontation was disturbing enough even before one considers the fact that private streets still exist in St. Louis. Make no mistake, these relics from the railroad elite are intentional acts of class segregation. Is it not oxymoronic to use “private” and “street” together as a term in our cities? In 2020, the Black

Lives Matter movement illustrated and reinforced the important roles that streets play in giving voice to citizens. Likewise, in Hong Kong there was no other choice but to use the street in the protests of 2014 and 2019. Given the city’s lack of public spaces, residents flooded streets as the only viable venue to project a collective voice. In 2014, one of the largest highways was occupied for 79 days, becoming one of the most vibrant and visited spaces in the city. The highway was filled with food, water, and first aid stations. Office workers from central came to eat their lunches in what became a temporary central park in the center of Hong Kong. Fig 2, 3. As a result of these events, and the COVID-19 pandemic, old problems and new opportunities are clearly visible in our cities and open spaces, opportunities that should be implemented. With the responses made to increase physical distances and reduce crowding on public transit, the world saw what it looked like to see fewer private vehicles in ordinarily congested urban arteries. Images from Wuhan during the height of its lockdown gave the appearance of a city abandoned. Milan, seeing an opportunity, was out front early, permanently converting 35 kilometers of roadway in the city center into pedestrian zones and bicycle lanes. Likewise, New York City closed streets to cars as part of its Open Streets program to allow space for pedestrians, runners, and cyclists to spread out, particularly in areas without convenient access to public parks. That program opened 83 miles of roadway to cyclists, runners, and walkers, allowing nearly 11,000 restaurants to stretch onto sidewalks and streets, as retailers were able to expand their storefronts beyond their front doors. As the New York Times reported in late 2020, “ People reclaimed the pavement and are now unwilling to give it back.”3 Interestingly, Janette Sadik-Khan, the former transportation commissioner of New York City who began the opening of key streets before COVID-19 for pedestrian use, is now advising officials in Milan. Could we imagine these transformations becoming permanent in New York City? In Hong Kong? Elsewhere? Absolutely! Many cities, forced to restrict or prohibit indoor dining, rediscovered outdoor dining with inventive solutions. For instance, New York City restaurants famously pack diners into every square foot of their spaces, and even then, only to manage a small profit. Initial restrictions only allowing food pickup and food delivery required a reframing of business, so many began exploring creative options outside. As outdoor dining was introduced, the city allowed restaurants to convert parking lanes in front of their businesses into dining zones, creating a unique addition to street life. As the weather cooled, plastic bubbles and miscellaneous forms of lightweight shelters began popping up over these outdoor dining zones, creating a series of small-scale structures strewn along streets at a radically different scale than the majority of buildings. One cannot help but think of the Cushicle and Suitaloon projects by Archigram member Michael Webb from the 1960s, coming back to life in new forms. Certainly, encouraging and enabling space for outdoor dining for many months of the year is a great amenity for the public life of the city and can increase revenues for a struggling industry and its employees.

