CITIZEN URBANISTS
Our contemporary built environment is a construct of laws, regulations, and tacit social agreements. Fines may be levied and standards enforced and policed to ensure safety and relative peace, but what we call public space is more a tenuous compliance than may be comfortable. Consider that brief smile you give when passing a neighbor on the sidewalk or the street sign that informs which days to park on which side of the street. Our contemporary built environment is a construct of laws, regulations, and tacit social agreements. Fines may be levied and standards enforced and policed to ensure safety and relative peace, but what we call public space is more a tenuous compliance than may be comfortable. This collective understanding supports daily life, but it also offers an active platform for a counter discourse. By taking a look at some current urban interventions, this chapter seeks to highlight those projects that insidiously bring about a social change. With a deliberate force these projects not only expose systemic inequalities, but also propose solutions that are outside the economies of high design and architecture. These projects slip into the system unnoticed by rulemakers, but greatly impact those in need. For example, Archeworks’ Mobile Food Collective (MFC) provides information on food and nutrition to under-serviced neighborhoods in Chicago. A fleet of mobile structures, the MFC consists of a mobile unit equipped with a large table and several bike-operated modular trailers. The project is a collaborative platform that educates community residents about healthy food. Through the Mobile Food Collective, Archeworks is utilizing sidewalks and streets as a place of social empowerment and agency. On a larger scale, Recetas Urbanas organizes and collaborates with multiple grassroots organizations to distribute repurposed shipping containers for use as homes, residential, and employment services centers. The project, Trucks, Containers, and Collectives, sidesteps the red tape of traditional government-run urban planning in Spain. By making an attempt to temporarily fill holes in the zoning and land use regulations these projects are inserted into the public arena in an attempt to equalize disparities across neighborhoods and provide residents with social and political power.
In Los Angeles and Oakland, Steve Rasmussen-Cancian and the West Oakland Greening Project use the sidewalk as a venue for community collaboration and action of residents in low-income neighborhoods. The Living Rooms project reclaims public sidewalks and median strips as places to relax and hang out, leisure activities often policed out of inner city urban areas. This occupation promotes community development while also deterring gentrification. Residents build, transport, and install these outdoor living rooms. In these largely African American and Latino neighborhoods, gentrification looms large and the Living Rooms project provides residents with the opportunity to enjoy public space and the tools to push back against larger developers. By turning their focus to homes instead of the street, both the Powerhouse project by Design 99 and the project Campito by artist collective M12, expose the living conditions of specific communities. Located in Detroit, The Powerhouse project encourages residents to take control of their neighborhoods by turning abandoned homes into sculptures that double as supply sources of off-grid energy. M12’s mobile living unit and contemporary appropriation of the Western American sheep wagon, Campito, calls attention to the existing living and working conditions of immigrant sheepherders in rural Colorado, an invisible population in need of a voice. By bringing these projects together, this chapter highlights the power of small-scale design. A few interventions—some sidewalk seating or a mobile resource center—can create riffs in the status quo, and reveal an environment truly designed for participatory urban culture.
CU-00