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MAY 16TH, 2014 MA Theories of Urban Practice 66 5th Avenue | Kellen Auditorium | 12pm-6pm
Urban Graduate Reception Lobby of 2 W 13th St building | 6pm-8pm
MAY 17TH, 2014 MS Design & Urban Ecologies 63 5th Avenue | University Center Rooms 502 & 503 | 9:30am-6pm
MA THEORIES OF URBAN PRACTICE The MA Theories of Urban Practice is a research-driven graduate program for students who seek a profound understanding of how cities are actually shaped and wish to acquire the transdisciplinary knowledge required to transform them.
MS DESIGN & URBAN ECOLOGIES This master of science program radically reframes the study of cities. Through research and fieldwork, students gain a broad understanding of the complex economic, political, social, environmental, and physical forces that influence urban growth and development. Working in multidisciplinary teams, they design processes for urban transformation.
EMERGING URBAN PRACTICES 12:20 PM
Welcome History + Program Organizations
12:30 PM 12:45 PM
Manifesto Terms of Urban Practice
12:50 PM
Guest Speaker: Davarian Baldwin
1:15 PM
First MATUP Speaking: Blair Lorenzo
1:30 PM
Second MATUP Speaker: Xavier Williams
1:45 PM
Third MATUP Speaker: Joy Davis
2:00 PM
Fourth MATUP Speaker: Alex Roesch
2:15 PM
Discussion
2:45 PM
Break
3:15 PM
Introduction to speaker Mike Cermak
3:20 PM
Guest Speaker: Mike Cermak
3:45 PM
Fifth MATUP Speaker: Matt Delsesto
4:00 PM 4:15 PM
Sixth MATUP Speaker: Victoria Petrovsky
4:30 PM
Eighth MATUP Speaker: Maryam Khabazi
4:45 PM
Discussion
5:15 PM 6:00 PM
Summary of Manifesto
Introduction to Speaker Davarian Baldwin
Seventh MATUP Speaker: Themis Pellas
Conclusion
Blair Lorenzo The Washington Metro and the Fall and Rise of American Urbansim In the same year as the passage of the Interstate Highway Act, at the height of American, auto-centric suburbanization, Washington, DC began the process of constructing the second largest rail rapid transit system in the United States. This thesis uses the Metro project as a lens to investigate the evolving and changing meanings of American urbanism, exploring not only one avenue through which the current urban renaissance has come about, but also the nebulous and undertheorized concept of the urban and its potential impact on how we shape cities in the present and for the future.
Xavier Williams Breaking New Ground: Exploring Spatial and Discursive Dynamics of Temporary Use Today, the public realm is often understood through claims by civic discourse and creative enterprise to permanence and memorability, whereas temporary-use has emerged as a particularly influential urban practice challenging the status quo. Temporary use has typically been theorized among practitioners and academics vis-a-vis notions of spatial transformation and land use reclamation therefore limiting the theoretical space within which this type of practice is conceived and operationalized. This project draws on informant interviews and observation analysis across three urban practices to propose a framework for a set of relational methodologies meant to establish new grounds for temporary urban transformations.
Joy Alise Davis Right to Difference | Intercultural Modes of Producing a Democratic, Participatory and Inclusive Urban Space This paper challenges the current practice of cultural coexistence and how this practice has failed to evolve beyond the 1960s rhetoric. This study looks toward a country that is at a tipping point. We can continue to ignore our cultural differences or as a country we can dedicate ourselves to cross-cultural dialogue and understanding. Without adequate preparation, the country is at risk of continuing the cycle of conflict and cultural distrust. This thesis seeks to answer the question: How can urban practitioners meet the needs of cultural groups [multiple publics] and progress beyond the coexistence of difference [multiculturalism] into the cohabitation of difference through coproduction [interculturalism]?
Alex Roesch Residential Displacement and Resistance in Crown Heights, Brooklyn: Building Communities of Practice This thesis complements existing knowledge of residential displacement with knowledge gained through the study of communal practices of resisting displacement in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. First, the project analyzes and engages with what have become standard practices of ‘displacement quantification,’ methods of research that shape the current knowledge of residential displacement. The inadequacy of this body of knowledge provokes the need tp research practices and processes of displacement by building communities of practice. One such community, the Crown Heights Tenant Union, is analyzed through engaged participant observation as a site for the production of integral knowledge that leads to successfully resisting displacement via organized community action.