Fig. 2. Umbrella Movement and Occupy Central with office workers on median barrier at lunch hour. 2014. Photo: Michael Kokora Independent of the COVID-19 pandemic, Barcelona began an experiment in 2016 in its Eixample district. The original plan of variable interconnected open spaces designed by Ildefons Cerdà was subverted by overzealous developers and lax zoning that led to continuous perimeter block development. Now the streets are being converted into what Barcelona is calling “super-islands,” by carving out islands of car-free zones within the greater district.4 The experiment has been working in the Poblenou super-island, and within the coming years, the entire district will be a car-free pedestrian zone of super-islands with parking only at the perimeters and through streets. While the exact design of the streets will be chosen in a competition in 2021, 80% of the street will be shaded, with 20% of the surfaces permeable. Beyond pedestrianization and increased mobility by foot and bicycle, the reductions in summer heat loads and reduced air pollution will benefit human health and reduce stress on Barcelona’s healthcare system. Undoubtedly, the super-island in Poblenou will have more success with its local businesses being able to operate on the streets in the open air during COVID-19. Quality public spaces belong in all neighborhoods, regardless of income or racial makeup. In many cities, there are certain parks that sustain themselves through private conservancies that drastically increase funding over municipal investment. In St. Louis, for example, where we worked on a competition a few years ago, we clearly saw the disparity between nonprofit-funded parks like Forest Park or Tower Grove, which have lush flora and abundant programming, and the financially challenged Fairground Park in North St. Louis, which receives much less investment and maintenance.5 Cities enable these disparities by allowing such dedicated funding in an inequitable system of public/ private partnerships prioritizing select locations and populations. A more equitable distribution would not only improve the quality of life of residents but also help increase property values in underserved neighborhoods. Where they exist, reimagining forlorn infrastructures as parks and greenways offers one way of increasing public space, particularly in dense areas. The Highline, which connects Hudson Yards to the West Village along the west side of Manhattan, was nearly demolished when then-mayor Rudy Giuliani saw it as a blighted structure. The foresight of the nonprofit conservancy Friends of the Highline and support of the design community saved this unique relic and turned it into a highly successful park in a neighborhood without such spaces. Other New York success stories include Brooklyn Bridge Park (formerly shipping piers), Domino Park (formerly a sugar factory), and Freshkills Park (formerly a landfill). These can be great economic generators for redeveloping neighborhoods while providing needed recreational space. Toronto’s Bentway under the Gardiner Expressway or Singapore’s Rail Corridor park along the closed Malaysian Railways line have captured this same opportunity and spirit. Public transit serves as critical infrastructure in the city but also exists as important points of public space. Daily commutes fell in most places as businesses moved their operations online or laid people off. Subways and buses actually feel manageable in terms of density at

the moment due to low ridership pressure on systems. On the flip side, these systems all face a massive fiscal shortfall, whether they are primarily funded by riders or local tax revenue. Local governments have little to offer due to massive losses in tax revenue from business closures. Without aid from the national government, many transit systems project severe cuts to service and postponement of capital improvements. Lower-wage residents who depend on transit suffer the most as routes to work dwindle or commute times increase. Fare structures should be revised to support the people who rely on transit the most, while more options should be made to allow for safe commuting via cycling routes.

more apparent. In many cases, it’s even quite simple to achieve. The creativity and inventiveness we are seeing in New York, Barcelona, Singapore, and elsewhere should be an inspiration for radical transformations to the quantity and quality of our shared spaces—inside and out. If not now, then when? Let’s make the most of this tragic situation and change our shared urban and interior spaces for the immediate and long-term future.

Meanwhile, people are spending more time inside due to the pandemic, making the lack of space for home offices, insufficient residential bandwidth, and general poor health of the indoor environments more apparent. As many companies contemplate an athome distributed workforce even after the pandemic, the spatial arrangement of residences may need to be reconsidered. Reduced occupation of office buildings does not easily translate into adequate space for those working at home. And what happens to those unleased commercial properties and how might they be reappropriated? We should reconsider how homes and industrial areas could change for increased live-work situations, something not unheard of before massive urban growth and exclusionary zoning. Most of the older residential buildings rely on inefficient window air conditioning units, which do not pull in fresh air from the outside. These issues, along with the building industry’s reliance on petrochemical products that continue to emit VOCs into indoor air, contribute to “sick building syndrome.” Wellintentioned environmental initiatives such as “Passive House,” which call for extremely tight building enclosures, result in spaces even more dependent upon mechanical ventilation and recirculated indoor air. The inability to simply open a window has a psychological effect in normal times and has become a big constraint on spatial use during this pandemic. Increased awareness of healthy and renewable materials certainly helps improve indoor air quality, but in new construction and renovations, owners are only incentivized by voluntary marketing programs like LEED or BREEAM. Finding ways to better incentivize or even mandate the use of renewable energy and reduce heat island effect in cities will go a long way toward improved public space. Our building facades, rooftops, highways, and parks have untapped space and surface area for renewable energy generation, something that is becoming easier and more affordable to implement with building-integrated photovoltaics. Initial investment typically remains a challenge, but once implemented, these measures save money that can be reinvested into our shared spaces, while at the same time improving environmental conditions, reducing pollution, and mitigating global warming. This pandemic will eventually be resolved—at least until the next one—but do we (and more importantly, our policy makers) have the will and stamina to confront these blatant inadequacies and deficiencies in our urban public spaces and our shared interior environments? The need for change could hardly be

