2021 Final Review Booklet

THE NEAR-FUTURE CITY FInal Review Booklet

Landscape Architecture Core IV STU 1212 Spring 2021 Harvard GSD

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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...The result of over determination is another paradox, namely that these frozen cities decay much more quickly than urban fabric inherited from the past. As uses change, buildings have to be replaced, since fixed form function relations make them so difficult to adapt; the average life span of new public housing in Britain is now forty years; the average life-span of new skyscrapers in New York is thirty five years.

The over specification of form and function makes the modern urban environment a brittle place…

To the scientist, open systems are familiar companions. Chance events, mutating forms, elements which cannot be homogenized or are not interchangeable all these disparate phenomena of the mathematical and/ or natural world can nonetheless form a pattern, and that assemblage is what we mean by an open system.

Richard Sennett*, The Open City (2004)

*RIchard Sennett is an urban theorist whose writings focus on labor practices and the social life in cities.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Course Abstract

‘ It doesn’t stop; every morning it begins all over again. One day, it’s rising water levels; the next, it’s soil erosion; by evening. It’s the glaciers melting faster and faster; On the 8pm news, between two reports on war crimes, we learn that thousands of species are about to disappear before they have even been properly identified. Every month, the measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are even worse than the unemployment statistics. Every year we are told that it’s the hottest since the first weather recording stations were set up; sea levels keep on rising’; the coastline is increasingly threatened by spring storms; as for the ocean, every new study finds it more acidic than before. This is what the press calls living in the era of an ‘ecological crisis.’ Alas, Talking about a ‘crisis’ would be just another way of reassuring ourselves, saying that ‘ this too will pass,’ the crisis ‘ will soon be behinds us. If only it were just a crisis! If only it had been just a crisis! The experts tell us we should be talking instead about a ‘ mutation’ : we were used to one world; we are now tipping and mutating into another.

Facing Gaia, Bruno Latour, p. 7 This is the fourth and final semester for the core Landscape Architecture sequence.

It questions ways in which we can design urban assemblages for the city during moments of deep and rapid transformation. The assemblages are explored as a basic “DNA” of the city in which urban, landscape and ecological elements are intertwined to imagine new ways of habitation for both human and non-human constituencies.

The urban assemblage considers the city to be comprised of multiple heterogeneous parts and networks, intertwined with the less tangible metabolic and material processes, that describe the nature of the city through its emergent and indeterminable characteristics. The assemblage is multi-scalar and subject to forces that range from the local to the global.

The Near Future is now, very soon and not yesterday, nor somewhere in the inconceivable future. Thus, this studio on the “Near-Future City” seeks to explore new urban assemblages and paradigms for the city that address present inequities and insecurities (as well as predicted future ones) and are not solely dictated by market economies or singular political institutions and their values. This work on the Near-Future City explores multiple tensions and ways of living that question our current modes of habitation.

This is an opportunity to speculate on a “Near-Future City” that considers the city as a thick ground condition, one that describes a set of complex systems characterized by gradients between the static and the dynamic. Through this thick ground, students will develop an understanding of the past and present city and how it can adapt to future conditions.

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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The “Near-Future City” designs will necessarily respond to the current and projected issues of climate change. These complex layered issues will be considered through strategies of adaptation and potential transformation of the assemblage and its DNA. Adaptation will be explored as both a strategy of immediate response and an ingrained code for ongoing modification.

The semester is structured around three phases of work: 01. metabolic flows and material processes, 02. urban assemblages for the “Near-Future City,” and 03. deployment and disposition of the assemblages. The semester will begin by interrogating a particular set of systems at play in the urban environment and identifying key constituencies to be addressed. From here, the development and encoding of an urban assemblage is rigorously explored as an intertwined agglomeration of urban elements and systems. Finally, in the last phase, students negotiate the formation of their assemblages in a sector of Boston.

Through this work, students will address one of the broader themes of the studio— mobility, habitation and supply chains—which together provide focused lenses through which we can tackle the key elements and systems of the “Near-Future City”.

Climate Agenda The studio proposes that radical proposals are necessary for the Near Future City to transition to a post-carbon urban condition. This future involves innovation in how we live, consume and move in our urban environments with the understanding that the future may require continual adaptation. This doesn’t require a retreat to medieval paradigms or an over-reliance on technologies (including new technologies that don’t exist yet) to provide the solutions. The future requires a re-tooling of the metabolic processes and material flows associated with the city. Herein, we aspire to shape urban assemblages, driven by landscape and ecological principles, that consider social, economic and environmental impacts at the regional, national and planetary scales.

How and who deploys interventions and transitions the city to a post-carbon future needs to carefully considered as an integral part of the urban assemblage’s DNA.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Phases and Modules Structure

The studio is organized around three phases. The phases build upon each other. The work from the previous phases and modules will be updated and revised with new discoveries in the subsequent phases. The shorter introductory exercises, in the pre-term and first phase, focus on establishing familiarity with tools, workflows, site and knowledge of urban issues and case studies. The longer exercises, in phases two and three, tackle a specific theme in depth and are grounded in particular sites located in the Greater Boston region, which cover a range of pertinent issues relative to climate and the “Near-Future City.”.

