Connecting People In Public Space by Zachary Futterer

To the wonderful human beings I have had the privilege of knowing in South Providence, who in the past months have inspired me with their authenticity, transformed my views on death and cemeteries, and forever changed my perception of those who differ from the norm. You all have truly enriched my life, and I will remember you forever.

PUBLIC SPACE Zachary Patrick Futterer Master of Architecture 2014 Rhode Island School of Design A degree project thesis for the study and envisioning of inclusive urban environments and community engagement, with a proposal for Trinity Square and Grace Church Cemetery in South Providence, Rhode Island.

CONTENTS

Illustrations 11 Abstract 12 INTRODUCTION 15 Statement of thesis 16 Musing on diversity and democracy in public space 18 22 Musing on inclusive cities of the future CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION 27 Case studies 28 Early projects 42 Site history 46 Site photos 52 DISCUSSION OF WORK 61 Community voice 62 Interviews 64 Map diaries 78 Quotes 86 Site tracings 88 Social media 103 Story book 108 Camera share 140 Chair bombing 142

Public space analysis 148 Designer voice 152 Early proposals 152 Early sketches 158 Master plan 180 Perspectives 186 Cemetery path 196 Development proposal 202 EXHIBITS 205 Bayard Ewing Gallery, October 2013 206 Woods Gerry Gallery, February 2014 234 240 Rhode Island Convention Center, May 2014 Woods Gerry Gallery, May 2014 241 CONCLUDING REMARKS 248 BIBLIOGRAPHY 250

ILLUSTRATIONS

Case study images group 1 Case study images group 2 Case study images group 3 Case study images group 4 Case study images group 5 Case study images group 6 Case study images group 7 Case study images group 8 Case study images group 9 Case study images group 10 Case study images group 11 Case study images group 12 Case study images group 13 Early project 1 Early project 2 Early project 3 Site situation image 1 Site situation image 2 Site photos group 1 Site photos group 2 Site photos group 3 Site photos group 4 Site photos group 5 Site photos group 6 Site photos group 7 Interview group 1 10

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Interview group 2 67 Master plan resources 1 68 69 Master plan resources 2 Master plan resources 3 70 Placemaking plan 71 Popup Providence 1 72 Popup Providence 2 73 AS220 Youth 75 Community engagement meeting 76 78 Map legend Maps group 1 79 Maps group 2 80 81 Maps group 3 Maps group 4 82 Maps group 5 83 Maps group 6 84 Quotes group 1 86 Quotes group 2 87 Site tracing 1 89 Site tracing 2 90 Site tracing 3 91 Site tracing 4 92 Site tracing 5 93 Site tracing 6 94 Site tracing 7 95 Site tracing 8 96

Site tracing 9 Site tracing 10 Site tracing 11 Site tracing 12 Site tracing 13 Site tracing 14 Social media group 1 Social media group 2 Social media group 3 Social media group 4 Storybook image 1 Storybook image 2 Storybook image 3 Storybook image 4 Storybook image 5 Storybook image 6 Storybook image 7 Storybook image 8 Storybook image 9 Storybook image 10 Storybook image 11 Storybook image 12 Storybook image 13 Storybook image 14 Storybook image 15 Storybook image 16

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Early proposal 1 Early proposal 2 Early proposal 3 Early proposal 4 Early proposal 5 Early sketches 1 Early sketches 2 Early sketches 3 Early sketches 4 Early sketches 5 Early sketches 6 Early sketches 7 Early sketches 8 Early sketches 9 Early sketches 10 Early sketches 11 Early sketches 12 Early sketches 13 Early sketches 14 Early sketches 15 Early sketches 16 Early sketches 17 Early sketches 18 Early sketches 19 Early sketches 20 Early sketches 21

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Early sketches 22 178 Early sketches 23 179 Master plan 180 Master plan zoom 1 181 182 Master plan zoom 2 Master plan zoom 3 183 Site model photos 1 184 185 Site model photos 2 Perspective 1 186 Perspective 2 187 Perspective 3 188 Perspective 4 189 Perspective 5 190 Perspective 6 191 Perspective 7 192 Perspective 8 193 194 Cemetery path drawings 1 Cemetery path drawings 2 195 Cemetery path drawings 3 196 Cemetery path drawings 4 197 Cemetery section 1 198 Cemetery section 2 199 Development plan part 1 204 Development plan part 2 205 Exhibit images 1 207 Exhibit images 2 208

Exhibit images 3 Exhibit images 4 Exhibit images 5 Exhibit images 6 Exhibit images 7 Exhibit images 8 Exhibit images 9 Exhibit images 10 Exhibit images 11 Exhibit images 12 Exhibit images 13 Exhibit images 14 Exhibit images 15 Exhibit images 16 Exhibit images 17 Exhibit images 18 Exhibit images 19 Exhibit images 20 Exhibit images 21 Exhibit images 22 Exhibit images 23 Exhibit images 24 Exhibit images 25 Exhibit images 26 Exhibit images 27 Exhibit images 28

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ABSTRACT

This thesis is investigating one main question: How can we connect people better in the public spaces of our neighborhoods?

Throughout the investigation I concentrate on the following ideas:

• How can public space be made more inclusive to produce democratic environments which encourage social exchange, shared activity, and perhaps even legacy in a neighborhood?

• How can an architectural program for a cemetery connect and share stories of past, present, and future residents and engage people as coowners and co-stewards of their public spaces?

• How can sacred and profane activities be mixed in a redefined threshold between the clean and gritty, protected and open, to allow the reminders of death to be a normal, positive part of our everyday lives and an integral part of great public space?

My answer thus far is that we need a new project delivery process for neighborhood revitalization, one which engages both community voices and designer voices in schematic design to arrive at a truly participatory urbanism. Despite increased violent crime and drug use, the site of Grace Church Cemetery, and its surrounding areas of South Providence, serve many people who want to see the place treated better, be surrounded by positive influences, find ways to improve their lives, and be a part of positive change. In response, I have concluded that the site requires architectural programs which juxtapose normal everyday activities, like doing laundry or buying cigarettes, with sacred activities like visiting one’s dead friend. While this process is long term, I have investigated a few key interventions to enhance social capital in the neighborhood. People will probably always have mixed feelings about death, but this does not mean that we cannot produce great public spaces out of our cemeteries.

STATEMENT OF THESIS MUSING ON DIVERSITY AND DEMOCRACY IN PUBLIC SPACE MUSING ON INCLUSIVE CITIES OF THE FUTURE

STATEMENT OF THESIS

At every stage over the course of nine months, this thesis has investigated one main driving question: How can we as designers connect people better in the public spaces of our neighborhoods? I have underscored this question with many themes in mind: • How can we help neighborhoods produce more diverse, inclusive, democratic public spaces which encourage social exchange, shared activity, shared civic identity, and a shared sense of legacy among locals? • How can we better understand and improve the unique social relationships of a neighborhood’s residents of past, present, and future, imagining a historic cemetery reactivated as a lively public park? • And to that end, how can we reopen the boundary between sacred space and everyday profane space, allowing the reminders of death to be a positive part of our everyday lives and an integral part of great public space? • How can we synthesize our data into a long-term master plan to encourage locals to take care of themselves and others as co-owners and co-stewards of their neighborhood’s shared spaces?

• How can we (with this plan) propose to test uses with tactical urban interventions, renovate storefronts with correct occupancy and ownership, infill with new buildings, and improve outdoor spaces with an active street life? In response to this main question of how to connect people better in our public spaces, I am arguing that we must consider a new project delivery process for neighborhood revitalization, one which engages both community voices and designer voices to create a truly participatory urbanism.

Creating inclusive public space Cities should empower all kinds of people to have a stake in their public spaces, as a sense of ownership can allow diverse groups to find shared interests outside their private lives. They should welcome residents of differing incomes, races, genders, religions, and sexual orientations rather than alienate them. As asserted by Jane Jacobs, the “ballet of the city sidewalk” preserves a vital and diverse public realm with constant use by many different kinds of people at multiple hours of the day to build trust among neighbors.

Planning interventions in South Providence

Encouraging participatory urbanism

I spent several months speaking with community members in South Providence and doing interventions at the site of Trinity Square, which will remain in place for extended periods to encourage diverse use, and more importantly ownership, of an area by multiple groups of people. This is first and foremost an effort in participatory urbanism to catalyze ownership, to design an intervention (and ultimately a long-term use) which residents themselves can participate in realising and thereby create the very things which they will use and take care of. Much like Tactical Urbanism, each tactic used at the proposed site of Grace Church Cemetery responded to a specific need that was not currently being met, providing tools to allow residents to do here what they had no place to do beforeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;perhaps to sit, talk, or play. These kinds of iterative interventions provide opportunities to study and improve foot traffic, social interaction, visual interest, street safety, community engagement, and collective ownership. On a deeper level, the repurposing of this cemetery as dignified public space will reintroduce mortality as a positive part of public life to encourage locals to consider their own legacy in and contributions to the neighborhood. Data compiled from interventions has informed a long-term vision for continued use of the area, with a (hypothetical) architectural proposal that can change based on observed changes in site activities. In these ways, this thesis asserts that ethnographic study and participatory urbanism facilitate a better informed design process.

Regarding our future cities, I am interested in the need for participatory urbanism to address human rights issues of social and political inclusion for all types of people. Whether by means of public policy changes or guerrilla intervention, cities must reclaim, through public space, the right to free assembly, the possibility for open social exchange, and the tolerance of difference. We must believe, as Richard Sennett does, that living in diverse, complex environments helps man mature and improves his sense of freedom, belonging, and legacy. We must celebrate difference rather than assimilate it. We must acknowledge the way that people are rather than define the way that they ought to be. We must welcome the many rather the one.

PUBLIC SPACE

MUSING ON DIVERSITY AND DEMOCRACY IN

Because good cities should aid the development of human identity, success, and health, the presence of difference in cities provides vital conditions for public spaces of democracy and acceptance. To this end, social, political, and physical issues in these conditions play a role in determining the degree to which public space can celebrate diversity. The need for social diversity In social terms, democratic city spaces should celebrate a diversity of people to build strong civic identity. First, the development of neighborhoods must empower residents of differing incomes, races, religions and sexual orientations rather than alienate them. For instance, diversity cannot thrive when institutions like churches try to homogenize individual aspirations and thereby eradicate difference. In his work Le siècle américain, sociologist Olivier Zunz describes the social engineering of “America’s protestant straitjacket,” where its diffusion of pluralism historically propagated discrimination against blacks, women, and the working class (Zunz, 1998: 14). Rather than allow discrimination in public space, we must outgrow our xenophobia and embrace the different, the strange, the foreign, the 18

unknown, the uncomfortable, the complex, the different. In his work The Conscience of the Eye, sociologist Richard Sennett argues that contemporary society is living in a divide between private life and public life, the inside and the outside, which he proposes as a reason for the lack of social exchange in public spaces: “The way cities look reflects a great, unreckoned fear of exposure. ‘Exposure’ more connotes the likelihood of being hurt than of being stimulated... What is characteristic of our city-building is to wall off the differences between people, assuming that these differences are more likely to be mutually threatening than mutually stimulating. What we make in the urban realm are therefore bland, neutralizing spaces, spaces which remove the threat of social contact.” (Sennett Conscience, 1992: 12) Moreover, living in diverse, unfamiliar and complex environments helps man mature from adolescence to adulthood and develop a strong sense of identity: “There is a social ethic that binds the elements of this adult state together, binds the sense of limitation, the sense of caring, the hidden unities with childhood and adolescence. The desires for purification generated in adolescence are ethically a form of self-slavery, a fear of freedom. What emerges in adulthood, in chance situations and shifting grounds, is a desire for liberty” (Sennett Uses, 1970: 130). Second, an active street life should build trust and safety on our sidewalks. Constant use of public spaces by multiple kinds of people at multiple hours of the day provides this vital sense of trust, acceptance and safety

for a neighborhood. For instance, the presence of self-appointed public characters, people who are “in frequent contact with a wide circle of people and who [are] sufficiently interested to make [themselves] a public character,” connects many kinds of people to sidewalk news and gossip and creates an informal public forum for social exchange (Jacobs, 1961: 68). Furthermore, as described in the ballet of the city sidewalk in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the poetic dance of an active and diverse public street is constantly generating new and unexpected interactions that reinforce street safety, much like a dance that never repeats itself and always produces new improvisations in every place: “This is the time of roller skates and stilts and tricycles, and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys; this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s; this is the time when teen-agers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips show or their collars look right; this is the time when beautiful girls get out of MG’s; this is the time when the fire engines go through; this is the time when anybody you know around Hudson Street will go by.” (Jacobs, 1961: 50) In all these ways, our public spaces perform vital social roles in welcoming diversity and need to acknowledge the way that people are rather than define the way that they ought to be.