Fig. 3. Umbrella Movement and Occupy Central, 2014. Photo: Michael Kokora

1 Alexia Fernandez Campbell, “Inequality in American Public Parks,” The Atlantic, September 30, 2016, https:// www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/inequalityin-american-public-parks/502238./ 2 “Homeless people increase amidst the COVID-19 outbreak,” Doctors Without Borders, accessed March 8, 2022, https://msf-seasia.org/news/19070 3 Mathew Haag, “How New Yorkers Want to Change the Streetscape for Good,” New York Times, December 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/17/ nyregion/nyc-open-streets.html 4 Feargus O’Sullivan, “Barcelona will Supersize its Car-Free ‘Superblocks’,” Bloomberg, November 11, 2020, https:// www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-11/barcelona-snew-car-free-superblock-will-be-big 5 This funding disparity whereby nice parks reside in financially stable neighborhoods and parks in disrepair reside in struggling neighborhoods mimics the public school systems where by two schools within the same district can have radically different amenities depending upon how much parents can contribute to the PTA for supplemental funding.

Dunyang Chen

Josiah Brown

Wenjie Yan

Josiah Brown

Wenjie Yan

Josiah Brown

STUDENT PROJECT DESCRIPTION The workshop focused on the physical form of the city. The design process Michael Kokora and Marcus Carter introduced to the studio involved removing one unit of building density from a cluster of buildings and placing one-and-a-half units of building density in close proximity to the site of removal. This created a double effect—a new void was created in the city as well as a newly densified building form. The design method was to select operative verbs as a guide for the removal and addition of building density. Students tested their ideas using physical models made from materials readily at hand. Dunyang Chen selected “puncture” and “stack” as his the operative verbs to manipulate a cluster of buildings in the Financial District of New York City. Wenjie Yan excavated from the existing building volume and, by “striating”, added a looming, delicate layer above the existing building cluster. Josiah Brown “carved” building density from the ground level and re-stacked it at the upper levels of the existing buildings, taking advantage of the terraced building form so common in New York City. His perspective shows the newly-opened ground level and the newly stacked upper building levels in red. In Hong Kong, Yurong Xue took a tripartite approach, “cutting, folding, and regrouping” building volume to make new forms with openings and bridges in Sheung Wan. Rachel Reinhard responded to the tightness of urban fabric by making a series of surgical slices and narrow additions to maximize density building by building, rather than operating on a building cluster all at once. Qi Jin developed a system of removing cubic volumes and replacing them with folded bands which create a new spatial variety within a cluster of existing buildings.

Wenjie Yan Global Urbanism Dispatch | 20

Josiah Brown

PUNCTURE & STACK

Yurong Xue

Rachel Reinhard

Qi Jin

Yurong Xue

Rachel Reinhard

Qi Jin

Yurong Xue

Rachel Reinhard

Rachel Reinhard 21

Dispatch from Brisbane Rosalie + Futures James Davidson Sam Bowstead Leonor Gausachs Britt Hill JDA Co.