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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Phase One: Agents, Agency, Metabolic Flows and Material Processes Phase One: Agents, Agency, Metabolic Flows and Material Processes will set the intellectual and spatial foundation for the subsequent work of the studio. We will begin by understanding the metabolic systems of the city, the key qualities of these systems and the agents responsible for their deployment. Through metabolism—or the processes that occur within an organism in order to sustain it—we can read the material and energy flows within a city. The metabolic model provides a framework to engage the natural and human systems intertwined in the urban environment. By understanding how people, materials and energy move into and out of the city, in multiple time cycles, it is possible to read the city dynamically through its various constituencies. These constituents, or agents, are the key entities operating in the urban realm. They are the for whom and by whom the city is made. Agents have the capacity to effect change, in other words, they have agency. To begin the design process, we will identify key systems, materials and agents operating both within the studio themes and across the studio sites. We will develop indexical tools to map, relate and synthesize these critical readings of urban processes. And we will use this understanding, to frame a polemic relative to the future climate and inhabitation of the city.

There will be one mini-symposium for Phase One Mini Symposium 01: February 08, 2021

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Phase Two: Urban Assemblage of the ‘Near Future City’

In Phase Two Urban Assemblage of the “Near Future City,” we will continue with the premise explored in Phase One and develop it as the brief for the urban assemblage of the “Near-Future City.” We will continue to identify the agents and processes of material ecologies. For here, we will create a project-specific catalogue of urban elements and their inherent principles and protocols for assembly, adaptation and mutation. Through the combination of proposed urban element(s), we will develop a suite of urban assemblages that inherently articulate the “DNA” of the “Near-Future City.” The urban assemblage will be considered as a “thick ground” with tangible and intangible characteristics for responding to states of uncertainty at both the local and global scales. The assembly will be tested in different situations, and the resultant variations will form a matrix of building blocks for the city. The matrices developed will have morphological and performative characteristics driven by principles drawn from an understanding of planning, urban design, engineering, ecology and market economies.

There will be one mini-symposium for Phase Two, Mini Symposium 02: March 11, 2021

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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Phase Three: (post spring break) Deployment and Disposition

Phase Three: Deployment and Disposition will return to the project’s foundation, established in Phase One and ground this intellectual premise by deploying the urban assemblages from Phase Two on site. In deploying the assemblages, we will speculate on the potential spatial transformations of the physical site as well as the possible mechanisms required to bring a project to fruition. These include: regulatory parameters, political structures, economic and ecological systems and cultural constraints. Again, the studio addresses the “Near-Future City,” arguing that pressing climate concerns are not an issue of the future but rather one of the present, and that, in designing for these conditions, it is necessary to understand how present models for building the city must be re-tooled to create viable alternatives moving forward. Thus, the projects will be interrogated for their understanding of the how behind their potential fulfillment (who is responsible for the execution in all its dimensions). In developing this work, the ethics behind the designs will be foregrounded. Projects will tackle specific scenarios (social housing, community land trusts, commons, etc.) that place into critical question the current marketdriven means for providing and evaluating spaces in the city.

There will be one mini-symposium and one curatorial session for Phase Three, Mini Symposium 03: April 19, 2021 Final Review: April 28+29, 2021

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Final Review: Day 01 Review Schedule THURSDAY 29TH APRIL 2021 8.00 am-11.00 am EDT • START IN COURSE ZOOM ROOM 8.00 am - 8:25 am: Course Introduction Zoom Link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/96382628327?pwd=NUpLaDd5bUg0Yi8rN24rbGZje lFsQT09 • MOVE TO SECTION ZOOM ROOMS 8.30 am: Meet in Sections for Introduction and Roaming of Miro Board • 8.40 am - 11:00 am: Review the student work in our individual sections EACH TEAM HAS 15-20 MINUTES TO PRESENT FOLLOWED BY 40 MINUTE DISCUSSION REFER TO INDIVIDUAL SECTIONS FOR ZOOM LINK EAST BOSTON Section: Alex Wall Reviewers: Bill Poorvu, Nina-Marie Lister, Silvia Benedito Zoom Link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/99234007106?pwd=WVE2dkFqUW5FRnFTeG1MRnd UOHNsZz09 Student Group 01: 1.Qilin Chen 2.Shuyue Li Student Group 02: 1.Melissa Eloshway Section: Sergio Lopez-Pineiro Reviewers: Megan Panzano, Surella Segu, Bas Smets, Elisa Cattaneo Zoom Link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/97615211325?pwd=U0tLMjNSRUxBbjhmM0xtMVZT d0UvZz09 Student Group 01: 1.Maria Vollas 2. Jiaying Qin 3. Jingyi Liu, Student Group 02: 1. Ying Dong 2. Leo Liu

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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SOUTH BOSTON Section: Belinda Tato Reviewers: Toni Griffin, Pablo Perez-Ramos, Ed Wall, Eric Robsky Huntley Zoom Link:https://harvard.zoom.us/j/94449802328?pwd=MDhFazhtUU92MVdMNXoxTUV NcjVIZz09 Student Group 01: 1. Hala Nasr 2. Sophia Li Student Group 02: 1. Janet Liu Section: Rosalea Monacella Reviewers: Jesse LeCavalier, Lola Sheppard, Michael Ezban, Elise Hunchuck Zoom Link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/96039578131?pwd=dkZHaUttNnpSSmxxN3NJVGgr TjM2dz09 Student Group 01: 1. Colleen Sloan 2. Morgan Vought Student Group 02: 2. Josiah Brown 2. Xue Bai 3. Jingyi Jia DORCHESTER Section: Danielle Choi Reviewers: Stephen Gray, Jeffrey Nesbit, Maria Villalobos Zoom Link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/91726330163?pwd=NTVzUW5YUjdyRkExZEE4Qjlw WUREZz09 Student Group 01: 1. Joshua Diem 2. Isaiah Krieger Student Group 02: 1.Hattie Lindsley 2. Jacob Cascio Section: Jill Desimini Reviewers: Francesca Benedetto, Billy Fleming, Frven Lim, Bridget Keane Zoom Link: elFsQT09

https://harvard.zoom.us/j/96382628327?pwd=NUpLaDd5bUg0Yi8rN24rbGZj

Student Group 01: 1.Ning Chen, 2.Lauren Duda, 3.Jake Deluca Student Group 02: 1. Alison Maurer 2. Jeb Polstein