The need for political diversity Politically, public spaces must allow for free access and free assembly in order to permit the manifestation of democracy in those spaces. In an article from Harvard Design Magazine Michael Sorkin argues that cities must be open, that is “founded on hospitality, a willingness to accommodate difference and to welcome outsiders” and furthermore full of choices that are “based on desire, not coercion or desperation” (Sorkin, 2009: 17). In addition, to foster this kind of openness our cities need more arenas to fight in. First and foremost, we must allow public space to be used as an everchanging fora of political and social discourse. As contested by Richard Sennett, we need to revive these democratic fora: “What [the people themselves] have lost is an arena in the old sense of the word, a place to express themselves and fight with others in a direct way for power” (Sennett Uses, 1970: 80). Finally, as articulated by David Harvey, we must conceive as public spaces as moments in an ever-changing process, rather than as forms or ends in themselves, as they must provide places for community activism and social demonstrations: “As a form of mobilization of power of people in place [community activism] can sometimes be extremely important and extremely useful. [It] can simply be a way of containing discontent but it can also be a very important moment in a more general mobilization” (Harvey, 1997: 232). In this way, we must utilize democratic public space as a malleable tool of discourse, revolt, change, unification and evolution, not only to give power and authority to many different groups of people and but also to co-construct civic identity.

Third, power has historically had an immense influence on the acceptance of diversity. First of all, America has a long history of manipulating and distorting the purpose of democracy to serve political and economic selfinterest. In his work Democracy In America, Alexis de Toqueville observes that an aspiration toward an “equality of conditions” in America has secured for itself one sole origin of power: real estate ownership (de Toqueville, 1835: 58). Moreover, this definition of equality has lead to a unique social state for Americans: “There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.” (de Toqueville, 1835: 115) Furthermore, the social engineering of American society in the twentieth century has powerfully influenced the defined roles of democracy and ownership in public urban spaces, resulting in a massive shift from a public life of local democracy to a private life of mass distribution. Olivier Zunz documents the misguided ideas of Herbert Croly, who in his 1909 work The Promise of American Life proposed a complete reorganization of American democracy and economy by embracing mass production as a way to engineer “the advent of a better society and of men equally better themselves,” which ultimately produced the conception of the American working man as breadwinner and a unique notion of “hard work” as the sole raison d’être in life (Zunz, 1998: 11). Finally and most recently, several Modernists market this conception of property ownership as a prerequisite to freedom. In his 1935 publication of Broadacre City: A New Community Plan, Frank Lloyd Wright markets the idea of a complete redistribution of land for all Americans, “a minimum of one acre going to the childless family and more to the larger family as effected by the state” (Legates, 2003: 378). Today, we know this social construct as the image of resident as taxpayer rather than citizen, an idea which favors the advancement of self-interest over participation in public life (Bookchin, 1992: 6). Therefore, 20

as evidenced by the role of power in these examples, our cities must amend this aspiration toward mass privatization of land and embrace public spaces as democratic fora of discourse, exchange and acceptance. Shared civic spaces must encourage the potential of ownership to empower multiple groups of people to participate in a culturally rich civic life. The feeling that one is in some way “owner” of a city, versus owner of a private house or car, reflects one’s participation in public life and taps into the culturally rich meaning of good civic spaces. To this end, in his book Wrestling With Moses, author Anthony Flint documents the fine story of the “Battle for Washington Square Park,” which demonstrates the capacity of a neighborhood full of immigrants, low-income families, struggling manufacturers, and hatmakers to mobilize the power of community engagement, media presence, and political activism to prevent political self-interest from destroying neighborhood diversity (Flint, 2009: 62). Preventing an act that would have displaced thousands of tenants and small businesses in an effort to declare the area around Washington Square as a slum, a close-knit neighborhood group of Greenwich Village residents, lead by local writer Jane Jacobs among others, stopped New York’s master builder Robert Moses from driving an expressway through the middle of Washington Square Park. In examples as fine as this, we see therefore that democracy must live as much in the voices of diverse groups of people as it must in the public spaces it empowers.

The need for physical diversity In a physical sense, cities must embrace difference by creating diverse places. First, we need acknowledge diverse cities as being body-based rather than car-based. According to the findings of Michael Sorkin, diverse public spaces result from comfort and dimensions which serve many different kinds of bodies and which privilege human locomotion: “City air makes you free, but only if you can get a breath” (Sorkin, 2009: 18). More importantly, this kind of walking city often benefits from a low architecture, for instance that of the walk-up building. Positing that by permitting easy

accessibility one can achieve a more body-based urban environment, Sorkin denotes, “I’ve lived on the fifth floor (the natural limit for stairclimbing on a regular basis) of a walk-up building for over twenty years” (Sorkin, 2009: 18). Thus, democratic urban spaces may welcome greater diversity by welcoming a body-based architecture. Moreover, our neighborhoods must welcome dense, walkable, mixeduse development rather than scattered, autocentric, segregated sprawl. While we as designers and planners cannot force this mixing, we can embrace several generators of diversity which allow for these conditions to develop, among them a good mix of primary uses, small street blocks, a variety of old and new buildings, and a dense concentration of people. Here, a mix of primary uses allows for people to use the same streets at different times for different reasons at different times of day, in order that these uses act as effective anchors which bring people to a specific place (Jacobs, 1961: 162). Next, small street blocks provide more options for travel, more intersections of public paths, and thus more socially and economically viable “places for buying, eating, seeing things, getting a drink” (Jacobs, 1961: 180). In addition, since lower occupancy costs in old buildings can allow for small businesses to make out successfully, a variety of old and new buildings may provide a neighborhood with an economic diversity of “high-yield, middling-yield, low-yield, and no-yield enterprises” (Jacobs, 1961: 188). Lastly, a dense concentration of people serves a vital role in engendering diversity. As Jacobs asserts, “without help from the concentration of the people who live [in a district], there can be little convenience or diversity where people live, and where they require it” (Jacobs, 1961: 201). For all these reasons, compact mixeduse development can help provide greater diversity and acceptance of difference in public places and thus a more democratic forum for discourse and exchange.

of a single class of goods but [also a] diversity of opportunities for a single class of people” (Sorkin, 2009: 12). Perhaps our public spaces need a shift of paradigm. Cities should be able to afford greater freedom to its citizens by providing choices and opportunities which allow for the invention of new possibilities. Democratic spaces must accommodate not only choices among existing things but also choices as “acts that create things, the ability to invent a life (or a thing) of your own” (Sorkin, 2009: 12). In this way, diverse choices can also allow multiple groups to claim a sense of ownership, acceptance and belonging in a public space. In conclusion, public space as a democratic forum must serve to combat the fear of difference in cities. We must create city environments which empower future generations of people, whose environments threaten their identity, success and health, to fight the homogeneity that degrades their sense of freedom and belonging. We must move toward social reality and away from prescriptive fantasy. We must acknowledge the way that people are rather than define the way that they ought to be. We must welcome the many rather the one.

To this end, democratic urban spaces must encourage a diversity of options. First of all, we must take care to provide a diversity of choices in order to attract a diversity of people. For instance, Michael Sorkin asserts that participation in consumerism tends to generate not merely a “diversity 21

MUSING ON INCLUSIVE CITIES OF THE FUTURE

Public spaces in the cities of the future will welcome all classes, genders, races, ethnicities, religions, and sexual orientations. By celebrating increased diversity, access, and sharing, these cities will allow for truly inclusive urban space. Firstly, using a concept which I call “cultural transparency,” public areas will accommodate diversity by making it more visible. Through quick interventions that dignify the already existing uses of a place, shared public spaces will bring together multiple kinds of people and encourage the acceptance of difference. Secondly, increased mobility will result in safer streets, higher employment, and healthier people. Dense development, clear but flexible land use, and increased access to basic resources will empower diverse groups of people to live where they work and work where they live. Finally, the shared experience of public spectacles will facilitate a sense of dignity and pride in one’s city, rather than merely in one’s house or private realm.

Increased diversity The inclusive cities of the future will prove that the everyday uses of public spaces produce extremely specific and diverse character, just like their users, rather than generic and banal routine. A space that accommodates simple and quick public events can readily make visible the rich culture of one’s neighborhood and produce a sense of “cultural transparency.” As Margaret Crawford documents in her book Everyday Urbanism, informal events put on by local residents can “refamiliarize” urban space, to make it more pleasant, more familiar, more like home: “The urban environment, 22

instead of being a relatively brutal and not very pleasant place, becomes more like the interior; it becomes a softer place that is more inhabitable” (Crawford, 1999: 22). Moreover, we color our neighborhoods with the activities of the people in them, be they a Mothers Day craft fair held from a truck bed in an unused parking lot, a garage sale with brightly colored clothing hung over a chain link fence, or rugs for sale draped over curbside parked cars: “The literal qualities of [these] goods, shimmering pink and red cellophane, delicately patterned lace and ribbons, or cut flowers evoke the intimacy of the interior rather than the no-man’s-land of the street. In a public place, items usually seen inside the home such as tables, chairs, and tablecloths transform neglected spaces into islands of occupation” (Crawford, 1999: 25). In these ways, our future public spaces will reveal the sociocultural diversity of their residents through the quick, informal, gritty, homemade sharing of one’s self with others. This exposure of private life within the public realm will result in the tolerance of difference, rather than a fear of it, by making visible in public space the activities of diverse social groups. As Richard Sennett describes in his work The Conscience of the Eye, a divide between private life and public life pervades much of modern culture and leads to a fear of difference among many. Instead of learning how to interact with those who differ, we “wall off the differences between people, assuming that these differences are more likely to be mutually threatening than mutually stimulating” (Sennett, 1992: 7). To this end, instead of walling off difference, we must repurpose bland urban spaces in our cities for other uses to encourage social interaction among diverse groups of people. The city of Bogotá serves as a perfect example of a proactive effort to

break this fear. A worldwide leader in the Tactical Urbanism movement for open streets, or “ciclovias,” it designates certain days of the week for declaring some roads as “car free” to allow recreational use by walkers and bicyclists. As pointed out by Mike Lydon of the Street Plans Collaborative, this simple initiative builds social capital by bringing together residents of all ages, incomes, occupations, religions, and races to enjoy their city’s public realm while sharing in a common activity: “In doing so, participants develop a wider understanding of their city, each other, and the potential for making streets friendlier for people” (Lydon, 2010: 6). To allow for diversity, our future cities need to practice empathy rather than sympathy, and congruently, tolerance rather than fear.

Increased access In the future, inclusive cities will provide clear land use plans to preserve access to water and fresh food for even the poorest of its populations. In his recent lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gustavo Petro, the current mayor of Bogotá, predicted that the availability of water will be a crucial factor in the future development of the world’s cities. In the case of Bogotá, Petro has introduced a controversial land use plan which mandates radical changes in development patterns and increased wetland preservation. First, since political power plays have displaced the poorest people in the city to border areas at the highest risk of flooding and landslide, this Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial (POT) proposes to change the existing social stratification by prohibiting further urban development in these high risk areas (Petro, 2013). Second, given that recent construction has destroyed wetlands, reduced access to water for poor populations, and heightened the risk of flooding, the plan seeks to increase the number of protected areas in Bogotá to control urban expansion, allow for more mixed-use business incubation in the city center, and thereby encourage the poor to migrate inward (Petro, 2013). In all of its policies and legislation, governments will need to provide for the daily needs and access of each citizen to vital resources, while at the same time encouraging in them a sense of shared responsibility to protect and preserve their public spaces.