September 8, 2021 Our small studio, JDA Co, was founded in 2009 during the peak of the global financial crisis, shortly followed by the peaks of the 2011 Queensland floods, Australia’s most expensive natural disaster at the time. James Davidson, who was then director of Emergency Architects Australia, enacted a project with Sam Bowstead to help uninsured homeowners receive pro bono reconstruction advice from over 100 volunteer architects, engineers, and students. The last decade has seen us build on this experience to become Australia’s leading architects for flood, storm, and bushfire resilience. Governments, local councils (cities), and private enterprises turn to our studio to adapt urban environments to withstand extreme weather conditions. In addition to delivering climate-resilient design guidelines, we also use sustainable strategies to design precincts, restore heritage sites, refurbish homes, and design new ones. Our approach to disaster has always been and will always remain one of a grassroots and practical response. We now face yet another crisis as we navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic. Being a geographically isolated country, Australia had a delayed onset of local infections, which allowed time to anticipate the arrival of the virus and put early measures in place to prevent its rapid spread. Australia, with a world-leading healthcare system and tight border controls, was in a particularly strong position to face the pandemic. On March 19, 2021 Australia closed to the world (it still is), and shortly after, the entire country locked down. Like many places around the world, in Australia COVID has prompted a local focus on neighborhoods, driving people to support small business and make the most of what is nearby. Our city of Brisbane is home to about 2.5 million people. It’s a city known for its small timber cottages rising and falling on steep hills, making their way down to a meandering river. Brisbane’s density could best be described as loose—backyards feature as an important part of the home, and commuting long distances is commonplace. During lockdown these commutes were subsequently reduced, and people focused closer to home. The house and the backyard became an office, a school, a restaurant, a daycare, a park, and a gym. The severe reduction in vehicles on the road during lockdown saw residents reclaiming space for alternative means of transport whilst public parks saw a surge in activity as the last remaining place for urban recreation—we were allowed up to 1 hour of exercise per day. This local focus was compounded by Australia’s system of government—a federal system of states similar to the United States. Health orders are enforced by the states, including border restrictions. As a result, most of us haven’t left the state of Queensland for the past 18 months. What we saw during the outbreak of the Delta strain, states that were COVID-free took an approach of “going it alone” and closing off to other states. At the time of writing, in September 2021, our state, Queensland, has had 1,979 cases and 7 deaths in a population of 5 million people (similar to Louisiana)—we have been very lucky. In the office we have seen sudden and short lockdowns that have forced us to work from home, but only for a week or two. The quick action of state health orders and the public’s willingness to follow them has allowed us to live and work relatively normally for most of the time. Queensland’s collective experience with other disasters—floods, cyclones, droughts, and fires—has also arguably put us in a strong position to respond to COVID. Each crisis strengthens the communication and collaboration between different levels of government, emergency services, and community networks. We have become good at rallying together and remaining resilient. The federal government has also played a key role in Australia’s COVID-19 mitigation in terms of economic repercussions. $130 billion was invested in “Job Keeper” payments to companies as an incentive to keep people employed and, importantly, provide the financial support to encourage the population to stay home during lockdown and 1 ultimately lower the number of COVID cases. Almost 3.5 million people accepted the payments, which were equivalent to about $1,500 every two weeks. Such drastic action has meant Australia has not seen the level of hardship as other places in the world. The federal government is also responsible for Australia’s two key failures—the inefficacy of hotel quarantine and the vaccine rollout. Australia currently stands last in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development vaccination rate due to a failure in supply, and the reliance on hotels, which were not fit-for-purpose, has contributed to multiple outbreaks. The government is only now building new quarantine facilities. This shows how important it is to have a Plan B. The premise of this essay was to ask how COVID has affected us locally, and how this related to our Rosalie Futures work with Washington University in St. Louis. The workshop allowed us to introduce our approach and our city to a new audience. We

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looked at the inner-city suburb of Rosalie (where we had been working postfloods) and developed new concepts to deal with increasing density and more extreme floods. Using the principle of “working with water,” students developed concepts focused on gradually changing the neighbourhood over time, while still allowing everyone who wishes to stay in their community to do so. We saw some particularly innovative ideas on how we could use urban farming and commercial spaces to help increase local resilience. This has parallels to COVID, as we identify opportunities where we can sustain ourselves with local production. While architects were in a strong position to help rebuild after the floods, our ability to directly assist in COVID is more limited. We’ve seen a lot of speculative ideas that get floated by architects after a big crisis. Sometimes it’s tempting to think that architecture can provide all the answers—it can’t. Our job is to advocate when we see a better way of preventing or responding to issues following a disaster. We are experts in the built environment, and from that position, we can help develop ways to make people’s lives better in the future. While Queensland, and to some extent Australia, has escaped the worst of the pandemic, the bushfires that were seen across the globe only months beforehand serve as a reminder of a much larger crisis looming. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report outlined particularly dire predictions for our continent. Australia will not dodge this bullet. Our governments, sadly, are not responding with the same urgency as the pandemic. This makes our work in resilience and climate adaptation that much more important, but also helps set a higher bar for how we can reduce the impact of our buildings in the future. We know the practical solutions and we need to advocate for them. This is the challenge for the next decade of our practice.

