MAPPING AFFECDENCE . LOISAIDA´S COMMUNITY GARDENS IN NEW YORK CITY . NATALIA MATESANZ VENTURA

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UPM POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF MADRID 1

ETSAM | Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid

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the reconfiguration of public space 12

NATALIA MATESANZ VENTURA 13

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IV Convocatoria Beca de Investigación en Nueva York

freedom that opens up the spectrum of possible solutions and leaves room for the unexpected. [See Model #M68] San Francisco case study

espacio afecto de Mayo68 “Materiality cannot be reduced to the objective”.[1]

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Urban space cannot be solely understood as the series of physical elements that configure the visible tissue of streets, buildings, parks and boulevards.

It cannot be understood from the Euclidian perspective that uses cartesian geometry as the only means to measure it.

Martin Heidegger defined space as a place of interaction that deserves our attention.[2] From his perspective, space is determined by the moments of closeness and distance that are characteristic of our relationship to the world, rather than being simply conformed by a geometric structure. For example, he argues that the distance between pieces of furniture does not occur according to measuring principles, but, rather, is established as a result of our relationship to them (whether they can be reached with our arm, or whether they can be moved around, etc). [2] This definition of space is both magical and liberating: if space can be defined as ‘the possibility to draw attention to something’, it would follow that, from an individual perspective, the elements excluded from such attention would then cease to exist.

The aim of this mobile model is to generate a research usefull device that allows for experimenting and visualizing the affective space that generated during the revolts.

It does not seek to elaborately elucidate the concrete characteristics of the event, but, rather, it functions as a preliminary approach to the nature of emergent affectiveemotional landscapes. This approach could in turn allow us to both establish and modify its connections and nerve centres. The device constitutes a mise en scène, an experimental strategy, rather than a model seeking to be replicated or a faithful representation in dimensional terms.

Along with other works and experiences, this should be a determining factor that could help improve the understanding of urban practice from a perspective that is based on contingent thought. Undoubtedly, such an approach entails thinking about city making from the perspective of the social fabric, allowing the city to ‘build itself’ from these emergent, affective spaces.

2006 - 2016 Natalia Matesanz Ventura

investigación

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Paris case study

MAPPING AFFECDENCE LOISAIDA: A LIVING CATALOGUE OF THE 70´ IN NYC Natalia Matesanz Ventura www.cumulolimbo.com PhD Candidate Advanced Projects in Architecture Architecture Department DPA - ETSAM - UPM. Polytechnic University of Madrid

THE PHD: AFFECTS AND DISSSENT IN THE RE-CONFIGURATION OF PUBLIC SPACE (Architectural alternatives in the construction of heterodox environments) Natalia Matesanz’s doctoral research maps different socio-cultural alternative scenarios of communal survival of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Through what she calls affecdent cartographies, her work depicts the 68´s urban revolution in Paris, the underground do-it-yourself (DIY) hippie networks of San Francisco and the re-programming of public space through New York´s community gardens. These three scenarios are interpreted as keystones to understand contemporary urban citizen-based innovation.

AFFECT AND DISSIDENCE AS ARCHITECTURAL CONTEMPORARY TOOLS This PHD research aims to define and understand Affecdence as an architectural concept resulting from the combination of two specific and usually independent conditions: affect and dissidence within a spatial contemporary framework. The concept, as if it were the result of an alloy, does not represent the addition of the caracteristics of both affect and dissidence separately, but acquires new special properties which don’t exist in either affective or dissident spaces.

The specific parameters and potential of affectdent spaces is what the PHD mostly develops, their capacities to be inter-connected in a net, to generate own technical and technological innovations and tools and particularly, the capacity to transform contemporary public space from parallel, non hegemonic, and even private territories.

Affecdence feaures refers to: -A space created by the users, spontaneous emergence. Not planified.

-Not marginalised but distant, phisically or virtually, from intitutions an others official agents in city generation.

Far away from hegemony and other forms of traditional power.

-Affecdence spaces creates news links in between the users and the spaces. Alternative nets of communication and interconnected signs, gesture, or behavior are settled in public space.

-Affectdent spaces leads to the generation of innovation, technologies and specific relational tools.