For example, in the city of Curitiba, Brazil, planner and former mayor Jaime Lerner has implemented what he calls an “equation of co-responsibility,” wherein people in the city’s slums receive from the government one kilo of fresh produce in return for every five kilos of trash that they collect from their streets (SBS/Dateline, 2006). As illustrated by these cases, inclusive cities will form policies which empower even the lowest classes by preserving access to basic natural resources. The availability of several transportation options will result in better access to jobs, as well as a greater sense of responsibility, for future urban populations. For example, the city of Medellín has dramatically reduced poverty and crime by extending its public transit network to serve the poorest communas of the city. As stated by Alejandro Echeverri, the city’s former Director of Urban Projects, “We [knew we had to] get public transport into the poorest areas; open the spaces, build the schools and centres of learning, create jobs—and people listened. Most people’s map in a Latin American city covers only 20% of that city. We needed to connect these barrios to each other, and to the rest of Medellín” (Vulliamy, 2013). Moreover, these innovative transformations in transit and safety mark a renewed sense of collective responsibility among poor residents to “unslum” one’s slum. With a new library park, school, and other civic projects built among the outer barrios of Medellín, locals now not only have access to computers and literature but can also take out a cheap credit loan to start up a new café or shop (Vulliamy, 2013). More than ever, inclusive cities of the future will embrace access to transit as a creator of jobs, a builder of public morale, and at least in part, a crime fighter.

Increased sharing By first providing the urban spaces where many different kinds of people can talk to each other, our future cities will allow its people to develop a sense of pride and belonging in their neighborhood, their culture, and their city. One great method will be guerrilla gardening, or more generally, community gardening. Among its many strategies for Tactical Urbanism, the 23

Street Plans Collaborative presents this kind of gardening as an excellent tactic for improving a neighborhood, since people tend to care for gardens years after their creation: “The direct re-purposing of the land is often intended to raise awareness for a myriad of social and environmental issues, including sustainable food systems, improving neighborhood aesthetics, and the power of short-term, collaborative local action” (Lydon, 2010: 11). More importantly, the activity creates opportunities for different groups of people to talk to each other and can therefore teach them to care about something, and someone, outside their home and private realm. In addition, this gardening solution relates well to the studies of “turf” presented by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She observes that children involved in gangs tend not to have learned how to play well with other kids, since their social activity and play were removed from well surveilled streets (Jacobs, 1961: 77). For all these reasons, inclusive public spaces in cities will provide occasions for people to develop a common ground, and perhaps even a common reliance on one another. In addition to engendering a shared sense of pride, the use of simple street interventions will dignify the concept of shared ownership in cities. For instance, the approach of Everyday Urbanism to “refamiliarizing” public space to be more like home can challenge the boundaries between public and private space: “On the sidewalk, apron-clad vendors sell tamales prepared at home, extending the domestic economy into urban space” (Crawford, 1999: 25). Furthermore, the strategies of Tactical Urbanism offer low-risk, high-reward methods for residents to reclaim, and find pride in, underutilized urban spaces. As articulated by the Street Plans Collaborative, quick interventions like PARK(ing) Day and Play Streets create recreational areas, like mini parks from curbside parking spaces or public playgrounds from car-dominant roads, where they do not currently exist (Lydon, 2010: 5). As evidenced by all these arguments, simple moves can empower many social groups to change their cities, and inclusive public spaces must allow for, and perhaps encourage, these changes to happen.

Thus, future urban spaces will be at once diverse, with many options for doing things beyond our private property on a day-to-day basis; accessible, in maintaining a dense network of basic resources like water, food, transit, and jobs; and shared, in building civic pride through the collective experience of local events and street life. Our cities will learn to use public space as a tool to introduce people to themselves and in all these ways be truly inclusive.

CASE STUDIES EARLY PROJECTS SITE HISTORY

CASE STUDIES

#whOWNSpace_DSGN AGNC_Manhattan, NY

9/11 Memorial_Michael Arad

78th Street Play Street_Queens, NY

ACTIVATE!_Latent Design_Chicago, IL

Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery_Elwood, IL

Anchorage Place DUMBO_Brooklyn, NY

Arquitectura Expandida_Bogotรก, Colombia

Art In Odd Places_Manhattan, NY

ARTfarm_AFHNY Studio_Bronx, NY

Before I Die Boards_Candy Chang_Providence, RI

BenchPress_BroLab_Brooklyn and Queens, NY

Better Block_Better Block Team_Dallas, TX

El Campo de Cebada Zuloark Madrid, Spain The City of Madrid abandoned this site after funds stopped. â&#x20AC;&#x153;A concrete hole of 5,500 square meters appeared, abandoned and hidden behind a fence. The political transformation of contemporary society calls for new formats for its streets and squares. A year later El Campo de Cebada was born.â&#x20AC;?

Imagination Playground David Rockwell

BK Farmyards_Brooklyn, NY

Brooklyn Night Bazaar_Brooklyn, NY

Bubbleware_Rebar_Austin, TX

Bunchy Carter Park_Department of DIY_Los Angeles, CA

Butaro District Hospital_Burera, Rwanda_MASS Design Group

chainlinkGREEN_International Design Clinic_ Philadelphia, PA

Chair Bombing_DoTank_Brooklyn, NY

Chair Bombing_Providence, RI

Community Living Room_Shared Spaces Landscape Architecture and Hood Builders

Crafts Cooperative_Santiago, Chile

Crown Heights Participatory Urbanism_Manuela Ávila_Brooklyn, NY

David’s Tower_Caracas, Venezuela

Depave_Portland, OR

Edible Estates_Fritz Haeg_Manhattan, NY

Favela Bairro_Jorge Mario Jáuregui_Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Food Trucks_Providence, RI

For Squat_Reuben Kincaid Realty_Chicago, IL

Fresh Moves Mobile Market_Architecture for Humanity Chicago_Chicago, IL

Ghost Bikes_St. Louis, MO

Greenaid Seedbomb Vending Machine_ COMMONstudio_Los Angeles, CA

Guerrilla Bike Lanes_Urban Repair Squad_ Toronto, CA

Guerrilla Drive-Ins_Santa Cruz, CA

Guerrilla Gardening_Green Guerrillas_Manhattan, NY

Guerrilla Grafters_San Francisco, CA

Harvard Yard Chairs_Italo Calvino_Cambridge, MA

Heidelberg Project_Detroit, MI

I Wish This Was_Candy Chang_New Orleans, LA

Iluminacci贸n_Urbano Activo_San Juan, Puerto Rico

Insert Here_Eve Mosher_Manhattan, NY

International Center for Urban Ecology_Kyong Park_Detroit, MI

Intersection Repair_City Repair_Portland, OR

Irrational Exhibits_Deborah Oliver_Los Angeles, CA

Sylvanus House Bere Architects London, UK

Grande Monuments Brooklyn, NY This businesses is both a tombstone shop and a bakery and serves as an excellent example of how program can be mixed to serve both sacred and profane activities in the same space.

Islands of LA_Ari Kletzky_Los Angeles, CA

Khayelitsha Neighborhood_Cape Town, South Africa

Kingshighway Skatepark_Kingshighway Vigilante Transitions_St. Louis, MO

KISS Popup Chapel_Z-A Studio_Manhattan, NY

Mal贸n Urbano_Ciudad Emergente_Santiago, Chile

MoMA PS1 Holding Pattern_Interboro Partners_ Long Island City, NY

No Longer Empty_Manhattan, NY

Nolli Plan_Giambattista Nolli_Athens, Greece; Rome, Italy

Notes for Anyone_Michael Pecirno_Chicago, IL

Nuit Blanche 2011_Manhattan, NY

NY Street Advertising Takeover_ PublicAdCampaign_Manhattan, NY

Occupy Wall Street_OWS Architecture Working Group_Manhattan, NY

Parc de la Villette_Bernard Tschumi_Paris, France

Paris Plage_Paris, France

PARK(ing) Day_Providence, RI (image credit to Providence Preservation Society)

Place de la R茅publique_TVK Architecture_Paris, France

Parking Plot_Free Agents Imbert & Meijerink_St. Louis, MO

Parklets_Rebar_San Francisco, CA

Parkman Triangle Park_Urban Operations_Los Angeles, CA

Parkmobiles_CMG Landscape Architecture_San Francisco, CA

Participation Park_Baltimore Development Cooperative_Baltimore, MD

People Make Parks_Partnership for Parks_ Manhattan, NY

Pet Cemetery_Tokyo, Japan

Phone Booth Book Share_Department of Urban Betterment_Manhattan, NY

PHS Pops-Up Garden_Pennsylvania Horticultural Society_Philadelphia, PA

Piano Stairs_Stockholm, Sweden

Piazza Gratissima_BroLab_Bronx, NY

Pimp Your Pavement_Dublin, Ireland

Place It!_James Rojas_Raleigh, NC

Placemaking in Bronzeville_Urban Activators_ Chicago, IL

Popup Art Loop_Chicago Loop Alliance_Chicago, IL

Popup City_Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative_Cleveland, OH

InfoWash Community Center SHoP Architects De Lisle, MS This place serves as both a laundromat and a community information center, built for a part of Mississippi severely hit by Hurricane Katrina.

The Laundromat Project Rise Wilson Manhattan, NY

Popup Lunch_Alexandra Pulver_Manhattan, NY

Popuphood_Oakland, CA

Post Furniture_Ken Mori and Jenny Liang_Los Angeles, CA

Power Cart_Mouna Andraos_Manhattan, NY

Project Row Houses_Rick Lowe_Houston, TX

Proxy_Envelope A+D_San Francisco, CA

PUPstop Project_People for Urban Progress + IndyGo_Indianapolis, IN

QR Hobo Codes_Free Art & Technology Lab_ Pittsburgh, PA

Quinta Monroy_Elemental_Alejandro Aravena_ Iquique, Chile

Re-News_Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum_San Francisco, CA

Re-Possessing Urban Spaces- Emergent Paradigms_Julie Torres Moskovitz_Detroit, MI

Red Swing Project_Austin, TX

Road Diets_New York Transportation Commission_ Manhattan, NY

Scum River Bridge_Jason Eppink and Posterchild_Astoria, NY

SEED Evaluator_Bryan Bell

Skipping Only Zones_Design That Moves You_ Alison Uljee and Sierra Seip_Brooklyn, NY

Stairway Stories_Design That Moves You_ Alison Uljee and Sierra Seip_Manhattan, NY

Streetfilms

Ten New Historical Markers_Howling Mob Society_Pittsburgh, PA

Territory_Museum of Contemporary Phenomena_ Chicago, IL

St-Ouen Flea Market_Paris, France

Swan Point Cemetery_Providence, RI

The Uni_The Uni Project & Hรถweler + Yoon Architecture_Boston, MA

Tidy Street_Jon Bird_Brighton, UK

Tiny WPA_Alex Gilliam_Flint, MI

TrafficCOM_Tomorrow Lab_Manhattan, NY

Version Festival 12_Public Media Institute_ Chicago, IL

Walk [Your City]

War Gastronomy- Recipes of Relocation_ SanFranStudios_San Francisco

Word Mapping_Barbara Kruger_Newark, NJ

Word Mapping_Jenny Holzer_Hoosick Falls, NY

Yarnbombing

EARLY PROJECTS Can we imagine a safer, more walkable, more ethnically transparent downtown on the streets of Camden, New Jersey?

Can we imagine a denser, more walkable downtown Providence, Rhode Island, with alley ways now beautiful pedestrian scaled promenades?

My fellow colleague Grace Cong Xin Wong and I submitted a proposal to the 2014 Open Engagement artists conference, sponsored by the Queens Museum in Flushing, New York. This collaboration clarified our parallel interests in connecting people in public space. Submission Category Immigrant Movement International

Submission Type Project - original project created for Open Engagement; can include performances, tours, exhibitions, or others

Brief Description The goal is to exchange stories between diverse communities and create a sense of ownership and empowerment by showing what public space could be through tactical intervention and catalyzing the idea of sharing fun with your neighbors, not fear through the act of giving and making together.