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Final Review: Day 02 Review Schedule FRIDAY 30TH APRIL 2021 6.00 pm - 9.00 pm EDT • START IN COURSE ZOOM ROOM 6.00 pm - 6.25 pm: Course Introduction Zoom Link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/92042117339?pwd=VjNON0NyRkhSOGVKZzB6dGR Bd2hUZz09 • MOVE TO SECTION ZOOM ROOMS 6.30 pm: Meet in Sections for Introduction and Roaming of Miro Board • 6.40 pm - 9:00 pm: Review the student work in our individual sections EACH TEAM HAS 15-20 MINUTES TO PRESENT FOLLOWED BY 40 MINUTE DISCUSSION REFER TO INDIVIDUAL SECTIONS FOR ZOOM LINK EAST BOSTON Section: Alex Wall & Sergio Lopez-Pineiro Reviewers: Emily Kutil, Craig Douglas, Ann Lui, Nick Pevzner, Maria Villalobos, Abby Spinak, Catherine de Almeida, Zoom Link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/99153364286?pwd=SDA5L1NpZWdSeWdkeUtNUDl EOTA4UT09 Student Group 01: 1. Sunjae Yu 2.Yuxin Yang, Student Group 02: 1. Jessica Love 2. Lucy Humphreys

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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SOUTH BOSTON Section: Belinda Tato & Rosalea Monacella Reviewer: Billy Fleming, Janette Kim, Brad Cantrell, Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, Elisa Cattaneo, Jeffrey Nesbit Zoom Link:https://harvard.zoom.us/j/92042117339?pwd=VjNON0NyRkhSOGVKZzB6dGRB d2hUZz09 Student Group 01:1. Berit Schurke 2. Rachel Deschner Student Group 02: 1. Cristian Bas Student Group 03: 1. Sophie Mattinson 2. Reem Bukhamseen DORCHESTER Section: Danielle Choi + Jill Desimini Reviewers: Chris Reed, Surella Segu, Azzurra Cox, , Frven Lim, Bridget Keane, Rory Hyde Zoom Link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/98027394496?pwd=YUtLd3VkVHBjb3B0ZC9rZG1W M25XQT09 Student Group 01: 1. Marina Recio Rodriguez 2.Arty Vartanyan Student Group 02: 1. Jenna Wu 2.Liwei Shen 3. Barbara Graeff

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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Living Foodway Sunjae Yu & Yuxin Yang Alex Wall During the pandemic, food insecurity has affected the whole country, with vulnerable communities in the city being the hardest hit. In East Boston, with low access to resources, a high proportion of land in the flood-prone region, and housing issues, the area suffers from a lack of self-sufficiency and a lack of services. Orient Heights is a mixed community, ethnically diverse with Italian immigrants and the Latin American community. Recent food insecurity brings attention to other social issues such as low income, inaccessibility, and inequality, limiting the community’s inclusive growth. Our project proposes a living foodway orchestrated by mobile “service trucks,” temporary markets, and glasshouses.

“Food trucks,” the intersection of food and wheels, have diversified urban living landscapes since birth. From food to services, these service trucks address the city’s food, culture, and maintenance deserts in a nimble and easy-to-operate manner. From temporary services to the long-term network, the trucks collaborate with markets and glasshouses to address urgent social issues and render a sense of place for all communities in high flexibility and efficiency.

Glasshouses are long-term sufficiency support for the city. Glasshouses and workshops would be built or rent as large constructions as well as the renovation of the existing buildings. The monoculture industrial areas and residential towns transform into a cooperative society with various food resources and cultures. Orienting from the Orient Heights, shifting new development to the west of the city, the overall reconfiguration will bring another cultural and ecological possibility to the whole community and the city.

Foodways are living. The assemblages of temporary-to-permanent elements and publicand-private institutions induce productive landscapes while reconnecting the community in the urban context.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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The Disordered Backyard: A Non-Park Landscape of Integration and Juxtaposition Melissa Eloshway Alex Wall This project is looking at creating a non park landscape on an oil terminal site in order to celebrate a cultural landscape of juxtaposition in East Boston and Revere, MA. The non park landscape will henceforth be known as the disordered backyard; a communal space of integration, experimentation, health, toxicity, water, concrete, lawn, human inhabitation, pollinator service. This backyard is a geological event of the anthropocene, and will become a layer in the further future deep section as the site of oil storage has already. In this age, layers of change become thinner, but as seen in the deep section of the existing oil terminal , the layer’s impact is deep; sinking solvents vertically span thirty meters or more, pluming petrol proliferates horizontally in the soil, flowing atop groundwater, expanding toxic site into ecosystems miles away from the storage site.

