[06] SoHo Commoning | Spring 2021 | N;C

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soho commoning Angelina Zhang / Nicholas Chung / Susana Quintero Vidales

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Angelina Zhang / Nicholas Chung / Susana Quintero Vidales

SoHo Commoning Design Studio 06 Ground Rules Studio Report - Spring 2021 Video Presentation: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ3G-AeQ6Tg

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Ground Rules - Syllabus

What are the most significant challenges we face today? And how does architecture relate to them? This is not just about built form—physical buildings and cities—but also the policies and economics that drive form and development.

This design studio focuses on the state of our city and society. We will study the forces that shape the built environment, working specifically with the roles of urban planning, architecture, and real estate development. How did we get here, and what do we want to build? We will address these questions in the following ways in class: 1. Through an ISSUE seminar that provides a macro-view on an interrelated set of contemporary crises, as well as a micro-view of NYC-specific happenings.

2. Through the DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT of a comprehensive project sited in New York City. In this project, students with be able to see how the themes from the ISSUE seminar play out on a local level, with all the complexity of a specific place, context, and group of stakeholders. They will also learn about the push-and-pull relationships between urban planning, architecture, and real estate development.

3. Through a COURSE STRUCTURE that prioritizes collaborative and cooperative learning.

As a group, we will model an inclusive decision-making process that determines specific course content, assignment deliverables, and presentation formats.

Syracuse University School of Architecture NYC Fisher Center Studio Instructors

Angela Co (Design Studio) Shawn Amsler (Real Estate)

Final Review Critics

Gloria Lau, Stantec Andrew Weigand, Principal, Gluckman Tang Yukie Ohta, SOHO Memory Project David Vega Barachowitz, WXY Nick McDermott, Future Expansion

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Issue Seminar Right to the City

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Deep Dives POPs The High Line Ad Hoc Markets Sesc Pompeia

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Seminar Workshop

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SoHo

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Rezoning Department of City Planning

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Positioning

History & Research

Urban Strategy 122 126 130

Community Management Trust Concept Program Economic Argument

Conceptual Development 135

Initial Massing Studies 2/3 Review

Design Development 146

System Modular Design

154 164

Prototype Sites Design Real Estate Proforma

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Vision & Aspirations

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Right to the City

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Public Space versus public space

Part I : Public Space

In researching our issue topic of Right to the City, we aimed to unpack the questions of what is public space? Who owns it? Who are the users and enforcers? And what are the optics of these relationships?

Are they highly prescriptive and formal Or is that formality disrupted by ad hoc informality as determined by consensus programming from the community

In explaining RTTC, Henri Lefbvre describes the city as an oeuvre, the production and reproduction of human beings by human beings, rather than the production of objects.

He insisted that far from being established once and for all, the public realm is itself the site and the stake of struggle.

As such, when thinking about questions of who owns space, who gets to rewrite space, and how do we facilitate such freedoms through program and form, we believe that spaces that contain a public presence are in a state of constant self-reiteration. These spaces should be dynamic and democratic in how program change through time, with its incompletion being both the means and the ends.

The goal is to foster a sense of communal responsibility and shared ownership through democratic programming and decision making. It is also important to provide equitable opportunity for upward socioeconomic mobility.

There is also the need to act against predatory displacement and erasure by invasive design.

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Stravides writes that metropolis “is full of privatized public spaces in which public use is carefully controlled and specifically motivated” and that “users must often be checked and categorized”.1 This is important to understand the distinction between public space and free space as the former implies exclusive use by the citizenry, which at times is not the same as the entire population. In addition, the uninhibited use of public space is only true when the users abide by the rules set out by the institutions that own them. For instance, the state provides parks and other recreational spaces for its citizenry, but also imposes their expectations on the users. Indeed, some of these expectations, such as ‘no littering’ or ‘supervise your children’, are desirable social behaviors and is implemented as “preventive designs, but only by popular demand”2. Public space, therefore, acts as proliferators of these conditions so that they are reproduced at every scale of city life. It therefore falls onto institutions to program the spaces they make public since “they can circumscribe the sphere of the political and restrict political agency to an activity performed by definite agents endowed with the appropriate qualifications; of they can give way to forms of interpretation and practices that are democratic, which invent new political places, issues and agents from the very same texts”.3 The problem with this is that since it is institutions and private interests that decide what qualities are reproduced, regardless of whether they reflect popular opinion or not, it opens the possibility for abuse and suppression of ways of life that may undermine institutional legitimacy.

1 Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 26.

2 Theo Deutinger, “Handbook of Tyranny”, Lars Muller Publishers, 2018, 85.

3 Rancière, “Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics”, 54.

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But before discussing the issue of who has the right to appropriate the programs of public space, we need to understand the systems and rhythms that constitutes ‘public space’ and its effects.

So how does one qualify or define ‘publicness’? In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs remarks that a city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, our of the presence of strangers, as the street of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have the following three qualities: - “Firstly, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space. Public and private spaces cannot ooze into each other as they do typically in suburban settings or in projects.

- Secondly, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.

- The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalk in sufficient numbers.

Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.”4

4 Jane Jacobs. “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, Random House, 1961, 35.

Above: Oscar Newman Defensible Space

Below: Nolli Map of Rome

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Guy Debord Theory of the Dérive

Part II : Rhythms

Although the domain of a government begins and ends on its borderline, for the sake of this study, we will understand the city as the extents of urban emancipation. Stravides writes that since “the ideal city-space” supports social life and “expresses those values that are necessary for social production”5, the form of public space should reflect changes in social practices. As mentioned, spaces are conditions of human occupation defined by their temporal extents, and both Stravides and Henri Lefebvre regards “the socially meaningful time of performed practices”6 as ‘rhythms’. Lefebvre explains that “every rhythm implies a relation of time with space, localized time, or if one wishes, a temporalized space”7. This can be understood as the speed of feedback loops between constituents or the experience of moving in the city. But in all cases, rhythm is a way to evaluate the efficiency of power exercised on space. But critically, what Lefebvre is arguing is that rhythms of space, much like rhythm of music, regulates tempo and dynamics, and strategies can be deployed to either prolong or destabilize the temporal rigidity to the programs of space.

Stravides remarks that the city consists of “a dominant rhythm and localized exceptions”, with the former being what Lefebvre calls “linear rhythms”. “Linear rhythms are defined by consecutiveness and the reproduction of the same phenomena, identical or almost at more or less close intervals.”8 In other words, “linear rhythms” is the spatial experience of the routine or the familiar. However, Stravides argues that public space is mobilized as an instrument to condition society since “the publicly exhibited identities of the users are enacted in accordance with those rhythms that discriminate and canonize them”. This means that public space is charged with an agenda to keep the citizenry in line, though the reasons for doing so can vary. As such, governments need “a carefully designed system of control is absolutely necessary for the regulation of socially defining rhythms”9 that asserts desirable social conditioning without giving the appearance of asserting upon the citizenry’s perception of their own freedom.

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Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 23.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 24.

Henri Lefebvre, “Writings on Cities”, Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, 230.

Lefebvre, “Writings on Cities”, 231.

Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 29.

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Lower East Side, Early 1900s

Part III : Circulation

Another way to understand the city is to see it as an active agent in the mobilization of urban life. The urban condition is “the spatial image of the passage” that expresses space through constituents’ “relation to others.”10 Stravides writes that “every society protects its passages” and the process of traversing “from one identity to another without the order of social reproduction being threatened.” In this case, the maintenance of the city falls onto the citizenry for it is they who thrive under the city’s amnesty.

As the White Plans of the PROVO movement would suggest, the city is public property that has its agency and character. The citizenry’s social contract is no longer one with the state, but the living matrix of systems and interactions that facilitates their inhabitation and activity.

If operating on the premise that public space is modelled around democratic principles of indifference, and to an extent anonymity, the public space most accessed is the space of the street. Stravides likens the mobility of the city as blood circulation in the body as “the grounding precondition for the sustaining of urban life”11 and an expression of the city’s “health”12. As such, it would not be unfair to say that the street is an elemental component to all urban registrations. In its democratization, the street “naturalized a presentation of society as an agglomeration of individuals who, as the experience of the crowd, could be different and anonymous”13.

In its democratization, the street exposes the imperfections of democracy, and often the inability of government to rectify those issues. It would make sense then, that the street remains autonomous and independent from any stakeholder’s influence.

Yet at the same time, it makes even more sense that government would want to regulate the efficiency of the street in the same fashion as the dominant rhythm, for their legitimacy and stability is positively correlated to “the rational and never-broken control of traffic.”14 Much like a disrupting triplet in a regular Baroque rhythm, “social chaos” is “a city circulation out of order.”15

10 Stavrides. “Towards the City of Thresholds”, 112.

11 Stavros Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, Zed Books Ltd, 2016, 129.

12 Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 130.