Expanded Description In a symbiotic relationship between urbanism and art, the team aims to introduce to immigrant communities a new sense of ownership of the neighborhood. Working with Dorcus International Institute, Grace and 44

Zachary plan to create temporary parks out of potted plants, where they facilitate and participate in plant decoration and give-away to refugee neighborhoods in Providence. The temporary sidewalk “park” invites visitors to imagine what the neighborhood could be and become a part of this proposed use of public space. Decorating and socializing helps empower residents by providing a space to express themselves and share their story. Photos of ‘decorator’ and ‘decorated’ will replace the plants, thus exhibiting the diverse community and their creative talent. Afterward, the photos will be printed onto street furniture and placed on the sidewalk outside IMI, thereby creating a lasting sense of ownership of the sidewalk. The team believes in treating public space as the merger of one’s own “story”—or in this case, one’s potted plant—with those of others, thus promoting shared experiences among different kinds of people. Through short-term collaborative action, public spaces can evolve into inclusive environments of continual social exchange through “storytelling” and generate a sense of pride for immigrant communities in their neighborhood, their culture, and their city.

SITE HISTORY

Thanks to the documentary film Southside: The Rise and Fall of South Providence, lended to me graciously by the Providence Preservation Society, I was able to acquire a brief history of the culturally and historically rich neighborhood in Providence known as Southside. South Providence, from 1860 to today In the 1920’s, a large number of ethnic groups lived along the Broad Street area, among them Irish, Jews, Ukranians, and Italians. During the period of Providence’s industrial development from the 1860’s and beyond, this area around Broad Street and Elmwood Avenue was in a high demand. It used to be a very prestigious neighborhood, convenient, and busy, and Willard Avenue was well served by amenity shops and a street car into the city. It was exactly the kind of old-fashioned neighborhood where everyone knew each other, depended on each other, and watched each other’s children, and everyone took good care of their property. From 1950 to 1970, there was a downhill shift. The population moved from 3 to 43 percent black, and overall 44 percent non-white. In the 1960’s, the neighborhood experienced severe disinvestment. The West Side was torn down for redevelopment, displacing many residents to Southside. 46

Business was moving out of Providence from 1970 to 1980, which caused unemployment in Southside to drop from 7 to 19 percent. At that point, it no longer held a very positive reputation. Its days of industrial prosperity were gone, and from 1980 to 1990 the number of Southside workers employed in manufacturing fell from 47 to 15 percent. Crime increased in the 1960’s, causing more negative connotations about the neighborhood that would stay for a long time. Civil rights activists pushed toward fair housing and against police brutality. In 1849, Providence began celebrating West Indian Emancipation Day. Then in 1966 a freedom rally erupts into disturbances near the Willard Avenue Shopping Center, destroyed soon after in 1967, where protesters carried signs demanding, “Help us live in better homes.” In 1970, youth riots broke out against firemen and white motorists, with people throwing rocks and smashing shop windows. A great mistrust of police, coupled with a great mistrust between whites and ethnic minorities, propagated this tension and showed that “when you push people who are already badly oppressed, they push back after awhile.” The area saw a large increase in the number of vacant lots and housing, and many property owners abandoned their houses and apartments due to high taxes and insufficient rent. Properties became expensive, and some people became very wealthy by burning large numbers of houses and collecting insurance money on them. With all this vacant land on the Southside, the construction of highway I-95 destroys one-third of houses in Southside. Rhode Island Hospital consumed a lot of land and bought 40 to

70 acres for surface parking, since it was cheaper to buy up homes than to build parking structures. The Providence Housing Authority built 744 units of public housing as the Roger Williams Homes of the 1940’s, but by 1991 only 4 units remained. The neighborhood was originally quite racially mixed but then saw the white flight from cities in the late 1950’s, where even maintenance moved out and caused the now known case of neglect. Drugs and prostitution became prevalent, and Roger Williams was soon deprogrammed from HUD in 1984. Then a system of limited equity co-op started, where one could own a “share” in their unit instead of owning the unit itself. Under the leadership of Mandela Woods, tenants formed the Family Housing Development Corporation and demanded that land be developed as affordable housing. Woods’ funding stopped, and the group urgently needed new schools to be built on vacant land. The Williams Woods project was finished in 2007 and provided 65 new units of affordable tax-credit housing. These efforts marked a new era in housing revitalization with new construction, repairs, disappearance of blighted properties, absence of arsen, not-for-profit investment, and lot maintenance. The Trinity Gateway project for Grace Church Cemetery acted as a gateway to the Southside and a vision to see it reborn. Southside Community Land Trust started 25 years ago and created community gardens on Thurbers Avenue to accommodate incoming migrants with farming backgrounds. These gardens were a kind of model biointensive farm to revitalize the area, to grow and show people how to grow organic food. SSCLT was concerned with protecting people’s connection between each other and nature and created new pocket parks and open space for food production. Community development corporations became the new saviors of affordable housing in Providence. Development costs were even too high for developer profit. A new corporation, Stop Wasting Abandoned Property (SWAP), began stopping the high rate of vacant lots in the Southside. They purchased and refurbished buildings and put them back up for sale at an affordable price. Completed between 1988 and 1989, the tax-credited Omni Point

Apartments expanded to 1200 units, up from 55, and building contractors began taking advantage of affordable housing opportunities. SWAP began as a homesteading organization, “a place where you buy a home for one dollar.” Between 1992 and 1993 they built 85 to 90 new affordable homes, restarting neighborhood revitalization and making it attractive again to buy homes there. The Omni Development Corporation was conscious not to create new ghettos and instead focused on mixed-income development. This motivation was luckily shared by businesses and residents, which allowed for new investment in building refurbishment and maintenance. Property values inevitably gentrified. Pressure from private builders caused price increases, and some could no longer afford to live in their Southside homes. The mortgage crisis of 2006 and 2007 badly hurt Southside, especially minority neighborhoods. The amount of foreclosures in Southside rose from 27 in 2004-2005, to 168 in 2006-2007. Between 2006 and 2008, 19 percent of residential lots were in foreclosure. During this time there was again a high level of drug and gang activity among Latino and Asian gangs. The Institute for Study and Practice of Nonviolence tried to mediate, educate, and reduce violence and even incorporated nonviolent practices into the police department. The police made great efforts to develop real relationships with the people of Southside, to be seen as friendly people and not the ones arresting their friends. OIC job training was available in many fields, and CCRI offered an English program, drawing attention to a rich resource of diverse employers. The South Providence Development Corporation (SPDC) partnered with Rhode Island Hospital to help provide educate and employment to improve the economy. A for-profit subsidiary of SPDC, Clean Scape started efforts at improving employment and industry in Southside. Statistically, 75 percent of employed Southside residents were actually minority, many of them non-English speakers, but they were very motivated workers. Clean Scape redeveloped Gordon Avenue with a new business incubator, recognized as 47

Grace Church Cemetery in Trinity Square, the gateway to the Southside neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island.

the first “smart” green building in Rhode Island, with photovoltaics, green roof, and rainwater collection. The Prairie Avenue Revitalization Initiative also created a plan to stimulate broader business investment. This period also saw a consolidation of banks in Southside. The Minority Investment Development Corporation provided access to capital for underserved businesses. They addressed the challenge of cost of credit with new credit unions in Southside. The Southside Merchants Association helped Latino businesses hire more cross-ethnically in order to grow. SWAP also improved the South Broad Street with planters and canopies. The city began working the Merchants Association to help many African, Jamaican, and Asian businesses to grow. The neighborhood is now busy with activity. However, the city is only investing in big “one-off” projects and claiming that they will change the world with them. The reality, though, is that the neighborhood has great energy, great cultural pride, great diversity, great resilience, and great capacity to evolve.

Thanks to the thorough account given during my interview with Anne Tait of Roger Williams University, I can provide a brief history of Grace Church Cemetery. A history of Grace Church Cemetery Anne lived in the caretaker’s cottage in Grace Church Cemetery for six years. There are actually not that many cemeteries in Providence. The cottage of the cemetery was not broken into into the building was abandoned and a fence put up. The cemetery was established in 1834, and the church in 1929, renovated by Gothic revival architect Russell Warren, who also designed the cottage in the rural retreat style and is buried in Grace Church Cemetery. Public burials officially started in the 1890’s. More than 9000 people are buried in the cemetery and all vary greatly in ethnicity, with backgrounds ranging from English, Chinese, Armenian, and many more. Grace Church wants to change the ownership of the cemetery to a 501C-13 (not-for-profit cemetery organization). In order to get it to be a public park, we must restore its endowment funds. It is really a potentially beautiful public space, as can be seen with the master plan proposal by Martha Lyden and the detailed tree survey by Chris Utter. Anne feels that the cemetery and cottage are much safer and better treated. There were three break-ins in the first year after the cottage was abandoned, with many of her books and appliances stolen. She cites the incidents as a lesson in what happens when a building goes vacant. The minister of Grace Church, Bob Brooks, also tried to give the cemetery to Anne, but she of course did not have the resources to manage it.

The cemetery holds great significance for its transitional cemetery design in Gothic revival style. Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge was the first rural retreat cemetery in the United States, established in 1831, first owned by a private cemetery company, and now a complete with a museum. The secular Swan Point Cemetery and Locust Grove Cemetery in Providence, established in the 1880’s, are two other examples. Grace Church is a rural retreat cemetery that serves a downtown church and as such composes a hybrid.

Cemetery associations tried to minimize maintenance and secure greater endowments. In Rhode Island, one cannot dig within 25 feet of a cemetery.

There was originally a strong desire to create cemeteries as outdoor living rooms, meant as a healthy way to get out of the city to visit one’s dead friends.

The cottage can become a key part of programming as a sort of hub and meeting point for the square. Traffic from the main highway is dangerous, and crosswalks are not completely safe. We must take advantage of the square and make it into a real square.

We must bring back a poetic respect for our cemeteries and the reminders of death in our society. Grace Church is often viewed as blighted and unsafe, but it really has great potential as a park and open space. We need to take great care in dealing with grave stones so as not to degrade them further: “Every stone has its own little problem.”

The local women’s center talked about doing a cemetery square in Grace Church, to be called the Garden of Innocence for youth burials, but it was never developed. History could work for design in Grace Church Cemetery with some simple strategies, like noninvasive gardening and shallower plantings (roses and lilies). A community or family plot adoption program could also help with general upkeep, but the stones also need professionals to reset them. During our interview, Anne brought of videos online called “Ask a Mortician,” in which the moral was about bringing mortality back into our culture. There was a decision to remove any signs of death from cemeteries, so that they are as “dead as our loved ones.” In the 1940’s, our views of death changed. The Victorians only used to talk about death but not sex, and now all we do is talk about sex but not death. Old burial rituals, originally in opposition to cremation, dealt with the respect of the body, and yet now many more cemeteries are being demolished or moved—for airports or other reasons—because of a decrease in this respect. There was also the lawn cemetery movement, to clear our protruding objects for the lawnmower and strive for minimum maintenance. 51

SITE PHOTOS

The neighborhood is home to an ethnically diverse community of Spanish- and Portuguese speakers, southeast Asian immigrants, African Americans, Caucasians, Armenians, Jews, Gypsies, and refugees from over 150 countries. There are plenty of amenities along Broad Street and Elmwood Avenue, like markets, community centers, and convenience stores. Photos will show the current condition of the cemetery, which also speaks to its many uses, and many people consider it their home. In the cemetery one can find coats, cognac bottles, travel books, flowers, office chairs, recycling bins, food containers, heroine needles, graffiti, and overturned gravestones.

Many people consider the cemetery to be there home and leave quite personal things in it.

The Southlight installation, organized by RISD and the Social Light Movement, drew locals out to the cemetery for two nights with their kids and dogs to share stories and enjoy some hot chocolate.