BIOGRAPHY Natalia Matesanz is an architect, researcher, and urban mediator based in Madrid. Her research analyses how affective and dissident grassroots practices lead to urban innovation and reshape the city. For the Fall semester of 2018, Matesanz worked at UC Berkeley as a visiting scholar completing her case study on the drag counterculture of San Francisco and she now got the funding to finish her case study in New York CIty. As a European scholar and professional practitioner, this funding gives to her the possibility of encountering the community, organizations and the academia, in order to produce a rigorous fieldwork that can present Loisaida´s gardens as a paradigm to European cities and as fundamental infrastructures for the contemporary city that should be in public urban agendas.

Matesanz founded cumuloLimbo studio in 2012. As a female professional with technical knowledge and experience in urban actions and educational workshops, her transdisciplinary approach to urban space, architecture and performance traces the links between gender studies, human geography, sociology, and the arts. Her articles about Loisaida´s community gardens have been published in academic journals and her work was exhibited in the Architectural Biennale di Venezia 2018. Matesanz is currently a PhD candidate at ETSAM Polytechnic University of Madrid. In 2018, she worked at UC Berkeley as a visiting scholar.

She has a Professional Degree in Architecture from Alcalá de Henares University and a MArch in Cultural Landscape from Polytechnic University of Madrid. In 2010, she co-founded #El Campo de Cebada, a collective urban project widely awarded in Madrid. Through workshops like #X-cenas (2015) and #WeirdSpace (2018), she promotes urban performances, understanding them as a method for collective creativity and urban innovation.

NATALIA MATESANZ VENTURA ETSAM | Shool of Architecture.

Polytechnic University of Madrid.

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MAPPING AFFECDENCE LOISAIDA: A LIVING CATALOGUE OF THE 70´ IN NYC ABSTRACT OF NEW YORK´S CASE STUDY In 1973, Loisaida´s neighbours, in the Lower East Side, Manhattan, came together to face the lack of public facilities in their then-decaying and impoverished neighbourhood. Rehabilitating and greening several vacant lots, they built sheds, kitchens and playgrounds, turning these lots into spaces of gathering, experimentation, food supply and care.

Today a network of about fifty community gardens can be found all over Manhattan´s grid. (Image 1) Some of these spaces are protected, but many have been disappearing Tin the last decades. These ephemeral and fragile architectures set a precedent for urban creativity and innovation. This project will create a visual catalogue to update and expand the existing documentation of their physical and affective legacy by engaging with the community and organizations of this everyday life infrastructure. Since these spaces revalorize reproduction and economically non-productive activities in the city KEYWORDS: Affect, dissidence, technical, codified, connected, public **** Since the 1970s, a network of self-organized community gardens in Loisaida has presented a model of urban appropriation. This green infrastructure supports everyday life and care activities. Unlike the DIY (do-it-yourself) urbanism that privileges “‘public’ economically productive or cultural spaces”1, these spontaneous architectures, centring reproduction and care, contribute to the discourse of everyday life urbanism from an intersectional feminist approach.

In 1995, scholar Karen Schmelzkopf presented a map of the gardens. (Image 2) There were then about ten family gardens, mostly managed by women who cultivated them and provided equipment: children´s sandboxes, kitchens and washing areas. Twenty additional sites, led by men, were based on the casita (small house) construction, that sometimes became a social club.2 Noting the historic gender segregation and specific materialisations of these everyday spaces, as well as their high degree of flexibility, the project aims to update Schmelzkopf´s map by documenting their evolution. In addition, it will interpret these structures, charged with symbolism and cultural references from their inhabitants, most originating from Puerto Rico. (Image 3) The goal of the project is to continue the research which has already been done off-site: mapping the gardens, especially La Plaza Cultural (Image 4), and examining with google maps their communitarian constructions: casitas, fences, murals, altars, playgrounds etc (Image 5).

The remaining work can only be done on-site. It includes cataloguing the current state of these vernacular and organic constructions. Additionally, I will discuss their future possibilities and needs with the community, whose memories must also be part of the final compilation. Three open workshops will be organized to understand and collect the physical and imaginary identities of the gardens, to provide a useful and meaningful archive with and for the community.