13 Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 132.

14 Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 133.

15 Stavrides, “The City as Commons”, 133.

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Aerial photo of Marrakech

Part IV : Specificity of the City

Working upon the notion of the city – public space – as a representation of an organism that cannot be read as ‘partial phenomenon’, as theories or concepts, Lefebvre would argue that the city as an ideology has a specificity that changes according to the relations of immediacy, of direct relations between persons and groups which make up society. Effectively, the city is not an object, but a fluid medium that facilities the flow of people.

Similar to how Jacobs, Stravides, Guy Debord qualify the city, it is “an oeuvre, closer to a work of art than to a simple material product. If there is production of the city, and social relations in the city, it is a production and reproduction of human beings by human beings, rather than a production of objects. The city has a history; it is the work of a history, chat is, of dearly defined people and groups who accomplish this oeuvre, in historical conditions. Conditions which simultaneously enable and limit possibilities, are never sufficient to explain what was born of them, in them, by them.”16 16 Henri Lefebvre. “The Right to the City”.

1996.

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Production, in its wildest definitions, encompass the physical and metaphysical. It represents both the physical artifacts and the production of knowledge, culture, and civilization without an objective vernacular. These operations reveal themselves in the top-down institutionalized regulations as well as the localized cultural norms enforced by the collective. The oeuvre is not prescriptive of its agents whose actions result in a ‘product’ that is their image projection.

In practice, this is how communities create identities that differentiate themselves from their neighbors, allies, and rivals. The urban public space is neither a specific object formation, nor an abstraction of the soul, but the natural flow of continuities and discontinuities that intertwine, disentangle, and unravel with each other.

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Open Streets New York City

Part V : Ownership

Thinking about the agents and actors that mold the oeuvre, it is important to consider the roles ownership and autonomy play in motivating spatial appropriation. There is distinction between what is naturally communal and what is demarcated as public. Modes of ownership and modes of community can vary across different socio-economic and cultural settings. For example, there has been a rise of eco-urban communities across the globe that strives for ecological codependency in the face of increasing urbanization. Ownership can also inform the hardness or softness of the spatial prescriptions enforced in the public realm. The difference between open communities versus urban enclaves or capital versus anti-capital begins to inform how the built environment encourages or restricts a person’s sense of spatial ownership. What is naturally public or communal can often come into conflict with what is marketed as ‘Public’. public (v.) refers to the commons that is undefined and unscripted. It is equitable as it asserts that everyone is born with a right to an equal amount of spatial or material ownership.

The Public (n.) refers to a space that has been assimilated by legitimized bodies of power and then reintroduced as a privatized commodity.

Its users and rules are specifically or implicitly identifiable and grants equal access to those who meet those parameters.

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David Harvey would draw the distinction between the two by the influence of capital in democratic processes. The transformation of resource to commodity is, by virtue, the ideology of forming communities. By transitioning from a physical relationship of harvesting from the ground to one that transacts with a medium (farmer, factories, wholesalers) through capital. The human body’s alienation from the physical commons has allowed for capital, a social construct, to specify value on the natural material space. The case studies in this anthology will look at modes of ownership and enforcement, and how its reflection in the physical environment can affect the production of their localized oeuvres. These systems of mobility and capacity to transition from being dominant rhythms to localized ‘red zones’ would be the basis on how we measure a site’s facilitation of ‘Right to the City’ – of ownership and democratic participation in shaping can changing the image of public spaces.

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Research: Deep Dives

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Privately Owned Public Spaces

[photo credits here]

contested claim on public space Privately owned public spaces, also known by the acronym POPS, are spaces dedicated to public use and enjoyment and which are owned and maintained by private property owners, in exchange for bonus floor area or waivers.

More than 590 POPS provide a myriad of opportunities to sit, relax, people watch, eat, meet others – in other words, to partake and enjoy in urban life in one of the world’s greatest cities. POPS come in many shapes and sizes, both outdoor and indoor, and offer a variety of amenities. POPS are the result of City zoning regulations aimed at ensuring the densest areas of our city offer a measure of open public space and greenery. Thus POPS are important amenities for New Yorkers, commuters, and visitors.

To date, over 590 POPS have been built at over 380 buildings across New York City. These public spaces are primarily located in Manhattan, but are increasingly being developed in the other boroughs, particularly Brooklyn and Queens, as the commercial office markets expand. Combined, POPS provide over 3.8 million square feet of additional public space in the City.

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WHO B

Perhaps it has became a common phenomenon that the city one inhabit, the malls, shopping centers, movie theaters, private plazas, parks, has became increasingly privatized. One must question what this means and what they are losing in the process.

What will happen to democracy when people do

not have

the spaces to meet, organize, and collective plan for future?

What will happen to people when the city no longer belongs to its inhabitants?

WHO IS THE SPACE FOR? BUILDS THE SPACE / WHO USES IT?

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accessibility vs.

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The POPS Program dates to 1961, when New York City’s Zoning Resolution was last overhauled. Then an innovative program, POPS have stood the test of time, and today there are more than 590 POPS, mostly in Manhattan’s dense urban core. When first introduced as a zoning tool, the program allowed developers to build more usable space (also known as floor area) or receive special waivers for a building if they also created plazas or arcades that are open to the public.

POPS are required to be provided and maintained by the property owner in perpetuity according to the regulations they were built pursuant to and any City approvals.

The Department is committed to ensuring that all POPS serve the public, and continually enhances design standards so that POPS are of the highest quality, useful and inviting for the public.

Our current public plaza standards can be found in Zoning Resolution Section 37-70.

Public Plaza Design Principles Our current design standards are informed by decades of experience and are guided by the following principles:

purpose

Open and inviting at the sidewalk - Easily seen and understood as open to the public - Conveys openness and maintains clear sightlines through low design elements and generous paths leading into the plaza - Provides seating and amenities adjacent to the public sidewalk Accessible - Located at the same elevation as the sidewalk - Enhances pedestrian circulation Safe and secure - Contains easily accessible paths for ingress and egress - Oriented and visually connected to the street Well lit Comfortable and engaging - Promotes use and comfort by providing essential amenities - Accommodates both small groups and individuals with a variety of well designed, comfortable seating - Balances open areas with greenery and trees

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HOW ARE THE LIMITS TO RTTC ENFORCE 1

Stanchions. A tool used for crowd control and waiting lines. Commonly seen among banks, stores, hotels, museums, restaurants, and other events.

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Steel Barricade. Physical/psychological barrier to limit movement and control access to an area or property.

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Plastic Barricade. Often seen aro construction sites to keep pedes and vehicles out of hazardous zo Noticible by its bright color, and perceived as warning sign.

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A-Frame Traffic Barricades. Often used to route, stop, or redirect the flow of traffic around dangerous enviornment. Usually perceived as a warning sign to prescribe public circulation.

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Traffic Barriers. Often used on-site to alert pedestrians and lower vehicle traffic of nearby danger. A method to redirect public circulation.

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Anti-homeless spikes. An elemen defensive urban architecture de to prevent the homeless from oc public space to rest.

11 Curfew. Regulations set upon public by

12 Signage. Rules designed by authority to

13 Bench with armrests. A metho

16 Absence of public bench. The most effective meth-

17 Inclined bench. Designed to prevent

18 Low Stone Bench. A cold, hard

authority. It is an expression of power that dictates the rule that impacts the public psychologically.

od to prevent crowd gathering is to not design public furnitures at all.

A tool for anti-loitering, anti-skating, anti-homeless.

regulate public behavior.

homeless people from lying down on the benches.

sive architecture to moderate people uses the furniture. In o the defensive design helps to crime and damage to public p

monly seen in public spaces a signed to be uncomfortable t from prolong uses.

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ED?

ound strians ones. often

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Metal Gate. A tool used to restrict pedestrian access at a point of entry to a space enclosed by walls/fences. It may be used to prevent or control the entry or exit of individuals.

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nt of esigned ccupying

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Inclined Surface. Designed to avoid crowd from sitting and stagnation.

10 Plantation. Used to guide and to pre-

od of defene the way other words, o prevent property.

14 CCTV Camera. A method of public sur-

15 Police. The authority on the street to

d surface comas benches. It is deto prevent people

veillance used to guide crowd behavior psychologically.

19 Round Benches. Defensive architecture

designed to restrict its function to temporary sitting.