COMMUNITY VOICE PUBLIC SPACE ANALYSIS DESIGNER VOICE

COMMUNITY VOICE

The first part of this process—the engagement of community voice—is about engaging directly with locals, and really listening to them. I have spent the last five months getting to know the Trinity Square neighborhood in South Providence and its people and documented each visit, like diary entries, in a series of maps. In a place like Trinity Square and Grace Church Cemetery, people value social connection, and this area is in great need of improved public spaces which reflect the deep relationships they share with each other. Regular site visits have allowed me to observe people using the cemetery and its surrounding area for many different things. People go for walks, ride bikes through the paths, visit a grave, smoke a cigarette, chat with friends, wander around intoxicated, take naps, practice boxing, and wait for the bus. Convenience stores and parking lots also provide excellent hangout spots. People play music from their radio/car, sell CDs and other goods outside and inside, chat with business owners, beg for money, pick up trash off sidewalks, distribute cardboard business cards, share drugs, start fights, start romantic relationships, look out for each other, look for someone’s help, self police, and really depend on each other in a profound way. I have found great value in these social relationships and argue that the area needs new master planning efforts to help these relationships grow and individuals to improve their lives and neighborhood. And so I have used multiple methods to gather information from locals, test ideas for intervention, and embed in this project the stories/voices of Elmwood community residents.

I have attended community meetings; spoken with city officials; interviewed locals and not-for-profits; traced over objects/surfaces in the cemetery; started a social media campaign, distributed flyers; collected handwritten stories from locals into a book; developed photos taken by locals with a disposable camera; planned, fabricated, and executed a chair bombing intervention; and hung out with some outdoor regulars. I have met workers of five convenience stores, and now know a couple quite well. I have been introduced to some of the outdoor crowd that hangs out in public all day. I recognize some of them now when I go there, and they recognize me and (I think) on some level understand what I have been trying to do. I would like to share a few quotes I took from my interviews with local stakeholders: “There’s nothing in the community for the kids to do, so they find their own things to do, which isn’t very productive. So they take it out on the poor cemetery.” “There is a lot of effort around the green space there. It’s the largest green space in the area, so there’s a lot of opportunity.” Now I would like to read aloud a couple stories hand written in the book I left for a month by the cash register at a convenience store near the cemetery:

“Hi my name is Henry Mirce, better known as DJ Colossus. I work at the Classic Café in Prov. I have three wonderfull girls. I just trying to make it in the music business... Peace to everybody who trying to make it in this world. I wish everyone the best. Keep striving and you will succeed. One, DJ Colossus.” “I lived outside and ate out of the garbage. My showers were a bar of soap and to hope it rained... I may have nothing except love. I stand here working at Star Market on Broad sober! I have a bed in a house and drink socially. I do no drugs and find my own happiness. Allah loves me, Wendy.” All these tactics I am using as ways to better understand and really hear the voices/ opinions/stories/dreams/ambitions of those who frequent the area. Despite increased violent crime and drug use in the cemetery and nearby areas, many people, including homeless and low-income families, have told me that they want to see this place treated better, be surrounded by positive influences, find ways to improve their lives, and be a part of positive change. All the feedback I have received has told me that people need to feel proud about the work they do in order to feel connected to their neighborhood and motivated to improve their lives.

INTERVIEWS

2013-12-30 Mike Lydon / Street Plans Collaborative / Brooklyn, NY During a trip to Brooklyn, I met Mike Lydon, the founder and principal of the Street Plans Collaborative, a for-profit consulting agency which uses Tactical Urbanism to test and improve the quality of social life in public spaces. As Mike graciously agreed to let me interview him, I stopped by to chat about effective means and methods of doing Tactical Urbanism. In answering my questions, he placed special emphasis on the following points: (1) Site selection • Choose a site with good “bones,” that is a good working infrastructure for street interventions. Good candidates will already possess a fair amount of street frontage and foot traffic. • Be prepared to follow the appropriate steps for working on private or public property. Private property will require buy-in from businesses and property owners for insurance liability. Public property will require research of good design and use of temporary materials. (2) Preparation

• Work with people who have knowledge of the location. Talk with the “stakeholders” involved in the site you wish to use, including nearby businesses, property owners, and developers. • Consider contacting local companies, like nurseries, lumberyards, and recycling centers, for material donations. These contacts will help you maintain inexpensive supply costs. 64

(3) Documentation • Document every intervention in its 3 stages—before, during, and after intervention. • Use multiple media to collect information if possible, such as camera, video, and notes. • Choose multiple times of the week to document, like a Monday morning, a Friday night, and a Sunday afternoon. Activity in good, well-used neighborhoods will vary hourly, weekly, and seasonally. • Conduct surveys with street users—this is a very important part! Ask 1-3 yes-no questions, and keep them very simple: “What is one thing that could happen here to make your day better?” or “Do you like this installation here?”

2014-01-13 Mary Ellen Lynch / Dorcas International Institute / Providence, RI Based on our interest in working in diverse neighborhoods, my colleague Grace Cong Xin Wong and I met with Mary Ellen to discuss the mission of Dorcas in receiving, training, and housing refugees from 150 countries in Rhode Island, 95% of whom settle in this neighborhood. We learned that the Southside itself is also diverse, with many southeast Asian and Hispanic immigrants and a dense mixture of ethnic establishments. Mary Ellen referred us to a grassy lot on Cromwell Street—an active area with many refugees, known for crime and in need of reviving—as a possible site for intervention.

Grace and I at Dorcas International Institute.

2014-01-13 Antonio Manaigo / Antonio Manaigo Design Studio / Providence, RI Across from said grassy lot on Cromwell Street, we stumbled upon the Klein Building and met Antonio, a RISD alumnus who is working with Freecell Architecture to renovate the building into artist lofts, a microbrewery, mixed offices, urban farm, and restaurant incubators. In South Providence he sees great potential—with its low cost of living, affordable real estate, rich industrial history, and diverse community—and views this project as an investment in its revitalization. Antonio referred us to Linda Weisinger (SWAP), Lauren Crahan (Freecell Architecture), Ned Connors (Historical Consultant), and Mario Neri, an Italian landlord on the corner and long-time resident of the area.

2014-01-14 Linda Weisinger / SWAP / Providence, RI We learned that SWAP was working with the RISD Urban Lighting Studio to design a lighting installation for Grace Church Cemetery, currently listed on the Providence Preservation Society’s Ten Most Endangered Properties List. Linda was very pleased to hear about our interest in using urban interventions to connect people in the neighborhood. We began discussing the possibility of collaborating on new interventions at the cemetery over the next few months, since the installation will finish in the first week of February. Linda invited us to attend the community engagement meeting on January 21st, where students, city officials, and other stakeholders will be present to discuss the finished proposal for the lighting installation.

that has made the cemetery a “bad hub,” according to neighbors. SWAP stepped in to propose the lighting installation to draw attention to these issues and do a bit of Placemaking. Future plans for the cemetery also include a new fence and a memorial garden for cremated remains. He lent me the documentary Southside: The Rise and Fall of South Providence and referred me to Emily Kish (Providence Planning Department) and Anne Tait, a historic preservation advocate who worked on site in the caretaker’s cottage for five years.

2014-01-20 Elettra Bordonaro / Social Light Movement Collective / Providence, RI Elettra is leading the RISD Urban Lighting Studio for the forthcoming installation in Grace Church Cemetery on February 6-7. She advised us to consider the following: • A lack of connection between the fragmented public spaces of South • Providence, each different and disconnected by boundaries like river, highway, or sheer distance. • A lack of places to sit in these public spaces. With few seats and benches around Trinity Square, people resort to sitting on gravestones. • A need for a meeting point in Trinity Square, the underutilized gateway to South Providence. • An opportunity to interview locals in nearby laundromats and shops, spaces which are conducive to chatting.

2014-01-20 Anne Tait / Roger Williams University

2014-01-14 Paul Wackrow / Providence Preservation Society / Providence, RI

Anne welcomed us into her home. Conversing over mint tea and truffles, we learned a brief history of Grace Church Cemetery:

Paul told me that Grace Church on Westminster Street, the owner of the cemetery, wants to improve its limited funding and the undesired activity

Dating from 1834, the cemetery (and cottage) was designed by Gothic revival architect Russell Warren, contains over 9000 bodies of varied

Anne Tait invited us over to her house for tea so that we could talk more with her about the history of Grace Church Cemetery.

These are a few of the people we interviewed in Trinity Square for our public surveys. We asked them general questions about how they liked the neighborhood, where they lived, and what they might like to see happen here.

ethnicity, and represents historic innovation for the first public gardens in America.

2014-01-20 Public surveys / Trinity Square / Providence, RI

Cemeteries should offer a healthy way to get out of the city and visit dead friends. Current owner Grace Church wants to convert the property to a 501-C13 (non-profit cemetery) to treat it more as a public park that functions like an outdoor living room.

We began interviewing and filming (with permission) passerbys in Trinity Square, and so far the results have been very informative. We asked variations of the following questions: • Are you from around here? • Do you like this area? • Do you feel safe here? • Do you like living here? • Do you know your neighbors? • What brings you to this area? • Where do you hang out when you have free time? • What do you like to do for fun around here? • What is one thing you would like to see here to improve the area? • If that thing happens here, would you like to be a part of it?

The abandonment of the caretaker’s house on site is a lesson in what happens when a use is removed from an area. Since Anne moved out, there have been 3 break-ins, books and appliances stolen, and increased littering and drug activity in the cemetery. There is an urgent need for creative design to renew a poetic respect for cemeteries and mortality in today’s culture, to shift to more positive connotations about public legacy, ownership, and identity.

According to the master plan proposal from 2008 by Martha Lyon Landscape Architecture, LLC, a great deal of topographical analysis indicates desirable benefits to enhancing the paths through and around the cemetery.

Here are some suggestions we heard for steps to improvement: • Short-term activities that invite social camaraderie: chess tables, book share, movie screenings, basketball with Salvation Army • Long-term activities that invite community involvement: community garden, paintball, video game conferences • Long-term amenities that invite social interaction: club, liquor store, football or soccer field • YMCA-type activities, especially for children, to keep people active and broaden their minds • Signup sheet for involvement to distribute at Salvation Army • Program for people coming out of incarceration to help fix the gravestones • Applications to help groundskeeper with cemetery maintenance

2014-01-21 Local stakeholders / Community engagement meeting / Providence, RI With city officials present from SWAP, Department of Art, Culture, and Tourism, Department of Planning, Providence Groundwater, Providence Preservation Society, and Grace Church, the RISD Urban Lighting studio presented their proposal. The goal of the installation is to connect the past, present, and future stories of the people in and around the cemetery, dead and alive, through layers of lighting that extend from trees down to graves and illuminate paths of circulation.

The master plan proposal from 2008, by Martha Lyon Landscape Architecture, LLC, explicitly proposes to enhance Cypress Avenue, one of the primary transversal paths through the cemetery connecting Broad Street and Elmwood Avenue, with seating, edge maintenance, and bollard additions.

2014-01-23 Stephanie Fortunato / Department of Art, Culture, and Tourism / Providence, RI We learned more about Popup Providence, a tactical urbanist program initiated by the Department of Planning to improve social capital and public art in the city’s public spaces. Applicants may propose installations to begin in May, for up to 6 months in duration.

2014-01-24 Michelle DePlante / Welcome Rhode Island / Providence, RI Welcoming RI and Dorcas do many projects and events to create inclusive environments for foreign-born residents and to show that migrants are community givers, not just “takers.” Michelle said that they recently made a cookbook where immigrants and refugees contributed recipes from their home countries and shared the food at a community potluck event. In addition to suggesting contact with Trinity Restoration, Inc., Crossroads Homeless Shelter, Center for Southeast Asians, West Elmwood Housing Authority, and West Broadway Neighborhood Association, Michelle is referring us to state senator Juan Pichardo and state representative Grace Diaz, immigrants from Dominican Republic who know this neighborhood.

2014-01-29 Russell Preston / Principal Group / Boston, MA

The City of Providence is putting Trinity Square in high priority for new efforts to build transit corridors and do Placemaking.