Matt DelSesto Remaking Urban Society: Food as Infrastructure for Democracy How do gardens grow both food and citizens? This project explores the most empowering and effective agricultural practices for the cultivation of urban democracy. In depth case study analysis and reflection on recent developments in the food justice movement illuminates civic engagement strategies, ecological management, and design practices that are producing the next food infrastructure.
Victoria Petrovsky Healing from the Ground Up / Community Composting in Newark NJ This presentation will consist of short documentaries uncovering relationships among organizations and people I have become involved with while starting a compost pilot in Newark. It will discuss the challenges to urban land regeneration and social revitalization, from the point of view of the organizations working toward these goals, as well as community/ies on the receiving end. Finally the presentation will outline scenarios for growth of composting as a [gateway] community practice in Newark placed within a ‘deep sustainability’ paradigm.
Themis Pellas Contemporary Shifts to the Institutional Mediation of Health: The State of Emergency in Greece Emergency legislation, economic dispossession, unemployment, police coercion, everyday precariousness, internalization of guilt and shame, racism attribute to the management of crisis in Greece, under which, healthcare financial cuts and restructuring parallel racialized and gendered criminalization of HIV-positive persons and intensified, discriminatory policing of the Roma population and sans papiers immigrants. Ad hoc clinics — free of charge and volunteer-based — have been established to cope with the deficiency of state-funded social services due to the adjustment programme between the Greek state, the Euro Area member States and the International Monetary Fund. The purposes of this thesis are to decipher and amplify a common denominator of this response with contemporary global shifts in the institutional mediation of health — the destabilization of social roles, and more particularly, professional compartmentalization and social construction of disease in order to delineate potential transformations of habitation modalities and the antagonisms that this entails.
Maryam Khabazi Disaster Management through Social Resilience This thesis focuses on the connectivity processes that are necessary for the governance and daily management of preparedness for disasters in cities and how this connectivity can increase resiliency of organizations to respond to disaster. In order to be prepared for disasters this thesis conducts an investigation on the current networks between community-based organizations including Occupy Sandy, Sahana Foundation, and neighborhood organizations. This investigation leads to the proposal of actions and strategies to generate more effective and successful disaster management.
EMERGING URBAN ECOLOGIES 09:15 Coffee and Pastries Available 09:45 Welcome and Presentation of Design & Urban Ecologies
09:50 Common Praxis 10:00 10:10 10:20 10:30 10:40 10:50 11:00
Braden Crooks Aubrey Murdock Joel Stein Charlie Wirene Alexandra Castillo-Kesper Joshua Barndt Discussion
11:50 Everyday Urbanities 12:00 Andrew Tucker 12:10 Jonathan Lapalme 12:20 Sabrina Dorsainvil + Luisa Munera 12:35 Bonnie Netel + Jessica Kisner 12:50 40-Minute Lunch served adjacent to session spaces 01:30 Gabrielle Andersen 01:40 Cristina Handal + Troy Hallisey 01:55 Discussion
02:30 02:40 02:50 03:00 03:10 03:20 03:50
04:10 04:20 04:30 04:40 04:50 05:00 05:10
Rethink the Block Charles Chawalko Anze Zadel April De Simone Shirley Bucknor Discussion Coffee Break
Urban Industrial Jesseka Mae Emerick Travers Martin Caitlin Charlet Kaitlin Killpack Ekaterina Levitskaya Discussion
05:40 Summary and Open Discussion
COMMON PRAXIS Braden Crooks Economy of Ethics: Emergent Cooperation Across Diverse Urban Ecologies Urban economic development routinely fails to produce lasting, ‘incommon’ equity and prosperity for urban communities struggling in a globalized world. Through research on comprehensive alternatives, such as a Situational Analysis of Cleveland’s “Evergreen Cooperatives,” as well as collaboration with civic organizations in New York City, this thesis seeks to influence a new direction for economic cooperation across diverse urban ecologies.