Once site toxicity has been spacialized in plan, the term “oil terminal” is no longer an accurate descriptor. Terminal can mean “of, forming, or situated at the end or extremity of something,” “the end of a railroad or other transport route, or a station at such a point,” or “a point of connection for closing an electric circuit.” Each of these definitions connotes an end, a connection within an organized, closed system. However as seen in plan and section diagrams toxicity spread, these “terminals” are not part of a closed organized system, nor are they the end of the line for the products they store. Rather, they are sites of proliferation, a feral biology of Man which overrides jurisdictional site boundary lines.

In this way, the extension of site across normalized boundaries calls a wider spectrum of stakeholders to the table to engage in the near future making a pointed site which affects a far wider, far deeper site.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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Estuarine Assemblages for East Boston Julia Rice, Qilin Chen & Shuyue Li Alex Wall East Boston is a city of many assemblages. The traveler coming from the East, by sea, will come upon what looks like a mirage. Tall, glimmering buildings appear to float over the long tidal flats and salt marshes. They will be greeted by the sounds of shore birds, the lapping of the incoming tide, while the city is silent and distant. It is only when the traveler reaches the docks and the first houses on pilings which dot the marshes, that the bustle and noise of the city’s residents comes to their ears. It is like waking from a dream.

Traveling from the west, the visitor must come by boat on one of the many rivers which flow into the city. This trip is noisy and boisterous. The rushing rapids, the laughter and talk of their fellow passengers; East Boston shows itself as welcoming and generous.

Upon arrival the traveler discovers the engineering marvels of the city. The rivers are channeled in marvelous ways to provide drinking water for the residents and sent out into the marshes to support the teaming fish ponds and rice paddies. Surrounded by water, the city is prosperous and well-fed.

Coming to East Boston from the south is a long, arduous trip. The traveler passes through many other cities along the way. Several are desolate and slowly decaying. Fellow travelers all speak of their dreams and the new lives they envision for themselves in East Boston. The city is not so much a place as it is an assemblage of desires. Each new arrival builds the city anew with their hopes and vision of what could be.

The traveler coming from the north hears many tales of how East Boston used to be. The birds, migrating for the winter, talk of the forests they used to find refuge in. The whales speak of the silence of the shipping channels before commerce came to the city. Other travelers reminisce about the bustling airport, the Sunday races at the racetrack, the Madonna on the hill. Some of these things still remain but it is hard to adjust to the new East Boston, city of water, city of reeds. Sometimes the traveler longs for the solid ground of the past. These wisps of memory fade when the traveler first sets foot on the boardwalk and says good morning to the people of East Boston, opening their shops, their children laughing on the way to school.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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μm-City (A City of Tiny Particles) Jingyi Liu, Jiaying Qin, & Maria Vollas Sergio Lopez-Pineiro Our view of the near-future and post-carbon city is from the perspective of the very small but largely pervasive invisible substances that are ubiquitous in urban environments.

In particular, the extracted grains of salt that de-ice and melt the snow in the winter are invisible, yet they have the ability to radically manipulate the freezing point of water and the larger effects of weather and climate in the city. They’re also devastating to the plant and aquatic life, by raising the levels of salinity in the ground and in various water bodies. Pollen is another group of tiny particles that are dispersed from trees and plants to the city through the wind patterns of the atmosphere. They are also one of the main causes of allergies for the city’s human population. Fertilizers, primarily composed of phosphorus and nitrogen, are also ubiquitous yet invisible particles in the city. They are mostly located either underground or underwater, affecting the flourishing of plant and animal species and altering the chemical compositions of soil and water.

All these tiny, invisible substances are closely connected to the significantly larger weather patterns and atmospheric phenomena. The salt is connected to winter through ice and snow, pollen to spring and summer through temperature and wind patterns, and fertilizers to summer and fall through precipitation.

The City of Tiny Particles is a near-future and post-carbon city that is conscious of the presence and the power of such substances, and it is seeking a new agenda between the disparate scales of the micro and the macro. The landscape acts as both a microscope and a magnifier in order to acknowledge and read the concentrations of these substances in the city, and manipulate their uses, quantities and flows to prevent contamination and to explore new ways of living with these materials in the near-future.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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Unboxing: From Private Commodity to Collective Experience Ying Dong & Leo Liu Sergio Lopez-Pineiro The development of e-commerce has led to changes in both the logistics infrastructure and the living patterns of urban residents. Unlike the traditional stationary warehouses located in the suburban area, storage spaces have been fragmenting into the architectural and urban fabric of the city. Amazon, one of the biggest e-commerce retail and logistics companies, distributed a great number of Amazon Hub lockers into fragmented areas inside the urban environment, including metro stations, parking lots, convenience stores, gas stations, etc. In addition to the changes in the configuration of urban logistics infrastructure, the living pattern of urban residents is also changing rapidly. With the enhancement of the efficiency of the logistics system, the banal home-work living pattern is reinforced, unorganized activities, and unexpected encounters within the public realm are diminished.

In the proposal for near-future city, we embrace Amazon’s logistics system and try to take advantage of the efficiency of the system to reintroduce publicity and ecological diversity into the urban environment. To achieve this goal, we integrate amazon lockers, the composting process of corrugated paper boxes, and potential public spaces to create new urban assemblages, they function as both package pick-up spots, soil producing facilities, and environments with novel aesthetic experiences.