STUDENT PROJECT DESCRIPTION Josiah Brown and Rachel Madryga play through out a scenario where overland flooding prompts the shifting of homes from the floodplain of the Rosalie neighborhood into the center of the adjacent blocks. The building transfer creates a floodable commons, increasing flood resilience and access to open space, and densifies the neighborhoods to keep all residents in their current communities. This strategy explores the morphological potentials for a stay-in in-place flood flood-proofing scenario. 1 “$130 Billion Jobkeeper Payment to keep Australians in a job” Prime Minister of Australia, accessed March 8, 2022, https://www.pm.gov.au/media/130-billion-jobkeeperpayment-keep-australians-job

Dispatch from Toronto On Canada’s North Lola Sheppard & Mason White Lateral Office

July 22, 2021 The Canadian Arctic is one of the fastest-growing regions per capita in the country, with more than 120,000 people now living in the cities, towns, and hamlets in the territories north of 60 degrees. The region is predominantly populated by small, dispersed Indigenous communities. With the exception of the three territorial capitals, most of the 85 communities north of 60o have fewer than 1,000 residents.1 One of the challenges of an urbanizing Canadian North is that for most Indigenous peoples, permanent settlement—with the imposition of the spatial, temporal, economic, and institutional structures that came with it—has been antithetical to traditional ways of life and culture, which are deeply tied to land and seasons. In the context of the Arctic, therefore, urbanism must be understood in a multivalent way: a distributed territorialization of small communities linked by non-physical networks of trails, internet, and a shared culture. While towns and hamlets can be understood as geographically separated islands of inhabitation, the region is connected in other ways: technologically, culturally and through particular social infrastructures. Building in the North is shaped by numerous unique realities. Infrastructure is one of the biggest challenges facing northern communities. Cities such as Iqaluit are facing major water shortages due to rapid population growth and are relying on aging infrastructure. Equally surprising, many communities are “running out of land,” or at least infrastructure-serviced land. Despite immense housing needs, the lack of serviced land makes it difficult to plan new construction of housing. Questions of architecture’s response to weather, climate, snow, wind, and durability are, of course, key. Amplifying the challenges, construction costs are typically two to three times the costs of southern Canada. This is because the logistics of getting material up to Northern regions that often have no road access means every component of a building must be pre-planned, every material pre-ordered and sent by the annual sealift. Nowhere have the impacts of COVID been more worrisome than Indigenous communities. The reasons for this are numerous: Indigenous communities in Canada experience tremendous overcrowding in houses and are forced to live in poor housing conditions. This means many Inuit have significant pre-existing health issues including shockingly high rates of tuberculosis, and access to healthcare is extremely difficult, amplifying the health challenges. Because many communities have no road access and distances are immense, COVID and quarantine were a stark reminder, if anyone needed it, of Northern Canada’s reliance on air travel for connectivity and access to health services, education, and legal aid, among other things. Many territories where completely closed off to everything but essential travel. Those from southern Canada who travelled up to work in health, education, government, etc. had to quarantine for 14 days, meaning only long-term visits were viable. While rare, COVID outbreaks in small communities have spread rapidly, largely due to overcrowding and limit medical services. For these reasons, Canada’s northern territories have been aggressively vaccinating their populations, achieving vaccination rates of 75 to 95% of eligible population. The single most significant challenge facing Northern Indigenous communities is access to housing. 35% of households in Nunavut are overcrowded. 50% are in need of major repair, and 4% of the population faces hidden homelessness (couch surfing from one family member’s house to another, sleeping in laundry or mechanical rooms, etc.)2 The current pandemic has only amplified the need for more housing. In a moment when residents are told to work, study, and play from home, severe overcrowding, coupled with poor internet connections, renders this proposal incredibly challenging. In addition, Northern Indigenous communities have long been advocating for (and training) Indigenous health workers, nurses, midwives, teachers, and all forms of government and business leadership. The current difficulty of travel reaffirms the critical need for communities to be self-reliant and receive the support (financial and human resources-wise) to develop and operate their own programs, rather than relying on southerners who fly in for specific durations. What has perhaps not changed in the Canadian North, but the rest of the world is catching up to, is the importance of being out on the land, connected to nature, and learning from our environment. For Indigenous communities, this has always been, and continues to be, at the center of their culture. The temporal strictures of “work day” and evening, weekday and weekend, are Euro-Canadian constructs.3 Over the course of the twentieth century, the Canadian Government imported and im-