Revolving Door. A point of entry designed to decrease the loss of heating/ cooling for the building. It is also an effective barrier both physically and psychologically to restrict public access to the building.

scribe pedstrian way of traveling through a public space.

maintain public order. An effective tool for crowd control both physically and psychologically.

20 Installation/Art. Often installed in public

plaza as decoration, also prevents crowd gathering.

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success? failure?

Zuccotti Park is often considered as a Model for Privately Owned Public Spaces due to its openess and fluidity. It was also the famous site of assembly, #Occupy Wall Street, a protest movement against economic inequality. Public spaces, like Zuccotti Park, have the merit of being a vital component of a democratic republic. Based on this assumption, one may credit Zuccotti Park for living beyond this ideal by providing flexibility in the space.

While Zuccotti Park was a product from the City Planning Commission in 1968, along with 520 of other POPs that sprung up around NYC. As the zoning law states, for developers that donate a certain amount of their property for public space for the creation of anything from pedestrian walkways to plazas may be in exchange for flexibility on the main structure’s height and setback restrictions. In the case of Zuccotti Park, Brookfield was given an additional 304,000 square feet, which was 9 extra stories, for office space in their adjacent property, One Liberty Plaza.

Although Zuccotti Park may be perceived as a successful place for democratic expressions, it may also be considered a site of trouble by its developers. The leniency on park curfew allowed for Occupy Wall Street to settle and grow, but at the same time became a space with rising confirmed incidents of sexual assult and other instances of violence. The park owners, Brookfield Office Properties gradually lost control to the space after backing down from trying to legally evict protestors on the grounds for poor sanitation. The contestedness of the space remains controversial through today.

ZUCCOTTI PARK

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The Trump Tower has been criticized by public for its inaccessible privately owned public spaces (POPS) with the increase in security measures. It is often promoted by real estate brokers as “the most secure building in

Manhattan”.

Trump received zoning floor area ratio (FAR) bonuses for building the public spaces at 725 Fifth Avenue, which amounted to 105,436 square feet – about 14% of Trump Tower. He received an additional bonus of 105,437 square feet for providing retail within the special Fifth Avenue Subdistrict. But even before Trump’s Presidential campaign and election, these spaces were noted to be not clearly accessible by both experts on the city’s privately owned public spaces and the City of New York, which levied a fine just this year.

su

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uccess? failure?

According to the Jerold Kayden, author of Privately Owned Public Space: The New York Experience and the Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, on his extensive website documenting New York City’s POPS,“The covered pedestrian space at Trump Tower is simultaneously New York City’s most famous and least understood privately owned public space.” With the marble and gold details, this POPS is one of the least recognizably public in the city.

TRUMP TOWER

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contested evaluatio

In conclusion, the evaluation of whether a POPS

is successful is more or less based on the evaluator itself. A POP that offers little regulation and

open access may be considered an ideal example of the right to the city which encourages democratic practices; On the contrary, the same POP space may be considered as a faillure by the owner. From the owner/maintainer’s point of view, they aspire for cleaniess and safety to surround their property rather than the freedom to express. Perhaps the relationship between the distance of POPS and the main building is the dominating factor that decides the accessibility of the public.

on:

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Ad Hoc Markets

photo credit: unsplash

Rem Koolhaas’s retroactive on Delirious New York remarks the marketplace as an important architectural site, one which has lessons for a kind of radical mobility and temporailty in architecture. A deeper understanding of the interlocking entanglements, networks, habitus can reveal how people engage with different spatial practices according to their circumstances, and each locality presents a set of conditions depending on population, typology, regulations, morphology, and environment. The marketplace is the convergence of mankind as they alienate themselves from the ground - the original commons - in favor of the polis - an operating system whose language is capital democracy. Michel de Certeau would add that habitus is nothing less than a mode of Beinig expressed through spatial practices.

In more explicitly architectural terms, habitus as a typology is rehabilitated and described as ‘a locus of multiple forms of agreement’ (Mooshammer & Mortenbock). In ‘heterotopias’ (Foucalt), these spaces do not functino in isolation: markets, even the most informal, are networks of spaces, connecting sites of production with those of consumption, and linking one market place to the next - a global phenomenon.

This Deep Dive will study two sites that deploy the ad hoc in formal/ad hoc manners as routine, as systems, as organic (living) habitus.

ad hoc as an architectural model

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anthropology of exchange Pierre Bourdieu’s Logic of Practice would further structure de Certeau’s notion of habitus as ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor.”

Working within the premise of habitus as metapractice, exchange can be quantified by its material culture. Marcell Mauss’s foundational work on the gift as prototypical form of activity introduces ideas of reciprocity and obligation. Material culture implies that objects have what Arjun Appaduari calls ‘lifespan’ as it moves between status categories depending on their wider social, political, and economic contexts.

Hart and Hann’s study of macro-economics specifies money as purchasing power the represents a claim to space, resources, or people instead of a commodity. This abstraction of transaction as reciprocity is needed to underpin the dynamics of a marketplace, and the dynamics between sellers and buyers, as well as sellers and other sellers.

This then translates into how space is read. de Certeau critiques the dominant formal and Cartesian readings of space, and argues that both space is existential and existence is spatial. Crucially, the market is established as a set of practices that interact with another, in a transactional manner that operates in total statelessness.

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Tung Choi Stree Hong Kong

et,

photo credits: unsplash

The first case study is Tung Choi Street in Hong Kong. It is stretch of road that runs through Mong Kok - a foot traffic intensive area with high commercial density. The space is structured in multiple layers - on the building faces are store fronts that access the pedestrian sidewalk. Beyond that, ad hoc stalls then extend onto the street, leaving one lane of space for circulation. These streets are usually closed to vehicular traffic, and are built then dismantled on a daily basis. Owners and immigrant workers usually move in by 6 to 8am with carts that store their goods and basic canopy materials. The scaffolding structure are usually left on the sides of the road on a community-trust-basis. By 10am, the structures would have been built and shopkeepers stay in their allotted space for the day. There are no centralized systems so owners share a community grid from power generators or outlets if nearer to the ends of the street. Lighting and ventilation usually are portable and multiple shopkeepers would gather together to listen to the radio or eat during non-peak hours.

Pre-COVID19, the generally demographic of Tung Choi Street are foreign tourists for the stalls mostly sell cheap souvenirs, counterfeit/ lookalike branded items, and other basic lifestyle goods. Bartering and bargaining is commonplace in the area, which enhances the informal nature of the space.

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1 2 Tung Choi Street during early morning: lot allocations are drawn on the street to create a formal framework for units to move into.

Carts moving in: each stall stores collapses their physical space into carts that can be collectively stored overnight. Stall owners can either store them independently.

Or more commonly, storage facilities charge to collect the carts overnight and return them in the morning.

Stalls that sell similar products are staggered to create a diverse environment. The structures usually use the cart wrappings to create canopies.

photo credits: Google Streetview

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3 4 the unravelling of built space

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context & accessibility major eet hoi str

e avenu

tung c

artery

mass transit The site being a public street- it is a continuously porous environment well connected to main transit routes and civic arteries. It is also near the heart of the districts commercial area, adjoining a large mall and numerous hotels, supplying the space with tourists and sustaining foot traffic.

city sanitation

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management & ownership The public street itself is ‘owned’ by the city itself and managed by the government. The Transport Department of Hong Kong has certain regulations and provisions for pedestrian only streets that facilitate a safe and formalized environment for the daily habitus of various marketplaces across the city to happen. The district office gives out licenses and provides a power grid and basic equipment for stalls that want to set up. They also draw lot spaces on the street - though most stalls usually occupy 2 or more lots to account for service and structure.

The Pedestrian Scheme restricts vehicular traffic under the following parameters: - Pedestrian capacity and safety of the existing footways.

- Public demand and land use, e.g. are there shops or places of interest which would attract pedestrians flow?

- Impact of pedestrianization on the local traffic and the access and loading/unloading activities of the buildings in the vicinity.

power outlets

scaffolding material designated lots

pedestrian scheme

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demographics In the early mornings, stalls carts are usually retrieved and set up by immigrant workers who are paid relatively little for manual labor. They generally operate under storage facilities or management offices of multiple stores. Locals are generally accepting of this routine and navigate this alternative form of traffic. These workers are also exposed to larger risks due to the physical demands of the work whilst sharing the street with vehicular traffic.

s

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The street is generally avoided by locals and shopkeepers usually also ignore them if they pass by, since they’re not the target demographic for their products.