The catalog of assemblages constitutes four scales of publicity. For the public scale, the combination of the movable composting pits and package pick-up spots constantly transform post-industrial sites and abandoned city areas into wildlife public parks. The advertising structures, such as the billboards, are transformed into night parks that people visit and pick up packages after work at night. For the domestic community scale, special warm-ground parks in the backyards of typical blocks in East Boston, heated by the active composting pits underground, provide recreational and resting spaces for the domestic community. For the social organization scale, temporary farmer’s markets managed by farmer’s association take up secondary streets on weekends. Finally, allotment gardens, combined with compost windrows and package pick-up facilities, are rented to and cultivated by individual residents and provides fresh agricultural products for the farmer’s market.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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Stable Isles Lucy Humphreys & Jessica Love Sergio Lopez-Pineiro Stable Isles responds to the complex conditions of soil liquefaction and decaying piles in East Boston, and explores two modes of action in the city: Adaptation and Retreat. These methods are arranged along a scale of stability and address factors of livability in East Boston.

Stable Isles: Shades of Stability Jessica Love Using the history of filling in East Boston and its implications, Stable Isles: Shades of Stability aims to redefine the coastal edge of the city according to the degree of instability.

In its rigidity, the current system of shoring up and stabilizing structures, the system in East Boston becomes brittle. A gradient of risk demands a new type of city block to allow degrees of habitation and abandonment. The project rejects the rigidity of the current model, yet retains the residential block made up of the typical triple decker homes in East Boston with new modes of stabilization and retreat.

Shades of Stability seeks to reorient the block of East Boston and redefine the coast as a gradient of retreat.

Stable Isles: Redefining the East Boston Archipelago Lucy Humphreys Drawing upon the history of East Boston as an archipelago, Stable Isles: Redefining the East Boston Archipelago aims to strategically protect the social and physical anchors of the city.

Even if 80-90% of residents leave by 2070, as liquefaction risk and flood projections suggest, that may be four generations of people in East Boston who still need a functioning city. And beyond that, no matter the crisis or disaster, there are always some who stay put.

The project understands public schools as the social and physical anchors of the city. Not only is education of nearly universal importance, but the infrastructure provides emergency shelter, polling places lie at the heart of the democratic process, and community centers provide an important public resource.

Stable Isles: Redefining the East Boston Archipelago asks how stability shapes the future city.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

+26°C

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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Rethinking the Structures and Systems of Public Housing Hala Nasr Al Juboori & Sophia Li Belinda Tato South Boston is home to three public housing sites, all built in the 1940s. The resident populations are considered “vulnerable”—a majority of residents make under 30% of median income, the unemployment rate is 20% and most are minorities and/or over 62 years old. The existing assemblage does not serve the needs of the residents or the community as a whole. Two of the three public housing sites are slated for redevelopment already. However, it merely involves modernizing the buildings while retaining the same structural layout and programming (or lack thereof ). The current residents will be moved out while the buildings are torn down and replaced, which could take years and will lead to a fracturing of the social infrastructure. Studies show that less than 20% of relocated residents return to live in public housing revitalization projects. We believe it is necessary to rethink this strategy and question the effectiveness of hundreds of millions of dollars and time being spent on demolition and construction of newer-looking buildings without improving anything else. We see the existing spaces as economic, cultural, and educational opportunities with long term potential to assist community members in taking ownership of their livelihood and the land.

From Monocultures to Manycultures Hala Nasr Al Juboori The project’s ambition is to introduce strategic interventions to build a connected urban community that share a network of knowledge and skill exchange, creating a dynamic and vibrant community. To break the monoculture of development and construction, the project considers directing enduring benefits to projects and groups that embed value into the community’s physical assets.

Farm-to-Table / Farm-to-Community Sophia Li Public housing sites have the potential to be patches of agricultural market economy within the urban fabric that provide educational, cultural, nutritional, and economical benefits. Rooftop greenhouses are the anchor for a system that allows for more collective forms of generating wealth and a thriving community in partnership with neighboring institutions.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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Liquid Love: Reshaping Public Realm After Covid-19 Pandemic Janet Liu Belinda Tato Keywords: Resiliency, Public Realm, Urban Forest, Social Interaction, Mental Connection Our society has moved away from a solid, hardware-focused modernity to a liquid, software-based modernity through the current social situation. People seek speed, change, and a light atmosphere in this liquid society. At the same time, we have been struggling with social, cultural, economic, and mental issues with the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is a time when social interaction, cultural understanding, employment rates, and overall mental certainty were down. The Pandemic immediately expresses the present future which begs the question: how do we redefine public spaces for the new lifestyle during this unexpected pandemic?

The project focuses on the notion of public spaces, by acknowledging the fact that the current public space is no longer to respond to emergency needs. This has allowed the possibility of a more interactive but secure living for supporting residents’ mental condition during pandemics. The city needs to be understood in contemporary through variable perspectives. Therefore, the project used South Boston as the laboratory to produce a system that provides a revolutionary way of living. By choreographing the space of residents’ buildings, various scales of elements (L, M, S) allow for multiple programmatic possibilities that provide a new way of encouraging residents to interact with new potential public spaces. While at the same time, residents can maintain their current living spaces and form a resilient neighborhood (XL).

Technology will be a medium of social connection to support dynamic balance. Shortly, public spaces will be combined with physical and digital activities which display the new relationship with society, culture, economy, and mentality. The new recreation of open space is introduced with connectivity to improve the environment by adding natural elements and sharing resources. This resulted in the connection of the public space for each of the neighborhoods, as well as creating a certain level of social interaction providing a new version of dynamic urbanist lifestyle and eventually expanding to the whole South Boston area.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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Comfort City Rachel Deschner & Berit Schurke Belinda Tato Comfort City is a concept that responds to the current lack of attention given to the diversity of needs in the city fabric of the South Boston neighborhood. Currently, its design is ableist, catering to those of a certain height, certain visual capability, certain hearing ability etc … resulting in inaccessible and uncomfortable experiences for anyone outside of that narrow range. As a first step, we’d begun to categorize those obstacles to start to understand their frequency and decipher which were the most necessary to address.