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posed southern institutions, calendars, political structures, and language, among other frameworks.4 Communities and individuals living off the land had very different notions of time; the emergence of permanent communities, wagebased economies, and patterns of social structures attendant to education, and recreational activities, among others, produced increasing temporal regulation.5 Contrary to Western control of time, “Inuit learn how to relinquish a desire to control time in order to become more aware of, and therefore better able to yield to, the rhythm and movements of weather, ties, animals, seasons, etc.”6 The current pandemic has challenged many residents in cities and suburbs to rethink their notions of calendar, schedule, and their relationship to the larger environment. In the absence of concerts, restaurants, shopping, or congregations in public spaces, connections to land have become a crucial antidote to our hyper-mediated experiences of work, learning, and socializing. These connections to land attuned to daily rhythms are practices Indigenous peoples have maintained for millennia. For the Global Urbanism Studio students were asked to develop near-future visions (2050) of inhabitation in the Arctic. They were asked to select two to three competing forces—such as Indigenous sovereignty and culture, colonization, energy issues, resource extraction, military sovereignty, scientific research, tourism, food security, or climate change, among others—which are currently contributing to the cultural, social, and environmental transformation of the region. The class investigated the format of the graphic novel as a tool to envision how these forces might influence or engender new building types, affordances, infrastructures, and environments. Narratives could serve as a cautionary tale or evoke hopeful opportunities. In a region where reality is often more surprising than any fiction, the graphic novel offered the possibility of embracing narrative in architecture, of speculating through spatio-visual means, and of oscillating between precision and open-endedness in imagining projective futures.

STUDENT PROJECT DESCRIPTION Sebastian Jin and Yurong Xue embraced the workshop prompt to center comic strip narratives around the non-human occupants of the Arctic Circle. Their narrative centers on the melting permafrost of the Arctic North and a possible remediation strategy that uses endogenous megafauna to compact the soil. Their proposal suggests a planned grazing pattern for reindeer, migrating them across the landscape region by region to compact the soil into permafrost insulation. Their narrative ends with the recognition of shared space between the human and non-human occupants of the Arctic landscape.

1 See Yukon Government website, Communities; Northwest Territories government website, Community Data; Nunavut Bureau of Statistics, Population Data.; http://www.gov.yk.ca/ aboutyukon/communities.html http://www.statsnwt.ca/community-data/index.html; http:// www.stats.gov.nu.ca/en/Population.aspx 2 In Nunavut, Canada’s largest Inuit territory, one in every three households accommodates “hidden homeless,” family members without a permanent home, at some point in the year. Roughly 4% Nunavummiut were living temporarily in another person’s dwelling. 3 Pamela Stern “Upside-Down and Backwards: Time Discipline in a Canadian Inuit Town,” Anthropologica 45 (2003): 159. 4 Ibid 5 Ibid 6 Edmund Searles, “Inuit Identity in the Canadian Arctic,” Ethnology 47 (September 2008): 248.

Dispatch from the Ocean Still and Liquid Refusals of Representation Elisa Kim Atlas of the Sea