These stores sell a wide range of items which range from lifestyle items, clothing, souvenirs, electronics, wigs, to counterfeits. The common thread they are cheap. The low production cost means that these sellers tend to make a higher profit by selling at what tourists assume is ‘market price’. It also means that they have a lower bottom line for selling prices, thereby incentively bargaining and the appetite to spend.

In general terms, these spaces are highly formal regardless of their transient disposition. The stalls leverage the aesthetic of ad hoc to create a habitus of exchange that is highly transmissive and infectious.

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Namdaemun market in central Seoul is a general market selling a wide range of goods, ranging from street food, clothing, and kitchenwares. It consists of twenty five buildings and a grid of streets connecting them. The building facades are generally simplistic and the windows are blocked out with typography that indicate what is sold within the spaces. The spaces are self organized and an informal thematic order was born. Ground floor units are open to the street selling traditional medicine, luggage, and high value goods. These buildings are open for most of the working week, with general working hours are midnight to 7am for wholesalers, 7am to 5pm for most other retailers. The streets are generally more varied and less thematically consistent on a daily basis. Most days the main streets are crowded with the white enameled steel carts provided by the city government. These impromptu occupations exist as highly ordered spatial practices, thereby fulfilling the criterion of ‘architecture’, whilst challenging preconceptions of established temporal, mobility, and practice.

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Namdaemun Market, Seoul

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public-private ownership The site can be considered a joint venture between the government and local businesses that have commoned in the neighborhood.

The streets are ‘owned’ by the government and its cart stalls are supplied by the city. However, it is respectful to the practices and informal relational networks that dictate the area. The following analysis will take these two types of ownerships separately before studying how they facilitate a visibly more constructive and healthy habitus than Tong Choi Street in Hong Kong.

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The various buildings of the market arrange themselves thematically, with one building devoted to clothing for children, another for cookwares, and another for wedding fabric and jewelery, and so on.

The infrastructure is centralized and standardized for consistency and ease of searching. The organization optimizes what is already initially there, instead of forcing a new spatial rearrangement. In that sense, there is a direct connection between the practices of sellers and consumers in which the market operates.

interior marketplace

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The street market is different each day of the week, following the occupation which is not only cyclical but also arranged according to the density and flow of people, the demands of crowding and preferences, responsive to the weather and the working day of customers from the nearby business district and governmental center. Some days the streets are cleared of carts, other days the maintenance activities of the market spills over extended periods as vendors rearrange their carts.

This exposes the arrangement of spaces as something to be remade every day according to a pattern which has been established already through trial and error.

As the market needs to be regularly ‘unmade’, the government has allowed for permitted spillage where goods can be set up in a stepped arrangement on the street.

Additionally, neighbors assist one another even when they are in competition for the same trade, monitoring each other’s external space when required. This reciprocity indicates that the market is orderly, not a site of conflict, and that keeping it in good order ensures safety for everyone’s livelihood - granted that this spillage leaves at night.

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streetscape

When businesses are closed or when the streets are overcrowded, the modular carts are also put away. The surfaces of commerce collapse and are wrapped up, which are then dragged away by quad bikes.

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Compared to Tung Choi Street, it is clear that Namdaemun’s spaces are more porous and retain more agency in how they establish their spatial image. They distinguish themselves with one anther but the overarching mega-structure forces upon the space a sense of collective responsibility in its retention.

habitus of communal exchange

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branding and demographic In sharp comparison to Tung Choi Street, Namdaemun is as much for tourists as it is for locals. In collaboration, businesses and the government successfully captured the je ne sais quoi of the streetscape and converted it into a structured cultural institution that retains the veneer of ad hoc. This is arguably a more desirable arrangement than Hong Kong since it does not rely on a volitle externalities in organization and survival.

Intuitive spatial design can leverage our capacity to naturally interpret and sort through information, thereby creating a more organic, and adaptable space that resolves its own conflicts as they arise.

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Architecture, at its roots, is the definition of space. It is impossible to argue that the market vendor does not do this - albeit more informally. Spaces are articulated and defined: even the most informal stall has a front and back, a zone for the vendor and one for the buyer.

Often in informal stalls, a zone is marked on the ground by cardboard or drawn grid. Articulation - the modulation of surface - here has a communicative function that relates space, people, and materials to one another, as exchangeable networks that transform people into surfaces.

The object of the stall signifies an identity, the same way a billboard signifies meaning in Venturi and Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas.

Yet these surfaces are more than signifiers, they are mediums that perpetuate the idea of flow as a social construct that is decided by, and accommodates the various interacting flows of people, traffic, goods. Kuma Kengo’s Anti-Object presents several interpretations of this mechanism: flowing out, erasing, minimizing, unraveling, and breaking down into particles.

Public space that facilitate mobility of the city acts as a membrane that mediates the viscosity, cohesion, and composition between medium and substance. Spaces in habitus have the capacity for adaptation and change, thereby being in construction whilst simultaneously being dismantled.

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o t n e m i t n pe

whats beneath

The High Llne

photo credit - Diller Scofidio + Renfero

moving products:

then and now In collaboration with Friends of the High Line during 19992002, conducted a comprehensive study and outlined recommendations for the reuse of the elevated railway as public open space. They researched and analyzed the High Line’s historical significance, physical conditions, local zoning, current land use and community needs, and evaluated all the possibilities for the High Line – reuse for transit, reuse for commerce and reuse for open space. In the study of “ Reclaiming the High Line”, they propose that the design should focus on pedestrians, commercial potential existed along the High Line, and a walkway on top of the High Line, caused values of adjacent properties to rise due to this open public space. They suggested preserving the elevated railway, enabling them to move forward with their goal of turning the railway into an elevated park - thereby transforming the High Line from transitting literal product to moving figurative commodities, alongside the wave of capital that tags along.

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photo credit - Google Streetview

In order to understand the physicality of the High Line, its

PHYSICAL INVENTORY might begin by looking at

WHAT DOES IT GO THROUGH? WHERE DOES IT TOUCH THE GROUND BELOW? and more critically:

WHERE DOES IT NOT?

The intentions of the designers, urban planners, and real estate developers are painfully clear - this piece of infrastructure actively avoids the ground like the plague at locales that do not follow the capital fetish that this former civic resource (that was there to protect pedestrians from being run over by trains, mind you) can’t get enough of. It touches the ground where it can mingle with the Neil Denaris, the Zaha Hadids, the BIGs and Heatherwicks that flocked to the area.

avenues school

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Hudson Yards

6

1

8

1

W 30th St

2 5

W 28th St

3

4

W 26th St

5 9

W 23rd St

6 10 W 20th St

3

7

W 18th St

7

8

W 16th St

W 14th St

9 4

Gansevoort St

2

Access Points

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BIG

as a result...

DS+R

investment is fueling inequality and displacement RENZO PIANO

And it’s doing so by design. While the park began as a grass-roots endeavor — albeit a well-heeled one — it quickly became a tool for the Bloomberg administration’s creation of a new, upscale, corporatized stretch along the West Side. As socialites and celebrities championed the designer park during its early planning stages, whipping community support into a heady froth, the city rezoned West Chelsea for luxury development in 2005.

The neighborhood has since been completely remade. Old buildings fell and mountain ranges of glassy towers with names like High Line 519 and HL23 started to swell — along with prices.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation published a study last year stating that before the High Line was redeveloped, “surrounding residential properties were valued 8 percent below the overall median for Manhattan.”

Between 2003 and 2011, property values near the park increased 103 percent.

The New York Times, “Disney World on the Hudson”

HEATHERWICK

STUDIO

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If you want to live in an apartment building designed by Zaha Hadid and can afford $5 million for a two bedroom, the place to go is West 28th Street, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Or perhaps you’d prefer a luxury unit designed by Shigeru Ban, Hon. FAIA, Annabelle Selldorf, FAIA, Neil Denari, FAIA, or Jean Nouvel, Hon. FAIA. In which case you’d also be looking in Chelsea, more specifically along the 1.45-mile stretch of the abandoned freight railroad turned High Line. And that doesn’t even include the dazzling towers by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Rockwell Group, Kohn Pedersen Fox, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill that are now under construction at Hudson Yards, an JUUL-HANSEN ZAHA HADID 18-million-square-foot development encircled by the High Line’s northern end.

Since the first section opened in 2009, the High Line has been a magnet for visitors (over 7 million last year) and architecturally adventurous, high-end real estate. Anyone strolling along it today would assume that encouraging luxury development was its raison d’être. Except that it wasn’t. Not really. Robert Hammond and Joshua David, the two neighborhood activists who teamed up to save the industrial relic from demolition, did sell the Bloomberg administration on the idea that the project would help generate some $200 million in new real estate taxes, a bit more than it would cost to build the park. But they wildly underestimated its impact: development adjacent to the High Line will pump $900 million into the city’s coffers by about 2038.