Referred to me by Anne Tate, Russell spoke over the phone with me about his practice of Tactical Urbanism. Having started Popup Boston, he now works to form more collaboration between design and planning and engages directly with the population to create more authentic places. For case studies Russell suggested the George Tech Tactical Urbanism blog. Lastly, he made several points which I find relevant to my efforts: • Each tactic should respond to a specific need of people in the area. • Tactical interventions should be intentionally linked to a long-term urban design project to be more successful. • Each tactic should define or address this long-term proposal. • Tactics and master planning work best when developed at the same time. • Public space plan programming will help clarify what the uses and activities of the area are. • More stakeholder input only makes the intervention better. • Don’t be afraid to fail. • It may be good to combine tactics or try multiple ones. 71

WALK [PROVIDENCE]

NEUTACONKANUT HILL PARK

PLAI

M A N T O N V

BRO

NS AV

COLUMBUS SQUARE

WALK [PROVIDENCE] COLLIER POINT PARK

WALK [PROVIDENCE]

COMMUNITY MUSIC WORKS STOREFRONT

TRINITY SQUARE “MUCHACHOS”

T LD S

TAKE A SEAT

R ST

NFIE

T TER S

THAYER STREET PARKLET

PING-PONG PLAZA

MINS

WALK [PROVIDENCE]

PROSPECT TERRACE PARK

WALK [PROVIDENCE]

NORTH BURIAL GROUND

WEST

OLNEYVILLE SQUARE BANNERS

“BEFORE I DIE” WALLS

U IN

RIVERSIDE PARK

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BLACKSTONE BLVD & SWAN POINT CEMETERY

2014-01-30 Emily Kish and Bonnie Nickerson / Department of Planning and Development / Providence, RI Referred to us by Stephanie in the Department of Art, Culture, and Tourism, Emily and Bonnie told us more about Popup Providence, which grew from a $150,000 grant to be used over 3 years. Upcoming demonstration projects to be installed in late spring include the following: • “Muchachos” photo-collage wayfinding figures, Trinity Square (AS220 Youth) • Pop-up music studio, Broad Street (Community Music Works) • Before I Die chalkboard walls, Kennedy Plaza and Grant’s Block (Candy Chang) • Ping pong plaza, Empire Street • Adirondack chairs, Providence River • Parklet, on Thayer Street • Banners to brand neighborhood commercial revitalization, Olneyville Square • Walk [Providence], guerrilla wayfinding Emily and Bonnie can put us in touch with the right people to get our projects approved. To install on private property (aka the cemetery), I will need to obtain an MOA or MOU with Grace Church, the property owner, whereas installing on public property would really only require that I inform the Department of Public Works. Thus, I have been encouraged to develop an “ask” for the board of Grace Church and/or the Department of Public Works to get approval for my interventions. Within this ask, a pavementto-plaza proposal would necessitate maps of the area with a new traffic proposal, and contact with the RI State Department, who will resurface Elmwood Avenue this spring. They also referred us to Sebastian Ruth at Community Music Works, who will have a temporary storefront presence on Broad Street this spring, and the local elementary school group, who is planning events in the area.

2014-01-30 Scott Lapham / AS220 Youth / Providence, RI We stopped by AS220 to meet Scott and see the wonderful photo-collage installations planned for Trinity Square at bus shelters and as wayfinding installations. Partners with the Youth Apprentice Program at the Providence Steel Yard, they showed us the images of the photo collages and their RIPTA bench designs, which incorporate used soda cans, and are excited at the potential of our interventions in the square to complement theirs. ` 2014-02-08 Mike Lydon and Dan Bartman / Tactical Urbanism How-To Workshop / New Haven, CT I took a trip to New Haven to attend a Tactical Urbanism How-To workshop with two speakers, Mike Lydon (Street Plans Collaborative, Brooklyn) and Daniel Bartman (Principal Planner, Somerville). Mike gave a bottom-up approach of quick participatory tactics for community engagement and made the following key points: • Define “tactical” as small-scale actions serving a larger purpose. • Instigate municipal change through Build-Measure-Learn. • Consider scale, adjacencies, response type, and existing initiatives. • Research site history, previous plans, and public perception. • Identify project partners to spread buzz and share credit. • Know what you want to have today, next month, and in the end. • Be active in communicating the project message. • Set a date and advertise it! • Collect and measure before/after data. • Embrace failure, and don’t quit!

Dan offered a top-down perspective of how cities can use Tactical Urbanism to change the project delivery process and emphasized these points: • Do more with less. Think Temporary-Multipurpose-Adaptable. • Involve people in the public decision making process. • Allow people to be more involved if they are willing to be stewards. Speaking with them both one-on-one at the workshop, I felt very lucky to have made these connections. I have the good fortune of having Mike, and now Dan, as intervention mentors who encourage my own creative approach but also remind me of practical considerations.

2014-02-17 Aurash Khawarzad / Do Tank / Brooklyn, NY I spoke over the phone with Aurash about best practice in Tactical Urbanism, and he offered me the following general advice: • Interventions are meant to be experimental; not necessarily meant to replicate; and must address what the community wants. • Discourse with the community is important if you want meaningful change and engagement. • It is essential to understand what the community is, as people are already organized, a social network and culture already in place. • A community’s center should have active maintenance and stewardship and be considered as their “backyard.”

Scott at AS220 Youth graciously showed us the planned installations for the “Muchachos” wayfinding signs and bus shelter public art to be installed in and around Trinity Square.

2014-02-20 Local stakeholders / Community engagement meeting / Providence, RI The local stakeholders for the site of Grace Church Cemetery met to go over the Southlight event and plan for future efforts. The planning department sees a viable benefit to continuing a regular event like Southlight with a few permanent changes. The group brainstormed about working with institutions and restaurants to make this an ongoing event. Polly, the voice 75

of Grace Church, expressed relief at seeing a shift in the cemetery finally becoming an asset to the neighborhood again. However, she wished that Grace Church was brought into the planning process at an earlier stage, as these event efforts were unforeseen and surprising. Elettra advised that roles must be shared in the future for cleaning, fence work, funding, and popup events.

As the most diverse neighborhood in the state of Rhode Island, Trinity Square is economically ideal for a sustainable designation and has already received over $200 million of state-funded affordable housing. SWAP, an active developer in the neighborhood, is also the number one for state affordable housing. Richardson wants Trinity Square to have more distinct features and activities, maybe even performances or events in the cemetery, which might attract more people to the area.

2014-02-28 Richardson Ogidan / Southside Cultural Center / Providence, RI Grace and I met with Richardson, who moved to Providence from Nigeria in 1972. He explained that this neighborhood has always been for workers; it is only the ethnicities that change. Trinity Square is on the National Register of Historic Places and qualifies as an ideal candidate for New Urbanism. He spoke to us about the creation of Southside Cultural Center, an incubator for local groups that do music, dance, gallery exhibits, entertainment, workshops, and art classes for the following groups, who are free to schedule use of the building as they wish: • Rhode Island Black Storytellers • Laotian Community Center • Cambodian Society Rhode Island • Wilbury Theatre Group • Rhode Island Latino Arts • Providence Improv Guild • Education Center for Arts and Science Theatre • Sacred Journey Richardson outlined the history of Trinity Church as having an Episcopal hierarchy of aristocrats over workers (“you know your place”). Trinity churches are composed of English, Scottish, and Welsch ethnicities, with all workers excluded.

MAP DIARIES

I documented each visit, like diary entries, in a series of maps. I have spent the last five months getting to know the Trinity Square neighborhood in South Providence and its people. Each time after I visited the site and neighborhood, I made an annotated map telling the story of what I saw and did.

MAP LEGEND Path traveled on foot by surveyor

Site for investigation

Path traveled on transit by surveyor

Public green space

Discontinuity, social or visual

High density of foreign-born residents

Continuity, social or visual

Dirty or blighted area

Deliberately planned conversations

Active business or restaurant Market, restaurant, or cafĂŠ

Spontaneous conversations

Community services

Vacant storefront Building under renovation

We talked with the owner of the peanut shop here. They are very excited about the new renovation efforts, and they have really good peanut butter.

Grace Church Cemetery

I interviewed a homeless man who was born in this neighborhood and loves it because he chooses to see the positive side. He wishes the cemetery was honored as a landmark and finds its current condition disrespectful. He would be interested in participating in a future improvement effort and suggested distributing a signup sheet at the Salvation Army. For sidewalk activities he would like to see things for children and families to do, other than focus on negative things.

We met Antonio Manaigo here, who is renovating the Klein Building into mixed-use. We learned about SWAP.

Grace and I spoke to a homeless man who was stabbed 7 times across the street at KFC. He knows of cliques of homeless people here that hang out in public. He suggested creating a program to have people coming out of incarceration help fix the stones in the cemetery. He would like to see a community center for kids to shoot pool or hang out together.

Warren Avenue Playground

SWAP storefront

Domino’s Pizza El Mesón Restaurant

Convenience Store, Chinese Market

Lot suggested by Mary Ellen

Convenience Store

RI Department of Human Services

Mini Mart Dorcas International (north campus)

Elmwood Health Center

Bucklin Park

American-Spanish Market

Knight Memorial Library

A man stopped us on the sidewalk and asked us how to adjust the settings on his phone to send and receive text messages. We agreed that the configuration was bizarre but could not figure out how to fix it.

Love 4 All Child Care Center New Way Supermarket

The store owner of Elmwood 99 Cent Plus approached us with concern when we took photos outside her shop. She said the last time it happened, someone from the news had come to report on a sudden shooting.

The cashier in the Thai mini market showed me her favorite scented body soaps in the store, and I followed her recommendation and bought some Thai soap that smelled really good.

Farm Market

We ate at a really good Thai restaurant. I ordered the “strange vegetable” dish with reconstituted fungus and barbeque sauce. The hot food was the perfect cure for the frigid weather.

Locust Grove Cemetery

Columbus Square

Dorcas International (south campus)

2014.01.10

Mary Ellen at Dorcas told us that this neighborhood is very diverse with Hispanic and southeast Asian immigrants, and that many refugees live near Cromwell Street. We decided to visit the area.

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McDonaldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

Wilbury Theatre Group Trinity Restauration

Salvation Army community center

Syrian corner store Syrian corner store

The Syrian convenience store owner sees the area as blighted but diverse. We shared thoughts on the political situation of Syria and swapped stories about funny regional dialects.

KFC Providence

Eden Halal Meat Market

La Gigante Meat Market

SWAP storefront

SWAP and RISD hosted a community engagement meeting and presented the proposed lighting installation to a pleased audience from Grace Church; Department of Planning; Department of Arts, Culture, and Tourism; Providence Preservation Society; and local residents.

Friendship CafĂŠ

Church of Christ

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2014.01.21

Grace and I got lunch at the Pho Paradise restaurant. I tried some kind of Vietnamese pancake that was really good, and the staff were very welcoming. After lunch we stopped in the Thai market to see what they had. I bought some mochi, which I love.

Trees illuminated in blue light formed nodes throughout the cemetery, where audiovisual presentations told stories about several people buried in the cemetery.

A nighttime lighting installation in the cemetery brought dozens of families, kids, dogs, city officials, local police, students, and many more all grateful for the hot chocolate, coffee, cookies and brownies inside the caretakerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cottage. Being inside, it was great to discover the great views one has from the upper floor, which overlooks the cemetery, the neighborhood, and downtown Providence. Many great stories from local residents were heard, including one from a very grateful woman who visited her dead sister here for the first time in decades. She was so happy to hear that a special social event was being organized in the place where her sister was buried. We also learned that Providence Groundworks will occupy the caretakerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house as the new steward of the cemetery.

Wilbury Theatre Group Trinity Restauration

Grace and I stopped at the Salvation Army community center to see about what kinds of activities they organize. We got the contact information of one of the event coordinators.

Grace and I attended another community engagement meeting which followed the Southlight installation. SWAP and the community were delighted with the result and hopeful to continue more events similar to the lighting installation.

SWAP storefront

Grace and I were witness to a car accident here, where a car slid on the ice and collided with a parked car at the curb. We gave our witness testimony to the grateful police officer.

Secondary paths were illuminated to connect the tree story areas and emphasize the paths which cross through the cemetery and connect to the streets.