Aubrey Murdock Everything We Need is Already Here: Modeling in the Fractured City
unearthing the embedded context - deschooling curriculum
“Everything We Need is Already Here: Modeling in the Fractured City” works from the central question: How do we teach The Commons? My work examines The Commons and Enclosure, knowledge and learning, in our present global context. The praxis portion of this thesis is an exploration of the role critical place-based pedagogy and non-traditional teaching methods can play in healing the rift between communities and the places in which they live. The foundation of the work is my experience implementing these ideas in collaboration with a middle school class in Orange, New Jersey. My work with these students is focused on fostering curiosity, creativity, and criticality in the ways they engage with their world; qualities necessary for commonsbased educational ideas and practice.
Joshua Barndt Here to Stay Here To Stay is an online platform and oral history archive of the History of the Cooper Square Committee. Through stories of struggle and triumph, it tells why Communtiy Land Trusts are necessary to sustain affordable housing in NYC. Produced through an engaged praxis of ‘Unflattening History’, Here To Stay is a provocation that as Urban ecologists we must be relentless and impassioned in our effort to historicize the making of the city. Not simply as the result of politics, policies, and urban planning, however important theses may be; but as the result of people working together, through cooperation and antagonisms, to make this entangled place work for themselves and those they care about.
Joel Stein Entangling Uncertainties, Risk and Resilience This project analyzes the emerging conditions of urban risk governance and the new framing of resiliency, focusing on the structural conditions of power and infrastructure. Proposing a participatory form of community risk assessment that is both future-looking and past-informed, it resituates uncertainty as a point of action in sustaining shared urban livelihoods.
Charlie Wirene Reconnecting the Grid: Community Owned Energy Infrastructure in Planning to Stay Like the natural ecosystems we study in high school biology class - which include forests, deserts, or freshwater lakes - urban ecologies are home to a multiplicity of systems - social, ecological, economic, political, and technological among them – which are intricately interwoven and interdependent in both obvious and obscure ways. New York’s density and diversity make it a remarkably complicated and congested urban ecology, an exciting case of the urban systems that exist at different scales across the country and the world. As a response to the growing awareness of this modern complexity, Reconnecting the Grid explores the increasingly obvious detrimental effects that dominant neoliberal policies exert on the physical infrastructures that support these urban ecologies. This exploration sets up the subsequent discussion of an alternative, commons-based infrastructure – a community owned and managed distributed Energy Commons – built from the Planning to Stay framework.
Alexandra Castillo-Kesper How the Rest of Us Work: the Rise of the City’s Contingent Workforce Alex is an urban ecologist focused on the relationship between the changing face of work and the city. In her thesis project, “How the Rest of Us Work: the Rise of the City’s Contingent Workforce,” Alex combines archival, ethnographic and participatory research methods to open and create discursive spaces around the socioeconomic and racial diversity of the city’s growing precarious workforce. Alex comes to the Design and Urban Ecologies program with an M.A. in Art History from the University of Southern California and years of experience in arts-based social justice initiatives on both U.S. coasts and abroad. Throughout her career, she has used her creativity and strong communication skills in public speaking, institutional research and writing to increase meaningful civic engagement and to enhance the quality of life for the city’s most underserved communities.
EVERYDAY URBANITIES Andrew Tucker An Abstraction that Became True in Practice: the Ecology of an Ethnic Enclave This thesis work will explore the dialectical forces that are simultaneously (re)creating and destroying Manhattan’s downtown Chinatown as an ethnic enclave. This study begins as a macro level, ecological exploration of the sociostructural, political-economic, and cultural-spatial forces as they intersect around a specific spatial location. The second part of this study will suggest a series of interventions that seek to address three intractable ‘frictions’ faced by the urban practitioner as they utilize design as an intervention in community-based processes.
Jonathan Lapalme What Lies Between - The Agonism of The New Urban Brokering Case Study: Beyond merely selling food, street food vendors in NYC have demonstrated to be strategically positioned to play pivotal roles in addressing momentaneous, acute and chronic urban challenges. In order to increase the unofficial social role that street vendors play in the city while addressing the struggles they face daily, mobile carts will be rethink as a diffused and anticipatory social infrastructure in which there exists a root of strategy ready to be deployed to address public health and safety issues in collaboration with local organizations.