More than a decade later, it’s easy to forget that the West Chelsea rezoning plan that made the High Line possible and triggered the accompanying real estate bonanza had a social component, too. Certain areas around the High Line were designated for “inclusionary zoning,” meaning that developers could build larger buildings than the zoning normally allowed if 20 percent of the units were affordable. The zoning rules were O GANGintended to encourage theBIG construction of 1,000 units of affordable rentals. A survey of the inclusionary zoning program from 2005 to 2013 by New York’s Department of City Planning shows that 1,470 new affordable units were built on Manhattan’s West Side, but a separate study by a city councilman’s office indicates that only 348 of them are in West Chelsea. Clearly, providing a funding mechanism or incentives for affordable housing isn’t nearly enough. What’s required is a much more focused effort, something that has the depth and determination of the 11th Street Bridge Park’s plan.

Karrie Jacobs, “The High Line Network Tackles Gentrification”

DENARI

FOSTER+ PARTNER

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So money games aside, since the High Line is so heavily funded by public money - making it a piece of public infrastructure that at minimum should let the average citizen see a return on capital, why are there people displaced? Why are there mom and pop shops closing down? Why is it that in a city of 8 million local residents, its 58-million strong army of tourist have priority to enjoy this ‘civic space’ before the civic audience?

Like all things in life, to answer why there are ‘losers’ (for lack of a better word), we must look at how the winners have optimized the game in their favor...

so who’s actually profitting?

The short answer? Not New Yorkers. The tax money used to fund the High Line generates the most returns for real estate developers along Chelsea and Hudson Yards. You may think that (if you own property in the area) that commonfolk also can profit from the High Line, but the rate of inflation is exponentially greater in areas that are established/endorsed by architects, planners, planners - speculators.

COST

$187m 77% public

FUNDING

$123m NY City

23% private $20m Federal Gov.

$44m Friends of the High Line

NY State $0.4m

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mapping inflation American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the U.S. Census, there were 15,000 -25,000 people living in poverty in the neighborhoods around the abandoned railway in 2005.

More recent census data shows that the poverty rate in New York City rose for the third straight year in 2011, representing 20.9 %of the total population. For a single person, this means earning less than $ 11,000 per a year; for a family, less than $23,000 per year. These numbers are especially alarming because the average rent for a onebedroom apartment around the High Line when it opened was already over $1,200 a month.

The mean property value uplift for houses within 1km of the High Line was actually 92% more than the Manhattan mean. Or to put it another way — if you owned an apartment in that 1km, you earned on average about $67,000 a year from the uplift alone.

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The ground, the space of the city, has been taken over by developers, architects, and designers who are alienated from the actual urban fabric. The game is afoot! It is a race to build, to speculate, to theorize about how rendered Jane and Johns can inhabit their foam models - in lieu of the real people who are living in those spaces. The injection of global designers, who do not have a full grasp of the localized spatial experience, has perpetuated a circular economy that begins in the hypothetical relam of imagination and spills over onto the people who they price out of by design.

LA SP

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INVESTOR

CIRCULAR ECONOMY

AND FOR SPECULATION

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It is maybe unsurprising, then, that many of [Jane] Jacobs' disciples have had nothing but scorn for the High Line. The New Urbanists, a movement who elevate Jacobs' ideas into dogma, have often attacked it in print. One of their number, James Howard Kunstler, blasted the High Line as "decadent", "a weed-filled 1.5 mile-long stretch of abandoned elevated railroad", where "mistakes are artfully multiplied and layered", such as "the notion that buildings don't have to relate to the street-andblock grid ... instead of repairing the discontinuities of recent decades, we just celebrate them and make them worse". Kunstler is elsewhere an advocate of a new agrarianism, so his problem is not greenness per se, but its use just for the sake of it, for contemplation rather than production – a return, as he sees it, to the old Corbusian ideas.

The Guardian, “High Lines and park life: why more green isn't always greener for cities”

t n pe

o t n e m i

PALIMPS

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HIGH LINE

SEST

?

STREET

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IDENTITY CRISIS

photo credit - Diller Scofidio + Renfero

A major critique of what the High Line stands for as a palimpsest that obscures, erases the context of the ground beneath can be exemplified by the culture its demographic brings to the space. Historically, Chelsea and the Meatpacking district held a vibrant, often tempestuous, coalition of characters and voices. The homogeneity of the High Line could not coexist with what it considers radical - or unprofitable. With that, what was the authentic culture of the street was silently replaced by the cacophony of arranged cultural events that flood the High Line. Weird for the sake of being weird, to give the veneer of substance when none remains.

class influence on urban identity: That said, the prejudice of the High Line extends comfortably beyond tourism and capital accumulation. The class divide that persists behaves as a vicious cycle, where the rich and elite swell in to retain their enclave and cachet. The juxtaposition in the physical environment is a result of too much development happening too quickly where the new cannot assimilate enough of the neighborhood, so it just covers it up by eclipsing and silencing it in a hostile takeover.

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as reflected on urban resurfacing This is good news for the elite economy but not for many who have lived and worked in the area for decades. It’s easy to forget that until very recently, even with the proliferation of art galleries near the West Side Highway, West Chelsea was a mix of working-class residents and light-industrial businesses.

But the High Line is washing all that away. D&R Auto Parts saw its profits fall by more than 35 percent. Once-thriving restaurants like La Lunchonette and Hector’s diner, a local anchor since 1949, have lost their customer base.

Hardest hit have been the multigenerational businesses of “gasoline alley.” Mostly auto-related establishments that don’t fit into Michael R. Bloomberg’s luxury city vision, several vanished in mere months, like species in a meteoric mass extinction.

Bear Auto Shop was out after decades; the Olympia parking garage, after 35 years, closed when its rent reportedly quintupled.

Brownfeld Auto, on West 29th Street near 10th Avenue, lost its lease after nearly a century. Today it’s another hole in the ground. Its third-generation owner, Alan Brownfeld, blamed the High Line for taking away the thriving business he’d inherited from his grandfather. “It’s for the city’s glamorous people,” he said.

Mr. Brownfeld is right, for now. But just as the High Line’s early, trendy denizens gave way to touristic hordes, Chelsea’s haute couture moment may be fleeting.

As big a brand as Stella McCartney is, she can’t compete with global chains like Sephora, which are muscling into the area’s commercial space.

Within a few years, the ecosystem disrupted by the High Line will find a new equilibrium. The aquarium-like high rises will be for the elite, along with a few exclusive locales like the Standard Hotel. But the new locals will rarely be found at street level, where chain stores and tourist-friendly restaurants will cater to the crowds of passers-by and passers-through. Gone entirely will be regular New Yorkers, the people who used to call the neighborhood home. But then the High Line was never really about them.

The New York Times, “Disney World on the Hudson”

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re: inclusionary zones & the open city

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This is because the conditions associated with “urbanism” – the effervescence of dense zones of centrality, interaction, exchange and spontaneous encounters – also frequently generate major economic payoffs, in the form of privately appropriated profits, for those who own the properties surrounding the project site. While many places have provisionally experimented with instruments of community reinvestment, local land trusts and profit-sharing mechanisms in relation to such newly created arenas of urbanism, the predominant global trend is for growthmachine interests – often linked to speculative, predatory investments in global financial markets – to reap the major financial rewards derived from them.

Consequently, early 21st-century initiatives to construct an “urban commons” through site-based public design interventions all-toofrequently yield the opposite: a city in which the ruling classes reinforce tight control over the production and appropriation of urban space. As socially vibrant and aesthetically attractive as such newly constructed sites of urbanism may often be, they offer no more than a fleeting glimpse of the genuinely democratic, socially egalitarian urbanism that is consistently precluded at a larger, citywide or metropolitan scale, often by the very politico-institutional forces and coalitions that brought such sites into being. The “open city” thus becomes an ideology which masks, or perhaps merely softens, the forms of topdown planning, market-dominated governance, sociospatial exclusion and displacement that are at play both within and beyond these redesigned spaces of putative urban “renaissance.”

Credits: GSD Urban Theory Lab, Issue 85: Open Space

A genuinely open city would be one in which investment is channeled to serve social need rather than private gain; in which public institutions secure and protect shared, common resources from private appropriation; and in which all inhabitants have secured equal capacities to influence decisions that affect the spaces, institutions and resources shared by all. Any design intervention that claims to promote the open city without pursuing these core goals will be seriously incomplete, if not delusionary.