September 15, 2021 Images of stillness and quiet have been madebecome characteristic of our recent pandemic times. On social media and across mainstream news, in which cities are stilled and hibernating, transit systems are halted and abandoned, economies and businesses are frozen shut, and communities shelter—cocooned in nothingness.1 Fashioned “the Great Pause,” these representations of life, still and frozen as we know it, only tell a piece of the story. Beneath this surface of stillness were (and are) networks in constant and exhaustive motion—think of delivery, fulfillment, and sanitation workers, healthcare and network providers, among others—or many, many somethings that both belie and enable a false sense of nothing. This is in many ways analogous to the way that I have broadly contextualized my work on the sea—a space historically rendered extra-geographic and outside the realm of representation. Yet even as oceans gain visibility and currency through their commercialization, legislation, and politicization, their urbanity and spatiality continue to be represented as incidental phenomena—blank, still, surfaces devoid of materiality— against which named, bounded, and terrestrial bodies of something emerge. Now in an era of ecologically and geopolitically induced migration and displacement, increased deep sea resource and mineral extraction, undersea infrastructural connectivity, and global shipping and transportation, the oceanic imaginary takes on new urgency and valence, interrelating questions of temporality and citizenship with the making of global infrastructure. Despite the crucial logistical and ecological roles that oceans facilitate in supporting our globalized and industrialized ways of life, misconceptions about the sea as an eternally bountiful, self-sustaining entity beyond ownership and sovereignty remain embedded in public consciousness. Further, misconceptions about the sea as the “constitutive outside” to the terra-centric frame of architecture and urbanism also remain. In order to reframe the sea not merely as an externality outside the purview of land-based urbanization and spatial practices, the project of drawing the sea, of representing all of the networks of buoyant somethings beneath the vast surface of nothing, aims to shift the frame of urbanism from a purely terra-centric perspective to a more liquid, maritime, and pelagic form of spatial subjectivity. I have always seen the project as fundamentally political in so far as it calls into question the terra- and territorial organization of our world, and this act of drawing—of mapping across scales, of layering quantitative and qualitative data, of tracing informal networks of mobility, exchange, and inhabitation—attempts to bring spaces that were previously erased as insignificant into visibility, and making room to reconsider our social and geopolitical reality and our acceptance of which planetary spaces and which constituencies matter in the realm of architecture and urbanism. But in reflecting upon the multiple categories and experiences of perceived absence or suspension over the past pandemic year and a half, it seems difficult—if not impossible—to imagine that the sum of all the somethings could ever precisely equal the appearance or the essence of suspended stillness, and that the way in which we choose to represent the somethings can never really get at the quality of perceived absence. In other words, mappings or drawings that make visible the networks of delivery workers… and sanitation workers…and internet connectivity and healthcare providers…and all of the other somethings that enabled “the Great Pause” don’t quite communicate or add up to the feeling of suspended life that accompanied and masked these intense networks of urban and human activity whirring beneath the surface of an otherwise seemingly still pandemic. And similarly, my work of drawing the material and spatial practices at sea—of mapping global migration, cultural exchange, marine infrastructure, and resource extraction—doesn’t quite seem to add up to a true representation of the essence of deep, liquid, urbanity. In meditating on the reality of the many oceanic refusals of representation and volumes of imperceptibility, it seems imperative to me now to explore what it would mean to altogether refuse the normative/ measured/ authoritative/ forms of visuality that functioned to refuse the space of the sea in the first place. Put another way—why should architecture and urbanism expect (orthographic, or even visual) representation in order to accept something as architecture or urbanism, and aren’t there other ways to arrive at spatial subjectivity? If the rigidity of the language of map-making and measured analysis enabled the original and historical erasure of the sea, perhaps this drawing language can only operate within a logic that merely contributes to the sea’s further dysgraphia, despite efforts to use this as a means of decolonization. Perhaps the pandemic has inspired a shifts in my approach to representation that calls for leaning into—or embracing—the nothing/ the stillness/ and the suspension/ as a way to probe a more liquid language of the sea, and to arrive more closely to the wetness, the sonic atmospheres, the depth, and the buoyancies that characterize ocean space . arrive at spatial subjectivity? If the rigidity of the language of map-making and measured analysis enabled the original and historical erasure of the sea, perhaps this drawing

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language can only operate within a logic that merely contributes to the sea’s further dysgraphia, despite efforts to use this as a means of decolonization. Perhaps the pandemic has inspired a shift in my approach to representation that calls for leaning into—or embracing—the nothing/ the stillness/ and the suspension/ as a way to probe a more liquid language of the sea, and to arrive more closely to the wetness, the sonic atmospheres, the depth, and the buoyancies that characterize ocean space.

STUDENT PROJECT DESCRIPTION We drew from the ocean to the land, re-centering our awareness on the vast expanse of the sea as the dominant spatial condition of Earth. Rachel Reinhard and Joe Mueller overlaid the ecological spaces of deep-sea dwelling animals and the contemporary shipping and monitoring patterns of modern globalized culture. Their mapping and analysis reveal moments of overlap and remoteness of these two systems. Dongzhe Tao and Haihan Qu drew the interplay of ocean currents and trash and speculated on the terrestrial origins of the latter. Their mapping omits the land, instead imagining the islands of floating trash as mobile nations with resources to be mined.