Sabrina Dorsainvil + Luisa Munera The Urban Atlas Project: Collectively Unearthing the Past, Revealing the Present and Imagining the Future Piloted in Harlem, The Urban Atlas Project is a platform for residents and local artists to identify and investigate urban conditions that impact their everyday life. The key component of this tool, the Urban Atlas Guide, utilizes creative methods and tactics to conduct urban investigations in their respective neighborhoods. Our goal is to facilitate ways in which the people directly affected by change explore discourse and imaginaries around urban development. Our vision is to build a method of investigating, understanding and imagining the urban environment that can inspire a movement focused on resident empowerment around urban development.
Bonnie Netel + Jessica Kisner The Vendors Vision Program: Maintaining Place through Active Citizenship & Street Food Vending Privatization, commodification and securitization are threatening our cities’ public space and people’s ability to appropriate such spaces. In addition to regulatory enforcement of the built environment, these forces directly impact vendors that sell food on the street. Furthermore, street food vending is a practice that transcends food and evokes conversations of immigration, public space and cultural narratives. The street food cart is the physical device for capturing attention and creating agency in the increasingly privatized public realm. In partnership with Vamos Unidos, the street food cart will be the host for an intervention that navigates complex urban ecologies in order for street food vendors to maintain their place on the street.
Gabrielle Andersen Not Just Access: The Peer Food Project The food system is broken; the agriculture of the middle is disappearing and agribusiness is expanding. Supply chains are worldly, worker rights are being abused, the environment is degrading, and countries and communities suffer from obesity and malnutrition at the same time. As communities fight for their right to fresh, nutrient dense food, can urban agriculture become one resolution to this wicked problem? The Peer Food Project aims to address these issues within New York City with a multi-faceted approach by supporting civic agriculture within the five boroughs; creating networks and linkages with existing food infrastructure; and educating communities on food choice.
Cristina Handal + Troy Andrew Hallisey Vamos en Todo Unidos: Developing Inclusive and Intersecting Planes of Living Production for Street Food Vendors in New York City Our aim is to achieve a culture of solidarity and inclusion among street food vendors and their surrounding community through the development of a multi-planar cooperative that links “El Garaje,” a commissary worker coop. “La Casa,” a cooperative providing affordable housing, “Cultivar,” a network of food production sites, and “El Mercado,”a consumer cooperative market. By relying on the street food vendors’ common cause and use of shared resources, VAMOS en Todo Unidos hopes to foster democratic participation and self-sustenance through alternative economic development. “ The nebulous regulations for street food vending in New York City have given way to ever-increasing and unpredictable instabilities in the daily operations of the vendors and their families. By examining the informal processes in the day-to-day operations of a street food vendor, we can determine an urban-scale response to improve their livelihoods and to equalize and elevate them as exemplar city makers.” – Cristina Handal “ My research focused on examining the urban ecological processes in economic, social and political enclaves. From this work, I hope to develop a program that unites the best of these processes in such a way to cultivate a culture of civic mindedness and self-reliance in an ‘in’clave—a hybrid living and working urban cooperative.” – Troy Andrew Hallisey
RETHINK THE BLOCK Charles N. Chawalko Illuminating Illusions: Southbridge Towers and the Myths of Mitchell-Lama Privatization As New York City is facing a seemingly-perpetual housing crisis, our affordable housing systems are under attack from a variety of forces – and my home is one of the very battlefields of this struggle. Utilizing my Mitchell-Lama apartment complex – Southbridge Towers – as a case study in the dynamics of the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan, this research paved a path into programming an operation to fend off a potential privatization. This operation is composed of the creation of an alternative, community-oriented coop manual; a potential run for the Board of Directors; and preparing an economic analysis of the Black Book – the voted-upon document that dissolves the Mitchell-Lama.
Anze Zadel Alternative Educational Processes for Transformative/Autonomous Housing and Sustainable Living Practices Today’s urban struggles are forcing us to look into new approaches to creating awareness and developing new strategies towards accessing affordable housing and better living conditions. Currently there are no tools to inform and explain complex urban conditions in New York City for most of the population. The existing tools are linear and complicated, and do not communicate the needed strategies for stronger consciousness for actions needed. There is a lack of simplified and easy to understand tools and resources needed in local organizations and the community to convey information. In this thesis, I have developed a tool to create consciousness around urban issues, an interactive game through which players will be developing strategies on alternative housing and other community based urban approaches
April De Simone Rethink the Block Rethink the Block is a visual and media campaign designed to evaluate what we have in both myths and facts, explore other socially innovative models, and to help us learn how to increase the capacity to stay and integrate others in our neighborhoods.