But Lefebvre’s concept pushes much further than this: it is not only a call for popular access to what already exists within cities; it is also a radical, militant demand for the democratization of control over the collective means of producing urban space.

An open city, in this sense, is not merely a space that can be accessed and enjoyed equally by all; it would also be a realm in which the institutional capacity to produce and transform space has itself been radically democratized. Lefebvre referred to this capacity as autogestion – self-management – and he insisted that, “far from being established once and for all, [it] is itself the site and the stake of struggle.”

The design of the right to the city, therefore, requires us not only to produce spaces of open access, whether within specific project sites or at larger spatial scales. More importantly, the pursuit of this right requires us to find ways of transforming the rules of urban governance so as open up urban space to democratic redesign, through an ongoing process of grassroots appropriation and reappropriation. By integrating questions of institutional control, political power and social justice into their vision of the site, the intervention and the program, designers can begin to contribute to the ongoing struggle for the right to the city.

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post mortem: context concept The terrifying reality, is that the High Line has totally eclipsed (figuratively and literally) the narratives of the street below. Any complex entanglement of relationships, networks, and conflicts are recoded according to the endorsement of a grandiose concept. The architects conventional understanding of ‘context’ is superseded by whatever conceptual underpinning that the High Line offers.

In a sense, the High Line satisfies the doctrines of Right to the City with flying colors - its ownership is diverse as a piece of public infrastructure, the physical environment satisfies both the immediate and fetishist needs of its users, it revitalized the economy of the area, and it offers flexibility for its users.

But critically, the High Line needed to create its own demographic in order to hit those parameters. If your project can’t fit the needs of the masses, find a new ‘mass’! The narrative of the ground has undergone a silent purge, which is why you can invariably feel the eerily sterile shells of Chelsea when you get down near the Whitney.

Moving forward, we need to make a more conscious effort to differentiate what is a common resource and what can be commodified. How will the next urban intervention change the reading of the ‘context’? How can we transpose the networks and narratives of what makes a space unique artistically and tastefully?

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nurturing citizenship

Sesc Pompeia

photo credit - Marcelo Ferraz

agent of social change SESC Pompeia is a cultural centre in the east zone of São Paulo, designed by the architect Lina Bo Bardi, and opened in 1982. The site is one of the world’s great democratic spaces in a city often lacking in them. . .

The complex is a collection of renovated and purpose built structures on a former factory site in central São Paulo. The concept behind the project was the culmination of Bo Bardi’s experiences with local culture from her arrival from Italy in 1946, resulting in a truly Brazilian architecture. The buildings are “popular appropriations” of existing space, materially they are constructed strictly within the constraints of the time, as cheaply and robustly as possible. The centre contains reading rooms, community classrooms, popular restaurants and bars, theatre and a vertical sports complex.

SESC Pompeia is run by the Social Service of Commerce in São Paulo. SESC is a private entity that has the objective of providing social well being and improving the quality of life of commerce, tourism, and general service workers and their families.

Accessing SESC Pompeia and other services is completely free of charge for this sector of the Brazilian society.

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Looking throught the lense of

Land for the people vs Land for Speculation - SESC

WHAT ARE THE ENFORCED RULES OF THE SPACE? WHO ARE THESE RULES LOOKING AFTER? ARE PEOPLE PRIVED FROM ANY RIGHTS? HOW IS THIS A DEMOCRATIC SPACE? As mentioned before SESC Pompeia is run by

the Social Service of Commerce in São Paulo.

This private entity allows small businesses to created proprsals for temporary access to the facilities at SESC Pompeia. The people who then get to actively participate in the space and be in charge of activities for the public receive a set of rules that they should try to follow. However, these are focused on the rights of the citizen and self more than anything. They want to allow people to express themselves through their servies to then allow others do the same through their presence when at SESC Pompeia.

The space has been claimed to be a democratic cultural space because its flexibility for the public.

A visitor is able to choose what it is they want to do within the available programs, or on their own.

There is no specific requirement as to what is “legal” or not within the SESC Pompeia grounds, as long as the community is being honored.

The focus is to give people opportunities and access to services that allow them to pride themselves in being Brasilian, and in being part or the economy. This goes specially to the working class, who are the main target for such center.

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drawings - Lina Bo Bardi photo and diagrams - SESC archive

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photo credit - SESC archive (top) Google maps Understanding urban space by its accessibility -

WHAT DEFINES PUBLIC SPACE? and how

are public ammenities essential for people to come into these?

A PRIVATIZED PUBLIC SPACE - how does space

usage differ from inside to outside?

WHO HAS ACCESS? and to what extent is

there access?

When thinking about the connection between public space and public services, the area and program of SESC Pompeia combines the two.

Although SESC Pompeia is a privately owned space, it is very much organized by the public.

The people decide what type of programs they want to see and be part of, and SESC gives them the space to do so. Public services, such as clinics and health facilties are also big part of what makes this space. To gain access a family just has to have a person workingin the labor sector. Thus, this space is meant to acknowledge the necessities of target groups andopen opportunities for the improvement of their quality of life.

However, the nature of the public space is enclosed by a thin green fence that demarks the property limits of the SESC Pompeia. Outside property limits, the street becomes quite unaccessible. The nature of the space inside is characterized because of its multiple facilities to allow program to exist and safety to be ensure, but this is not the case right outside the boundary of the space.

The fence inhibits passerby from even sitting near the property limits.

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Analyzing the infrastructure of a space and what it facilitates - ORGANIZATION

OF SPACE: can space be easily

understood by the user?

CONNECTIVITY OF SPACES,

ease in acces

In the inside, everything is meant to make up for 100% efficacy for the public use. Signs for program, safety procedures, directions, allow users to understand what, where, and how to use a space. Infrastrcture then supports these by connecting the programs. The best example for this are the connecting paths between the two towers. One tower has sports facilities and the other has locker rooms, clinics, and other small programs that go hand in hand with the other.

Although access is mostly allowed for all facilities, there are still certain boundaries within the spaces. For example, in art recreational areas, there are small fences or doors to keep people from entering the workshops when someone is not supervizing or leading a session.

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photo credit - Damil Ribiero Lima (top) Google maps Discovering the reflection of a specific aesthetic in its immediate context -

HOW IS THE CONTEXT CHANGED? or does it change?

Does public space set a CHARACTER for a location?

To the immediate visual context, the SESC Pompeia determined a certain style and color aesthetic.

A neutral tone from the concrete towers and metal detailing in deep red is followed by most of the near structures. Although the architectural style is not the same, the harmony in these tones makes the adjacent buildings and SESC Pompeia blend together.

Right across the entrance there is a small park that is heavily judged by multiple users because of its fenced surroundings.

In a way, SESC Pompeia and this park are the same, so why does one get praise and the other scrutiny?

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Seeing the most evident demographics and analyzing their presence within the public space - LOCAL VS TOURIST

USE : How can a public space boost the

qualoity of life of a local population? Is this nurturin citizenship?

What type of new economies are brought by incoming TOURISTS? incoming

IMMIGRANTS?

ARE USERS ABLE TO CHANGE THE CONTEXT? Populate the space? Can there be a surge of different microeconomies?

Is the public space favoring the INCOME INEQUALITY already present in the economy?

SESC Pompeia is praised because of its multiple programs that allow people to have leisure time in an economy that certainly wouldn’t allow them to do so.

In São Paulo, majority of the population lives in the flavelas (slums) that outline the city limits.

Pompeia itself used to have a flavela type of community back in the early 1900s when the SESC Pompeia was a drum factory. Most people had immigrated to the area because of jobs in the industry, and the quick settlements of large families with low income resulted in overly populated communities with poor conditions.

Lina Bo Bardi herself said that this project aimed to give “ a little cheer in this sad city” and it indeed did.

The presence of the SESC Pompeia as a public attraction brought a different economy to the locals through tourism. However, compared to other tourist spots around the world, this center has not lost its priority of making life better for the people of its own community. Whether it is by providing access to lift their own businesses for certain periods of time or to become part of any activity they want.

chart - NUMBEO photo credit - SESC archive

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ADAPTIVE RE-USE - celebrating the past and accomodating the future

BOTTOM-UP APPROACH - understanding

and working with the communities to create a space that is accessible for everyone

photo credit - SESC archive

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Seminar Workshop

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The research culminated in a seminar workshop where the thesis and axioms are presented to the ARC407 studio. The class were divided into group of 3 to complete a public space assessment toolkit for 6 spaces/places to evaluate the design tectonics deployed to facilitate or discourage Right to the City.