Since initially focusing on physical impairments however, we’ve broadened our scope to include differences and diversity in every realm including emotional and mental differences, racial and ethnic differences, as well as temporary conditions such as pregnancy or surgery recovery. Incorporating these new qualities into the matrix, we’ve mapped the potential risk experienced by people with such conditions to discover the most harmful obstacles and proposed possible solutions to alleviate as many issues at once to provide pockets of comfort throughout the city. We’ve also begun mapping larger and non-built elements of the city including noise level, shade, light, heat, and topography, exposing overlapping opportunities for rehabilitation.

Our goal from here is to better understand the potentials for the future-city, giving us a context to work within. Particularly interesting to us individually are the potential for a dynamic and flexible design that reflects its users to celebrate both diversity and connection, as well as the discovery of the extreme and radical in creating zones of comfort within South Boston, paying special attention to the existing climatic changes and those yet to come.

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PHOTOMONTAGE WITH EXISTING RENDERINGS

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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THE RE-NATURALIZATION OF THE WATERFRONT Cristian Bas Belinda Tato Since 2005, Seaport District lived a radical transformation due to changes of the industrial zoning to commercial evolving into a luxurious neighborhood with many social injustice problems and gentrification. The area is could be underwater because of sea level rise in the future.

Harvard’s historical map collection shows that Boston’s coastline was significantly different from what it is now. Even if we keep pushing the limits, the sea will recover some of its natural states.

Even though Climate Ready Boston and Sasaki’s strategies for protecting Boston from sealevel rise have been broadly accepted, however, how could we build those natural buffers?

The reality may be that all the earth and natural material could come from another landscape far away to the coastline. Even in 50 years’ time, the urgency that could occur, can put even the urban parks in danger for extraction of materials.

I’m thinking of other possibilities to bring back the coastline’s natural state without jeopardizing the environment’s balance and getting all of the material needed to construct the natural buffers from the hundreds of parking lots near the coastline because automatic driving is already a fact. Many of those parking lots will be obsolete in a short period.

The areas of intervention are defined by a topographic analysis, where the parking lots could be destroyed and carve out to start building the waterfront mounds. Moreover, those areas of intervention could accumulate polluted stormwater to be filtered before discharging into the ocean.

The project will be designed in phases; first, establishing the lower area of intervention in each parking lot. Second, and most drastic, carving the deepest space of the center that will support the most significant extraction of land and concrete to build the first part of the waterfront mound. Third the extension of the perimetral areas to be carved out to get the waterfront mound bigger. Finally, with native coastline plantation and geotextile membranes letting nature enhances the pile to earn natural structure.

The ‘carving in and out’ strategy could transform many areas in the city’s interior to connect nature with the new waterfront as a new urban ecosystem.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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United Grounds: Reconfiguring South Boston’s Living Systems Sophie Mattinson & Reem Bukhamseen Rosalea Monacella South Boston’s public spaces reveal a history of sourcing materials to construct their sidewalks, streets, and parks from extraction and distribution sites across the world before renovating such projects decades later. The public realm is standardized and homogenous: the granite paver is extracted from faraway quarries and the tree-lined streets consist of just a few species. The city’s patterns for consumption distances itself from local sources and relies on global vendors to serve its residents. United Grounds proposes a Bill of Rights that lays a framework for how materials are protected and perceived: living systems with rights to repair, community, and a right of way.

When all living systems are given rights, the public realm is shifted for humans and materials to coexist. United Grounds introduces four programmatic assemblages dispersed across the city: the tree lab, the house circuit, the tree rehabilitation center, and the paver production site. These components operate autonomously to facilitate urban public life while also offering exchanges for material, goods, and value. Materials are locally grown and monitored at these sites before the Public Works department transports to adjacent neighbors. Maintenance regimes aim towards repair, rather than renovate, where the public realm works in solidarity with their labor. City infrastructure and residential blocks are rerouted around forests, allowing space for growth, water, and community. In United Grounds’ vision, materials maximize their lifespan and are sourced locally while labor is reduced, redistributing budgets from expensive construction towards adaptive public spaces.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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Community Power: Intercepting Industry Redundancy through Collective Material Cycling Colleen Sloan & Morgan Vought Rosalea Monacella A radical shift in the tech industry’s current chain of extraction and waste is needed to ensure social and environmental justice in South Boston and globally. Through the formation of a Community Material Coalition, stakeholders are brought together to rewire the legacy sites of consumption, production, and waste processing. By transforming waste to capital, the coalition puts land tenure, knowledge, and material into the hands of the community, and, in doing so, reimagines the spatial configuration of South Boston’s urban fabric transforming current models of production, consumption and waste that are reinforced by the tech industry. Material and processes are intercepted at our nodes of intervention which include: The Community Power Hub, The Material Library, Collection Bins, the Exchange Port, The Deposition Depot and the Residential Recharge Park.

In exchange for localized e-waste material collection and processing, the coalition will secure a physical and ideological foothold at the Community Power Hub within the Seaport district’s fast developing “glass jungle,” as well as increased autonomy over public space. The South Boston Library will serve as the community’s hub for material collection, education, and fabrication. A network of collection bins will connect the Seaport and Library hubs to the larger residential and industrial networks in South Boston.