1 In my own work and practice, the pandemic put on hold a long-planned and anticipated research trip to the Nambian coast from where I would investigate the unprecedented yet highly urbanized and heavily funded world of deep sea diamond mining. Instead, work-life shifted into trying to know the sea from afar, from behind the screen of a computer, and through the lens of real-time networks of under sea sensors that monitor oceanic systems by digital means.

FUTURE PLANS The summer 2022 Global Urbanism Studio will return to a comparative model, this time looking at two distinct but related river/watershed systems: the Mississippi River, from the delta in Louisiana to St. Louis upstream, and the Chao Phraya, from the delta near Bangkok to the headwaters near Chiang Mai in Thailand. While in Thailand, we will be collaborating with Landscape Architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom and McDonnell Academy partner Chulalongkorn University, as well as other local partners. The comparative model will draw our attention to the margin between the (rising) sea and the (sinking) delta. These places are points of exchange, strategic advantage, and population density. These competing forces will create significant tension, as sea levels rise, inter-urban/international competition for dominance in exchange increases, and people seek to live close to where they work, in neighborhoods and buildings that are safe and recognize the humanity of their occupants. These issues are not isolated to the geography of the delta; the pressures span upstream to inland ports and cities. Bangkok is the future. It has a very high person and building density. It will surely be impacted by rising

sea levels and more extreme weather over the next 100 years, and can be a model for other highly populous nations in the Ring of Fire that are designing in the face of climate change. New Orleans is the future. It sits at the intersection of energy, shipping, and culture. Our long-term viability (as a species, as a nation) as a global culture will require balancing these forces through design. St. Louis is the future. It sits downhill from half the country, at the center of expansive agricultural, shipping, and manufacturing networks. Equitable design that leverages regional assets can be a model of development in the constellation of river-bound cities across the country.

The Chao Phraya River is the future, where tensions between nations, water needs, and historic and modern urban living unfold. In this studio we will find significant points of tension and test a range of design solutions for how we will live well along great rivers.

LECTURES & MORE! For more information, and to watch the public lecture series from our summer 2020 studio guests, visit the Global Urbanism Studio on the Sam Fox School website: https://samfoxschool.wustl.edu/GUS

Chiang Mai is the future. Its historic fabric and vibrant culture reflect the richness of river life; its persistence is a statement of its value. The Mississippi River is the future. It’s a working river linking upland manufacturing and agriculture with the fragile ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico.

GLOBAL URBANISM STUDIO Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

SUMMER 2022 STITELMAN HOEFERLIN BERNSTINE VORAAKHOM

CLIMBING RIVERS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Global Urbanism Studio relies on a network of experts, friends, colleagues, staff, students, and faculty. The course wouldn't be possible without their effort and commitment to this project. Jennifer Akins Ellen Bailey Matthew Bernstine Dail Chambers Carmon Colangelo Derek Hoeferlin Tyrean Lewis II Luscri Fatimah Muhammad Susan Taylor

Guy Trangoš Audrey Treece Rina Vecchiola Alex Wall Shinnosuke Albert Wassawa Katherine Welsch Audrey Westcott Heather Woofter Mandy Wortmann

Global Urbanism Dispatch | 28

MUD Students | 2020

Uganda Martyrs Students | 2020

MUD Students | 2021

Uganda Martyrs Students | 2021

Khalid Aljohani Josiah Brown Dunyang Chen Qi Jin Sebastian Jin Shiang Liu Ye Liu Rachel Madryga Joe Mueller Qijun Qian Jing Qiang Haihan Qu Rachel Reinhard Dongzhe Tao Yurong Xue Wenjie Yan Yitian Zhang

Marylin Aber Ronald Businge Christine De Guzman Jonathan Kateega Ann Murungi Elizabeth Nabagerekka Tadeo Nedala Elijah Tumusiime

Rachel Bennett Jinxin Huang Catherine Hunley Teresa Lu Yu Tang Jennifer Wang Chenzhang Zhao

Raymond Ainamani Derek Ayebazibwe Ayebare Christine De Guzman Jonathan Kateega Gilbert Kafuma Bridget Kukunda Derick Kwizera Mark Niwamanya Joseph Matovu

Global Urbanism Studio Dispatch | 2020-21 Edition

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Acknowledgements & Additional information