2014.02.05

Just outside the corner store in the side street we witnessed a fight break out where a man hit a woman. Immediately several people stepped in, broke up the fight, and shamed the man for his misconduct.

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I have clearly noted this corner as a high foot traffic area. There are always dozens of people talking, shmoozing, smoking, begging, fighting, and waiting for the bus. The door to the corner store is constantly opening and closing with customer flow.

Moroccan corner store

Southside Cultural Center

Wilbury Theatre Group Trinity Restauration

There were and have been regularly several people hanging out on the stoops chatting with each other in the mornings each time I walk by.

Since the weather was warmer today, I noticed more people using the cemetery. Some were visiting a grave, some boxing in the back, some crossing through.

Salvation Army community center I have begun to notice a group of people (some of whom I now recognize) that hang out here regularly in the afternoon. They lean against the traffic railing and smoke and chat with each other. I saw someone on the median handing out flyers to people in their cars at the traffic light. I noticed that people who waited for the bus here tended to lean on the fence, either with their elbow or with their back against the fence. They seem to be in need of seating, as there is nowhere to sit in Trinity Square.

I spent the afternoon tracing objects and surfaces in the cemetery with tracing paper and charcoal. Subjects included tombstones, milk crates, sweaters, novels, liquor bottles, tire tracks, cardboard, leaves, grass, and soil. Many people already consider this cemetery as an asset, and so I wanted to document these assets.

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Grace and I met with Richardson, who moved to Providence from Nigeria in 1972. He spoke to us about the creation of Southside Cultural Center, an incubator for local groups that do music, dance, gallery exhibits, entertainment, workshops, and art classes. He wants Trinity Square to have more distinct features and activities, maybe even performances or events in the cemetery, which might attract more people to the area.

2014.03.27

I met the corner store owner Zouhair, who just moved to Providence from Morocco 2 months ago. He thought my community social media effort was a good thing and let me put up a flyer for it in his store. I also put a flyer in the window of the Thai market across the street.

Moroccan corner store

This area remains a popular hangout spot for several locals who are familiar to me.

The guy at the counter of this Shell gas station was nice enough to let me post a flyer here too.

Syrian corner store

I spontaneously met a guy outside this meat market who posts flyers outside businesses all around the neighborhood. I gave him some of my flyers to distribute elsewhere. We exchanged contact information to coordinate any future efforts together.

Southside Cultural Center

I posted flyers at bus stops and light posts along all sides of the cemetery to promote my social media effort called Trinity Stories.

The guy at the counter of this corner store was not comfortable with me posting flyers, but he was very friendly.

I was sad to learn that this laundromat had just closed and would not be reopening in a new location.

2014.04.07

Many of the outdoor regulars seem to request spare change to go get a coffee or food at this McDonaldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. It too seems to be a potential hangout spot here.

Neighborhood Latino pub

I discovered that the Syrian corner store owner moved to this store instead. He said the corner was better here. Later on I met Zouhair again, and his colleague and friend Adil. I learned that they spoke French, and so we switched into French. Then a Senegalese priest at the counter turned around and started speaking to us in French too! Zouhair agreed to keep watch over my story notebook at the counter, and we exchanged contact info to get a drink sometime. One of the outside regulars introduced me to the group that hangs out here, and we talked for a bit. They seemed intimidated to write in my story notebook, which I later learned might be because they have literacy issues.

This Syrian corner store is now apparently closed.

I tried to speak a little Spanish with the guy at this Latino corner store, and he seemed very welcoming and let me post a flyer in his store window.

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JDB holdings company Dunkin Donuts Pho Paradise restaurant Thai market

Used to be a bakery. Shoe store Bakery and fastfood Convenience store Seafood market Technology shop Restaurant African market Nail salon

BBQ poultry

Asian flea market

I said hello to the convenience store worker Adil, with whom I have become good friends, and several others that I recognized. I also met Lucky, a proud and loyal steward of this street corner who self polices the area and picks up trash on the sidewalk throughout the day. He had great ideas about what kinds of change would be helpful for the area.

McDonald’s Health clinic

Used to be a gold buyer. When I approached, the man from the appliance store came out to see if I was interested in renting the space.

Miriam Hospital community access Methodist church

Appliance store Liquor store Outside this loan office, I noticed a mother getting out of the car with her kids.

Southside Cultural Center

Salvation Army community center Shell gas station and mini mart

Providence Ground Works will occupy. Was a convenience store.

Yoga studio KFC

Management office Gold buyer Halal meat market

Some girls on the sidewalk were registering people to vote. I said that I was already registered and told them they were doing a very good thing.

Gigante meat market

Uhaul truck rental

When I paused outside this house, the owner called out to me from his parked car and asked if I was interested in renting.

Hair salon SWAP community center For rent by SWAP Technology shop Mediation training center I spoke with two women sitting on planters back here, who said that they live in the area. Chiropractor OIC training and community center Pharmacy For rent by SWAP Mobile shop Friendship Café

Auto shop

Auto Zone

Corner store Mattress shop

Auto shop

Pizzeria Shoe and clothing store Domino’s Pizza Check cashing Nail salon

Hair salon This mobile shop offers free cell phones with 250 startup minutes. The outdoor regulars at the Star Market up the street were aware and told me about this. Used to be a Latino restaurant Community medical/health center

Latino pub Was a laundromat and just closed a week ago. Mid rise apartment building Two nice young people approached me and asked for a donation to fund their service trip to Africa for fighting HIV/AIDS. I donated a dollar and wished them luck.

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Auto shop This church also does Sunday school classes. Auto shop

QUOTES

SITE TRACINGS

I traced the textures of objects and surfaces in the cemetery to document those of past and present who are buried the cemetery or using it. The current condition of the cemetery speaks to its many uses, and many people consider it their home. In the cemetery one can find coats, cognac bottles, travel books, flowers, office chairs, recycling bins, food containers, heroine needles, graffiti, and overturned gravestones.

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SOCIAL MEDIA

Among many efforts to encourage people to share their stories, I started a social media campaign on Instagram and Twitter. I distributed flyers for the project around the neighborhood—in convenience stores, in storefront windows, at bus stops—asking locals to upload a photo or tweet about their day. A few people began following me and liking the photos of the neighborhood that I uploaded, and the convenience store workers I that I knew started to become enthusiastic about participating.

#TRINITYSTORIES WHAT’S YOUR STORY? LIVE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD? WHAT DOES YOUR DAY LOOK LIKE? SHARE A GLIMPSE OF YOU WITH OTHERS! UPLOAD A PHOTO OF YOUR DAY ON INSTAGRAM

username: trinitystories password: southsideprov TWEET YOUR THOUGHTS AND STORIES TO

@trinity_stories WHO AM I? MY NAME IS ZACH. i AM A DESIGN STUDENT WHO LOVES SOUTHSIDE PROVIDENCE. I WANT TO PROVIDE WAYS FOR THE COMMUNITY TO SHARE MORE OF THEMSELVES WITH EACH OTHER. PLEASE HELP ME BY SHARING A PART OF YOURSELF TODAY!

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STORY BOOK I collected handwritten stories from locals into a book, which I left at the cash register of the Star Market convenience store on Broad Street for a period of one month.

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CAMERA SHARE I developed photos taken by locals with a disposable camera, which I left at the Star Market convenience store on Broad Street for a period of one week.

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CHAIR BOMBING

I planned and executed a chair bombing intervention at a bus stop next to the cemetery to test the viability of outdoor seating in Trinity Square. Rather than do it completely guerrilla style, I chose to go through all the proper channels with the appropriate parties before installing. I notified the Department of Planning and Development, the Department of Art Culture and Tourism, SWAP, and the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority. On the first of May, I put the furniture on a truck and brought it out to the southbound bus stop on Broad Street next to the cemetery. The results were quite interesting. Within minutes of installation, people were using the chairs and tables. And upon return to the site, I found that people had repositioned the furniture for leaning. At every visit, there was always someone there using the furniture. Although the furniture has been removed as of three days ago, it has for three weeks indicated a clear need and desire for outdoor seating.

CERTIFICATE OF LIABILITY INSURANCE

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4/9/2014

THIS CERTIFICATE IS ISSUED AS A MATTER OF INFORMATION ONLY AND CONFERS NO RIGHTS UPON THE CERTIFICATE HOLDER. THIS CERTIFICATE DOES NOT AFFIRMATIVELY OR NEGATIVELY AMEND, EXTEND OR ALTER THE COVERAGE AFFORDED BY THE POLICIES BELOW. THIS CERTIFICATE OF INSURANCE DOES NOT CONSTITUTE A CONTRACT BETWEEN THE ISSUING INSURER(S), AUTHORIZED REPRESENTATIVE OR PRODUCER, AND THE CERTIFICATE HOLDER. IMPORTANT: If the certificate holder is an ADDITIONAL INSURED, the policy(ies) must be endorsed. If SUBROGATION IS WAIVED, subject to the terms and conditions of the policy, certain policies may require an endorsement. A statement on this certificate does not confer rights to the certificate holder in lieu of such endorsement(s).

Cross Insurance, Inc. - Higher Education 930 Commonwealth Avenue STE 2

CONTACT Christopher Jones NAME: PHONE (A/C, No, Ext): (617)732-0039 E-MAIL ADDRESS: cjones@crossagency.com

Boston

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Rhode Island School of Design 2 College Street Providence

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POLICY NUMBER

POLICY EFF POLICY EXP (MM/DD/YYYY) (MM/DD/YYYY)

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OCCUR

031238610

7/1/2013

6/1/2014

GEN'L AGGREGATE LIMIT APPLIES PER: PROPOLICY LOC JECT AUTOMOBILE LIABILITY

ANY AUTO ALL OWNED AUTOS HIRED AUTOS

LIMITS

EACH OCCURRENCE DAMAGE TO RENTED PREMISES (Ea occurrence)

MED EXP (Any one person)

PERSONAL & ADV INJURY

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PRODUCTS - COMP/OP AGG

COMBINED SINGLE LIMIT (Ea accident) BODILY INJURY (Per person)

$ $

SCHEDULED AUTOS NON-OWNED AUTOS

1,000,000 300,000 10,000 1,000,000 2,000,000 2,000,000

BODILY INJURY (Per accident) $ PROPERTY DAMAGE (Per accident)

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RE: Zachary Futterer project, April 9, 2014 - May 31, 2014. The City of Providence, its employees and/or agents are additional insured as their interest may appear.

I obtained a certificate of general liability insurance through RISD. Though public space installations generally do not require permitting, I was happy to learn the process for doing such a project correctly while maintaining transparency with all affiliated parties. 142

CERTIFICATE HOLDER

City of Providence Providence City Hall 25 Dorrance Street Providence, RI 02903 ACORD 25 (2010/05) INS025 (201005).01

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In the realm of quick furniture fabrication, I also made this table from an old, stained, graffitied wood fence, to hold my model and reference books during my final thesis review. It can serve both as a table, and also as a bench when flipped over.

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PUBLIC SPACE ANALYSIS Equally important is an understanding of the unique characteristics of the area’s shared spaces and its effect on people’s social relationships.

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There is a great deal of open space here, both used and underused, and the cemetery is one of the largest open spaces in all of South Providence, flanked on all sides by shops and institutions which sometimes act as good hangout spots too. My research has also drawn from the proxemics studies of Edward T. Hall involving our varying sensorial reactions to people at different distances. Closer social distances of 4 to 12 feet allow us to make out a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s facial features, establish eye contact, respond to gestures and mannerisms, speak at normal volume, and carry on a conversation with ease. Further public distances of over 12 feet, and especially beyond 25 feet, bring a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s whole figure into our view, make it difficult to recognize someone, require a louder speaking voice, and often make conversation difficult.