At the Deposition Depot, legacies of warehousing and industry such as hazardous material remnants in the soil are broken down through phytoremediation, and material is intercepted and deposited between sites residential consumption and waste processing. Lastly, Residential Recharge Park, reconfigures consumption to alter the relationship between people and waste as it relates to energy consumption, electronic consumption, and food consumption. This interception relies on the transformation of structure, ground, public and private spaces, and the growth of new ecologies both human and non-human.

The Community Material Coalition of Near Future South Boston reinstates the power of community by intercepting the redundancies of industry to make way for a new material ecology.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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Amazon Earth: A Manual of Care for the Neo-Logistic Landscape Josiah Brown, Xue Bai, & Jingyi Jia Rosalea Monacella Keywords: Access, Inclusion, Mutualism, Recovery, Ground, Care, Labor, Essential Worker, More-Than-Human, Landmaking South Boston sits on constructed land, a layering of soils, sands, concrete, and wood that forms a mass to support the modern infrastructures of the past three centuries. Roads and rail lines have dictated not only how we move around the city, but also what form the city takes. During the pandemic, these movements were changed drastically. As many of the city’s residents stayed home and had goods delivered to their doors, online retailers like Amazon profited at the expense of overbooked delivery workers. Given these conditions, this project takes a closer look at Amazon’s logistics operations and asks how a deep reading of the land, and a potential unraveling of the historic infrastructures of the city, can make way for new, equitable, sustainable, and resilient forms of collective living in the near-future city.

Guiding this project is a Manual of Care: care for the ground, the worker, the resident, and the non-human. Proposed Care Stations reconfigure the urban assemblage to create new infrastructures that leverage Amazon’s success into greater care for South Boston, from the microbiota living in the soil to the children playing in the street to the delivery worker making their rounds through the neighborhood.

• Exchange Stations allow the functions of delivery and waste removal to be decoupled from the residential street, opening up new possibilities for the spaces between dwellings while also reducing the burden on the delivery worker.

• ReCreation Stations continue the process of landmaking by liberating the ground from its asphalt coverings, allowing healthy soils, natural hydrologies, and human and nonhuman residents to reclaim land that had been given over to global logistics in decades past.

• Energy Stations recharge the soil and offer rest to essential workers and residents while also accomplishing an urban system that does not rely on extraction and exploitation of remote landscapes.

These reconfigurations allow an alternative vision of collective form to emerge in South Boston, one in which the logistical unit shifts from the individual residence to the neighborhood block, helping distribute labor and care more equally among workers and residents.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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A Food-Oriented Ontology Joshua Diem & Isaiah Krieger Danielle Choi What constitutes “food,” anyway? This project first seeks to explore and identify the various forms of food and meals that are (or that could potentially be) consumed in Dorchester, as well as their various enabling infrastructures and networks near and far.

While the Massachusetts Department of Health classifies 30 percent of the state as a “food desert,” Dorchester isn’t on the list. But then consider this The project began by assembling typical “food groups” of available foods and food sources within Dorchester: fast food, grocery chains, international markets, and local agriculture.

Despite vast differences in local manifestation (i.e. a cheeseburger versus a bowl of pho) much of the food sourcing and processing is wound up in the same global supply chains.

Having identified the components of existing systems of production and processing, the question was then; how can Dorchester’s familiar foods be recreated with substituted components that are localized, sustainable, and equitable?

The quest for localized food production then begins in the ground, with investigation into urban soils and novel growing configurations of crops which are suited for urban conditions (and Boston specifically). How can public and private property be used or incentivized to contribute to local grain production? How might existing networks of food and waste processing be folded into a massive, city-wide soil-generation operation?

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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P.S. Dorchester Jake Cascio & Hattie Lindsley Danielle Choi We began with a bus—a yellow school bus, contracted by Boston Public Schools, which shuttles K through 6th-grade students across neighborhood lines twice each schoolday.

We moved to the sign—the walk sign, the stop sign, the traffic light—those objects that mark the threshold of an education zone.There isn’t something in the earth which, cut through, designates learning; rather, these indicators are assembled street-level. Let’s work with that. Our project interrogates the school zone—its radius, infrastructure, transportation, symbols, and potentials.

We’re interested here in the distance traversed by elementary school-aged children. Let’s remove the school district’s dependence on yellow school bus transportation. Let’s make the commute safer and shorter, and let’s fold it within the existing schoolday in such a way that it too becomes an opportunity for learning. The school zone is more than a sign— it’s a corner, a street, a paver, a plant, a home, a neighborhood.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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Breathing Binding Water Bound Barbara Graeff, Liwei Shen, & Jenna Wu Danielle Choi Breathing Binding Water Bound aims to reveal environmental inequalities and invisible boundaries of Dorchester through the experience of those who suffer from respiratory diseases by illustrating particle radii, movement, and capture. Dorchester has the highest rates of asthma in the greater Boston region. How does a child with asthma experience this neighborhood? What challenges does traversing busy roads present on the way to school or to reach open space by the shoreline? By spatializing these inequalities in terms of the breath throughout the city, limits of accessibility that are invisible to the naked eye become apparent, exposing a need to reshape the Dorchester urban assemblage in terms of breathing boundaries and corridors.