Shirley Bucknor Showing Cause: The Effects of Unfair Practices in the Housing and Legal System According to a study conducted by New York City Rent Guidelines Board in their 2014 Income and Affordability Study, the number of actual cases heard in Housing Court decreased by 7.8% in 2013 along with the number of nonpayment filings by 1.1%. Most logic would assume this to be positive, however, somehow the number of evictions have actually increased by 0.4%. How can the leading cause of eviction, non-payment not correlate with actual evictions? My research working alongside local organizations, lends a forensic lens into the current circumstances tenants in Flatbush, Brooklyn especially those in prewar and rent stabilized buildings are facing, the growing market demand for housing, the tactics that are being used by landlords to evict tenants through the legal system, and the issues surrounding the structure and process of housing court. Although not unique to New York, using Flatbush will serve as a controlled study for my research. As a resident of Flatbush, it is my hope to bring to light the current issues and unobscure procedures of the housing court system.
URBAN INDUSTRIAL Jesseka Mae Emerick The Newtown Creek Water Imperative: Community Access to Clean Water Newtown Creek is a highly polluted water body with little public access and surrounding neighborhoods that are undergoing rapid gentrification and displacement. To implement successful interventions towards achieving community access to clean water and protecting residents from displacement, I have developed a ‘Fabric Map.’ The map serves as a living methodological tool for local organizations and activists by identifying connections, partnerships, redundancies and conflicts in order to strengthen the capacities and maximize efficacy in the achievement of a socio-spatial transformation at Newtown Creek. This work is developed out of theoretical, empirical and experiential research and in collaboration with Newtown Creek Alliance, North Brooklyn Boat Club, Newtown Creek Community Action Group and the STEW_MAP project, as well as multiple community players and activists.
Travers Martin Red Doors Red Doors utilizes “education through accessibility” as the primary tool to promptly reconnect communities to natural resources while providing the flexibility needed to sustain a variety of urban typologies. In the wake of a declining industry since the Second World War, the once active industrial periphery along Brooklyn’s waterfront, like many East Coast cities, has been left idle and polluted since the city’s economy has shifted away from manufacturing. In response, two agencies have emerged that reassign value to such forgotten landscapes: brownfield incentive programs that heavily promote real estate development and increasingly popular community gardens. Both offer limited potential. My project expands citizens’ tenure options and deepens the evolution of cultural memory.
Caitlin Charlet SHARING THE AIR: Creating a Community Air Trust Clean air is a right. An empowered community can create lasting change through visual topographic impact and levels of engagement with a legal structure that would define the air in a way that regards value as being for its use in the community, rather than just as the capacity for profit. If we foreground air rights that are shared, traded and donated as a community, then the health of the community can be valued as well and levels of engagement will rippled through the urban topography. A COMMUNITY AIR TRUST is an under theorized tool and method of participatory urban planning, and imagines the city with a future that is shared among all its elements.
Kaitlin Killpack Educating Spatial Practitioners My project aims to explore the conceived, perceived and lived space of the neighborhood encompassing the Brooklyn Tech Triangle, a plan established by various tech and real estate corporations in conjunction with the municipality to draw in new technology-based businesses in order to make money for the city and generate new jobs. By examining and bridging these three intrinsic types of spaces through urban walks imagined and implemented in partnership with high school youths—which will promote discussion, resident interaction and education of future urban activists—local residents will have tools to better understand the space that they occupy. In this manner, they can be empowered to question the dominant model of urbanization, resist the transformation and mitigate the displacement brought on by both the corporate sector and the city.
Ekaterina Levitskaya Commitment Ecologies The self-organization of people in order to be effective and stable needs a certain base – one that is based on continuity of and commitment to space. My project imagines an effective grassroots self-organization movement within the Brooklyn Tech Triangle. The goal is to create spaces for commitment to a common future vision of the area.