The toolkit is heavily inspired by William Whyte’s Seagram Plaza Studies, Jan Gehl’s Life Between Buildings, Theo Deutinger’s The Handbook of Tyranny, and Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City.

It is divided into 4 sections – Physical Inventory, Static Count, Serial Streetview, and an evaluation.

Since the semester was held remotely, the workshop was conducted on Conceptboard as a charette via Google Maps. Students were encouraged to think about accessibility, infrastructure, aesthetic, and management as parameters for the spaces and how they assert a coherent narrative about how the public spaces behave. The sites were then scored on a matrix and compared against the other precedents.

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(see next spread) The work is compiled in a research compendium found here: https://issuu.com/n.chung/ docs/right_to_the_city_compendium

Students Participated Aqila Bakri Sandrine Bamba Protik Choudhuri Georgia Currie Ellie Derwenskus Justin James Difabritis Zarah Durst Kimberly Esquilin Ethan Hagan

Taylor Hoople Ashlyn La Mothe Nicolas Ladino Abigail Mccarthy Eduardo Pradjonggo Zoe Quinones James Soper Sai Yanamadala

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Sesc Pomp

Scale

POPS

Union Sq Park

Oculus

Grand Central

Publicness

Sesc Pompeia

Oculus

Grand Central POPS

Democratic Ownership

Brasilia

Union S

Oculus

Domino Park

Grand Central

Union Sq

peia

Sq Park

q Park

Market Stalls

Domino Park POPS

High Line

Seoullo 7017 High Line

Domino Park

Seattle CHOP Market Stalls

Seoullo 7017 High Line

Seattle CHOP

Brasilia

Brasilia

Seattle CHOP Sesc Pompeia

Seoullo 7017

Market Stalls

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SoHo

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SoHo today, legitimate and illegitimate surfacing

Transformation

SoHo in itself has always been in a state of self-reinvention.

It started off as the farmlands of New Amsterdam, which was then paved over into a middle class residential neighborhood. A red light district that rooted in then drove out that residential neighborhood as it became increasingly undesirable to inhabit.

It then evolved into the cast iron manufacturing district that occupied the empty buildings, which brough along an industrial mix of traffic and noise that totalized the streetscape. During the era of urban renewal, the neighborhood was once considered a site of tabula rasa through Robert Moses’s urban renewal scheme. By the mid to late 20th Century, it became a cultural hub where artists and tastemakers began to inhabit, lived, worked, and socialized. It is the bohemian epoch that characterizes what we think of SoHo today.

In its contemporary setting, SoHo is a commercial shopping district that boasts high foot traffic for high-end retail, resulting in one of the most unaffordable neighborhoods in New York City. In addition, since the neighborhood is not zoned for residential, the little amount of living spaces are a result of a handful of conversion lofts, making the residential demographic in SoHo even more exclusive and ossified. As a mass spatial image, all surfaces and narratives that disrupt profitability (e.g. graffiti or litter) are covered over, whilst every other surface is an opportunity for advertising.

As such, we see the history and culture of SoHo as a continuous process of change and contest – giving it alignment to the principles of Right to the City. The SoHo that comes next should therefore not only be a nostalgic snapshot of what once was, but instead ought to be a democratic space that facilitates programmatic and demographic transformation.

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Farmlands of New Amsterdam

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Middle-class residential neighborhood, subsequently a red light district

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Industrial neighborhood for manufacturing

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Cultural hub for artists, provocateurs, taste makers

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Friction between various stakeholders

Demographics Looking at the internet of relationships and narratives that phenomeonize the dense streetscape of SoHo, we find the friction between stakeholders essential in creating the self-reiterative spaces that facilitates right to the city. This juxtaposition between large and small, agents in situ and in transit is what has historically made SoHo creative and exciting, a desirable characteristic we would like to leverage in reimagining living and working in this neighborhood.

SoHo is an area in Downtown Manhattan with a population of 13,224. There are 6,375 male residents living in SoHo and 6,849 female residents. The total number of households is 6,459 with 2 people per household on average. The median age of the current population is 36 with 4,558 people being married and 7,558 being single.

The employment numbers show that there are 96.01% white collar employees and 3.99% blue collar employees in SoHo. There is a 1:20 resident to employee ratio within SoHo, which indicates that local workers create much higher demand for goods and services than residents.

Today, SoHo/NoHo is home to: - About 8,000 New Yorkers who engage in a wide range of professions, representing a more significant residential presence than in typical manufacturing districts; - More than 51,000 jobs, primarily in office, retail, accommodation, food, and other non-industrial sectors; - Major creative centers - over 25% of the area’s total jobs are in the creative industries; - Major economic drivers - SoHo’s retail sales rank second citywide among shopping districts, and 10th nationally.

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Household Types

Occupational Employment

One-Person: 51.6%

White Collar: 96.01%

Occupied Housing Units Owner (20.73%) vs Renter (79.27%)

Total Households 6,459 Average People Per Household: 2

Race and Ethnicity White: 80.4% Asian: 9.7%

Blue Collar: 3.99%

Self Employees 13.25 %

Private Companies 71.06 %

Governmental Workers 3.52 %

Hispanic: 5.1%

Not for Profit Companies

Black: 1.7%

12.17 %

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Demographics of SoHo

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Rent: too expensive - Average retail rent in NYC is $75 to $84 psf - Retail rent in Manhattan are $100 + on average - Average retail rentals in SoHo are $127 psf - East SoHo currently has the cheapest retail rentals psf in all of the SoHo/Noho area.

Rents will fall throughout 2021, while the total number of available spaces should moderate by year-end as new businesses emerge post-pandemic.

More availability and lower rents will create appealing opportunities for new retailers and restaurants and early data indicates that hundreds of new restaurants feel confident enough to open under these trying circumstances.

The pandemic has taken a toll on NYC’s brick-and-mortar retailers with vacancy increasing 21% in Q4 2020 compared to 4% in Q4 2019.

Supply Retail space surplus Available spaces for rent have risen most drastically when comparing the timeline of 2016 Q2 - 2019 Q3 to 2019 Q4 2020 Q4.

Demand Demand is predicted to increase as business licenses have risen in the last two quarters of 2020.

Opposite: Rent trends of SoHo

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Street vendors and outdoor dining

Small Businesses Because of COVID-19 most of the small businesses in Manhattan have suffered sharp revenue losses.

More than 2,800 businesses in New York City have permanently closed since March 1, according to data from Yelp, the business listing and review site, a higher number than in any other large American city.

When the pandemic eventually subsides, roughly one-third of the city’s 240,000 small businesses may never reopen, according to a report by the Partnership for New York City.

So far, those businesses have shed 520,000 jobs.

The first to fall were businesses, especially retail shops, that depended on New York City’s massive flow of commuters.

Street Vendors & Outdoor Dining

With COVID-19 restaurants and businesses have turned into street vendors to comply with city regulations.

The city implemented fee for renewal and application to become a street vendor is officially up to $200. However, because of the city cap, vendors have to pay thousands of dollars to get a permit.

Renewal cycles for these permits are yearly and a permit can last up to 10 years.

Can vendors find better stability for their businesses through the implementation of a specific location for them to have temporary stands?

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Stakeholders of SoHo

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Rezoning

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For opportunity areas

Upzoned to FAR10

Mixed-Use Zoning 20% Inclusionary Housing

Opposite: DCP public hearings

NYCDCP Proposal DCP’s rezoning proposal establishes a new special district to densify SoHo, addressing the housing needs and economic challenges articulated by local and city stakeholders. It divides the neighborhood into historic cores, connective corridors, and opportunity areas. Within the opportunity areas, DCP proposes upzoning to FAR10, introducing commercial-residential mixed use and suggests 20% inclusionary housing. They claim that this flexibility for job-generating industries supports economic resilience whilst modernizing SoHo’s live-work culture.

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Positioning Right to the City amongst other perspectives on DCP’s rezoning

Positioning

Though we are in favor of DCP’s plan for densification and cultural retention, we take issue with the implied inflexibility in programming and the lack of actual infrastructure to support people who need affordable housing. There is also a prioritization of larger commercial interests, which implies further displacement and the ossification of SoHo’s homogenizing image.

To that end, we are not creating a frictionless city where we see Soho becoming a homogenous condition, but a highly volatile and contentious dynamic that encourages self reinvention through formalizing diversity, and creating opportunities for employment whilst protecting against local identities being displaced. These will all be tied together through a shared spatial experience produced and inhabited by the local community. With respect to Right to the City, we propose a new urban strategy that encourages collective governance, whilst allowing for flexibility for continuous programmatic reinvention. Our strategy proposes a mixed use vertical living that captures the vibrance of a dense city. Programmatic distribution would not be fixed, but will be particalized and allows for cross pollination on a granular level.