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In applying this information, I have researched the relationship between sacred space and profane space, trying to blur edge conditions in Trinity Square’s public spaces, those between street and building interior, but especially those between sidewalk and cemetery. I am directly relating this blurred edge idea to the work of Mircea Eliade on the sacred and profane. We should be able to use cemeteries as the public parks that they actually are. Rather than let our society continue to view cemeteries as off limits to everyday park uses, I argue that we should accept the reminders of death as a positive part of our everyday public life and legacy. Profane activities like smoking a cigarette or going for a jog should be mixed with sacred activities, like visiting one’s dead friend. Some of my community interviews have supported this view too: “A lot of cemetery struggle started in the 40s. The ideas of death changed. The Victorians, all they do is talk about death but not sex, and now all we talk about is sex but not death.” “There were elements in cemeteries to make external living rooms for people to visit the dead. They were meant to be healthy ways of getting outside the city and visiting your beloved dead friends.” In his book, Mircea Eliade says that we each have our own individual experiences of the sacred, be they in a cemetery, or the scene of our first love, or first foreign city visited. People will probably always have mixed feelings about death, in a spectrum of varying levels of comfort and discomfort, but this does not mean that we cannot produce great public spaces in spite of those feelings.

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EARLY PROPOSALS This intervention would repurpose the sidewalk in front of the cemetery as a sittable hangout spot for locals and passersby. Play Sidewalk Currently lacking seating or opportunities for positive outdoor social interaction, this sidewalk situated at the gateway to Southside could become a more well defined meeting point. A long-term proposal might focus on mobile architecture to provide semi-enclosed community recreation space.

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This intervention would repurpose the center of Trinity Square as a no-car â&#x20AC;&#x153;plazaâ&#x20AC;? for a specified period. Pavement to Plaza Currently overrun by traffic and underperforming crosswalks, this short-term tactic would provide repainted pavement, extra seating, and plantings, aiming to reclaim pedestrian use as the priority for the square. Additions might include art or theater performances put on by Trinity Restoration, outdoor clothing shares by the Salvation Army, or gaming days with board games or playable props. A long-term proposal might focus on repavement of the square to accommodate a new community recreation center.

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This intervention would repurpose the unoccupied grassy lot across from the cemetery on Elmwood Avenue as a new multipurpose open space for locals. Play Lot Currently lacking a cool spot for outdoor community social events and hangouts, this lot could be regroomed as a multiuse piazza for Trinity Restoration, Salvation Army, nearby soup kitchens, farmers markets, or other neighborhood groups to use throughout the year. Additions might include extra seating, tables for food or games, and extra plantings. A long-term proposal might focus on the feasibility of realising a new outdoor community play pavilion for future public events.

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This intervention would highlight one or more pedestrian paths through the cemetery as a social pathway for visiting, passing through, and hanging out in the large open space. Guerrilla Pathmaking Currently in poor condition from littering, drug activity, and lack of maintenance, this colorful and inviting path could improve the permeability of the cemetery and its connection to the street. Additions might include brightly painted pallet paths, extra seating, and plantings. A long-term proposal might focus on these paths as sites to construct a new memorial, relating to the concept of the new light installation to connect the past, present, and future legacies of people in this neighborhood.

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This intervention would create an interactive installation and sittable area for sidewalk passersby. Sittable Sidewalk Currently lacking seating and public areas to congregate, this installation will encourage people to stop and share their story on the boards, with paint and markets provided. The boards could then be used in a later intervention to create a colored path through the cemetery which carries the stories and artwork of participating locals. A long-term proposal might focus on envisioning a memorial that continues to accommodate storytelling with paintable surfaces as path, seating, canopy, pavilion, or other forms.

PAINT YOUR STORY HERE!

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EARLY SKETCHES In early sketches of possible design interventions, I looked at blurring edge conditions, mixing sacred and profane activities, and possible spatial (and social) relationships to create across these edges. I began considering how to use the idea of time to lay out an architectural program for past, present, and future users. I also began layering into the drawings all the textures that I had collected from the cemetery, as a way to embed as literally as possible the stories of those who have a stake in the cemetery and in Trinity Square.

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MASTER PLAN

The last part of the process—the engagement of my own creative voice as designer—is about synthesizing this data into a long-term plan to revitalize the underutilized outdoor space and vacant storefronts of the neighborhood. I am proposing a master plan with 27 different possible interventions to improve the Trinity Square neighborhood. Red is a tactical intervention that I have already done; orange is a proposed renovation of an existing building; yellow is proposed new construction; and white is proposed outdoor intervention. I have also gotten to know a fantastic man named Lucky, who helps steward and co- police the corner store and sidewalks just north of the cemetery. He used to be homeless, knows the area well, holds a new job, and has ideas for what the neighborhood needs. I have taken his suggestions into consideration for the master plan: • Outdoor seating, so police do not kick people off sidewalks for loitering. • Easy, transparent ways to acquire affordable housing and job training. • Simple activities that put people to work - sweeping, picking up trash, painting, busing tables. • Outdoor bookshare or Internet café, to address the absence of a library. • Outdoor activities, carried out in parking lots. • Public bathrooms, since there currently are none. 180

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Collectively the plan proposes new mixed programs like a combo Internet cafĂŠ/ job recruitment office or co- op business incubators; a new boulevard promenade with pavers, planters, and movable seats; and outdoor activities like book shares, open-air markets, theater performances, and play areas.

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I am looking to reimagine a new image for Trinity Square, where newly occupied buildings front onto active public sidewalks and squares with street fairs, and where people have things to do and places to sit outside to continue hanging out but also co-stewarding and co-policing their sidewalks as they have already started doing.

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CEMETERY PATH

A new path through the cemetery could both flank the sidewalk and cross through the park, as well as have larger decks for everyday activity within. In addition to blurring edge conditions between sidewalk, path, and cemetery (by removing the fence, for instance), I am arguing that this path should have multiuse surfacesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;for example, a short wall running along the path which both contains burial plot information and history and also acts as ground seating for those just there to relax. Allowing for these kinds of mixed activities might be a way to reintroduce this cemetery as a public park for everyone.

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DEVELOPMENT

A first big step in this master planning could be the development of the row of parcels bordering the south edge of the cemetery. Since it would be vital for this land to stay affordable, I am imagining development and ownership by a community land trust corporation, to keep the land tax-exempt and the buildings available at a low-rate to anyone ready to start a new business or pay their own rent. The proposal includes (left to right) a building with community spaces rentable throughout the week, set up much like a flea market, with housing above; market squares, where private gardens become public space connecting street and cemetery; existing houses transitioned to live work units with housing above; house extensions built on the back for business space fronting onto the cemetery; combo laundromat/ convenience store; a renovation of an existing Latino pub; and treatment of West Friendship Street as a â&#x20AC;&#x153;play streetâ&#x20AC;? for outdoor street fairs, antique/record sales, food trucks, and play areas for kids.

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OCTOBER 2013

Installation at Bayard Ewing Gallery

The need for difference Because good cities should aid the development of human identity, success, and health, the presence of difference in cities provides vital conditions for public spaces of democracy and acceptance. In social terms, cities should empower residents of differing incomes, races, genders, religions and sexual orientations rather than alienate them. As asserted by Jane Jacobs, the “ballet of the street” preserves a vital and diverse public realm with constant use by many different kinds of people at multiple hours of the day to build trust among neighbors. In political terms, ownership, or at least perceived ownership, can create a varied and complex civic life. The feeling that one is in some way “owner” of a city, versus owner of a private house or car, reflects one’s participation in public life and taps into the culturally rich meaning of good civic spaces. In physical terms, future cities must celebrate difference rather than assimilate it. Our settlements must provide dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods and reclaim through shared urban spaces the right to democratic freedom of assembly and the possibility for free and open social exchange. It is time for cities to “grow up.” Xenophobia has overtaken modern society, making us afraid of the strange, the foreign, the unknown, the uncomfortable, the complex, the different. According to Richard Sennett, living in diverse, unfamiliar and complex environments helps man mature from adolescence to adulthood and develop a strong sense of identity.

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I want to explore methods to combat the fear of difference in cities. How can we empower future generations of youth, whose environments threaten their identity, success and health, to take control of their lives and to fight the homogeneity that degrades their sense of freedom and belonging? We must move toward social reality and away from prescriptive fantasy. We must acknowledge the way that people are rather than define the way that they ought to be. We must welcome the many rather the one.

Exhibit description The drawings for the exhibit, many of them based on my own photos, form a side-by-side comparison of my typical experience of 2 places: Joliet, Illinois—my hometown, a sprawling, car-centric suburb—and Paris, France—my home for 2 years, a dense, walkable city.

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FEBRUARY 2014

Installation at Woods Gerry Gallery

Public space for everyone Public space in cities should be for everyone. To this end, socially and politically inclusive public space can produce diverse, democratic environments which accept difference, allow ownership, and encourage legacy. My goal is to use Tactical Urbanism to reactivate underutilized public spaces in the Elmwood neighborhood of South Providence, aiming for a long-term architectural proposal which will help rebuild the social capital of its community. Cities should empower all kinds of people to have a stake in their public spaces, as a sense of ownership can allow diverse groups to find shared interests outside their private lives. First, iterative street interventions at the proposed site of Trinity Square will respond to its specific needs and provide opportunities to study and improve foot traffic, social interaction, visual interest, street safety, community engagement, and collective ownership. On a deeper level, the repurposing of this cemetery as dignified public space will reintroduce mortality as a positive part of public life to encourage locals to consider their own legacy in and contributions to the neighborhood. Finally, data compiled from interventions will inform a more permanent proposal, based on observed changes in use of the site, asserting that ethnographic study facilitates a better informed design process. Our future cities must reclaim, through public space, the right to free assembly, the possibility for open social exchange, and the tolerance of difference. We must believe, as Richard Sennett does, that living in diverse,

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complex environments improves manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sense of freedom, belonging, and legacy. We must acknowledge the way that people are rather than define the way that they ought to be. For these reasons, I want to help reactivate Trinity Square as the asset it already is to its community.

Exhibit description This installation presented my intention of using Trinity Square and Grace Church Cemetery in South Providence as a site for study and intervention.

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MAY 2014

Installation at Rhode Island Convention Center

Connecting people in public space This thesis asks how we can design public space to improve social capital and neighborhood stewardship, with architectural programs that blend sacred/profane activities in and around a cemetery. Using both community voices and designer voices, I have tested a project delivery process which focuses on community engagement, public space upkeep, business incubation through community land trusts, and participatory urbanism.

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Final Review at Woods Gerry Gallery

Connecting people in public space At every stage over the past nine months, this thesis has investigated one main driving question: How can we as designers connect people better in the public spaces of our neighborhoods?

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CONCLUDING REMARKS

All of these ideas bring together my proposal for this kind of pa and designer, connecting people better in the public spaces of that sometimes one of our greatest public space assets could b

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rticipatory project delivery processâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;engaging both community their neighborhoods, to help areas like Trinity Square realize e a cemetery.

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De Toqueville, Alexis. Democracy In America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1863. Print. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959. Print. Flint, Anthony. Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City. New York: Random House, 2009. Print. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Dits et écrits II, 1976-1988. 1984. Web. 31 January 2014. <http://foucault.info/ documents/heterotopia/foucault.heterotopia.en.html>.

Lydon, Mike. “Tactical Urbanism, Vol. 2.” Issuu: The Street Plans Collaborative. 2010. Web. 27 Nov. 2013 <http://issuu.com/ streetplanscollaborative/docs/tactical_urbanism_vol.2>. Martha Lyon Landscape Architecture, LLC. Grace Church Cemetery Preservation Master Plan & Garden of Innocence Design, part of the Trinity Gateway Project at Grace Church Cemetery prepared for Grace Church. Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission, Ocean State Charities, and the United Way of Rhode Island: 2008. Print. Petro, Gustavo. “The Political Struggle for a Sustainable and Inclusive City.” Harvard University. Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA. 6 November 2013. Lecture. Sennett, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye. 1992. Print.

Hall, Edward T. The Hidden Dimension. New York: Anchor Books, 1969. Print. Harvey, David. “Contested Cities: Social Process and Spatial Form” Transforming Cities: 1997. Print.

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Sennett, Richard. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life. Hartford: Yale University Press, 2008. Print. Sorkin, Michael. “Eutopia Now!” Harvard Design Magazine Fall/Winter 2009/2010. Print.

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