A single water droplet falling through the air may capture tens of thousands of particles before it hits the ground. Each of our projects reinterprets air particulate through a series of water and soil assemblages. We propose that the air pollutants that currently bind the community are in turn bound by hydrology. Interstate 93 crossroads, MBTA railway stations, and sites contaminated by oil and other hazardous materials define our intervention network. What potential spatial and social value could these highly functional spaces hold if they were redesigned for increased breathing accessibility? How can rain and floodwater be redirected to collect air particulate from heavily trafficked corridors and textured surfaces, like plants? And how can we design for the transition of a petroleumbased society towards one ruled by policies like the Green New Deal and efforts to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels? How can we take responsibility for long-lasting chemical residues produced by our habits and use remediation processes to build new public spaces? The new assemblages propose various capture methods both above and below ground via mist, rain, land forming, phytoremediation and shoreline flooding. In doing so, they create new breathing corridors that provide more accessibility within Dorchester for those afflicted by asthma and other respiratory diseases.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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Three Stories: The Past, Present, and Future of Dorchester’s Triple-Deckers Ning Chen, Jake Deluca, & Lauren Duda Jill Desimini Keywords: Connection, Migration, Cultural Identity We are interested in the development of Dorchester as informed by an influx of people and plant material over time, specifically how this has affected densities and historic land uses. Dorchester has had many different cultural communities come and go. One housing type that has appeared and endured, is the triple-decker. Over time the density of Dorchester has increased, subsuming public landscapes and collective spaces.

Our designs respond to these pressures, as well as climatic stresses of heat and flooding, resulting from increased impervious surfaces and built coverage. Using predominantly canopy, recycled wood products, and a pervious circulatory network, we have introduced a series of public landscapes that change the way residents interact with the triple decker and landscape beyond.

In taking three different approaches, with different temporal implications, we read our project as the creation of a new foreground, middle ground, and background for the triple-decker fabric.

The foreground forms a cultural and personal connection between the people and the trees living in Dorchester. In other words, the assemblage explores how the growth cycle of trees can become a system for transforming the neighborhood’s physical space and value system. This is achieved through the establishment of a tree nursery and the introduction of a communal distribution system. The trees are planted by residents, and in turn, are encoded with information in order to tell the stories of the people who planted them. Through examining the porch, the street, and the canopy, the foreground creates a series of shared, public spaces, spaces that slowly emerge as thick, rooted spines.

The middle ground looks at the potential of triple-decker as both a material source for reconstitutions (as biodegradable material and biochar) and as a receptacle for the energy-efficient retrofits to reach Boston’s carbon neutrality goals in the near future.

Taking inspiration from vernacular building materials and the cultivation practices of various cultures, the assemblage creates a localized wood material flow and that extends the life cycle of the built environment in Dorchester.

The background of our assemblage examines how historic land-use types like the triple decker housing can be embedded in a broader historic landscape. Through the installation of a permeable, canopied network, the assemblage makes site preservation more dynamic, drawing foot traffic to historic sites while simultaneously providing shaded public landscapes to city residents.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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The Street as Human Habitat Marina Recio Rodriguez & Arty Vartanyan Jill Desimini A neighborhood is many things, but first and foremost, it must function as a human habitat. Applying a conceptual framework typically reserved for nonhuman organisms, this project aims to transform the neighborhood of Fields Corner in Dorchester by rethinking the public realm through the lens of habitat’s essential components: food, water, shelter, and space.

Human habitability is typically considered either at the micro scale of the individual home or the macro scale of the planet. This project seeks to address the vital yet often missing scale of the neighborhood by translating habitat’s key elements, today primarily accessible in the domestic realm, into the public realm.

This project challenges the bifurcation of what is public and what is private through a series of urban assemblages which utilize the street at the primary medium for spatial intervention. By redefining the street as a common habitat, this transformation in turn encourages dwellers to reconsider the existing urban model of private homes with individual yards as the basic unit of habitation. Reallocation of uses away from the private home frees individual dwellings from the burden of providing every habitat need and provides residents with the flexibility to resize, rearrange, and reimagine how they inhabit domestic space.

The near-future city must recognize that the neighborhood is a necessary scale for human habitat, and that access to clean water, healthy food, abundant shelter, and comfortable space is a necessity rather than an amenity. Shifting the scale of habitat from the private, domestic sphere to a larger, collective one—that is, turning habitat inside out—acknowledges that sustaining human life, especially in a changing planet facing increasingly harsh conditions, is only possible as a collective endeavor.

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Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

Harvard GSD Spring 2021 Core IV Final Review

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Growing the Mycelial Collective Alison Maurer & Jeb Polstein Jill Desimini Keywords: Mycelium, Labor, Collectivity WHEREAS the climate crisis ravages our planet, propelled by entrenched fossil fuel interests and infrastructure; WHEREAS Dorchester feels this in extreme heat, flooding, and ecological degradation; WHEREAS unemployment is high, especially mid-pandemic, and opportunities are alienating and bleak; WHEREAS interventions tend to benefit landlords and investors rather than tenants and residents, and the risk of displacement looms; and WHEREAS fungal mycelium offers an alternative to the extractive capitalist model of urban living, more concerned with collectivity, reciprocity, and adaptability; NOW, THEREFORE, be it resolved that the Dorchester Mycelial Union creates a mycelial mat—a dynamic, growing organism that inoculates willing blocks into new ways of being and growing. When the mat reaches your door, it guarantees jobs, decommodifies land, produces food and habitat, and usurps traditional infrastructures of extraction. The organism grows through spores (reaching distant areas) and hyphae (adjacent ones), working tirelessly to transform the city from the inside out.