Through audio-visual means, photography and drawing techniques, the project will be documented real-time through a digital archive and on an Instagram site. Thus, the visual archive will be accessible from the gardens and from around the world. (Image 6 & 7) Loisaida gardens are effective in their programmatic, material and innovative adaptation to the city. They represent an exceptional paradigm from which certain American and European cities might learn, where tools and legal processes have yet to be established to regulate these everyday urbanisms.

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HEIM LAFROMBOIS, Megan. Blind spots and pop-up spots: A feminist exploration into the discourses of do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism. Urban Studies, 2017, vol. 54, no 2, p. 421-436.

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SCHMELZKOPF, Karen. Urban community gardens as contested space. [Online] Geographical Review, 1995, vol. 85, nº 3, p.364 NATALIA MATESANZ VENTURA ETSAM | Shool of Architecture.

Polytechnic University of Madrid.

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MAPPING AFFECDENCE LOISAIDA: A LIVING CATALOGUE OF THE 70´ IN NYC METHODS The research project uses an ethnographic research method, collect oral histories and produce participant observation by generating several events/workshops with the community, students and experts. An online visual catalogue will openly communicate this process and its results. Primary and secondary sources will be personal testimonies, the fieldwork itself and archival search.

MOTIVATION The final goal of the project is to create a visual and technical documentation of the gardens and their constructions, as well as the memories and thoughts of the community. The project aims to put the community together to discuss and understand not only the history of the gardens, their main actors and constructions but also their needs and future possibilities. This must be done, collectively, by developing the fieldwork on-site and several workshops with the communty of Loisaida.

My though is that a great way to achieve this, is by inviting other scholar and students from the Universities in New York city to participate in the process and to be part of it. A rich collaboration between University of Madrid and Universities such as The New School, Parsons schools, NYU or Columbia University will maximize the impact of the project. I think the subject really engage a wide range of disciplines that can learn from it and enrich the investigation.

Only by going to New York city and encountering the community, organizations and specially, the academia, I will be able to produce a rigorous fieldwork that can present Loisaida´s gardens as a paradigm to European cities.

As a European scholar and professional practitioner, this project will provide international connection to the local scale, and to my career, but particularly the possibility of applying and finishing on-site my research.

Since my research work and dissertation is comparative and international, the project will aim to be a bridge for resources from an outsider, but experienced, point of view. This will hopefully complement the insider local knowledge and network, generating interesting insights.

As a female professional with technical knowledge and experience participating in urban actions and educational workshops, leading this process will take my research to a more advanced stage, creating important connections with academic institutions, organizations, sponsors and curators that will be essential for the research.

It will make both the project and my career move forward, reaching the necessary support and developing locally and internationally, revalorizing the gardens as fundamental infrastructures for the contemporary city that should be in public urban agendas.

IMPACT This project intentionally creates a collective and intersectional practical experience. It bridges the community and the academia, straddling fieldwork process and ethnographic method. Approaching the architectures of the gardens through direct, collective action and practical implication differs from a just descriptive work. Additionally, collecting the results on a visual catalogue makes the project accessible, interactive and open.

The feminist approach of the project is particularly enriching and contemporary because the network of gardens is an example of everyday non-productive or lucrative infrastructure of care, with a wide presence of active women and children. The understanding of this ephemeral and living architectures as essential for the city, traces the links with Feminist and Anthropocene theory.

Thus, the project reveals the important role of these green, minor, grassroots architectures and their influence in the planned city. Loisiada´s project claims for the revalorization of reproductive and care tasks in the city that NATALIA MATESANZ VENTURA ETSAM | Shool of Architecture.

Polytechnic University of Madrid.

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In 1995 Karen Schmelzkopf created this map to visualize the gardens.

The research aims to update it.

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The current network of gardens in the Lower East Side, Manhattan.

Font: Natalia Matesanz. Work in process

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MAPPING AFFECDENCE LOISAIDA: A LIVING CATALOGUE OF THE 70´ IN NYC

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NATALIA MATESANZ VENTURA ETSAM | Shool of Architecture.

Polytechnic University of Madrid.

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