Vibrance of the dense city brought up vertically

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Ossification of high-end retail and the erasure of identity

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Conceptual visualization of the vertical streetscape

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Urban Strategy

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Community Management Trust This public-private entity, titled the community management trust, owns the exclusive management rights of properties, and works with the city government to activate public spaces and programs as interconnecting tissues between properties.

This transfer of management rights is written into deed covenants and the trust operates as an intermediary between the community and the city in addressing needs, creating opportunities, and maintaining the neighborhood.

The goals of which are firstly the creation of a continuous commons that extends across the urban fabric, activating right to the city.

We also propose an in residency program for small business owners priced out of Soho. This will provide opportunities for upward economic mobility.

The grander notion is that once there is a large enough coalition, this trust can become an instrument of selfreinvention by challenging program mix, zoning, and connectivity.

Upzoning then will allow us to have a better distribution of the programs we intend to bring into the development.

The most prominent being the residential, wokshop, community, and commercial spaces, but with room for sporadic programming and growth that might be dependent on the users.

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1. Urban neighborhood as-is

2. Management rights of properties transferred via deed covenants

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3. Properties within in the management trust re-evaluate zoning based on performance

4. Connectivity incentivises new participants of the management trust

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Programming Derived from the management trust scheme are three main program categories, Residential, Commons, and Commercial. The habitus we imagine aims to build mutual dependency between stakeholders and the community.

Our in residency program for small business owners can also benefit members of the community who are lower on the socioeconomic ladder by providing employment and opportunity for self actualization. These live work programs are connected through common spaces that encourage reciprocity and connectivity where appropriate.

These programs are decentralized and highly flexible in composition and configuration, encouraging interpretive use and customization in how these modules interlock.

The organization of this internet of programs, narratives, and relationships imply particalization in massing with a discrete amount of hierarchy.

Opposite: Program mix, characteristics, and relation over time

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Above: Shuffled program configuration

Opposite: Program visualization

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Economic Argument In short, developers will first legally concede management and operation rights, as well as selling a small percentage of units to the Management Trust for the in-residency programs. The architecture is built and developers or owners will retain the remainder of their revenue stream at market rate.

Prospective businesses and low-income residents can submit in-residency applications to be reviewed by the CMT. They live and work in that space and ideally apprentices find economic security and selfactualization, businesses develop resiliency and integrate into the community, thus prompting developers to continue reinvesting into this system that provide jobs and boast commercial desirability.

For an applied financial example, please refer to real estate proforma for prototype sites.

Opposite: Process of CMT visualized

Above: Process of CMT

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Stakeholders of CMT showing upward socioeconomic mobility

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Concept Development

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Potential sites for development within DCP opportunity areas

Initial Massings When siting for our prototype projects, we looked towards DCP’s opportunity areas for spaces that are currently underutilized. We developed two sites around 2 typologies of commoning - the continuous surface and the continuous atria.

We independently pushed for different partis that speculate on modes of arrangement, wayfinding, and surface strategies that can be hybridized after receiving feedback during the mid-term review. We also speculated on possible urban strategies by introudcing street furniture, murals, and open streets to manifest the ideological goals of the Community Management Trust and Right to the City.

The main goal is to test massing envalopes as perscribed by FAR10 and the Sky Exposure Plane.

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Lot 209 axonometric, showing continuous atria

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Programmatic distribution through plan and section

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Opposite: Assemblage axonometric of Lot 208

Above: Modular surface and interior explorations

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Visualization of Lafayette and Canal, exploring the open street concept through furniture and murals

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Design Development

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Possible combinations of modules

Modular Design Particalization and flexibility imply modular form with a discrete amount of infrastructural hierarchy. These modules can serve as residential and workshop spaces, and further be combined for space efficiency or unexpected juxtapositions.

Collectively, they produce a microcosm of a city that imply certain relationships and frictions, where spatial use is negotiated between inhabitants instead of prescribed top-down planning. The ad-hoc sensibility of inhabiting the space between modules extends onto their surfaces. As the community evolves, homogenize, splinter, the spaces are resurfaced to reflect those identities and desires.

In bringing these continuities and discontinuities to a vertical configuration, we aim to preserve the same dynamics by activating exterior surfaces of modules as continuous landscapes. They serve as a systematic mode of wayfinding that seems organic and allow for unique spatial identities to form. The imaging of these streets in the air become the site and stake of maintenance and struggle for those inhabiting it.

Base modular units

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E

D

Decentralizated plans as a result of different modular scales

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C

A

B

A. Residential Studio B. Residential 1B1B (Sale) C. Residential 1B1B (Rental) D. Residential 2B1B (Rental) E. Commercial Workspace (Converted from 1B/2B)

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Conceptual relationship between modules through interpretive open landscapes

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Interpretive landscape as mode of wayfinding in vertical modular configuration

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247 Canal 257 Canal The continuous surface in Lot 208 becomes interpretive landscape for wayfinding that extends from the street. Its hierarchy decomposes as the programs transition from large social nodes to more particalized relationships.

Lot 209 is organized around a series of vertical courtyards that articulate the shared spaces between modules, enhancing vertical reciprocity between programs. Layers of modular units alternate with full floor plates that act as secondary commons and infrastructural datums.

We are seeding these 2 sites with a core programmatic composition for the first cohort of residents to provide the base infrastructure for live-work. These spaces can be informally converted by residents based on collective needs or desires.

Both buildings aggregate around cores that act as circulation, structure, and utility. Extended floorplates then become the landing or attachment points for modules. Life in these towers imply shifting between intimate and collective scales. Individual modules allow for privacy whilst keeping eyes on the street by maintaining visual engagement with the happenings of communal spaces. These communal spaces act as platforms or landscapes for social exchange, the production and reproduction of culture, and constructive friction. They also act as the connective tissues between living spaces and shared work spaces for local business owners and apprentices. This is where ideas and resources are shared, and new interdisciplinary approaches to live-work emerge. This connective tissue extends onto the street, where the community management trust can begin to bridge different properties and micro communities together through open streets or neighborhood events.

257 Canal / Lot 209 (left) and 247 Canal / Lot 208 (right)

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Exploded site axonometric

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Section through 257 Canal (Lot 209)

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Interior perspective from modular unit

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Vertical courtyard as shared commons

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Shared workspace and makers’ space in commons

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Perspective of open street on Canal and Lafayette

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Executive summary of proforma

Following page: Financial Summary & Schedule

Real Estate Proforma As part of the studio’s goals to understand the financial/ real estate implications of design projects in urban landscapes, we were tasked in creating a proforma and investor pitchbook as a deliverable for the final review.

This allowed us to speculate on modes of operandum and managment, having a requirement for pargmatism whilst meeting the goals of Right to the City. We decided to have a small portion of units sold off to the management trust as condos - for in-residency programs that are outside of the speculative market - whilst the rest are retained by developers/private owners as rental apartments. We researched the market conditions (factoring in downturn due to COVID19) and arrived at price points that were not necessarily aimed for profit maximization whilst allowing for us to break even and exit at roughly 5 years. We also tested the deals’ fesibility by comparing levered and unlevered performance.

In summary, total development cost for our 2 prototype sites (247 & 257 Canal) is roughly $239M, and with a levered equity multiple of 2.25x will generate $89.5M in net profit.

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Above: Deal summary

Opposite: Unlevered & levered residential rental

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Above: Unlevered & levered residential sales

Opposite: Unlevered & levered retail rental

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Extended Vision As mentioned, this initiative does not end with the delivery of our 2 prototype sites. Our project is about the notion of a new mode of urban living that is more equitable and exciting.

It is a framework that not only supports adaptive reconfiguration, but encourages a level of upheaval.

By democratically consolidating operational rights, the community management trust can leverage the opportunities of upzoning and public-private collaboration to create moments of civic communing, propose regulatory change, and advance incentives that perpetuate cycles of reinvention and upward social mobility.

Aerial perspective on Canal Street

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Modular design applied across immediate neighborhood

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Open Street

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Contributors

Yihan Angelina Zhang

Tsz Man Nicholas Chung

yizhan375@syr.edu https://issuu.com/angelinazhang

tschung@syr.edu https://issuu.com/n.chung

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Susana Quintero Vidales suquinte@syr.edu

Studio Instructors

Angela Co (Design Studio) Shawn Amsler (Real Estate)

Syracuse University School of Architecture NYC Fisher Center

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Design Studio 06 Ground Rules Studio Report - Spring 2021 Designed and Edited by Nicholas Chung